Ancient legends of thunder gods can be explained today with the modern science of sound waves, said a U.S. scientist on Thursday who believes an auditory illusion inspired the creation of Stonehenge.

The famous, 5,000 year-old stone circle in Britain is one of the best-known world heritage sites and many have guessed at the reasons for its existence, from a prehistoric observatory to sun temple to sacred healing ground.

Astronauts and robots have united in space with a healthy handshake.

The commander of the International Space Station, Daniel Burbank, shook hands Wednesday with Robonaut. It's the first handshake ever between a human and a humanoid in space.

Scientists met behind closed doors in Geneva Thursday to discuss whether controversial research on a mutant form of bird flu capable of being spread among humans can be made public.

The two-day gathering at the World Health Organization (WHO) was called to discuss the studies on the H5N1 virus which international scientists halted on January 20, citing fears of devastation if it were to escape the laboratory.

U.S. chemical and agribusiness giant DuPont announced Tuesday it will build a "state-of-the-art" seed bank in Beijing to boost its molecular breeding business in China's rapidly growing agriculture market.

DuPont said the facility at the state-owned Beijing International Flower Port would employ about 50 researchers and would focus on producing "high-yielding maize hybrids."

Massive storm surges that statistically threaten New York City once a century could occur at intervals from three to 20 years by 2100, according to estimates by US scientists published Tuesday.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Princeton University built a computer model that simulated tens of thousands of storms under different scenarios for global warming.

The tidy Swiss want to clean up space.

Swiss scientists say they plan to launch a "janitor satellite" specially designed to get rid of orbiting debris known as space junk.

The butterfly known as the Miami blue was once ubiquitous along the Florida coasts. But development and hurricanes shrank its habitat, and the last place it was seen was a state park in the Florida Keys in 2010.

For more than a year, it's been Bahia Honda State Park biologist Jim Duquesnel's mission to determine if the small butterfly, one of the rarest insects in the U.S., is still there, while fending off the iguanas threatening its habitat.

A tiny songbird weighing just two tablespoons of sugar migrates from the Arctic to Africa and back, a distance of up to 29,000 kilometers (18,000 miles), scientists reported on Wednesday.

The size of an undernourished sparrow, the northern wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe) tips the scales at just 25 grams (0.9 of an ounces).

A probe designed to delve into the "Big Bang" that created the cosmos has uncovered an enigmatic fog of microwave radiation in the center of our galaxy, European astronomers reported on Monday.

Planck, a billion-dollar European space telescope launched in May 2009, found "a mysterious haze of microwaves that presently defies explanation" during a scan of the center of the Milky Way, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

Sharks killed twice as many swimmers and surfers last year than in 2010, with the increase due largely to a growth in tourism and changing shark patterns due to global warming.

There were 12 deaths in 46 shark attacks in 2011, a mortality rate of more than 25 percent compared to an average of under seven percent in the last 10 years, according to statistics from the University of Florida.