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.…

Via Baby Sea Lion Born In Australia’s Adelaide Zoo (VIDEO).

There’s some talk that perhaps, just perhaps, a unidentified missile was launched off the California coast on November 8th. It wasn’t a missile. It was a jet contrail, viewed from an angle. There’s a fine website about contrails, contrailcience.com, with an overflow site that establishes — conclusively — that the supposed missile was a contrail…

See, Video: Doctors battle to save baby koala – Telegraph. Hat tip to Huffington Post for the link.

Modern science’s equivalent of a sweet tooth — Why people prefer certain foods over others depends largely on a combination of taste and texture. While taste sensations are fairly well understood, scientists are just beginning to unravel the mystery of food texture. Now, researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia have found that…

Via, ‘Looting The Seas’ Documentary Exposes Bluefin Tuna Black Market (VIDEO).

Magnificent and wild, the grizzly bear of the American west has a fearsome reputation. But as a population boom forces them from their deep wilderness habitat of the Rocky Mountains, their increasingly close encounters with humans are altering their lifestyles, making them lazy and fat, conservation experts say. Via Grizzly bears enjoy the good life…

Lucy Cooke “posted a short video [she] made called “Meet the sloth” that features some of the sleepy residents of the Aviarios del Caribe, the world’s only sloth orphanage in Costa Rica. The world then went nuts for sloths, the video went viral and has now been watched by more than 2 million people around…