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The first thing you notice about this small town in China's quake-devastated Sichuan province is that every building is standing except one: the primary school.

Bi Kaiwei rushed to his daughter's school, digging with his hands, desparately trying to find her.

As many as 200 children were killed here, crushed to death when three stories of concrete came crashing down.

At the school gates, some parents have left their children's identifications cards as a sort of makeshift memorial. Others still cling to them, like Bi Kaiwei.

When the major earthquake struck a week ago, Bi came rushing from the nearby factory where he worked and started digging with his bare hands.

In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers.

The hairy, reddish-brown creatures are known as "crazy rasberry ants" — crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and "rasberry" after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator who did battle against them early on.

"They're itty-bitty things about the size of fleas, and they're just running everywhere," said Patsy Morphew of Pearland, who is constantly sweeping them off her patio and scooping them out of her pool by the cupful. "There's just thousands and thousands of them. If you've seen a car racing, that's how they are. They're going fast, fast, fast. They're crazy."
The ants — formally known as "paratrenicha species near pubens" — have spread to five Houston-area counties since they were first spotted in Texas in 2002.

The Northern Territory president of the Australian Medical Association says he may have accidentally discovered how the potentially deadly salmonella bacteria gets inside chicken eggs.

Dr Peter Beaumont was cooking when he discovered a dead gecko between the inner shell and the membrane of a chicken egg he cracked open.

He believes the discovery is a world first and has handed the egg shell over to health authorities who will look for the presence of bacteria in the yolk and try to work out how the gecko got into the egg.

Dr Beaumont says he suspects the gecko entered the chicken before it entered the egg.

 "Eggs are made inside chooks up this tube from their bottom.

The United States has listed the polar bear as a threatened species, because its Arctic sea ice habitat is melting due to climate change.
US government scientists predict that two-thirds of the polar bear population of 25,000 could disappear by 2050.
However, the government stressed the listing would not lead to measures to prevent global warming.
Environmentalists have expressed disappointment that more will not be done to protect the bear's habitat.
US Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said the government had made the decision on the advice of scientists, but he suggested the impact of the move would be limited.
 "While the legal standards under the Endangered Species Act compel me to list the polar bear as threatened," he said, "I want to make clear that this listing will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting."

In this week's lesson we have been looking at the tricky question of tourism and development. Tourism and tourists brings money into an area and the tourist industry creates jobs. The facilities and infrastructure (look this word up!) that tourists demand, can be used by the locals.

However tourism can also bring problems (environmetal, cultural and social). Often the money created does not stay in the country.

In the video it was suggested that there is a ''middle way''. We introduced the idea of ''sustainable tourism''

Your homework is to look at the Bloomfield Lodge website. I am interested to see who does this, so please come to the lesson with answers to the following questions:

MartinC (who gave us the wonderful Bensteinian Rapsody) has been busy uncovering secret artifacts that further demonstrate the ambitions of the cdesign proponentsists. First there is some deleted scenes from Expelled! featuring such dialog as:

VINCENT: You’ll dig it the most. But you know what the funniest thing about Intelligent Design is?

JULES: Casey Luskin?

and then there is the Wedgewood Document:

What these infuriating atheists failed to realize is that if Russell’s Teapot could be disproved then the final defence of atheistic materialism will fall. Far from being a logical deathblow to belief in a personal God, the analogy is the Achille’s heel of atheism, for, if we can indeed detect Russell’s teapot in orbit, then it naturally follows that God CAN be empirically proven.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Seven astronauts climbed inside the space shuttle Discovery on Friday as part of a dress rehearsal for a May 31 mission to deliver a Japanese laboratory to the International Space Station.

Five of the seven have not flown in space before and have been spending more time in simulators than real spaceships.

Pilot Ken Ham said he had to look closely at two adjacent shuttle launch pads at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to find Discovery, which is partly wrapped in a protective metal structure.

"I think this is a sign of a being a rookie," he joked.

NASA called off the countdown with a few seconds left on the clock so the crew could practice an emergency evacuation.

The catastrophic cyclone that hit Myanmar hints at the shape of things to come in a warming world — but probably not for the reason you think. Chris Mooney, the author of "Storm World," argues that the tragedy says more about the sad state of infrastructure in the developing world than it does about the raw impact of climate change. However, shifts in climate will likely accentuate that global rich-vs.-poor split.

Mooney has been focusing on the intersection of science and politics for years - in his Weblog, aptly titled "The Intersection," as well as in his first book, "The Republican War on Science."

"Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming" traces more than a century of often-sharp disputes over climate science.

A special high-fat diet helps to control fits in children with epilepsy, a UK trial suggests. The number of seizures fell by a third in children on the "ketogenic" diet, where previously they had suffered fits every day despite medication.

The diet alters the body's metabolism by mimicking the effects of starvation, the researchers reported in the Lancet Neurology. The researchers called for the diet to be more widely available on the NHS. It is the first trial comparing the diet with routine care, even though it has been around since the 1920s.

Children are given a tailored diet very high in fat, low in carbohydrate and with controlled amounts of protein. A total of 145 children aged between two and 16 who had failed to respond to treatment with at least two anti-epileptic drugs took part in the study.

NASA is drawing up plans to probe the secrets of moon dust using a small orbiter that will ride piggyback on another spacecraft's rocket.

The $80-million LADEE spacecraft is slated to launch alongside a lunar gravity-mapping probe in 2011 on a 100-day mission to study the moon's wisp-thin atmosphere and ever-present dust.

A clear understanding of the moon's atmosphere and its clingy dust will be vital for NASA as it moves forward with plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface aboard its Altair lander by 2020.

During the Apollo lunar landings between 1969 and 1972, NASA moonwalkers were coated in lunar dust during excursions and tracked it back inside their landers, where it gave off a smell similar to gunpowder.

After linking up with the international space station, Endeavour's astronauts got right to work Thursday unloading the parts they'll need to build a giant robot that will help maintain the orbiting outpost. Astronauts Robert Behnken and Gregory Johnson were using the station's robotic arm to pull a pallet containing the Canadian robot, named Dextre, from Endeavour's cargo bay and install it temporarily on a station girder. Dextre — short for dexterous and pronounced like Dexter — is designed to assist spacewalking astronauts and, ultimately, to take over some of their dangerous outdoor work.

Spacewalkers Richard Linnehan and Garrett Reisman will begin assembling the robot late Thursday night during the first of five outings planned for Endeavour's busy 16-day mission.

English marine experts have laid their hands on an octopus that's missing two of its own: a six-limbed creature that they have dubbed 'hexapus.' Ordinarily, octopodes have eight arms and legs. And should they lose one or more in an accident, they can grow the limbs back. Which is what makes 'Henry' -- as staffers at Blackpool Sea Life Centre in northwest England have dubbed their find -- so unique. His missing limbs stem from a birth defect.

"If you look closer between the legs, there's webbing that attaches each of the arms together", John Filmer of the Sea Life Centre told CNN Tuesday. "You'd assume if he'd lost one of his legs in an accident, there would be space for an arm to grow back. "But there's no space for two extra legs to grow back.

A robotic spacecraft circling Mars has snapped the first image of a series of active avalanches near the planet's north pole, scientists said Monday. The image, taken last month, reveals at least four avalanches of fine ice and dust breaking off from a steep cliff and settling on the slope below. The cascade kicked up massive debris clouds, with some measuring more than 590 feet across.

The landslides were spied by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter during a routine tracking of seasonal changes. The probe arrived at the planet in 2006. It is rare for scientists to catch a natural event in action on the surface of Mars.