A killer wave slammed medieval Geneva, a new study says. And it could happen again. Nearly 1,500 years ago a massive flood in Geneva reportedly swept away everything in its path - mills, houses, cattle, even entire churches. Now researchers believe they've found the unlikely sounding culprit: a tsunami-like killer wave in the Alps. The threat, they add, may still be very much alive. (Video: Tsunamis 101.)

Spurred by a huge landslide, the medieval Lake Geneva "tsunami" (technically defined as a seismic ocean wave) swamped the city, which was already a trading hub, according to a new study. Far from any ocean, the massive wave was likely generated by a massive landslide into the Rhône River, which feeds and flows through Lake Geneva, according to a group of Swiss researchers.

The team analyzed a massive sediment deposit at the bottom of the lake's easternmost corner and determined that the material had once sat above the lake and had slid all at once into the Rhône, near where the river flows into the eastern end of Lake Geneva (map).

For some unknown reason, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy shoots out an X-ray flare about once a day. These flares last a few hours with the brightness ranging from a few times to nearly one hundred times that of the black hole's regular output.

But back in February 2012, astronomers using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory detected the brightest flare ever observed from the central black hole, also known as Sagittarius A*. The flare, recorded 26,000 light years away, was 150 times brighter than the black hole's normal luminosity.

What causes these outbursts? Scientists aren't sure. But Sagittarius A* doesn't seem to be slowing down, even though as black holes age they should show a decrease in activity.

A captive-bred Goffin's cockatoo has surprised researchers by spontaneously making and using "tools" to reach food.

The species is not known to use tools in the wild.

Researchers in Austria recorded the cockatoo - named Figaro - repeatedly breaking off splinters from a wooden beam and using them to reach nuts on the other side of his wire enclosure.

The team believe Figaro's feat is the first recorded instance of tool-making among parrots.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, was carried out at an aviary near Vienna by scientists from the University of Oxford; the University of Vienna and the Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology in Germany.

You have heard a lot of explanations about how and why Sandy happened, but none of them are as crystal clear, informative and detailed as this video by NASA.

You should watch it while keeping in mind that this will happen again.

Parrots are not known to use tools in the wild, but scientists say they've observed a captive Goffin's cockatoo named Figaro crafting implements to snatch food that's just out of reach.

Figaro was spotted playing with a pebble in the aviary where he lives at a research facility near Vienna, and at one point, the bird dropped the stone outside the mesh of his caged enclosure. When he couldn't reach the pebble with his beak or claw, Figaro grabbed a small stick to fish for the stone, the researchers say.

"To investigate this further we later placed a nut where the pebble had been and started to film," said Alice Auersperg of the University of Vienna. "To our astonishment he did not go on searching for a stick but started biting a large splinter out of the aviary beam. He cut it when it was just the appropriate size and shape to serve as a raking tool to obtain the nut. It was already a surprise to see him use a tool, but we certainly did not expect him to make one by himself."

Auersperg said Figaro successfully got the nut each time they placed it just outside of his reach, and almost every time, he fashioned a new tool or modified an old one to be the right shape and size for the task.

Everyone thinks it would be cool to travel at the speed of light, which is why scientists devote their lives to working out if it would be possible and NASA is trying to develop its own warp drive. But easy, tiger: turns out super-fast space travel would be fatal.

A paper published in Natural Science brings some boring common sense to the speed-of-light-travel table. In order to travel huge distances in next to no time, people need to travel close to the speed of light. In so doing, travelers cover extremely large distances very quickly and, thanks to the quirks of relativity, would feel like it took mere minutes because of an effect known as time dilation, which squashes perceived time.

Trouble is, traveling close to the speed of light brings about other effects, too. In Natural Science, Edelstein and Edelstein point out that hydrogen in any craft cable of traveling at the speed of light would also prevent it from traveling at the speed of light. They explain:

Unfortunately, as spaceship velocities approach the speed of light, interstellar hydrogen H, although only present at a density of approximately 1.8 atoms/cm³, turns into intense radiation that would quickly kill passengers and destroy electronic instrumentation. In addition, the energy loss of ionizing radiation passing through the ship's hull represents an increasing heat load that necessitates large expenditures of energy to cool the ship.

A giant flood of Arctic meltwater may have triggered an ancient 1,200-year-long chill nicknamed the "Big Freeze," the last major cold age on Earth, a new study finds.

These findings suggest that changes in the flow of water in the Arctic could suddenly alter the modern climate, study investigators added.

Starting about 12,900 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere was abruptly gripped by centuries of cold, an era technically known as the Younger Dryas. Scientists have suggested this chill helped wipe out most of the large mammals in North America as well as the so-called Clovis people. The Big Freeze was not a glacial period, which are colloquially often called ice ages - it was a cold time in the relatively warm spans between glacial periods.

Although researchers have suggested a cosmic impact might have set off this Big Freeze, the prevailing theory for the cause of the Younger Dryas was a vast pulse of freshwater - a greater volume than all of North America's Great Lakes combined - that poured into the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. The source of this flood was apparently the glacial Lake Agassiz, located along the southern margin of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which at its maximum 21,000 years ago was 6,500 to 9,800 feet (2,000 to 3,000 meters) thick and covered much of North America, from the Arctic Ocean south to Seattle and New York.

"The flood was likely caused by the sudden breaking of an ice dam," said researcher Alan Condron, a physical oceanographer at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "Prior to the flood, meltwater is thought to have drained into the Gulf of Mexico, down the Mississippi River. After the dam broke, the water rapidly flowed into the ocean via a different river drainage system."

Australians will have the privilege of witnessing a total solar eclipse about an hour after sunrise on November 14.

The eclipse will be visible from the northeastern Australia coast, along the Great Barrier Reef, during which astronomers will be working on scientific observations.

Jay Pasachoff, Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College, will be viewing his 56th solar eclipse, along with colleagues and students, observing the dynamics and motions of the solar corona as well as variations in the temperature of the corona over the sunspot cycle.

The team will be observing from three sites on the Australian coast with the Sun about 14 degrees above the eastern horizon. The Sun's path will be entirely over the ocean, where the scientists will be using telescopes, cameras and a spectrograph to study the event.

The eclipse will last for about two minutes, starting at 6:38 a.m. local time next Wednesday, or 3:38 p.m. in New York on November 13.

About 74,000 years ago, the Toba volcano on the Indonesian island of Sumatra erupted with catastrophic force. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, it is believed to be the largest volcanic event on Earth in the last 2 million years.

Toba spewed enough lava to build two Mount Everests, it produced huge clouds of ash that blocked sunlight for years, and it the left behind a crater 31 miles (50 kilometers) across. The volcano even sent enough sulphuric acid into the atmosphere to create acid rain downpours in the Earth's polar regions, which researchers have found evidence of in deep ice cores.

"We have now traced this acid rain in the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica," glaciologist Anders Svensson, of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement.

"We have long had an idea of at what depth the Toba eruption could be found in the Greenland ice cap, but we found no ash, so we could not be sure," Svensson added. "But now we have found the same series of acid layers from Toba in the Greenland ice sheet and in the ice cap in Antarctica. We have counted the annual layers between acid peaks in ice cores from the two ice caps and it fits together."

Testosterone levels during early fetal development might program certain behaviors later in life, according to a new study that found high levels of the sex hormone in the womb might boost boys' impulsivity later on.

Researchers studied a group of boys ages 8 to 11 whose fetal testosterone had been measured from amniotic fluid when their mothers were 13-20 weeks pregnant.

Sex hormone levels, which increase during adolescence, are also heightened during critical periods of fetal brain development.

The boys in the study were shown pictures of negative (fearful), positive (happy), neutral, or scrambled faces while a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine tracked changes in their brain activity. In the boys who had higher levels of fetal testosterone, the brain's reward system was more responsive to positive, compared with negative, facial cues, the researchers found.

This suggests those boys have a greater proclivity for "approach-related behaviors," such as fun-seeking and impulsivity.