Automatic spending cuts have hit America's science and research sectors especially hard, according to experts, who warn of potentially dire implications for the nation's overall competitiveness.

As the "sequester," a package of spending cuts imposed last month, begins to pinch, many research projects will be slowed or scuttled, from cancer therapies to efforts to convert medical breakthroughs into marketable therapies.

The deep oceans have yielded many mysteries that have puzzled people for centuries, from the giant squid to huge jellyfish that look like UFOs. To that list add a fish with totally transparent blood.

The Ocellated Ice Fish lives in the freezing waters of the Antarctic Ocean, where it manages to keep its body doing all the things that other fish do, but with blood that is absolutely clear, researchers told Agence France Presse on Friday.

The Italian government has asked the European Commission not to renew authorization of a key genetically-modified corn, according to a letter seen by Agence France Presse on Thursday.

The product is U.S. agri-giant Monsanto's MON 810 maize, one of only two GM products cleared to be grown in Europe along with German conglomerate BASF's Amflora potato.

Local bans are unlikely to stop bottled water overtaking soda pop as Americans' preferred beverage by the end of the decade, the chairman of Nestle Waters North America said Thursday.

Speaking to reporters in Washington, Kim Jeffery forecast that "within the next five or six years," bottled water would become "the number one beverage in America" as consumers turn away from carbonated soft drinks.

Scientists in Japan said Friday they had found a way to "read" people's dreams, using MRI scanners to unlock some of the secrets of the unconscious mind.

Researchers have managed what they said was "the world's first decoding" of night-time visions, the subject of centuries of speculation that have captivated humanity since ancient times.

A Seychelles freshwater turtle species declared extinct after decades of futile searches, in fact never existed, scientists said Thursday.

While Man has the extinction of several turtle and tortoise species on his conscience, DNA evidence has now cleared him of exterminating Pelusios seychellensis, a team from Germany and Austria wrote in the journal PloS One.

Canadian federal police on Wednesday charged two former government scientists with allegedly trafficking in dangerous and highly contagious germs.

Klaus Nielsen and Wei Ling Yu, former researchers at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), are accused of attempting to export harmful pathogens that could infect humans and livestock to China.

It is one of the cosmos' most mysterious unsolved cases: dark matter. It is supposedly what holds the universe together. We can't see it, but scientists are pretty sure it's out there.

Led by a dogged, Nobel Prize-winning gumshoe who has spent 18 years on the case, scientists put a $2 billion detector aboard the International Space Station to try to track down the stuff. And after two years, the first evidence came in Wednesday: tantalizing cosmic footprints that seem to have been left by dark matter.

Four little black sheep on Wednesday left the countryside and began their new careers in the city: working as eco-friendly lawn movers in a largely working-class district in northeastern Paris.

Between April and October, the new "park workers" will graze grounds the size of eight tennis-courts in three two-week-long sweeps in a move to promote biodiversity and make the grooming of the capital's green areas more sustainable -- replacing both chemicals and lawn mowers.

Astrophysicists have witnessed the rare event of a black hole awakening from its slumber to snack on a planet-sized object in a galaxy 47 million light years away, the University of Geneva said Tuesday.

The observation made using the European Space Agency's INTEGRAL satellite project, revealed a black hole that had been slumbering for years chomping on a giant, low-mass object that had come too close.