Spider 'is 20 million years old'

BBC NEWS: "A scientist has described a spider that was trapped and preserved in amber 20 million years ago. Palaeontologist Dr David Penney, of the University of Manchester, found the 4cm long by 2cm wide fossil during a visit to a museum in the Dominican Republic. Since the discovery two years ago, he has used droplets of blood in the amber to reveal the age of the specimen. It is thought to be the first time spider blood has been found in amber and scientists hope to extract its DNA."

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Michael Crichton, Novelist, Becomes Senate Witness

Michael Crichton, Novelist, Becomes Senate Witness - New York Times: "WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 - His last book, 'State of Fear,' was published more than nine months ago, but the reviews were still pouring in on Wednesday, even as Michael Crichton folded his 6-foot-9-inch frame into a seat to testify before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. 'More silly than scary,' the flier dropped off by the Natural Resources Defense Council said. 'Notable mainly for its nuttiness,' an analysis from the Brookings Institution said. 'Does not reflect scientific fact,' the Union of Concerned Scientists said. For all his previous works as a writer (13 novels, 4 nonfiction books, numerous screenplays) and his prominent career in Hollywood as a writer, producer or director of 13 films and as the creator of the popular television series 'ER,' little has yanked Mr. Crichton so deeply into political controversy as 'State of Fear,' an environmental thriller that casts doubt on the widely held notion that human activities contribute to global warming. It has become a hugely divisive policy issue in recent years, gaining a new urgency, perhaps, by the recent hurricanes that slammed into the Gulf Coast. Many prominent scientists, no friends of Mr. Crichton, to be sure, believe that man-made greenhouse gases are causing the earth to warm and are urging lawmakers to pass new regulations that govern carbon dioxide emissions. But after considerable study of his own, leading to 'State of Fear,' Mr. Crichton has concluded that the science is mixed at best, and that lawmakers should take that into consideration when they decide what they might do about it."

Researchers says Hobbit was human

World's smallest mobile robot is built

HANOVER, N.H., Sept. 21 (UPI) -- Researchers at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., have announced the creation of the world's smallest mobile, controllable robot. The scientists say about 200 of the robots -- each nearly as wide as a strand of human hair -- could march in a line across the top of a piece of plain M&M candy.

Human remains link to BSE crisis

BBC NEWS: "It proposes that some raw materials for fertiliser and feed imported from the Indian subcontinent in the 60s and 70s contained human bones and soft tissue. If remains were infected with human prion diseases like CJD, they could have been the source for BSE. The study by British researchers has been published in The Lancet. But it has been greeted with scepticism by several experts on Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). The authors admit their evidence stops short of proving their case, but argue that their theory is plausible enough to warrant further investigation."

Day-After Pill Exposes FDA Rift

Wired News: "The highly regarded women's health chief at the Food and Drug Administration resigned Wednesday in protest of her agency's refusal to allow over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception. Assistant Commissioner Susan Wood charged that FDA's leader overruled his own scientists' determination that the morning-after pill could safely be sold without a prescription, and stunned his employees last week by instead postponing indefinitely a decision on whether to let that happen. 'There's fairly widespread concern about FDA's credibility' among agency veterans as a result, Wood told The Associated Press hours after submitting her resignation Wednesday. 'I have spent the last 15 years working to ensure that science informs good health-policy decisions,' Wood, director of FDA's Office of Women's Health, wrote in an e-mail about her departure to agency colleagues. 'I can no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended by the professional staff here, has been overruled.' It was an unprecedented public show of discord for the FDA, and prompted lawmakers to call for congressional hearings into whether the nation's leading public health agency allowed politics to trump science in determining the fate of the morning-after pill called Plan B."