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Pluto has snow-capped mountains in areas called Cthulhu range, which stretches halfway around the dwarf planet's equator at more than 1,800 miles. The dwarf planet has methane snow on its peaks, the same methane that composes natural gas on Earth.

The highest peaks in Cthulhu range are coated with bright color, which is referred mostly as methane ice. “That this material coats only the upper slopes of the peaks suggests methane ice may act like water in Earth's atmosphere, condensing as frost at high altitude”, said John Stansberry, a New Horizons science team member from Space Telescope Science Institute of Baltimore.

Encryption is the medium to keep secret information secure, which includes credit cards, state secrets and other confidential data. This practice exclusively relies on factorization of large number. The traditional encryption schemes could now become obsolete as some researchers from MIT and University of Innsbruck in Austria have led to an idea of quantum computing that uses atomic-scale units to encrypt more efficiently. The results of the new research were published on Friday in the journal Science.

The bottom of the ocean isn’t as quiet as it seems. Researchers were surprised when they heard noise on dropping a microphone into the Mariana Trench 6 miles down in the Pacific Ocean.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oregon State University scientists, who were behind the experiment, didn’t expect strange sounds recorded by their equipment. According to a release by Oregon State University, the scientists didn’t hear silence, but sounds of earthquakes, ships, the far away moans of baleen whales and the overwhelming screams of a category 4 typhoon that had crossed overhead.

Total solar eclipse can be witnessed at select locations next week. However, if you want to witness it, you will have to take a journey to Indonesia and over the North Pacific Ocean. An individual should never look directly at the sun, even with sunglasses on during solar eclipse.

In case you are planning to go to Indonesia for the eclipse, you would be on the west of the international dateline, which means the calendar date is going to be Wednesday, March 9. The narrow path of totality is the site where the moon's dark cone of shadow, known as the umbra, tracks throughout the Earth. It starts here, stretching eastward across the Pacific Ocean.

On Thursday, the New England Aquarium declared that its Omura whale research off the coast of Madagascar was highly successful. The study on the rare tropical whale was led by Dr. Salvatore Cerchio. Last fall, Cerchio’s team claimed 80 sightings whereas before their expedition, just 44 sightings as a whole had been made since the discovery of the whale.

In 2003, the Omura’s whale was recognized just as a unique species. Since long, the tropical Omura’s whale has been mistakenly taken to be pygmy Bryde’s whales. The rare tropical whale study by Dr. Salvatore Cerchio and his fellow researchers was a first on the elusive species.

Since long, the ability of some octopus and squid species to mix up with their surroundings by altering their skin texture and color has been enthralling scientists. The trait lets the creatures use a natural form of three-dimensional morphing well to hide themselves from prey and attackers.

Graduate students at Cornell University in New York published a study in the journal Science wherein they explained how they managed to use the concept of glowing octopus skin in the development of an artificial version possessing the ability to stretch a number of times its real size and even emit light.