Latest Discovery Hints at Origin of Mysterious 'Fairy Circles' and other top stories.

• Latest Discovery Hints at Origin of Mysterious 'Fairy Circles'

  A stunning phenomenon of circular barren patches in the dry grasslands, known as "fairy circles," was once thought to only exist in the Namib Desert in Namibia, Africa. For decades, the origin of the fairy circles mystified researchers and scientists ...

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• Why would scientists grow dinosaur legs on a chicken?

  

  The genes of a chick can be manipulated to lengthen its legs to dinosaur-like proportions, researchers announced. No one need yet be afraid that such experiments are advancing a "dawn of the dinosaurs" that would spell a "Jurassic Park"-like fate for human society. These "dino-chicks" failed to hatch – so far. "These studies are not aimed at producing dinosaurs for commercial or non-scientific purposes, as in the 'Jurassic Park' series," according to a press release.It may remind some at first ..

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• Prehistoric puzzle no more: Illinois fossil a vertebrate

  

  CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — For decades, fossil hunters combing the soil near a creek in north-central Illinois have been rewarded with the preserved remnants of a prehistoric creature, its wide-set eyes on stalks and a long, arm-like appendage extending from below them with a pincer-like mouth. There was no doubt that the Tully monster, Illinois’ official state fossil, was “very, very bizarre,” said Scott Lidgard, a paleontologist at Chicago’s Field Museum. But no one could say exactly what the soft-bod..

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• Seduced by Junk Food, Storks Are Opting Not to Migrate

  

  Photo Some of the storks’ favorite menu items, the researchers found, were rotten fish, leftover chicken and hamburgers. Credit UEA-BTO White Stork Project In Portugal, storks, the birds known in folklore for dutifully delivering babies, have become homebodies.The reason, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Movement Ecology, is the tasty local landfills in the south-central part of the country. Thousands of birds have chosen to forgo their typical wi..

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• Pigeon patrol tracks air pollution in London

  

  Meet the most unlikely agents in the fight against air pollution -- pigeons. On Monday, a small flock of pigeons were strapped with pollution-sensing backpacks and sent out into the skies of London for three days to monitor the city's air pollution levels.Our backpacks measure Nitrogen Dioxide, Ozone and other volatile compounds in the air as we fly. #PigeonAir pic.twitter.com/0fsrX1qv9R— Pigeon Air Patrol (@PigeonAir) March 14, 2016 The backpacks are designed to monitor levels of nitrogen diox..

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• New space podcast asks 'Are We There Yet?' of Mars

  

  The Space Coast will once again be the frontier of a space race, this time to the Red Planet. WMFE's new online podcast with guests from the Orlando Sentinel asks the question, "Are We There Yet?" in the journey to Mars.NASA is preparing to launch humans to Mars with their powerful Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft by the 2030's from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. “I realized it wasn’t an issue of if we were going to put humans on Mars, it’s really a question of when,”s..

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• It's a Girl! Paleontologists Examine Pregnant T. rex

  

  Sexing a dinosaur isn’t easy. As far as gross skeletal anatomy is concerned, male and female dinosaurs are practically identical. And the shape of saurian bones provides no help. So far as anyone has been able to tell, the skeletons of dinosaurs were not sexually dimorphic (or, in other words, different between males and females). Even in highly-ornamented species of horned dinosaurs, armored dinosaurs, and others, all the gnarly spikes and plates and crests don’t show a definitive split in for..

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• Have Norwegian geologists solved the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle?

  

  “Bermuda Triangle, don’t go too near,” Barry Manilow warns in his saccharine 1980s pop hit named for the enigmatic region in the Atlantic Ocean legendary for the number of ships and planes that disappear in its proximity.Now, some media reports are suggesting that the mystery behind Mr. Manilow’s admonition may be solved. Pointing to a Norwegian research abstract that details the discovery of craters at the bottom of the Barents Sea in the Arctic, British newspapers The Times and Daily Mail wer..

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