Scientists who weren't in Chile during this morning's aftershocks nevertheless knew the moment the rumbling started, thanks to a global network of quake-detecting instruments called seismographs.

Seismographs are securely mounted to the surface of the Earth, so when the ground starts shaking, the instrument's case moves.

What doesn't move, however, is a suspended mass inside the seismograph, called the seismometer. During an earthquake, the seismometer remains still while the case around it moves with the ground shaking.

A new snapshot from NASA's latest space telescope has revealed a vast cloud in deep space that is brimming with new stars inside flower-like wisps of interstellar dust.

The spectacular infrared image shows the Berkeley 59 cluster of young stars, each of which is just a few million years old, as blue dots just to the right of the center of a dust cloud awash in red and green hues, leading NASA scientists to liken it to a giant cosmic rose.

The new image was taken by NASA's new Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a $320 million space observatory built to map the entire sky in unprecedented detail. The infrared space telescope has already recorded stunning images of dark asteroids and comets that were previously unseen because they were hard to spot in the visible light range of the spectrum.

French, Swiss and British archaeologists are in a "paradise" of discovery, unearthing the mysteries of a civilisation that once conquered ancient Egypt.

There is not a tourist in sight as the sun sets over sand-swept pyramids at Meroe, but archaeologists say the Nubian Desert of northern Sudan holds mysteries to rival ancient Egypt.

"There is a magic beauty about these sites that is heightened by the privilege of being able to admire them alone, with the pyramids, the dunes and the sun," says Guillemette Andreu, head of antiquities at Paris' Louvre museum.

Mexico City - Several Prehispanic mural paintings at Tetitla Palace, in Teotihuacan Archaeological Zone are fully restored after 2 years of work conducted by specialists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

Among the paintings created between 600 and 700 AD, outstand Las Aguilas (The Eagles), Diosas verdes (Green Goddesses), Caballero Jaguar,(Jaguar Warrior), Jaguares anaranjados (Orange Jaguars), Manos (Hands), Aves con conchas (Birds with Shells) and Los Buzos (The Divers).

Back in January, the online analytics company Compete estimated that Facebook attracted 133 million unique viewers in the US alone, a showing strong enough to boost Facebook over Yahoo in the Great American Traffic Race. Now, there is evidence that for one week in February, Facebook temporarily unseated even Google, long the most popular site in the US.

According to Hitwise, an NYC-based tracking firm, Facebook soaked up 7.07 percent of all US Internet activity for the week ending March 13. By comparison, Google registered 7.03 percent of the market. Hitwise analyst Heather Dougherty wrote in a blog post today that Facebook had previously topped Google on a handful of prior occasions, including last Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day.

There is a whiff of old-school science fiction in this watch, which resembles a wrist-bound communicator to a mother ship. The Tibida lets wearers tell time three different ways. "Minute-centric mode" has the minutes themselves appear scoreboard-style in the lower, two-sided display - if it is 22 minutes past, the lights form two twos; if nine past, then you see a zero-nine. The hour is marked off in the top display that has 12 spots. "Hour-centric mode" just swaps the hours for the bottom and minutes for the top, though this mode only has a minute resolution of five minutes, naturally, and is for when actual minute-to-minute time is unimportant. The third mode displays the time in a binary digit format using only the 12-unit top display. The way this works is that from right to left, the six columns stand for one, two, four, eight, sixteen and thirty-two. The top row is the hour and the bottom row is minutes. So if the second and fourth lights from the right in the top row are lit, it is 10 o'clock (8 + 2).

As with most Tokyoflash watches, telling time on the Tibida is not something the wearer will be doing in no time flat.

Space physicists from the University of Leicester are part of an international team that has identified the impact of the Sun on Mars' atmosphere.

Writing in the AGU journal Geophysics Research Letters, the scientists report that Mars is constantly losing part of its atmosphere to space.

The new study shows that pressure from solar wind pulses is a significant contributor to Mars's atmospheric escape.

The researchers analysed solar wind data and satellite observations that track the flux of heavy ions leaving Mars's atmosphere. The authors found that Mars's atmosphere does not drift away at a steady pace; instead, atmospheric escape occurs in bursts.

Anxiously awaited follow-up observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the presence of two new moons around the distant planet Pluto. The moons were first discovered by Hubble in May 2005, but the science team probed even deeper into the Pluto system last week to look for additional satellites and to characterize the orbits of the moons.

Though the team had little doubt the moons are real, they were happy to see the moons show up very close to the locations predicted from the earlier Hubble observations. The initial discovery is being reported today in this week's edition of the British science journal Nature.

For 1,400 years, a stash of Anglo-Saxon artefacts remained buried - until it was found last year by a man with a metal detector. It throws fascinating new light on clashes in the Dark Ages, but now we must win the fight to keep this precious hoard in Britain

It's a misty dawn in Middle England, some time in the 7th century. A small band of armed men struggle up a wooded hill. At the summit they pause. While one keeps watch, the others tip their loot on to the ground. They divide up the jewels and coins, then they turn to the rest of the booty: swords, crosses, saddle fittings, which are mostly gold and exquisitely made. They hammer at them with stones and the hilts of their knives, they rip the pommels from the swords and stuff the blades into their jerkins, smash the helmets and bend the arms of the crosses until they look like nothing more than twisted pieces of metal. They stuff the small gold and bejewelled fragments into leather pouches, grub out a hole in the earth, and bury their cache. Then they disappear over the hill as swiftly as they came.

Centuries pass: William the Conqueror's Normans arrive; the Tudors squabble over national control; Queen Victoria and the British Empire come and go. The hoard remains untouched - until 1,400 years later, when an amateur collector, Terry Herbert, rediscovers it on what is now a farm. Since Terry came across the treasure, now known as the Staffordshire Hoard, using a simple metal detector last July, the story behind it has captured the public imagination. The items he discovered - more than 1,500 pieces of beautifully crafted gold and silver - have been described as the most important Anglo-Saxon archeological evidence ever found in Britain. The battle to keep the bling in the country is well under way. The government would be unlikely to grant an export licence but it could still be split up and taken abroad illegally by a private collector. Despite all the furore, the hoard poses as many questions as it answers.

The DNA tests that revealed how the famed boy-king Tutankhamun most likely died solved another of ancient Egypt's enduring mysteries - the fate of controversial Pharaoh Akhenaten's mummy. The discovery could help fill out the picture of a fascinating era more than 3,300 years ago when Akhenaten embarked on history's first attempt at monotheism.

During his 17-year rule, Akhenaten sought to overturn more than a millennium of Egyptian religion and art to establish the worship of a single sun god. In the end, his bold experiment failed and he was eventually succeeded by his son, the young Tutankhamun, who rolled back his reforms and restored the old religion.