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An effort to protect endangered salmon is resulting into culling of thousands of seabirds on an Oregon island. Since May this year, the United States government has killed over a thousand seabirds on the island just to protect the fish. Many environmentalists said that the mass killing of seabirds, a plan of US government, should be stopped.

A report released on Friday by US officials said the country's government has killed more than 1,200 cormorant birds, and over 5,000 nests have been destroyed completely. The culling will continue in October until the seabirds leave the place due to upcoming winter season, according to the officials.

Researchers have sampled activities of a number of different species during three consecutive winters in Kongsfjorden, Svalbard. They have said many things happen there during the cold dark winter. The findings were published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on September 24.

Jorgen Berge of UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the University Centre in Svalbard said this has changed the way they used to think about marine ecosystems during the polar night.

The three-year-long study of a fjord in Svalbard has discovered surprising levels of animal activity at the time of long, dark, including the water is buzzing with lively goings on, from glowing krill to seabirds on the hunt.

The Rosetta spacecraft orbiting the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has found that even comets have weather. Scientists said the European Space Agency spacecraft has discovered a proof of a daily water-ice cycle on the comet's surface, linked to its rotation, exposing regions of the comet to frequently alternating sunlight and shadow.

They explained that the cycle drives a small weather system, wherein the ice sublimates into vapor at the time of the comet's 'sunrise'.

The researchers said with each rotation, a square-kilometer field of solid ice in the 'neck' area of the dumbbell-shaped comet appears and then fades away.

According to a report published in ActaPalaeontologicaPolonica, a new dinosaur species has been spotted in the northern reaches of Alaska. The animal is a kind of hadrosaur, a type of duck-billed dinosaur that used to roam in herds.

The species has been named Ugrunaalukkuukpikensis, meaning 'ancient grazer of the Colville River' in the native Inupiaq language. Researchers have recovered the fossils from 69-million-year-old rock deposits.

The Seattle Times has reported that northern Alaska is icy today but it was once used to be covered by forest and was much warmer as compared to it is today. Although, the temperatures were probably higher, Ugrunaaluk stayed in darkness for months. Besides, they might also have experienced snow.

A CRISPR system involving a different protein that has the ability to alter human DNA, and may work even better than Cas9 in some cases, has been found by gene-editing scientists. They have discovered the system at such a time when CRISPR/Cas9 was swept through biology labs.

Thus, this new genome-editing technique is no less than revolutionary. In fact, some rival groups, each claiming to be first to the tech, have been bitterly fighting for the CRISPR/Cas9 patent. This latest gene-editing protein, known as Cpf1, meant that a patent may not be so powerful.

CRISPR sequences belong to primordial immune systems, which are present in around 40% of bacteria and 90% of archaea.

It has been a year since American space agency NASA's newest mars probe MAVEN has been circling the Red Planet. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft arrived in orbit around the Red Planet on September 21, 2014.

The craft reached in the orbit of the Red Planet almost 10 months after it was launched off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. MAVEN endured a two-month checkout phase being in the orbit around Maras.

After the two-month duration of the craft started studying Mars' atmosphere, in an attempt to determine how fast the planet's air is escaping into space.