One lump of rock is revealed as two in the distant Kuiper belt.

The stand-offish dance of two asteroids at the outer reaches of the Solar System is captivating astronomers. The two rocky objects, discovered locked in mutual orbit, could tell us about the properties of the far-flung Kuiper belt.

Christian Veillet and his team 1 studied an object called 1998 WW31 in the Kuiper belt, a sparsely populated region of space beyond the orbit of Neptune. The object w

Two cricket-like creatures establish new insect group.

The first new order of insects to be discovered for more than 80 years has emerged from the mountains of Namibia. The order’s first official members are two creatures about 2 cm long that look a bit like a cross between a cricket and a stick insect 1 .

The group, called Mantophasmatodea, joins the other 30 or so insect orders such as beetles, flies and termites. “If it was in mammals it’d be like

Between now and Saturday, 20 April, you can follow via the Internet the progress of the new-found Comet SOHO-422. Usually, comets seen by the SOHO spacecraft quickly burn up in the Sun’s hot atmosphere. This one won’t, so there is still time to monitor its progress.

Like most of the hundreds of comets found with the ESA-NASA sun-watching spacecraft, SOHO-422 was first noticed by an amateur astronomer. Pictures from SOHO are made available, freely and rapidly, on the Internet. Peop

P3P gives people more control over use of personal information on the Web

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has issued the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation, representing cross-industry agreement on an XML-based language for expressing Web site privacy policies. Declaring P3P a W3C Recommendation indicates that it is a stable document, contributes to Web interoperability, and has been reviewed by the W3C Membership, who favor its widespread adoption.

Random vibrations can generate rotation.

A simple top converts foghorn noise to one-way spin. The device raises the hope that useful energy could be collected from ambient sounds. Normally, random vibrations, which physicists and engineers call noise, produce useless random motion. You can’t move a cart from A to B by shoving it randomly in every direction.

But in the new device, made by Yaroslav Zolotaryuk of the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby and colleagues

Chemists put biological catalysts to work in clean industrial solvents.

In a move towards cleaner chemical processing, researchers in Spain and France have worked out how to use enzymes as catalysts using two ’green’ solvents: one to dissolve the enzyme, the other to dissolve the materials it transforms.

In some industrial processes chemists have replaced polluting organic solvents, such as chlorine and benzene, with supercritical carbon dioxide. This is the liquid