Scientists in Canada are reporting the development of a fast, inexpensive "dipstick" test to identify small amounts of pesticides that may exist in foods and beverages. Their paper-strip test is more practical than conventional pesticide tests, producing results in minutes rather than hours by means of an easy-to-read color-change, they say.

Two brown dwarf-sized objects orbiting a giant old star show that planets may assemble around stars more quickly and efficiently than anyone thought possible, according to an international team of astronomers.

"We have found two brown dwarf-sized masses around an ordinary star, which is very rare," said Alex Wolszczan, Evan Pugh professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Penn State and lead scientist on the project.

The star, BD +20 2457, is a K2 giant -- an old bloated star nearing the end of its life. Seeing a pair of brown dwarfs around a K-type giant is a first for astronomers and offers a unique window into how they can be produced. The researchers from the Torun Center for Astronomy, Poland and the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, Penn State report their findings in the current issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

An appeals court on Tuesday ordered Microsoft to stop selling Microsoft Word 2007 and other Office 2007 products by Jan. 11 because the software infringes on a patent held by a Canadian company. The judge also hit Microsoft with a $290 million fine.

In ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down Microsoft's appeal of a lower court's finding that Word 2007, the most current version of the product, infringes on a patent held by Toronto-based i4i Inc.

I4i originally sued Microsoft in 2007, claiming that an XML editor built into Word steps on its patent. In August, the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas found in favor of i4i, prompting Microsoft's appeal. The appeals court on Tuesday upheld the Texas decision.

If the thought of a voracious, razor-toothed dinosaur ripping into its prey isn't scary enough, consider a venomous dinosaur. That's what some scientists propose after discovering an unusual fossil in China.

Sinornithosaurus was petite as dinosaurs go - think of a turkey with teeth. It ran with a tough crowd, though; it was cousin to the oh-so-scary velociraptor of Jurassic Park fame.

Paleontologist David Burnham from the University of Kansas and a Chinese colleague were puzzled by a 125-million-year-old Sinornithosaurus fossil in a museum - specifically, by its upper teeth.

"We finally realized that we're looking at the outside of these teeth and they're grooved," Burnham recalls. "And we both looked at each other and thought,
'What? Why would an animal have grooved teeth?' "

Starting from the end of November, Queen Mary's Particle Physics Research Centre is the sole recipient of the T2K experiment data. The T2K Collaboration is a 500-strong alliance of scientists in 12 countries, who have come together to investigate the ghostly neutrino.

Physicist Dr Francesca Di Lodovico said: "Trillions of neutrinos pass through our bodies every second, but you don't notice; they pass through space and the Earth with almost no effect. This makes neutrinos very difficult to study and yet they are thought to play a fundamental role in the formation of the Universe and understanding where we came from."

Neutrinos come from outer space, either shot out from the Sun, or left over from the Big Bang. But despite their abundance, techniques to understand their nature have only been developed in the last few decades, giving surprising results.

A group of Norwegian and American researchers have shown that common variations in genes associated with microcephaly -- a neuro-developmental disorder in which brain size is dramatically reduced -- may explain differences in brain size in healthy individuals as well as in patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders.

The study, which involved collaboration between researchers from the University of Oslo, the University of California, San Diego and Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, California, will be published online the week of December 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

In relation to body size, brain size has expanded dramatically throughout primate and human evolution. In fact, in proportion to body size, the brain of modern humans is three times larger than that of non-human primates. The cerebral cortex in particular has undergone a dramatic increase in surface area during the course of primate evolution.

Archaeologists in Israel say they have uncovered the remains of the first dwelling in Nazareth believed to date back to the time of Jesus Christ.

The discovery sheds light on how people lived 2,000 years ago, when Christians believe Jesus was growing up there, Israel's Antiquities Authority said.

A spokeswoman said Jesus and his childhood friends likely knew the home.

It was found near the place where angel Gabriel is believed to have told Mary that she would give birth to Jesus.

Fossil of early hominid heads the journal's list of top 10 scientific advances of 2009.

The research that brought to light the fossils of Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominid species that lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia, has topped Science's list of this year's most significant scientific breakthroughs. The monumental find predates "Lucy," - previously the most ancient partial skeleton of a hominid on record - by more than one million years, and it inches researchers ever-closer to the last common ancestor shared by humans and chimpanzees.

At a very early age, children learn how to classify objects according to their shape. Now, new research suggests studying the shape of the aftermath of supernovas may allow astronomers to do the same.

A new study of images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory on supernova remnants - the debris from exploded stars - shows that the symmetry of the remnants, or lack thereof, reveals how the star exploded. This is an important discovery because it shows that the remnants retain information about how the star exploded even though hundreds or thousands of years have passed.

"It's almost like the supernova remnants have a 'memory' of the original explosion," said Laura Lopez of the University of California at Santa Cruz, who led the study. "This is the first time anyone has systematically compared the shape of these remnants in X-rays in this way."

Take a close look at your Christmas tree -- it has seven times more genetic material (DNA) than you do! Why this is so is still largely unknown, but now the DNA of the spruce is going to be mapped by Swedish researchers from Umeå Plant Science Center (a collaboration between the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and Umeå University), the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), and the Karolinska Institute (KI), with the aid of a SEK 75 million grant from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

Coniferous trees have dominated major parts of the earth for hundreds of millions of years. When primitive batrachians crawled around Carbon Age forests, they were surrounded by conifers. Conifers survived the geological disaster 250 million years ago that paved the way for the age of the dinosaurs. When the impact of a meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs, conifers lived on. Today conifers dominate major regions of the earth -- the combined weight of all the people on earth is less than that of the conifers in Jämtland County in central Sweden.

Apparently conifers managed as early as 300 million years ago to create an extremely successful genetic make-up that has allowed them to dominate the globe, but what does it look like? All conifers have twelve chromosomes, but they are extremely large: a cell from a spruce or pine has seven times as much DNA as a human cell does. Why do conifers have so much DNA? Does it have to do with their having thrived for millions of years on earth, and do they really have more genes than you and I, or are their genes simply more 'diluted'? This is not known, but their enormous amount of DNA has entailed that scientists have not dared to tackle a mapping of the complete genome of coniferous trees.