Collosal Squid Has World's Biggest Eyes

Archaeologists find animals' bones across northern Europe

(NEWSER) - The Roman Empire may have brought camels a long way from home to serve as its beasts of burden, archaeologists say. Researchers have found Roman-age camel bones at 22 sites across northern Europe, USA Today reports. What's more, "antique literature and iconographical sources inform us about the uses of camels in the Roman Empire," the archaeologists write. More»

It was like 'finding a foot-long cockroach,' researcher says

(NEWSER) - Scientists looking for deep-sea life off the coast of New Zealand were amazed when their traps yielded several specimens of a "supergiant" crustacean not seen for decades. The amphipods—sometimes called the "insects of the sea"—were more than 10 inches long, 20 times as big as typical amphipod species. They were plucked from four miles down in the Kermadec Trench, one of the world's deepest ocean trenches. More»

Noah Feldman is amused by Gingrich's academic past

(NEWSER) - Newt Gingrich's attacks linking President Obama to Saul Alinsky delighted Harvard law professor Noah Feldman. "What excites me is not the preposterousness of the statement," though indeed, it was preposterous, he writes for Bloomberg . "What I love was the absurdity of Newt Gingrich apparently believing that the name Saul Alinsky would have any kind of meaning to the Americans listening to him." (It doesn't, Bill Maher assures us .) Truly, the ex-speaker is a historian at heart—he "can't help himself." More»

Relativity, theory of evolution top the list

(NEWSER) - Every year, the website Edge poses a big, open-ended question to leading scientists. This year's query— "What is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?" —received 191 answers covering a wide range of ideas, with Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution receiving the most replies, reports Reuters . Some interesting responses:

• "Darwin's natural selection wins hands down," writes Richard Dawkins, unsurprisingly. "Never in the field of human comprehension were so many facts explained by assuming so few."

California researcher broke law with blubber, feds say

(NEWSER) - A renowned marine biologist has landed in hot water for giving blubber to killer whales. Nancy Black, who runs whale-watching tours in California's Monterey Bay, has been indicted by a grand jury on charges that she violated a federal law banning feeding or otherwise interfering with marine mammals in the wild, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Her lawyer says all she did was attach a rope to a free-floating piece of blubber from a gray whale, killed earlier by orcas, in order to film killer whales eating. More»