Science

Eight legs. Fangs. And a whip-like tail. Call it Chimerarachne yingi, a newly discovered arachnid that crawled around rainforests in what is now Southeast Asia more than 100 million years ago - during the Cretaceous period. 

Drinkers of hot tea do not face an increased risk of esophageal cancer, but those who also consume excessive alcohol and smoke have five times higher risk than people who have none of the three habits.

One blue surgical drape at a time, the patient disappeared, until all that showed was a triangle of her shaved scalp. "Ten seconds of quiet in the room, please," said Dr David J. Langer, the chairman of neurosurgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. Silence fell, until he said, "OK, I'll take the scissors."

A new paper in the journal Science estimates that reefs across the Asia-Pacific region are littered with more than 11 billion pieces of plastic larger than 5 centimetres. 

When you are standing barefoot on a beach - even if it is one you visit every year - there is no way to understand whether the sea is higher than before. Yet, it is, because satellite measurements have told us so. Unfortunately, as it cannot be seen with the naked eye, a lot of people refuse to believe that sea levels are rising alarmingly. 

The devastating earthquake on December 26, 2004 - that ruptured the ocean floor near Sumatra and resulted in a deadly tsunami - occurred during a full moon.

Smoking chimneys spewing super hot (300°Celsius) fluids, goose barnacles and tube worms swimming in the shimmering water and delicate columnar structures swarming with copper, gold, zinc and rare minerals like neodymium. Marine geochemist Andrea Koschinsky of Jacobs University at Bremen in Germany comes back to explore the benthic zone at Kermadec Arc, off the New Zealand coast, again and again.

Here's an interplanetary botany discovery that took college students and not Nasa scientists to find: hops - the flowers used to add a pleasant bitterness to beer - grow well in Martian soil. 

Remember Vitalstatistix? The only thing the leader of the tiny Gaulish village in the Asterix comics was afraid of was the sky falling on his head. How we all laughed at that recurring joke!

A new study by scientists at the University of Adelaide in Australia found that our oceans could lose stocks of commercial fish as rising sea temperatures affect their food source.