"North Korea demanded Wednesday that the United States sign a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War, as a senior North Korean diplomat visited New York to negotiate ways to restart six-nation nuclear disarmament talks.

In an editorial marking the 58th anniversary of an armistice that ended the 1950-53 war, the North's official Korean Central News Agency insisted a peace treaty could go a long way toward resolving a deadlock over Pyongyang's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

North Korea has long called for a peace treaty with the United States. The armistice left the Korean peninsula in a technical state of war. Its latest push comes as North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan makes a fresh attempt to reopen six-nation talks that were last held in December 2008.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton invited Kim to New York to meet with U.S. officials later this week only after nuclear envoys from the rival Koreas held surprise talks last week.

Seoul blames North Korea for two attacks that killed 50 South Koreans last year and has demanded that Pyongyang show remorse. The United States has insisted that its ally Seoul must be satisfied that inter-Korean ties are improving before it will pursue more nuclear negotiations with Pyongyang.

Kim told reporters after landing Tuesday in New York that he was "optimistic of the prospects for the six-way talks and the North Korea-U.S. relationship," according to South Korea's Yonhap News Agency. "I believe North Korea-U.S. relations will improve, as now is the time for countries to reconcile."

Despite Kim's positive tone, North Korea is making clear ahead of the New York talks that it wants a separate dialogue on signing a peace treaty, in addition to six-nation nuclear negotiations, said Kim Keun-sik, a North Korea expert at Kyungnam University in South Korea..."

-- I don't think Kim understands how peace talks work.

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"We’d love to claim the photo below was taken in outer space, but that isn’t true. Seen below is the hydrothermal worm, a rather obscure microorganism that lurks in thermal vents deep (really deep) in the ocean. It’s a recent discovery and its scientific name is still unknown.

The hydrothermal worm is so small it’s no use giving its exact measurement. Just think of it as roughly the size of your friendly neighborhood bacteria. No doubt its not the only miniscule creature lurking beyond the naked eye and beyond the human imagination. There must be trillions of undiscovered species out there. Lurking. Waiting. Feeding.

Just to give credit where credit is due, the epic photograph up north was taken by Philippe Crassous using an electron microscope. The FEI Quanta Sem zoomed unto the organism more than 500 times to capture a portrait of its ferocious mug. Staring intently at it, the hydrothermal worm’s visage reminds us of sandworms from Dune..."

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-- Watch it.

"Discovered by two miners looking for lead, these amazing crystal-lined caves could be mistaken for Superman's ethereal Arctic lair.

These stunning white beams of gypsum have been growing at a snail's pace for hundreds of thousands of years in caves below Naica in Mexico.

Ten years after the amazing discovery, scientists are petitioning the Mexican government to claim for Unesco World Heritage status to protect the unique formations for future generations.

'They're really one of the Wonders of the World,' said Juanma Garcia Ruiz, a geologist from Spain's Instituto Andaluz de Las Ciencias de la Tierra, who has studied at the mine.

These stunning images, which were taken by world-renowned Spanish photographer Javier Trueba, show the sheer size of the crystals, some of which measure up to 11 metres.

Growing slowly over time, it is still unclear why the formations fill the caves at such haphazard angles.

The huge mines at Naica have been excavated for years, but in 1975 a massive area was drained so mining operations could take place..."

-- !!!

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-- Whaaaaaaaaatttttsss!!!

""J-10."

"Aw, you sunk my battleship!"

Those lines were immortalized in the 1967 TV commercial for Milton Bradley's first edition of the board game Battleship. But the game had existed in various pencil-and-paper forms since the early part of the 20th Century. Since then, the game has been adapted into electronic versions, video games, and now mobile phone apps. But next year the game is being reinvented again as a big-budget action movie.

So how are they turning a fairly simple two-player strategy game into a two-hour silver-screen spectacle? By adding aliens.

In "Battleship," Taylor Kitsch (TV's "Friday Night Lights") plays Lt. Alex Hopper, a Naval officer with a rebellious streak living in the shadow of his older brother, Stone (Alexander Skarsgard of "True Blood"). Out off the coast of Hawaii for an international training exercise, Alex discovers a massive vessel floating in the water. It rises up into the air, and suddenly the war games aren't so fun anymore.

So obviously it's not a direct translation of the game, but it does promise to retain many of the fundamental elements of the original. Director Peter Berg ("Hancock," "The Kingdom") told CHUD.com that like in the game each side of the conflict will have a small fleet of five ships. The aliens are part of a scouting party, not a full-fledged invading force, and the humans will be cut off from the rest of the world. And the Naval ships will have their radar disabled, so they will have to strategize to figure out where their enemies are lurking..."

-- Coming this summer Rubics Cube - The Movie, in 3D.

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"Cilia, tiny hair-like structures that perform feats such as clearing microscopic debris from the lungs and determining the correct location of organs during development, move in mysterious ways. Their beating motions are synchronized to produce metachronal waves, similar in appearance to "the wave" created in large arenas when audience members use their hands to produce a pattern of movement around the entire stadium.

Due to the importance of ciliary functions for health, there is great interest in understanding the mechanism that controls the cilias’ beating patterns. But learning exactly how cilia movement is coordinated has been challenging.

That may be beginning to change as a result of the creation, by a team of Brandeis researchers, of artificial cilia-like structures that dramatically offers a new approach for cilia study.

In a recent paper published in the journal Science, Associate Professor of Physics Zvonimir Dogic and colleagues present the first example of a simple microscopic system that self-organizes to produce cilia-like beating patterns.

“We’ve shown that there is a new approach toward studying the beating,” says Dogic. “Instead of deconstructing the fully functioning structure, we can start building complexity from the ground up.”

The complexity of these structures presents a major challenge as each cilium contains more than 600 different proteins. For this reason, most previous studies of cilia have employed a top-down approach, attempting to study the beating mechanism by deconstructing the fully functioning structures through the systematic elimination of individual components..."

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"A herd of Critically Endangered wild Przewalski's horses in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is under threat from poachers, say scientists.

Researchers in Ukraine say that the population may be in decline because poachers have been removing the animals faster than they are breeding.

Thirty-one horses were taken from a Przewalski's horse reserve and from a local zoo.

They were released into the zone in 1998 and 1999.

Scientists from the state-run SSSIE Ecocentre in Chernobyl say the horses were introduced to "enrich the biodiversity" of the exclusion zone surrounding Chernobyl nuclear power station's damaged nuclear reactor.

The zone was evacuated in 1986 after reactor number four exploded.

Professor Tim Mousseau, a biologist from the University of South Carolina who visits the zone to work at least twice a year, says that the herd he has spotted has been "getting smaller" in recent years.

"Many people in this part of Ukraine are very poor," he told BBC Nature on a recent trip to the exclusion zone.

"So access to a readily available supply of horsemeat is tempting for people."

But Sergiy Paskevych, a researcher from the National Academy of Science in Ukraine and the author of a website dedicated to ecology and wildlife in the exclusion zone, told BBC Nature that poachers probably travelled long distances to the exclusion zone and took the carcasses away to be sold..."

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-- Bringing back the deviantART features! Been neglecting DA. =(

"Rome has the catacombs; Paris has its sewers. Now New York will have its own subterranean wonder: a 200-ton mechanical serpent’s head.

It is a gargantuan drill that has been hollowing out tunnels for a train station under Grand Central Terminal. As tall as four men and with the weight of two whales, the so-called cutter head — the spinning, sharp-edged business end of a tunnel boring machine — is usually extracted, dismantled and sold for scrap when the work is done.

But the Spanish contractor overseeing the project is taking a different approach. It believes it can save time and money by simply leaving it behind, dormant and decayed, within the rocky depths of Midtown Manhattan. The drill’s final resting place: 14 stories beneath the well-tended sidewalks of Park Avenue.

There is little precedent for such a Brobdingnagian burial. No one at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which plans to officially entomb the machine sometime this week, can recall such an interment. “It’s like a Jules Verne story,” Michael Horodniceanu, the authority’s chief of construction, said.

A recent visit to the cutter’s future crypt revealed a machine that evokes an alien life form that crashed to earth a millennia ago. Its steel gears, bolts and pistons, already oxidizing, appeared lifeless and fatigued. A wormlike fan, its exhaust pipe disappearing into the cutter’s maw, was still spinning, its drone not unlike a slumbering creature’s breath..."

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"In 1984, researchers spotted dolphins doing something unusual in Shark Bay, Western Australia. When the animals got hungry, they ripped a marine basket sponge from the sea floor and fitted it over their beaks like a person would fit a glove over a hand. The scientists suspected that as the dolphins foraged for fish, the sponges protected their beaks, or rostra, from the rocks and broken chunks of coral that litter the sea floor, making this behavior the first example of tool use in this species.

But why do dolphins go to all of this trouble when they could simply snag a fish from the open sea?

The answer, researchers hypothesize and report online today in PLoS ONE, is that the bottom-dwelling fish are a lot more nutritious. Some species also don't have swim bladders, gas chambers that help other fish control their buoyancy as they travel up and down the water column. In the Bahamas, where dolphins are also known to forage for bottom-dwelling fish, dolphins hunt partly by echolocating these bladders, which give off a strong acoustic signal. That helps the cetaceans find prey even when it's buried in sea sand.

But bottom-dwelling fish, such as barred sandperch, which are favored by some Shark Bay dolphins, don't have swim bladders and so are harder to find with echolocation. The sea floor is not nearly as soft here as it is in the Bahamas, so if dolphins want to probe for these fish, they risk injuring their rostra..."

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