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Bats Feast on Fornicating Flies

The sex sounds flies make can lead to a violent death -- luring predator bats to their love nests while their defenses are down, a report said Monday.

Researchers who studied a small community of flies and bats in a cowshed near Marburg, Germany, found that the insects' chances of becoming dinner were dramatically higher while copulating.

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Experts: Some Fracking Critics Use Bad Science

In the debate over natural gas drilling, the companies are often the ones accused of twisting the facts. But scientists say opponents sometimes mislead the public, too.

Critics of fracking often raise alarms about groundwater pollution, air pollution, and cancer risks, and there are still many uncertainties. But some of the claims have little — or nothing— to back them.

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Lobstermen Finding More Odd Colors In the Catch

When a 100-pound shipment of lobsters arrived at Bill Sarro's seafood shop and restaurant last month, it contained a surprise — six orange crustaceans that have been said to be a 1-in-10-million oddity.

"My butcher was unloading them and said, 'Oh, my gosh, boss, they sent us cooked dead lobsters,'" said Sarro, owner of Fresh Catch Seafood in Mansfield, Mass. "He then picked one up and it crawled up his arm."

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Report: Taiwan to Get New Powerful Rocket System

Taiwan is scheduled to take delivery next month of a powerful multiple-launch rocket system aimed at neutralizing former rival China's amphibious landing capabilities, local media reported Sunday.

The weapon, called Ray Ting 2000 or "Thunder 2000", will be put into service in August, said the Taipei-based Liberty Times, as the military plans to phase out the current rocket system introduced three decades ago.

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Japan Sends Cargo to Space Station

A Japanese H-IIB rocket blasted off Saturday to deliver an unmanned supplies vessel to the International Space Station.

The rocket lifted off into an overcast sky from the southern island of Tanegashima on schedule at 11:06 am (0206 GMT), according to live images relayed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

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French Crusader for Gibbons in Borneo Jungle

For 15 years Aurelien Brule has lived in the Indonesian jungle, crusading against palm oil multinationals, loggers and corruption in his bid to save endangered gibbons from annihilation.

He admits that his is a losing battle. The primates are being pushed out of their natural habitat by loggers removing the equivalent of six football fields-worth of jungle "every minute" to make way for palm oil plantations.

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Leaders Say Climate Is Changing Native Way of Life

Native American and Alaska Native leaders told of their villages being under water because of coastal erosion, droughts and more on Thursday during a Senate hearing intended to draw attention to how climate change is affecting tribal communities.

The environmental changes being seen in native communities are "a serious and growing issue and Congress needs to address them," Tex Hall, chairman of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation of New Town, N.D., said Wednesday.

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First Algae-Based Biofuel Plant Will be Built in Brazil

The world's first industrial plant producing biofuels from seaweed will be built in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco in late 2013, the official in charge of the project said Thursday.

The factory to be set up by Austrian firm SAT on a sugar cane plantation that yields ethanol, will produce 1.2 million liters of algae-based biofuels annually, Rafael Bianchini, head of SAT's Brazilian subsidiary, told Agence France Presse.

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Astronomers Find Rare Spiral Galaxy in Early Universe

Astronomers said Wednesday they had stumbled upon an astonishing spiral galaxy that was born nearly 11 billion years ago, a finding that could spur a rethink of how galaxies formed after the Big Bang.

Dubbed BX442, the ancient star cluster was discovered in a survey of 300 distant galaxies carried out by the powerful Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

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Climate: 'Ocean Fertilization' Experiment Stores CO2

German researchers on Wednesday said they had evidence that sowing the ocean with iron particles sucks up and stores carbon dioxide (CO2), preventing the gas from stoking dangerous climate change.

But their work, touching on a fiercely controversial issue called geo-engineering, came under attack from other scientists and environmentalists.

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