Futurists have proposed that extinct animals could be resurrected some day via cloning of their DNA extracted from bone or frozen tissue.

...a new project to store tiny samples of tissue from endangered animals at New York's natural history museum again prompts questions on whether this approach might be insurance against extinction...

...Spanish biologists resurrected an extinct Spanish goat, the Pyrenean Ibex, this year, cloning it from frozen tissue collected before the species' demise in 2000. The clone survived for seven minutes after birth before succumbing to a lung infection...

Researchers unveil imprints made 20 years before Edison invented phonograph

...earliest known recordings. A bunch of wavy lines scratched by a stylus onto fragile paper that had been blackened by the soot from an oil lamp date from 1857.

Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville never intended for the soot-lined imprint of the sound waves to be played back, the historians reported. But the inventor hoped the visual patterns of the sound waves he had recorded using a hornlike device with the stylus attached resembling an artificial ear ? called a phonautograph ? might one day be read like sheet music to recreate a singer?s voice or the timbre of a musical instrument.

The most comprehensive and technologically advanced survey of China's Great Wall has discovered the ancient monument is much longer than previously estimated, state media reported on Monday.

The wall, built over centuries to keep foreigners out of China, stretches for 8 851,8 kilometres, much further than common estimates of 5 000 kilometres, according to the findings of the survey.

A living time capsule of sorts has been found buried under hundreds of feet of Antarctic ice -- a colony of microbes that have been sealed off from the rest of the world for more than 1.5 million years.

The microbes, which live without light or oxygen, were detected in meltwater flowing out from Taylor Glacier, one of the outlet glaciers of the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet in the otherwise ice-free McMurdo Dry Valleys.

Genetic tests suggest that the microbes are similar to ones found in marine environments today, which the researchers think are a remnant of a larger population of microbes that once lived in a fjord or sea that was cut off when sea levels fell and left the pool behind. The pool was eventually capped off by the flowing glacier.

The water the microbes dwell in averages a temperature of 14 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 10 degrees Celsius), but doesn't freeze because the water is three to four times saltier than the ocean.

The program allows iPhone owners to draw images on the handset's touch screen using just their fingers.

The program has been downloaded more than 4,000 times from Apple's iTunes store in less than two weeks.

While most children of his age are painting or drawing with crayons, Lim Ding Wen has been programming.

Lim, who is now fluent in six programming languages, first started using a computer when he was two-years-old, discovered programming aged seven, and has since completed more than 20 programming projects.