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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dropped a legal appeal Thursday to reinstate a rule that would have allowed the killing of bald eagles by wind and solar power companies.

The Resurrection Appearances Chronologically ArrangedBy: Msgr. Charles Pope This blog post is a follow-up from yesterday’s blog. You can read yesterday’s post by clicking HEREWhen we encounter the resurrection accounts in the New Testament we face a challenge in putting all the pieces together in a way that the sequence of the events flow in logical order. This is due to the fact that no one Gospel presents all, or even most of the data. Some of the data also seems to conflict. I tried to show in yesterday’s blog that these apparent conflicts are not, usually, true conflicts....

Companies seeking to cut rising health care costs are starting to dock the pay of overweight and unhealthy workers. Clarian Health, an Indiana hospital chain, will require workers who smoke to pay $5 out of each paycheck starting in 2009. For workers deemed obese, as much as $30 will be taken out each paycheck until they meet certain weight, cholesterol and blood pressure standards. Clarian employees will also be required to take part in a health risk appraisal that will inform the company which employees smoke. Such appraisals are becoming a popular tool for businesses to determine the health of...

THE biggest, and possibly the baddest predatory dinosaur of them all was not the fabled Tyrannosaurus rex, or even its slightly larger rival Gigantosaurus, but a long-jawed, sail-backed creature called Spinosaurus. An examination of some newly obtained fossils shows that Spinosaurus stretched an impressive 17 metres from nose to tail, dwarfing its meat-eating relatives. As well as being longer than its rivals, Spinosaurus also had stronger arms with which to catch its prey, unlike the puny-armed T. rex and its ilk. Until 10 years ago, T. rex held the mantle of the biggest predatory dinosaur. Of the 30 specimens collected...

Fussy eaters 'may be protecting themselves' Children who won't eat their fruit and vegetables could be demonstrating an evolutionary trait designed to protect them from harm. Cancer Research UK scientists found fussy children were particularly wary of certain types of foods such as greens, fruit and meat. The authors, writing in the journal Appetite, suggest children may have evolved a natural suspicion of foods with the potential to upset their stomachs. The researchers hope that by understanding the reasons behind children's fussiness, ways can be found to encourage them to eat more healthily. Scientists at University College London questioned whether...

Microscopic crablike creatures with a voracious appetite for swimming larvae may soon become the newest weapon in the war on mosquitoes. A University of Florida researcher believes the tiny crustaceans have big potential for helping control buzzing hordes that have become a serious health threat with the spread of West Nile virus, malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases. ''They'll pretty much kill any mosquito larvae they see,'' said Jorge Rey, a professor at the University of Florida's Medical Entomology Laboratory in Vero Beach. Rey hopes the organisms called copepods, common in Florida waters, will bolster the growing arsenal of what scientists...