The Great Fiji Shark Count is willing to work with the Ministry of Fisheries to ascertain how 50 baby hammerhead sharks were found dead along the Nukulau beachfront over the weekend.

Nanise Ledua, a member of the GFSC, said they were working on sending a team to Nukulau Island to gather samples of the dead baby sharks and to determine the cause of their deaths.

"We have so many theories surrounding the dead baby sharks, but we cannot prove it right now," she said.

Ms Ledua said the toxic spill theory was not possible as other species of fish and other marine lives were not affected and the other possibility of the cause of their deaths was the change in water temperature, but this could not be confirmed.

The invasive, noisy birds can damage citrus crops, and their droppings can spread disease..

In Houston, they tried air cannons so loud neighbors called in the SWAT team. In New Mexico, it took a half-dozen men and thousands of explosives. In Austin, technicians go out night after night with heavy-duty lasers. All to battle an 8-ounce, highly adaptive bird that's colonizing the country -- and leaving behind inch-thick layers of droppings as it goes.

The great-tailed grackle, called by some the devil bird, is lovely to look at. Males are jet-black with a violet-blue iridescent sheen to their feathers that made them prized by Aztec kings in their original range in Central America. But while they once were seen only in the most southern tip of Texas, today they're in 23 states, as far north as Montana and as far west as Washington.

That might make them nice for bird watchers. But for residents of areas they colonize, not so much. Grackles tend to congregate in large flocks and like shopping centers and fast-food store parking lots, where there's trash for food and trees or light posts for perching. Their droppings can spread disease, and they can damage citrus crops.

Could magnetic waves be the trustworthy tool that saves lives?

Twenty-three hundred years ago, hordes of mice, snakes, and insects fled the Greek city of Helike on the Gulf of Corinth (map). "After these creatures departed, an earthquake occurred in the night," wrote the ancient Roman writer Claudius Aelianus. "The city subsided; an immense wave flooded and Helike disappeared."

Since then, generations of scientists and folklorists have used a dizzying array of methods to attempt to predict earthquakes. Animal behavior, changes in the weather, and seismograms have all fallen short. (Watch: home video footage and the science of earthquakes.)

The dream is to be able to forecast earthquakes like we now predict the weather. Even a few minutes' warning would be enough for people to move away from walls or ceilings that might collapse or for nuclear plants and other critical facilities to be shut down safely in advance of the temblor. And if accurate predictions could be made a few days in advance, any necessary evacuations could be planned, much as is done today for hurricanes.

Scientists first turned to seismology as a predictive tool, hoping to find patterns of foreshocks that might indicate that a fault is about to slip. But nobody has been able to reliably distinguish between the waves of energy that herald a great earthquake and harmless rumblings.

An Afghan designer and former refugee has developed a low-cost, wind-powered mine detonating device inspired by the toys he played with as a child.

Massoud Hassani's Mine Kafon is composed almost entirely from bamboo and biodegradable plastics, with a skeletal structure of spiky plungers that resembles a giant spherical tumbleweed from another planet.

At 70 kilograms, Hassani says his invention is light enough to be propelled by a normal breeze, while still being heavy and big enough - 190cm in diameter - to activate mines as it rolls over them.

According to the U.N., there are more than 110 million active mines scattered across 70 countries, with an equal number stockpiled around the world still waiting to be planted.

What do a planet-sized, frigid moon and a small galaxy have in common?

The Magellanic Clouds consist of two dwarf galaxies in proximity to the Milky Way. According to astronomers, they are orbiting our galaxy and might have once been part of it.

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is approximately 200,000 light-years from Earth, as astronomers gauge distance, and is no more than a smudge of light to the naked eye. Both galaxies were first seen by the European explorer Ferdinand Magellan during his global circumnavigation in 1519. The people of Australia have known about their existence for thousands of years, however.

According to astronomers from the Spitzer Space Telescope team, the SMC is interesting because it "is very similar to young galaxies thought to populate the universe billions of years ago." A lack of heavy elements - 20% of those found in the Milky Way, for example - leads then to conclude that its stellar population has not had time to transmute the hydrogen in their thermonuclear cores into nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen, the "elements of life."

Discovery Date: December 22, 2012

Magnitude: 19.5 mag

Discoverer: Pan-STARRS 1 telescope (Haleakala)

The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2012-Y36.

They typically winter no farther south than New Jersey. Maybe Hurricane Sandy steered them off course or disrupted their usual diet of schooling fish.

Biologists aren't sure why these penguin-like birds, called razorbills, have flocked to the Space Coast and beyond, way farther south than normal.

The black birds with white underbellies have flapped their way to Kennedy Space Center, where Audubon members spotted several during their annual Christmas Bird Count.

"Everybody's talking about it," said Ned Steel, who coordinated the Audubon count on Merritt Island, which includes the security area of the space center.

Before this year, there had been only 17 sightings of razorbills reported to Florida's bird surveillance program. Those were typically one or just a few birds.

The sun's peak of solar activity this year will likely be the quietest seen in at least 100 years, say NASA scientists who watch Earth's closest star daily.

Sunspot numbers are low, researchers said, even as the sun reaches the peak of its 11-year activity cycle. Also, radio waves that are known to indicate high solar activity have been very subdued.

"It's likely to be the lowest solar maximum, as measured by sunspot 'number,' in more than a century," wrote Joe Gurman, a project scientist for NASA's sun-observing mission Stereo, or Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory. The current sun weather cycle is known as Solar Cycle 24.

Quiet as the sun may be, scientists still have a vested interest in watching it. A rogue flare could damage electrical grids or knock out communications satellites, as has happened many times before.

Though solar science is still in its infancy, it has advanced greatly even from the time solar activity knocked out much of Quebec's electrical grid in 1989, Gurman pointed out.

"The interconnectedness of power grids has grown tremendously since the Hydro Québec issue," he wrote.

"Compared to the frequency of widespread power outages due to trees falling on above-ground power lines during snowstorms or hurricane-force winds from storms such as the recent [Hurricane] Sandy, it's a very low order of probability event."

Geologists Robin Wordsworth and Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago, suggest in a paper published in the journal Science that early Earth was kept warm enough for life to develop by collisions between hydrogen and nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere. In a perspective piece in the same journal, fellow geologist James Kasting of Pennsylvania State University comments on the work Wordsworth and Pierrehumbert have been doing and suggests their theories seem plausible.

During the first two billion years of Earth's existence, something helped keep the planet warm enough for life to develop, but it wasn't heat from the sun. Scientists have put forth many theories to explain why the planet wasn't covered with ice despite receiving just 70 percent of the solar radiation it gets today. Most have centered on the idea that methane from hydrogen eating organisms likely served as a greenhouse gas, helping trap the small amount of heat that did come from the sun.

In this new research, Wordsworth and Pierrehumbert suggest an entirely different source - collisions between hydrogen and nitrogen molecules that resulted in the creation of "dimer" molecules that would wobble in response to being struck by infrared light from the sun. That wobbling, they say, would have allowed for heat capture providing the planet with a warm blanket.

Asteroid 2012 DA14, discovered early this year by the LaSagra Observatory in Spain, will pass inside the geosynchronous satellite ring about 35,800 km above the equator on Feb. 15, 2013. Astronomers say the asteroid may hit a communications satellite. National Geographic reports that Paul Chodas, a planetary astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said: "That's very unlikely, but we can't rule it out."

According to calculations, the asteroid will pass close enough to Earth to disrupt some orbiting satellites. Chodas, however, said that the orbiting International Space Station in low-Earth orbit is not at risk.

In spite of the fact that NASA astronomers assure that the asteroid will not hit the Earth, Steven Chesley, also of JPL, said: "We don't know exactly where it is, and that uncertainty maps through to an uncertainty in the orbit and predictions." The uncertainty, according to astronomers, means that they can't rule out that it will not hit Earth in subsequent close approaches to Earth after 2013.

NASA astronomers say there is an estimated cumulative 0.031% risk (1 in 3,230) of 2012 DA14 impacting Earth sometime between 2020 and 2082, a figure they hope to refine further as they collect more information during its close approach to Earth in February next year.

National Geographic reports that if the asteroid hits the the Earth, it will likely hit the Antarctica or the Southern Ocean because it approaches the Earth from the south. The impact of the 140,000 ton rock could release energy equivalent to a 2.4 megaton bomb, about the same as the 1908 Tunguska blast in which hundreds of square miles of forest in Siberia were leveled. According to Chodas, "If the asteroid were to strike the ocean, It could produce a tsunami," although "it probably wouldn't be big."