Scientists in Switzerland said on Friday they had devised software that can swiftly trace terror suspects, computer viruses, rumor-mongering and even infectious diseases back to their source.

"Using our method, we can find the source of all kinds of things circulating in a network just by 'listening' to a limited number of members of that network," said researcher Pedro Pinto of Lausanne's Federal Polytechnic (EPFL).

The U.S. space shuttle Endeavour will arrive in Los Angeles next month before making its way across the city in October to its new home at the California Science Center, officials said Wednesday.

Endeavour, which completed its last mission a year ago, will be flown on the back of a modified Boeing 747 from Florida's Kennedy Space Center to Los Angeles on September 20, where it will remain for a few weeks in a hangar.

Threatened shark species are being used to make shark fin soup, a delicacy in Chinese cuisine, in several U.S. cities, according to an unprecedented study based on DNA testing.

Thirty-three different species of sharks turned up in samples collected in 14 cities and analyzed at Stony Brook University's Institute for Ocean Conservation Science in New York.

Modern man's forerunners shared the planet with at least two related species nearly two million years ago, scientists said on Wednesday, pointing to newly-unearthed pieces in a 40-year-old fossil puzzle.

Findings published in the journal Nature touch on the odyssey of our ancestor, the upright-walking early human known as Homo erectus.

The United States ran into crossfire on Wednesday after it called for "flexibility" in climate talks, even if this approach could not guarantee meeting the U.N.'s target on global warming.

Europe demanded that the two-degree-Celsius (3.6-degree-Fahrenheit) objective set at the Copenhagen summit in 2009 be honored while small island states accused Washington of dangerous backsliding.

Scientists found that Antarctica was covered by rain forests some 50 million years ago after the analysis of materials taken from the bottom of the ocean in the area, NBC reported.

The scientists said that if the temperatures kept increasing around the world at the current speed, the traces of the plants left under the ice could rise up and Antarctica could become green again.

An Australian medical team and government jet were sent to Antarctica Wednesday to assist in the rescue of an expeditioner from the United States' McMurdo Station base.

The Australian Antarctic Division, a branch of the government's environment department, said the U.S. National Science Foundation had requested assistance in an emergency mission, the details of which were not immediately clear.

A second volcano in New Zealand threatened to rumble to life on Wednesday, a day after a long-dormant mountain that was the backdrop to "The Lord of the Rings" movies erupted.

GNS Science reported no fresh convulsions at the Mount Tongariro volcano, which sent a plume of ash 20,000 feet (6,100 meters) into the atmosphere, showering the North Island and disrupting domestic air travel.

When Bruce Willis used a nuclear bomb to save Earth from a giant asteroid in the movie Armageddon, the scenario had little science and a lot of fiction, physicists said on Tuesday.

Willis' nuke would have had as much impact on the rock as a cheap firecracker and was used so late that the planet would have been doomed anyway, they said.

British physicist and astronomer Bernard Lovell, the creator of what was once the world's biggest radio telescope, has died at the age of 98, his university said Tuesday.

Lovell was the Emeritus Professor of Radio astronomy at Manchester University and the founder and first director of Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, northwest England.