Two Dutch men were arrested after police discovered 40 boxes filled with animal bones, including those of a rare snow leopard, in the northeastern city of Emmen, a police spokesman said Friday.

"Police received a tip-off about the men and when they searched two homes on Thursday, they found chimpanzee, crocodile and hippopotamus skeletons and even the skull of rare snow leopard, as well as ivory," Ron Reinds told Agence France Presse.

A substance found in nuts and whole grains may someday help doctors fight the kind of food poisoning that sickened thousands of people in Europe last summer, a study in mice suggests.

While a variety of germs can cause food poisoning, the European outbreak involved a dangerous strain of the bacterium E. coli. It infects people and pumps out a poison called Shiga toxin. Some other bacteria also produce this toxin, which overall causes more than 1 million deaths a year worldwide. The European food poisoning outbreak included about 4,000 people and 50 deaths.

The world last year was not quite as warm as it has been for most of the past decade, government scientists said Thursday, but it continues a general trend of rising temperatures.

The average global temperature was 57.9 degrees Fahrenheit (14.4 Celsius), making 2011 the 11th hottest on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. That's 0.9 degrees (0.5 C) warmer than the 20th century average, officials said. In fact, it was hotter than every year last century except 1998.

Scientists working in the dense jungles of Indonesia have "rediscovered" a large, gray monkey so rare it was believed by many to be extinct.

They were all the more baffled to find the Miller's Grizzled Langur — its black face framed by a fluffy, Dracula-esque white collar — in an area well outside its previously recorded home range.

Many male birds use their flashy colored feathers to lure females, but the great bowerbird of Australia has mastered the art of illusion to captivate the ladies, researchers said Thursday.

Part architect, part magician, the great bowerbird constructs an elaborate arched walkway called a bower made from twigs.

It's high noon for the humble leap second.

After ten years of talks, governments are headed for a showdown vote this week on an issue that pits technological precision against nature's whims.

Russia will look into the possibility that a U.S. radar station could have inadvertently interfered with the failed Mars moon probe that plummeted to Earth, Russian media reported Tuesday, but experts argued that any such claims were far-fetched.

NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs also said the U.S. space agency was not using the military radar equipment in question at the time of the Russian equipment failure, but instead was using radar in the Mojave desert in the western United States and in Puerto Rico.

Rare and expensive fragments of a Mars meteorite fell from the sky in July over Morocco, a team of international scientists confirmed.

A fireball in the sky was observed in a remote region of southern Morocco by nomads who tracked down fragments of the seven kilogram (15 pound) meteorite, marking only the fifth time in history that a Mars rock has been seen falling to Earth.

Scientists studying white nose syndrome in bats estimate the fungal ailment has killed at least 5.7 million bats in 16 states and Canada, providing alarming new numbers about the scope of its decimation.

White nose is caused by a fungus that prompts bats to wake from their winter hibernation and die after they fly into the cold air in a doomed search for insects. First detected in a cave west of Albany in 2006, white nose has spread to 16 states from the Northeast to the South and as far west as Kentucky. It also has been detected in four Canadian provinces.

Boa constrictors can sense the heartbeat of their quarry as they suffocate it, thus giving themselves the signal to know when the prey is dead, scientists say.

In a study published on Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters, snake experts at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania pondered how the boa can tell when its target is lifeless and can then be swallowed.