At the State Journal, there’s a story about a rare bird — at least rare for our part of the country: Thousands of miles from its normal West Coast winter haunts, the bird showed up at perhaps the very best place it could have picked to create a stir in the local birding world –…

Via How Beavers Prepare For Winter (VIDEO).

Last week, I posted on a widely-reported NASA contention that agency scientists had caused microbes to accept a diet of arsenic, rather than phosphorus, thereby expanding the possible bases of life. (The contention was published in the journal Science and reported widely.) Over the weekend, scientists in America and abroad began to challenge the findings,…

Via Huffington Post: Hovering Hummingbirds Hold Secrets of Flight — Video Pick Page

The cub, who will be named when he is 100 days old following Chinese tradition, will be placed in public viewing areas when he can walk, usually around 4 months old. He measures just over a foot long and weighs 2.2 pounds. Via Baby Panda Cub Debuts At Zoo Atlanta (PHOTOS/VIDEO).

Quite the innovation — Researchers on Thursday said they had created microbes that “very likely” use arsenic in their DNA in place of phosphorus, in what may be the first exception to the formula long thought to govern the basic chemistry of life. Force-grown in the lab, the bacteria use the notorious poison to replace…

  Severe weather: Walworth Co. gets walloped by November storm packing strong winds, rain – WITI.

The 2010 Leonid meteor shower runs from Wednesday, Nov. 10, through Sunday, Nov. 21. The peak will be the nights between the 17th and the 19th. The Leonids are famous for being spectacular storms — since the orbit of the Temple-Tuttle comet intersects with that of Earth, the debris cloud our planet passes through each…

Suddenly the “drowned rat” look became adorable! Longleat Animal Park has two baby otters, Sumalee and Kasem, just 14 weeks old. In this video, the cute duo are learning to swim. They first were trained in a sink, then progressed to a bath, and now their skills are truly being tested… in a paddling pool.…