TV News LIES

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured images of a monster hurricane at Saturn's north pole – a storm so vast and powerful it makes tropical cyclones on Earth look tame by comparison.

The storm's eye alone spans some 1,250 miles – about the distance from North Carolina's Outer Banks to central Kansas. Wind speeds at the inner eye wall have been clocked at 330 miles an hour. The storm extends for another 600 to 700 miles beyond the eye.

Astronomers have found three planets orbiting far-off stars that are close to Earth-sized and in the "habitable zone": a distance from their suns that makes the planets' surfaces neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.

One of the three planets orbits a star with the prosaic name Kepler-69. "Kepler-69 is a sun-like star," says , a research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute who uses the , which is on a mission to search for Earth-like planets.

A new type of battery has been developed that, its creators say, could revolutionise the way we power consumer electronics and vehicles.

The University of Illinois team says its use of 3D-electrodes allows it to build "microbatteries" that are many times smaller than commercially available options, or the same size and many times more powerful.

It adds they can be recharged 1,000 times faster than competing tech. However, safety issues still remain.

The White House on Thursday honored a Broward County, Fla., scientist who helped launch a multi-county initiative to address sea level rise and other consequences of climate change in South Florida.

Jennifer Jurado, who heads the Broward County Natural Resources Planning and Management Division, was among 12 people the White House identified as "Champions of Change" for preparing their communities for the consequences of climate change.

If CLARITY had been devised 15 years ago, my life as a PhD student would have been much, much easier. I was trying to understand how migrating cerebellar granule cells find their way through the developing chicken brain. This involved dissecting hundreds of tiny brains from chick embryos into slices and labeling some of the cells with a fluorescent dye.

I'd incubate the slices for a week or so and embed them in a gel. Then, I'd use a machine called a microtome to shave each one into dozens of sections, each thinner than a human hair, and, finally, examine them with a confocal fluorescence microscope.

Ancient DNA shows that bowhead whales bucked the trend to survive the last Ice Age, say scientists. The demise of cold-adapted land mammals such as mammoths has been linked to rising temperatures around 11,000 years ago.

But researchers were surprised to find a contrasting population boom for whales living off the coast of Britain. Their study is also the first to discover that the ocean giants lived in the southern North Sea.