A Dutch man came face-to-face with an angry bear when he climbed into the enclosure at a German zoo to rescue his three-year-old daughter.

While her parents were looking away, the little girl, who was visiting the area with her parents and young sibling, climbed a three-foot-high fence in the Luenebach zoo in south-western Germany and tumbled into the animal's pen, police said on Thursday.

Though her father quickly climbed after her, the 28-year-old Asiatic black bear had already hit the girl's forehead, injuring her, police said in a statement.

The man succeeded in carrying his daughter to safety, but not before the bear injured his leg, according to police, who did not release the names of the family involved.

Other visitors who were watching the "dramatic situation" called the rescue squad and the girl was flown to a hospital in Trier, police said. The father was also hospitalized, but their wounds were not life-threatening.

Scientists have discovered how to tell whether a wasp is angry - by looking at the markings on its head.

Researchers found that wasps with more black spots tend to be more aggressive and ferocious.

The remarkable connection was discovered as part of into an investigation into why some wasps have such patterned faces.

The study involved painting dots on the faces of dead wasps, placing them on tempting sugar cubes and see how other wasps reacted to them.

Dr Elizabeth Tibbetts of the University of Michigan in the US found that living wasps were less willing to land near dead wasps with more spots.

She argues that the insects have learned to be wary of the most highly decorated wasps because they are more aggressive.

An aggressive swan known as "Hissing Sid" has been evicted from his riverbank home and moved almost 40 miles away after a series of attacks including one that almost caused a teenage girl to drown.

The vicious bird used his powerful 7ft long wings to attack hundreds of rowers and canoeists on the River Chelmer in Chelmsford, Essex, his home for the past two decades.

The 22lb swan would patrol the busy river terrorizing users on a daily basis, before attempting to drown them with his flapping wings or pecking holes in boats.

But the swan's violent behavior became progressively worse over the past year, escalating in March when he attacked a 13-year-old girl.

The teenager, who was not named, almost drowned after the ferocious swan capsized her canoe using its long wings.

It appeared in the skies over East Staffordshire and left witnesses baffled.

The sight was so rare that few people in the UK have ever encountered one before.

What they saw was an anomaly of nature: the incredible spectacle of an upside down rainbow.

Wayne Burgess, who lives in Tutbury, spotted the remarkable sight when he was outside with his two young children during a regular, sunny afternoon on Monday.

What he did not expect to see while he was with his children was a meteorological event that rarely occurs away from the North and South Poles.

"I was playing in the garden with my children, Natalie and Zak, when my daughter said 'look at that rainbow'," he said.

"When we all looked up, to our amazement, we saw that it was upside down." The curved rays of light left Mr Burgess so dumbfounded that he photographed them using his mobile phone.

In early August 2010, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) released its analysis of global temperatures for the previous month. In July 2010, GISS found, the global average temperature was 0.55 degrees Celsius (almost 1 degree Fahrenheit) warmer than climatology - defined as average temperatures for the same month from 1951 to 1980. July 2010 was practically in a three-way tie for the warmest July on record, tied with July 1998 and July 2005.

This color-coded map shows global surface temperature anomalies for July 2010 compared to average temperatures for the same time of year from 1951 to 1980. Above-normal temperatures appear in shades of red, and below-normal temperatures appear in shades of blue. Red-hued Greenland, for example, experienced above-normal temperatures while the blue-hued Pacific Northwest experienced below-normal temperatures. Gray patches indicate areas of insufficient data.

The GISS analysis found temperatures more than 5 degrees Celsius (about 10 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than climatology in the region of Eastern Europe, including Moscow, and in Eastern Asia. (Both Moscow and Eastern Siberia faced severe wildfires and smoke in July 2010.) The eastern United States also experienced unusual heat, although not as severe as the heat in parts of Eurasia.

Substantial areas, however, showed below-normal temperatures, including central Asia and southern South America. Parts of South America suffered through sub-freezing temperatures and heavy snow, leading to hundreds of cold-related deaths, ruined crops and livestock, and contaminated rivers after millions of fish froze, said news reports. Temperatures were below normal across much of East Antarctica, although they were well above normal over the Antarctic Peninsula.

A police officer was trapped in his patrol car for three hours after 50,000 angry honeybees descended on his vehicle.

Sheriff's Deputy Brandon Jenkins, 31, had been called to the scene of a broken down lorry in North Carolina. The lorry was pulling a trailer loaded with 60 boxes of bees and the insects had escaped.

Officer Jenkins arrived at day break just as the bees were waking up and they swarmed him, forcing him to retreat to his car and radio for assistance.

"It was mind boggling how many bees were out there. At some point, it was hard to see out of the windows," he said.

The officer admitted using deadly force on some of the insects who got in.

Scientists have found themselves raising a smile when studying this creature - the happy face spider.

The spider, which measures just a few millimetres across, has developed bizarre markings giving the appearance of a smiling face.

Scientists think the spider, which has the scientific name Theridion grallator and is harmless to humans, has evolved the patterns to confuse predators.

It is under-threat of extinction in the rainforests of the Hawaiian island chain in the Pacific.

Dr Geoff Oxford, a spider expert from the University of York, said: "I must admit when I turned over the first leaf and saw one it certainly brought a smile to my face.

Date-Time:
Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 16:28:20 UTC

Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 02:28:20 AM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
12.210°N, 141.456°E

Depth:
43.1 km (26.8 miles)

Region:
MARIANA ISLANDS REGION

Distances:
385 km (240 miles) WSW of HAGATNA, Guam

460 km (285 miles) WSW of Rota, Northern Mariana Islands

470 km (290 miles) NE of Yap, Micronesia

565 km (350 miles) SW of SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands

Wellington - The devastating tsunami which killed nearly 200 people in Samoa and Tonga last September was the result of a rare double earthquake and not one as previously believed, scientists said Wednesday.

Simultaneous earthquakes, with one hiding the other, are unusual "and almost certainly increased the size of the tsunami and its destructiveness on some Tongan islands," New Zealand's GNS Science said in a statement.

Global earthquake readings initially indicated a single large "normal faulting" quake of magnitude 8.0 had occurred, producing an extensional motion while the tsunami waves indicated a "thrust" event with compressional movement.

The scientists said they were unable to reconcile the conflicting data until six weeks after the event when measurements from a small Tongan island showed there must have been two large earthquakes.

Their findings appear this week as the cover story in the prestigious science publication Nature.

"This is a rare phenomenon," lead author John Beavan, a geophysicist at GNS Science, said Wednesday.

Another hippopotamus at a Ugandan safari park has died, bringing the death toll to 83 since June. Stranger still is the cause of the massive pachyderm massacre: anthrax poisoning, the London Daily Telegraph reports.

Besides being a powdery biological weapon that grabbed headlines in the perilous week following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks (when some was mailed to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, among others), anthrax is also a soil-dwelling bacteria -- bacillus anthracis bacterium -- that is clearly harmful to both humans and animals alike. Symptoms of infection can include high fever and bleeding.