Canadian paleontologists have answered the old conundrum by closely studying a fossilized dinosaur nest:

LiveScience.com, via Yahoo! News:

…[I]nterpreted literally, the answer to the riddle is clear. Dinosaurs were forming bird-like nests and laying bird-like eggs long before birds (including chickens) evolved from dinosaurs.

“The egg came before the chicken,” Zelenitsky said. “Chickens evolved well after the meat-eating dinosaurs that laid [...]

MSNBC recently reported on an unusual idea – that offshore wind farms would be not only good for creating clean energy, but they’d also boost fish populations:

Extracting energy from wind changes regional air currents, which can in turn affect how the nearby ocean circulates, according to Goran Brostrom of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute in Oslo.

…

The change in currents seems [...]

It sure sounds too good to be true, but New Scientist is talking about new UCLA research on astralagus, a plant that’s almost as widely used as ginseng in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Apparently, this real-life “ancient Chinese remedy” does some interesting things to our chromosomes:

In the latest work, Effros took killer T-cells from HIV-infected people and exposed them [...]

Click to embiggen

Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, as seen from the Galileo space probe. The blue background is a false-color overlay of Jupiter’s swirling clouds.

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona, found via.

OK, it’s a specific kind of rock:

CleanTechnica.com:
Scientists at Columbia University have discovered that a rock found in the Middle East can be used to soak up carbon dioxide at a rate high enough to significantly slow global warming.

The team found that when the rock, known as Peridotite, comes into contact with carbon dioxide it converts the gas into harmless [...]

Seed contributor Jonah Lehrer posts to Scienceblogs about the brain-boosting effects of a stroll in the woods:

Because you can’t help but stop and notice the reddish orange twilight sky – paying attention to the sunset doesn’t take any extra work or cognitive control – our attentional circuits are able to refresh themselves. A walk in the woods is like [...]

From the British paper The Register, reporting on the ammonia-laden refrigerator being ejected from the International Space Station:
ASTRONAUT SPACE DUMP PONG-BOMB FRAG SHOWER TODAY
ISS Stinky fridge hurl plunge shocker.

Now that’s the poetry of science. The story is remarkably more prosaic….

The refrigeration unit in question is the Early Ammonia System (EAS), a 1400lb tank intended to furnish backup supplies of [...]

PhysOrg.com reveals the unexpected origin of a new alternative energy technology – it isn’t new at all:

…[I]t may seem a bit out of place that, in 1833, an Italian physicist named G. D. Botto was performing experiments on a technique for generating hydrogen.

…

Botto’s original 19th-century device is quite simple. It consists of a chain of iron and platinum [...]

PhysOrg reports on a slithery new power source – the eel generator:

Electric eels channel the output of thousands of specialized cells called electrocytes to generate electric potentials of up to 600 volts, according to biologists.

…

Their calculations show that substantial improvements are possible. One design for an artificial cell generates more than 40 percent more energy in a single [...]