Washington, Feb. 16 : US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has told reporters on her first trip abroad that she doubts whether North Korea's uranium enrichment program is really a threat to the rest of the world as is being made out.

Beginning a trip to Asia Sunday, Clinton told media persons accompanying her on the flight to Tokyo, Japan, that North Korea''s effort to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons should not have been used as a pretext to scrap a 1994 deal to freeze Pyongyang''s plutonium program.

Washington, Feb 16: By using synchrotron X-rays, a team of scientists hope to uncover the hidden secrets of dinosaurs, by detecting unseen details of the soft tissue that once surrounded the well-preserved bones of dinos.

About 150 million years ago, an evolutionarily hybrid creature, a dinosaur on its way to becoming a bird, died in what is now Germany, and become fossilized in limestone.

About 150 years ago, the fossil of this "dinobird" was discovered and celebrated as proof of Charles Darwin's new theory of evolution.

New Delhi, Feb 16: China and the US will resume their military talks with a defense policy dialogue in Beijing on February 27-28.

The dialogue between the countries' senior military officers was postponed in November after the former President George W. Bush Administration announced in October to sell 6.5 billion dollars worth of arms to Taiwan despite China's protest.

The dialogue will be informal, Defense Ministry spokesman Hu Changming said on Sunday, the China Daily reported.

The talks, a routine yearly meeting between Washington and Beijing since 1997, is likely to be hosted by a US Deputy Defense Minister and a Deputy Chief of China's Army.

Washington, February 16 : Synthetic biology researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, say that their efforts are yielding clues to the mystery of how life began on Earth.

Biochemist David Deamer, who has been researching the origin of life for over two decades, said so while making a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago recently.

He said that life began with complex systems of molecules that came together through the self-assembly of nonliving components.

As to how that happened, he said that it could be found in combinatorial chemistry, an approach in which thousands of experiments are carried out in parallel by robotic devices.

Washington, Feb 16 : The Census of Marine Life explorers have found that hundreds of identical species thrive in both the Arctic and the Antarctic Oceans.

They were especially surprised to find that at least 235 species live in both polar seas despite a distance of more than 13,000-kilometer distance in between.

The scientists found marine life that both poles apparently share in common include marathoners such as grey whales and birds, but also worms, crustaceans, and angelic snail-like pteropods, the latter discoveries opening a host of future research questions about where they originated and how they wound up at both ends of the Earth.

DNA analysis is underway to confirm whether the species are indeed identical.

Washington, Feb 16: A US intelligence community has warned that the primary threat to Western interests comes from Europe-based extremists affiliated with al Qaeda who return from training in Pakis