The insights provided by neurobiologist Dale Purves and his colleagues over the last few years about why the brain doesn't see the world according to the measurements provided by rulers, protractors or photometers suggest that vision operates in way very different from what most neuroscientists imagine.

In a new book "Perceiving Geometry: Geometric Illusions Explained by Natural Scene Statistics" (Springer), Purves and colleague Catherine Howe explore why the brain generates geometric illusions.

Visual perception is a daunting task for the brain, explains Purves, because light streaming into the eye carries only ambiguous information about the environment.

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Researchers have thawed ice estimated to be perhaps a million years old or more from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica using novel genomic techniques to determine how tiny, living "time capsules" survived the ages in total darkness, in freezing cold, and without food and energy from the sun.

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A view of Earth from the International Space Station in an image from NASA TV taken November 20, 2007.

NASA hopes to launch its fourth shuttle mission in six months on Thursday, a pace that will keep the International Space Station on track for completion by 2010.

ROME - Remnants of the first known surviving Roman throne have been discovered in the lava and ash that buried the city of Herculaneum in the first century, archaeologists said Tuesday.

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Undated photo made available by the Italian Culture Ministry in Rome, showing part of a wooden throne dug out between October and November in the ancient southern Italian city of Herculaneum, near Pompeii, one of the Roman cities buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79. Decorated with ivory bas-reliefs depicting ancient deities, the wooden remains are the first known example of a Roman throne, archaeologists said Tuesday.

OSLO, Norway - Remains of a bus-sized prehistoric "monster" reptile found on a remote Arctic island may be a new species never before recorded by science, researchers said Tuesday.

In the pilot of the animated comedy Futurama, the protagonist awakens from a millennium of cryogenic slumber to find himself in the year 3000. The first thing he hears is a portentous, booming voice: "Welcome...to the world of tomorrow!" The speaker is soon revealed to be a lab technician with a flair for the melodramatic. The scene riffs on a 70-year-old fair ride, a vision of the future that's been so influential it'll probably seem familiar even if you've never heard of it.

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Next week, policy makers, scientists and activists from around the world will gather in Bali, Indonesia, to try to produce a climate-change agreement that will take us beyond the 2012 expiration of the Kyoto Accord. This meeting will take place in an atmosphere of sharply heightened unease among leading climate scientists.

NORTH SINAI, Egypt - On the eve of Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the story of Moses leading the Israelites through this wilderness out of slavery, Egypt's chief archaeologist took a bus full of journalists into the North Sinai to showcase his agency's latest discovery.

It didn't look like much - some ancient buried walls of a military fort and a few pieces of volcanic lava. The archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, often promotes mummies and tombs and pharaonic antiquities that command international attention and high ticket prices. But this bleak landscape, broken only by electric pylons, excited him because it provided physical evidence of stories told in hieroglyphics. It was proof of accounts from antiquity.

That prompted a reporter to ask about the Exodus, and if the new evidence was linked in any way to the story of Passover. The archaeological discoveries roughly coincided with the timing of the Israelites' biblical flight from Egypt and the 40 years of wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land.

"Really, it's a myth," Dr. Hawass said of the story of the Exodus, as he stood at the foot of a wall built during what is called the New Kingdom.

Astrologers have long argued that a person's essential nature is written in the stars.

Now research by an English academic has shown that there is indeed a correlation between when a person is born and their personality.

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Astrologers say other forces are at work in determining a person's nature.

Chinese archaeologists said Thursday they have discovered the remains of an ancient city in eastern Zhejiang Province, which could better prove the long history of Chinese civilization.

The relic was found near Mojiao Mountain between Liangzhu and Pingyao townships in Yuhang District of the provincial capital Hangzhou, said Bao Xianlun, director of Zhejiang Provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau.