Palaeontologists on Friday announced they had uncovered the remains of one of the greatest land predators ever -- a nine-meter (30-foot) four-tonne dinosaur that stalked the planet 100 million years ago.

The newly-discovered species has been called Siats meekerorum, whose first name honors a cannibalistic monster in the mythology of the Native American Ute people.

Ghostly sub-atomic particles called neutrinos in outer space have been glimpsed from an icy observatory in Antarctica, offering a rare new view of the universe, scientists said Thursday.

These high-energy particles are everywhere, and billions pass though our bodies every second, according to Kara Hoffman, a physics professor at the university of Maryland, a co-author of the study in the journal Science.

A nanosatellite owned by Argentina is now in orbit after being launched from a Russian platform.

Argentina's technology ministry said it was launched Friday at 4:30 a.m. (730 GMT) and has already orbited around the Earth five times.

Astronomers call it the monster. It was the biggest and brightest cosmic explosion ever witnessed. Had it been closer, Earth would have been toast.

Orbiting telescopes got the fireworks show of a lifetime last spring when they spotted what is known as a gamma ray burst in a far-off galaxy.

A volcanic eruption has raised an island in the seas to the far south of Tokyo, the Japanese coast guard and earthquake experts said.

Advisories from the coast guard and the Japan Meteorological Agency said the islet is about 200 meters (660 feet) in diameter. It is just off the coast of Nishinoshima, a small, uninhabited island in the Ogasawara chain, which is also known as the Bonin Islands.

A meteorite found in the Sahara last year by Bedouin tribesmen is a rock from Mars, revealing that the Red Planet's crust formed 4.4 billion years ago, scientists reported on Wednesday.

Sold to the elite club of meteorite collectors, the extraordinary rock has been analysed by U.S. and French geologists.

Scientists on Wednesday said they had found a way to make raindrops bounce faster off surfaces, opening the way to new water-resistant materials from clothing to aircraft wings.

Reporting in the journal Nature, a team at Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said they had slashed the amount of time a water drop stays in contact with a surface.

Today's kids can't keep up with their parents. An analysis of studies on millions of children around the world finds they don't run as fast or as far as their parents did when they were young.

On average, it takes children 90 seconds longer to run a mile (1.6 kilometer) than their counterparts did 30 years ago. Heart-related fitness has declined 5 percent per decade since 1975 for children ages 9 to 17.

Czech universities and firms have received the go-ahead to conduct scientific research on board an American space tourism aircraft, the Czech Space Office (CSO) said Tuesday.

The CSO inked the deal Monday with the firm XCOR Aerospace, which is putting the final touches on its Lynx aircraft designed to shuttle tourists to the brink of outer space.

Environment ministers meet in Warsaw on Wednesday to grapple with climate finance for poor nations a day after U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon urged leaders to ramp up efforts to curb global warming.

Finance threatens to derail the talks in the Polish capital which seek to pave the way to a new, global deal by 2015 to curb climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions.