The world's largest snake has been found deep in the South American rainforest

• Discoveries of
• american scientists

• The world's largest snake has been found deep in the South American rainforest.
• The monster boa is at least 13 metres long from mouth to tail and weighs 1,135 kilograms, (2,500 pounds).
• The snake named Titanoboa cerrejonensis lived around 60 million years ago in hot swamps after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

• It grew so big because the world was much hotter then. Scientists estimate temperatures in the rainforest could have been between 30-34C (86-93F), 5C warmer than today.
• The discovery is leading scientists to re-think how hot the Earth has been in the past and how animals and plants were able to survive and grow in the intense heat.
• The giant snake was found by fossil scientists in one of the world's largest open cast coal mines, at Cerrejon, north east Colombia.

• Most everybody knows that DNA contains the blueprint for life. The names of Watson and Crick, the first scientists to figure out the structure of DNA in the 1950s, are also widely recognized. But left obscure in history is the name of the chemist who first isolated the DNA molecule itself. Johann Friedrich Miescher, working in the late 1800s, single-handedly separated out what he called "nuclein" from cells.

• Miescher did develop some hypotheses about how "nuclein" might be involved in heredity, he ascribed to the view at the time that any one type of molecule would be too simple to account for all the variation seen within species. It would be about 75 years before the magnitude of Miescher's discovery would be fully understood.

• Rubik's Cube
• Two American professors have proven that the earlier-held belief that at least 27 turns are needed to solve the most famous Hungarian puzzle/toy/contraption, the Rubik's Cube, is false. Dan Kunkle and Gene Cooperman of the University of Boston used a "super computer" to solve the puzzle with only 26 turns.

• TAU Scientists Help Discover the
• Most Massive Stellar Black Hole
• An international team, including astronomers from Tel Aviv University, has uncovered the most massive stellar black hole found to date in a binary system. The newly-discovered black hole is about 16 times the mass of our sun and located three million light-years away in a distant galaxy called Messier 33. The finding is unique because the black hole, named M33 X-7, is associated with an unusually large companion star (its binary pair), with a mass about 70 times the mass of our sun. The two objects move one around the other in space once every 3.5 days in an everlasting dance.

• Concludes Prof. Mazeh, "Astronomical measurements allow us to peek into the vastness of space and discover epic events incomparable with anything which takes place on earth."
• A stellar black hole is formed from the collapse of the core of a massive star at the end of its life. The collapse creates an intense gravitational force, where not even rays of light can escape its gravitational pull, rendering the phenomenon invisible. Matter transferred from the companion star into the black hole falls into the hole’s gravitational attraction and emits X-ray radiation that the astronomers have detected by using special satellites.

• A team of British and American scientists has discovered a new method to detect major weather events occurring 32 km up in the Earth's stratosphere. Cosmic rays, detected 0.8 km beneath the planet's surface in an obsolete iron mine, have the potential to identify weather events that happen during the Northern Hemisphere winter.

• American scientists have found human antibodies that kill a broad range of influenza A viruses, a discovery that raises hopes of both better flu drugs and a more effective, longer lasting flu shot.
• The discovery of monoclonal antibodies that target what some researchers believe may be flu's Achilles heel suggests medicine finally may be able to find a way to neutralize the virus's maddening ability to evade the immune system through constant mutation.

• Scientists discovered a new bird species, but its habitat is threatened by a dam project in a southeastern Venezuela river basin, a British environmental organization announced Wednesday. Birdlife International said the new species has been named the Carrizal Seedeater, or Amaurospina carrizalensis, after the tiny islet in the Caura River where was discovered by researchers Miguel Lentino and Robin Restall. The Carrizal Seedeater is a species of the blue-flecked finch. It has a larger bill than other finches and small plumage differences, Birdlife International said in a statement.

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