TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — The Obama administration will spend $51.5 million this year to shield the Great Lakes from greedy Asian carp, including first-time water sampling to determine whether the destructive fish have established a foothold in the lakes, officials said Thursday.
Officials released an updated strategy that also includes stepped-up trapping and netting in rivers that could provide access to the lakes, as well as initial field tests of scents that could lure carp to where they could be captured. An acoustic water gun that could scare carp from crucial …

Free-flying planets, not anchored to a star, could outnumber stars in the Milky Way by 100,000 to one.
According to researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), the discovery could affect current theories of planet formation and could change our understanding of the origin and abundance of life.
“If any of these nomad planets are big enough to have a thick atmosphere, they could have trapped enough heat for bacterial life to exist,” says team leader Louis Strigari.
Almost all of the more than 500 planets detected outside our …

Modern mammals, including humans, could be at risk of shrinking as a result of global warming, just as teeny prehistoric horses shrank to an even smaller size when temperatures rose 56 million years ago.
Early horses were already quite tiny to begin with in comparison to modern beasts, which have been helped along by people breeding them for size, speed and strength.
However, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when temperatures on the planet rose by around 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit (about 5.5 to 11 degrees Centigrade) over 175,000 years, they …

Following intense attacks over its changing privacy practices, internet giant Google agreed to add a “do-not-track” button to its web browser, Google Chrome.
This can have many implications as websites and businesses would have to treat analytics in a new manner. Most small businesses that used Google’s free web analytics software could be affected if users opt out of tracking.
Also businesses that used tracking features for targeted advertisement campaigns would be affected. However, this would provide greater freedom to the internet user as it would become increasingly difficult for small companies …

The “Retina Display” purportedly from Apple’s iPad 3 has surfaced again, with notorious teardown merchants iFixit doing their level best to get the pixel-blessed panel up and running. The screen – put under the microscope earlier this month, and seemingly revealing its 2048 x 1536 resolution – presented no shortage of issues, however, with a completely different connector from that used in the current iPad 2.
Still, iFixit trained its microscope on the panel again, finding a far denser collection of pixels that seemingly re-confirms original suggestions of Retina Display style …