Stephen Hawking barely needs an introduction, but his recent direction does. He is packaging the universe for the younger generation. With his daughter Lucy Hawking, he has branched out into writing children's books. They tell Alison George all about it, and recount Stephen's personal alien experience.

Everyone's got a copy of A Brief History of Time, but few have finished it. If we engage children in science young enough, will this change?

Stephen Hawking: The book aroused a great deal of interest, although many people found it difficult to understand. But I believe everyone can, and should, have a broad picture of how the universe operates, and our place in it. This is what I have tried to convey in all my popular books.

It is extremely important to me to write for children. Children ask how things do what they do, and why. Too often they are told that these are stupid questions to ask, but this is said by grown-ups who don't know the answers and don't want to look silly by admitting they don't know. It is important that young people keep their sense of wonder and keep asking why. I'm a child myself, in the sense that I'm still looking. Children are fascinated by black holes and ask me questions. I find they soon get the idea if it is explained in simple language. And yes, it is nice to think a few of them might grow up and read A Brief History from cover to cover.

Spotting risky rock formations that are about to collapse and trigger tsunamis could be done with the help of Google Earth, new research suggests. The software could prove a useful tool where other types of survey prove too difficult or expensive.

One such spot has just been found in the Caribbean by Richard Teeuw from the Geohazard Research Centre at the University of Portsmouth, UK.

See satellite imagery of the volcano for yourself online or in Google Earth.

"We were doing fieldwork on the volcanic island of Dominica in the Lesser Antilles and initially just used Google Earth to identify good study areas," he says. "But with its 3D flyover tool, we quickly got excellent direct glimpses of a slab or rock that may soon cause a tsunami."

The flyover tool allowed Teeuw and his colleagues to examine the million-tonne rock in 3D, and from several angles. They found plenty of evidence that this block of coastline is a landslide waiting to happen. "The flank is undercut by erosion from the sea and we saw scars from recent landslides and tension cracks above the block," he says. "Earthquakes are common in the area and we are pretty sure it's going to go soon."

Pittsburgh - Hallmarks of an exotic state of matter called a supersolid have been spotted in a gas of ultracold rubidium atoms. In the same piece of matter, researchers found signs of the seemingly disparate properties of both solidity and superfluidity, the frictionless flow of atoms.

Reporting March 18 at a meeting of the American Physical Society, Dan Stamper-Kurn described two telltale signs that suggest this weird state of matter may indeed be a supersolid. The new matter is "a gas, which is superfluid, and also shares properties of a solid," said Stamper-Kurn, of the University of California, Berkeley. If confirmed, a rubidium supersolid could help scientists better understand the properties of this strange state of matter.

"What we've seen is an ability to describe a peculiar state of nature," comments Paul Grant, a former visiting scholar at Stanford University and IBM research staff member emeritus. If the researchers are able to extend their "interesting basic physics" results to come up with new ideas and applications, Grant says, "there may be a Nobel Prize there."

Researchers are studying some common soil bacteria that "inhale" toxic metals and "exhale" them in a non-toxic form. The bacteria might one day be used to clean up toxic chemicals left over from nuclear weapons production decades ago.

Using a unique combination of microscopes, researchers at Ohio State University and their colleagues were able to glimpse how the Shewanella oneidensis bacterium breaks down metal to chemically extract oxygen.

The study, published online the week of March 16 in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, provides the first evidence that Shewanella maneuvers proteins within the bacterial cell into its outer membrane to contact metal directly. The proteins then bond with metal oxides, which the bacteria utilize the same way we do oxygen.

Dhamar - A Yemeni archaeologist team has discovered a mosaic statue of a women sitting on a throne with here chest engraved with Musnad letters.

The archaeologists also found other relics including a stone board with faith signs engraved on it.

Brussels - Nine in 10 people expect their Internet service providers to offer open and unrestricted access to the Web, a survey showed on Wednesday. The survey, commissioned by Google, Yahoo and Web telephone company Skype, came as the European Parliament and EU states hold talks on a joint deal to reform the bloc's telecoms rules to boost competition.

"EU lawmakers should make sure that national authorities have the powers they need to act in cases where traffic management by telecommunication companies constitute unnecessary, discriminatory and/or anti-competitive behavior," the companies said in a joint statement.

On March 13, 1989 the entire province of Quebec, Canada suffered an electrical power blackout. Hundreds of blackouts occur in some part of North America every year. The Quebec Blackout was different, because this one was caused by a solar storm!

On Friday March 10, 1989 astronomers witnessed a powerful explosion on the sun. Within minutes, tangled magnetic forces on the sun had released a billion-ton cloud of gas. It was like the energy of thousands of nuclear bombs exploding at the same time. The storm cloud rushed out from the sun, straight towards Earth, at a million miles an hour. The solar flare that accompanied the outburst immediately caused short-wave radio interference, including the jamming of radio signals from Radio Free Europe into Russia. It was thought that the signals had been jammed by the Kremlin, but it was only the sun acting up!

On the evening of Monday, March 12 the vast cloud of solar plasma (a gas of electrically charged particles) finally struck Earth's magnetic field. The violence of this 'geomagnetic storm' caused spectacular 'northern lights' that could be seen as far south as Florida and Cuba. The magnetic disturbance was incredibly intense. It actually created electrical currents in the ground beneath much of North America. Just after 2:44 a.m. on March 13, the currents found a weakness in the electrical power grid of Quebec. In less than 2 minutes, the entire Quebec power grid lost power. During the 12-hour blackout that followed, millions of people suddenly found themselves in dark office buildings and underground pedestrian tunnels, and in stalled elevators. Most people woke up to cold homes for breakfast. The blackout also closed schools and businesses, kept the Montreal Metro shut during the morning rush hour, and closed Dorval Airport. Click here to view animation.

Proving that you don't need Google's billions or the BBC weather centre's resources, the four Spanish students managed to send a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere.

Taking atmospheric readings and photographs 20 miles above the ground, the Meteotek team of IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia completed their incredible experiment at the end of February this year.

Building the electronic sensor components from scratch, Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta­ Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort managed to send their heavy duty £43 latex balloon to the edge of space and take readings of its ascent.

Archeologists and forensic experts believe they have identified the skeleton of Cleopatra's younger sister, murdered more than 2,000 years ago on
the orders of the Egyptian queen.

The remains of Princess Arsinoe, put to death in 41BC on the orders of Cleopatra and her Roman lover Mark Antony to eliminate her as a rival, are the first relics of the Ptolemaic dynasty to be identified.

The breakthrough, by an Austrian team, has provided pointers to Cleopatra's true ethnicity. Scholars have long debated whether she was Greek or Macedonian like her ancestor the original Ptolemy, a Macedonian general who was made ruler of Egypt by Alexander the Great, or whether she was north African. Evidence obtained by studying the dimensions of Arsinoe's skull shows she had some of the characteristics of white Europeans, ancient Egyptians and black Africans, indicating that Cleopatra was probably of mixed race, too. They were daughters of Ptolemy XII by different wives.

Kate Moss and Agyness Deyn have an ageless competitor now. Japanese researchers have launched a new fashion robot that will soon strut her stuff down a Tokyo catwalk.