London, August 21 : A scientist who bought a fossilized insect on the web auction site eBay for 20 pounds has discovered that it belongs to a previously unknown species of aphid.

According to a report by the BBC, Dr Richard Harrington, vice-president of the UK’s Royal Entomological Society, bought the fossil from an individual in Lithuania.

He then sent it off to an aphid expert in Denmark, who confirmed the insect was a new species, now extinct.

The bug has been named Mindarus harringtoni after the scientist.

London, Aug 21 : A fresh confrontation between Moscow and the West was looming after Russia announced that it was preparing to recognise the independence of the two Georgian breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Russia has indicated that it was no longer prepared to honour UN edicts on the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The State Duma, Russia''s parliament, has been recalled and will meet in emergency session on Monday to debate an Abkhaz appeal for immediate recognition of the region''s sovereignty.

The South Ossetian rebel leader, Eduard Kokoity, said he would follow suit imminently, The Telegraph reported.

London, Aug 21: A former Korean academic has revealed how he first met North Korean leader Kim Jong-il who was an ordinary student, who turned into a tyrant that rid Pyongyang of the disabled and ordered his entire family killed.

Kim Hyun-sik (76) recollected North Korean leader Kim’s boyhood based on his experience as a private tutor for the late Kim Il-sung’s children in the 1970s, in an article in the September-October issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

London, August 21 : One of Britain’s most recently discovered species - a type of Italian snail, has been found in the country after a gap of 110 years, covering just 27 meters in the said duration.

According to a report in the Times, Papillifera papillaris, the snail in question, arrived in England near the end of the 19th century, having hitched a ride on a stone balustrade imported from Rome.

But subsequently, it disappeared.

A colony of the tiny snails, which have distinctive spindle-shaped shells 11mm long, has now been found on the “tortoise fountain” in the Italian-style gardens of the Cliveden Estate, Buckinghamshire.

London, August 21 : A new study has suggested that some planets beyond our solar system might be rocky like Earth, but lack a metallic core and a magnetic field, which would make them inhospitable to life as we know it.

Rocky planets were once thought to consist of three main layers: a thin solid crust, a viscous, rocky mantle and a solid or molten iron core.

This layering, or differentiation, is thought to have occurred early in the solar system’s history, when collisions between rocky bodies and the decay of radioactive isotopes melted the interiors of large objects, allowing dense material to settle towards their centres.

But exoplanet discoveries have revealed a menagerie of diverse worlds.

London, August 21: Elephants can sum small numbers with almost 90 per cent accuracy, says a researcher.

Naoko Irie of the University of Tokyo in Japan has revealed that an Asian elephant named Ashya could recognise which of the two buckets was carrying more apples during an experiment.

For the study, a trainer dropped three apples into one bucket and one apple into a second, then four more apples in the first and five more in the second.

It was observed that the elephant recognised that three plus four was greater than one plus five, and snacked on the seven apples.