Today's fatal earthquake near Christchurch in New Zealand confirms that a country already riddled with major fault lines has gained another one, say seismologists.

"Christchurch has never been identified as a major earthquake zone, because no one knew this fault ran beneath," says Roger Musson, a seismologist at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh.

New Zealand experiences thousands of earthquakes each year, because it lies on the boundary between the Pacific and the Australian tectonic plates. To the north-east, the Pacific plate is subducting beneath New Zealand's North Island, and to the south-west, the Australian plate is subducting beneath the South Island. Between these two subduction zones lies the Alpine fault, running along the mountainous spine of the South Island.

It now appears likely that the Christchurch quake resulted from activity on a fault extending directly eastward from the Alpine fault that remained unknown until last year, says Musson.

New research gives the first accurate estimate of how much faster Earth's core is rotating compared to the rest of the planet.

Previous research had shown that Earth's core rotates faster than the rest of the planet. However, scientists from the University of Cambridge have discovered that earlier estimates of 1 degree every year were inaccurate and that the core is actually moving much slower than previously believed -- approximately 1 degree every million years. Their findings are published on 20 February, in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The inner core grows very slowly over time as material from the fluid outer core solidifies onto its surface. During this process, an east-west hemispherical difference in velocity is frozen into the structure of the inner core.

"The faster rotation rates are incompatible with the observed hemispheres in the inner core because it would not allow enough time for the differences to freeze into the structure," said Lauren Waszek, first author on the paper and a PhD student from the University of Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences. "This has previously been a major problem, as the two properties cannot coexist. However, we derived the rotation rates from the evolution of the hemispherical structure, and thus our study is the first in which the hemispheres and rotation are inherently compatible."

A researcher at Simon Fraser University is preparing to analyze the DNA from personal letters written by the legendary aviator Amelia Earhart in hopes of learning her fate.

Earhart - who had already flown solo across the Atlantic Ocean - disappeared July 2, 1937 during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe in a Lockheed Electra. She was declared dead two years later but her final resting place has been indispute ever since.

SFU health sciences student Justin Long of Vancouver has supplied the university with four letters, believed to have been hand-written and sealed by Earhart. The envelopes were opened at the end leaving the gummy seal - and hopefully Earhart's saliva - intact. Long acquired the letters from a collection of 400 pieces of the aviator's correspondence collected by his grandfather Elgin Long, a lifelong Earhart biographer.

The countdown has started for the launch of the Discovery space shuttle. At 4:50pm Eastern time Thursday, Discovery will lift off and head for the International Space Station after a delay of more than three months.

NASA said Tuesday that liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen will be loaded into Discovery's Power Reactant Storage and Distribution (PRSD) system today. The system, used in the shuttle's three fuel cells, allows the shuttle to produce electricity in space, pressurizes the shuttle's crew cabin, and produces water.

"Shuttle crews visiting the International Space Station routinely fill up bags with the water for use by station residents," NASA said.

Liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen are also used by the space shuttle's main engines at lifotff, but the propellants for that job go into the 15-story-tall external fuel tank and are not loaded until launch day.

This piece covers the facts of 9-11 in under 15 minutes. It could well be the most compelling introduction of 9/11 to the uninitiated person and/or those who accept the Government-NIST fairy tale.

Researchers studying the origin of Earth's first breathable atmosphere have zeroed in on the major role played by some very unassuming creatures: plankton.

In a paper to appear in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Ohio State University researcher Matthew Saltzman and his colleagues show how plankton provided a critical link between the atmosphere and chemical isotopes stored in rocks 500 million years ago.

This work builds on the team's earlier discovery that upheavals in the earth's crust initiated a kind of reverse-greenhouse effect 500 million years ago that cooled the world's oceans, spawned giant plankton blooms, and sent a burst of oxygen into the atmosphere.

The new study has revealed details as to how oxygen came to vanish from Earth's ancient atmosphere during the Cambrian Period, only to return at higher levels than ever before.

It also hints at how, after mass extinctions, the returning oxygen allowed enormous amounts of new life to flourish.

Saltzman and his team were able to quantify how much oxygen was released into the atmosphere at the time, and directly link the amount of sulfur in the ancient oceans with atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide.

The result is a clearer picture of life on Earth in a time of extreme turmoil.

"We know that oxygen levels in the ocean dropped dramatically [a condition called anoxia] during the Cambrian, and that coincides with the time of a global extinction," said Saltzman, associate professor of earth sciences at Ohio State.

In a paper in the journal Nature just last month, the same researchers presented the first geochemical evidence that the anoxia spread even to the world's shallow waters.

"We still don't know why the anoxia spread all over the world. We may never know," Saltzman said. "But there have been many other extinction events in Earth's history, and with the exception of those caused by meteor impacts, others likely share elements of this one - changes in the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans."

"By getting a handle on what was happening back then, we may improve our understanding of what's happening to the atmosphere now."

This is a preliminary result of the network of retweets with the hashtag #jan25 at February 11 2011, at the time of the announcement of Mubarak's resignation. If you retweeted someone, or has been retweeted, it is possible that your username is one of these tinny points (or maybe a bigger one?).

To collect the network data, I used the Gephi Graph Streaming plugin, connected it to a Python web server I made myself. This web server works like a bridge, it connects to the Twitter Streaming API using the statuses/filter service and converts the users and retweets to nodes and edges in a network format that can be read by the Gephi Graph Streaming plugin. Nodes are twitter users, and links appear between the nodes A and B when B retweeted a message of A containing the hashtag #jan25.

Washington, D.C. - The long list of hypotheses generated to explain why people stutter includes some whoppers. In the 1600s, for example, scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon proposed that stutterers have tongues that are too stiff and prescribed warm wine to make them more pliable.

"Even if it wasn't effective, it's a treatment I wouldn't mind trying once in awhile," joked Luc De Nil, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada who studies speech disorders. De Nil spoke here yesterday at a session on stuttering at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceNOW).

Scientists now know that genetics play a role in stuttering. The speech disorder tends to run in families, and twin studies indicate that it is about 50% to 70% heritable. Dennis Drayna, a geneticist at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Rockville, Maryland, who participated in the session, described how he and his colleagues used 44 Pakistani families to pinpoint a handful of mutations responsible for the disease. Together, these mutations likely account for perhaps 5% to 10% of all stuttering cases worldwide, Drayna estimates.

"In Pakistan, 70% of all marriages are between either first or second cousins," Drayna says. That makes for some complex relationships. In one of the families Drayna studied, two brothers and a sister married two sisters and a brother that are the offspring of their first cousin. All this intermarrying "results in a population structure with a greatly increased incidence of genetic disorders," he says. This enabled the researchers to detect mutations in three genes - GNPTAB, GNPTG, and NAGPA - involved in the function of lysosomes, the cellular sacs where debris gets recycled. Together, the three genes help the lysosomes do their job. Drayna and his colleagues speculate that the brain contains a group of neurons that are unique to speech production and also "uniquely sensitive to this metabolic deficit."

A plant pathologist experienced in protecting against biological warfare recently warned the USDA of a new, self-replicating, micro-fungal virus-sized organism which may be causing spontaneous abortions in livestock, sudden death syndrome in Monsanto's Roundup Ready soy, and wilt in Monsanto's RR corn.

Dr. Don M. Huber, who coordinates the Emergent Diseases and Pathogens committee of the American Phytopathological Society, as part of the USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System, warned Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack that this pathogen threatens the US food and feed supply and can lead to the collapse of the US corn and soy export markets. Likewise, deregulation of GE alfalfa "could be a calamity," he noted in his letter (reproduced in full below).

On January 27, Vilsack gave blanket approval to all genetically modified alfalfa. Following orders from President Obama, he also removed buffer zone requirements. This is seen as a deliberate move to contaminate natural crops and destroy the organic meat and dairy industry which relies on GM-free alfalfa. Such genetic contamination will give the biotech industry complete control over the nation's fourth largest crop. It will also ease the transition to using GE-alfalfa as a biofuel.

"My letter to Secretary Vilsack was a request to allocate necessary resources to understand potential nutrient-disease interactions before making (in my opinion) an essentially irreversible decision on deregulation of RR alfalfa," Huber told Food Freedom in an email.

Scientists have estimated the first cosmic census of planets in our galaxy and the numbers are astronomical: at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way.

At least 500 million of those planets are in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold zone where life could exist. The numbers were extrapolated from the early results of NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope.

Kepler science chief William Borucki says scientists took the number of planets they found in the first year of searching a small part of the night sky and then made an estimate on how likely stars are to have planets. Kepler spots planets as they pass between Earth and the star it orbits.

So far Kepler has found 1,235 candidate planets, with 54 in the Goldilocks zone, where life could possibly exist. Kepler's main mission is not to examine individual worlds, but give astronomers a sense of how many planets, especially potentially habitable ones, there are likely to be in our galaxy. They would use the one-four-hundredth of the night sky that Kepler is looking at and extrapolate from there.

Borucki and colleagues figured one of two stars has planets and one of 200 stars has planets in the habitable zone, announcing these ratios Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. And that's a minimum because these stars can have more than one planet and Kepler has yet to get a long enough glimpse to see planets that are further out from the star, like Earth, Borucki said.