July 3, 2008 -- About 700 years before the birth of America, a dying star exploded, creating a shock wave that blasted through space at nearly 20 million m.p.h. for the next thousand years.

Initially, the burst of light was so bright that it could be seen in daylight on Earth, nearly 7,000 light-years away in a constellation known as Lupus.

July 3, 2008 -- Exotic species and Homo sapiens have a hard time existing side by side. Wherever you find Man, you are also likely to find that rare birds, mammals, fish and flowers have been driven to the brink of extinction, and sometimes beyond.

Madagascar, though, is pinning its hopes on turning this tragic fact on its head.

July 3, 2008 -- Body art was all the rage in early Australia, as it was in many other parts of the ancient world.

Now a new study reports that elaborate and distinctive designs on the skin of indigenous Aussies repeated characters and motifs found on rock art and all sorts of portable objects, ranging from toys to pipes.

July 3, 2008 -- The Phoenix lander's first chemical sniff of Martian soil did not turn up any trace of the building blocks of life. Its next whiff could be its last.

Engineers said a short circuit that occurred last month in one of its test ovens designed to shake and bake miniscule soil samples could happen again when the instrument is turned on.

July 3, 2008 -- A slice of cool, fresh watermelon is a juicy way to top off a Fourth of July cookout and one that researchers say has effects similar to Viagra -- but don't necessarily expect it to keep the fireworks all night long.

Watermelons contain an ingredient called citrulline that can trigger production of a compound that helps relax the body's blood vessels, similar to what happens when a man takes Viagra, said scientists in Texas, one of the nation's top producers of the seedless variety.

July 2, 2008 -- Around 2300 B.C., an acrobat was killed during a bizarre sacrificial ceremony in what is now northeastern Syria, according to a new study published in the current issue of the journal Antiquity.

Gory evidence of the entertainer's death -- along with the remains of several rare horse-like animals which appear to have been sacrificed as well -- was found in the remains of a building at a site called Tell Brak, which was once the ancient city of Nagar.

July 2, 2008 -- Four years ago, the Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn to answer questions about how planets and other bodies have come to exist.

Accompanied by a large and eclectic family of moons and encircled by an intricate collection of rings, Saturn, located 1 billion miles from Earth, is like a mini solar system unto itself.

July 2, 2008 -- Millions of textbooks depicting our solar system as spherical have got it all wrong, according to studies of data sent back from deep space by NASA's venerable probe, Voyager 2.

The sun's zone of influence -- called the heliosphere -- turns out to be seriously asymmetrical, not round, they say.

July 2, 2008 -- Carbon capture and storage (CSS) is fast becoming the oil industry's favorite solution to the climate crisis, but the seductive simplicity of the idea masks a series of doubts about its viability.

In its simplest form, CSS consists of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) as it is released into the atmosphere, compressing it and then pumping it back into depleted oil and gas fields or other safe underground chambers.

July 2, 2008 -- Astronauts heading to the moon have more to worry about than rocket rides and radiation exposure. Researchers have discovered that breathing on the lunar surface could be hazardous to their health.

The problem is dust. On the moon, it's sharp-edged, chemically active and ubiquitous.

July 1, 2008 -- Tens of thousands of years ago, "armadas of ice" crumbled off of the ice sheet covering North America into the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away on the other side of the continent, icebergs calved off of another ice sheet into the Pacific.

Their synchrony -- just uncovered by new research -- suggests the events might be connected in a long-distance domino effect.

July 1, 2008 -- At least 12,000 years ago, the most popular musical events might have taken place in torch-lit caves next to walls covered in art, according to new archaeological research in France.

Stone Age-era caves there bear paintings located in the most acoustically resonant places, where sound lingers or echoes.

June 30, 2008 -- "Live fast and die young" takes on new meaning in light of a recently discovered chameleon that spends over half its life in an egg before living hard for a handful of months and then dropping dead of "old" age.

With an existence akin to that of an annual plant, the chameleon, Furcifer labordi, breaks the world record as the four-legged animal with the shortest known lifespan.