A species of mouse that lives in the Southwestern deserts of the U.S. eats scorpions and other living things, hunts by night and howls at the moon. According to New Scientist, the grasshopper mouse (Onychomys torridus) will eat crickets, tarantulas, even other rodents.

Even the fearsome Arizona bark scorpion is not safe from the grasshopper mouse. New Scientist said, "It fights bravely, stinging its attacker on the nose. To no avail. The mouse ignores the painful venom and cruelly breaks the scorpion's tail by pummelling it into the ground, then bites its head and feasts on its flesh."

From virtually the day they are born, grasshopper mice are what New Scientist calls "natural killers." Even baby mice, which are called pups, raised in captivity learn quickly how to take down and eat prey much larger than themselves.

Watch video of the mouse howling:

Astronomers on Friday said they had observed the largest structure yet seen in the cosmos, a cluster of galaxies from the early Universe that spans an astonishing four billion light years.

The sprawling structure is known as a large quasar group (LQG), in which quasars - the nuclei of ancient galaxies, powered by supermassive black holes - clump together.

The discovery in the deep Universe was made by a team led by Roger Clowes at the Jeremiah Horrocks Institute at Britain's University of Central Lancashire.

It would take a spaceship travelling at the speed of light four thousand million years to get from one end of the cluster to the other.

When a prisoner goes on parole, a parole officer determines under how much supervision the individual is put based on the perceived likelihood of committing crime again. In a number of states, these determinations are being increasingly taken out of the flesh and blood hands of parole officers, settled instead by algorithms.

Precognition software, already in use in Baltimore and Philadelphia, determines how likely a prisoner is to commit murder and thus how much parole supervision they should receive. Wired explains how the algorithm works:

To create the software, researchers assembled a dataset of more than 60,000 crimes, including homicides, then wrote an algorithm to find the people behind the crimes who were more likely to commit murder when paroled or put on probation. Berk claims the software could identify eight future murderers out of 100.

The software parses about two dozen variables, including criminal record and geographic location. The type of crime and the age at which it was committed, however, turned out to be two of the most predictive variables.

Passengers on board Capt. Dave's Dolphin and Whale Safari tour boat were treated to a rare sight this past weekend when around 1,000 common dolphins began to stampede off Dana Point in Southern California.

The unusual event happened on Saturday and then on again on Sunday, from when the video below was filmed.

Dave Anderson, the boat's owner, told The Los Angeles Times that throughout his 10 years in business he's almost never seen a pod of dolphins this large charging through the waters at full speed.

Problems with various theories could be resolved if mistaken identity were considered.

It has been demonstrated over the centuries that the worst possible witnesses in court are often those who were present at the scene of the crime. There are documented cases of people being held for crimes they did not commit because one or more eyewitnesses swore to their guilt under oath. It becomes known only later when overwhelming evidence, such as DNA, proves that the alleged perpetrator could not have done what was claimed.

Often, the problem with mistaken identity is one of prejudice. Suspects are categorized by their racial profiles, their affiliations with radical groups, previous behavior, or association with those who are known lawbreakers. Lacking a confession from some other individual, law enforcement personnel are sometimes unable to prevent themselves from focussing on guilt by association, or circumstantial evidence. Assistant District Attorneys do not last long without convictions.

Nearly a year after Russian researchers reached the unique sub-glacial Lake Vostok, the first sample of transparent ice from its water has been taken. The finding is of great value as it could reveal if the lake harbors life.

The Lake Vostok, isolated by 4-meter layer of ice for around the past 20 million years, has been of great interest to scientists since it was first discovered in the 1990s. Locating it became one of the major finds in modern geography.

If it turns out that some primitive bacteria or even more complex life-forms survived in the lake's waters it could offer an earth-shattering insight into our planet's past.

Scientists managed to reach the fresh ice only on the depth of 3383 meters and took samples at 3,406 meters.

"The first core of transparent lake ice, 2 meters long, was obtained on January 10 at a depth of 3,406 meters. Inside it was a vertical channel filled with white bubble-rich ice," the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute said in its statement.

Computer users are being advised by security experts to disable Oracle Corp's widely used Java software after a security flaw was discovered in the past day that they say hackers are exploiting to attack computers.

"Java is a mess. It's not secure," said Jaime Blasco, Labs Manager with AlienVault Labs. "You have to disable it."

Java, which is installed on hundreds of millions of PCs around the globe, is a computer language that enables programmers to write software using just one set of code that will run on virtually any type of computer.

It is used so that Web developers can make sites accessible from browsers running on Microsoft Corp Windows PCs or Macs from Apple Inc.

In the galactic scheme of things, the Sun is a remarkably constant star. While some stars exhibit dramatic pulsations, wildly yo-yoing in size and brightness, and sometimes even exploding, the luminosity of our own sun varies a measly 0.1% over the course of the 11-year solar cycle.

There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate. A new report issued by the National Research Council (NRC), The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth's Climate, lays out some of the surprisingly complex ways that solar activity can make itself felt on our planet.

Understanding the sun-climate connection requires a breadth of expertise in fields such as plasma physics, solar activity, atmospheric chemistry and fluid dynamics, energetic particle physics, and even terrestrial history. No single researcher has the full range of knowledge required to solve the problem. To make progress, the NRC had to assemble dozens of experts from many fields at a single workshop. The report summarizes their combined efforts to frame the problem in a truly multi-disciplinary context.

Starting this month, NASA will send a remotely piloted research aircraft as high as 65,000 feet over the tropical Pacific Ocean to probe unexplored regions of the upper atmosphere for answers to how a warming climate is changing Earth.

The first flights of the Airborne Tropical Tropopause Experiment (ATTREX), a multi-year airborne science campaign with a heavily instrumented Global Hawk aircraft, will take off from and be operated by NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The Global Hawk is able to make 30-hour flights.

Water vapor and ozone in the stratosphere can have a large impact on Earth's climate. The processes that drive the rise and fall of these compounds, especially water vapor, are not well understood. This limits scientists' ability to predict how these changes will influence global climate in the future. ATTREX will study moisture and chemical composition in the upper regions of the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere. The tropopause layer between the troposphere and stratosphere, 8 miles to 11 miles above Earth's surface, is the point where water vapor, ozone and other gases enter the stratosphere.

A popular theory that relies on dark energy, thought to be the main contributor to the accelerating expansion of the Universe does not fit newly obtained data with regards to one fundamental constant - the proton to electron mass ratio.

Rodger Thompson, a University of Arizona astronomy professor, disclosed his findings Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Long Beach, California. He argues that dark energy theories, which have emerged as variations on Einstein's theory of general relativity, do not support newly obtained results on the relative masses of protons and electrons during the earliest stages of the Universe.

He computed the ratio predicted by dark energy models, a hypothetical form of energy believed to be found throughout space, and found that these theories (which add a scalar field to Einstien's equations to account for the acceleration o the Universe) did not fit the new data. Thompson's findings "impact our understanding of the universe and point to a new direction for the further study of its accelerating expansion," the university said in a recent statement.

In work that was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, researchers demonstrated that the expansion of the universe was speeding up, not slowing down, as had previously been thought. That acceleration could be accounted for by reinstating the "cosmological constant" into Einstein's theory of General Relativity - originally introduced by Einstein to balance the expansion predicted by his original equations, as he believed at the time that the Universe was static.