| African countries hardest hit by malaria are failing to contain it and a new U.N. campaign launched on World Malaria Day on Friday aims to ensure that all Africa has access to basic malaria control measures. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said some African countries have fallen behind in fighting the disease, which the World Health Organization estimates kills 1.3 million people each year, mostly children under age 5. Vikings acquitted in 100-year-old murder mystery OSLO (Reuters) - Tests of the bones of two Viking women found in a buried longboat have dispelled 100-year-old suspicions that one was a maid sacrificed to accompany her queen into the afterlife, experts said on Friday. The bones indicated that a broken collarbone on the younger woman had been healing for several weeks -- meaning the break was not part of a ritual execution as suspected since the 22-metre (72 ft) long Oseberg ship was found in 1904. Hold the marbles: Abstract approach best for math CHICAGO (Reuters) - Frustrated math students may have a good excuse -- some of the teaching methods meant to make math more relevant may in fact be making it harder to understand, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. They said students who were taught abstract math concepts fared better in experiments than those taught with real-world examples, such as story problems. Protein scraps help fill in dino family tree WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scraps of protein from the bones of a 68 million-year-old dinosaur and a mastodon carcass confirm their places in the family tree of life on Earth, researchers reported on Thursday. The same team that established Tyrannosaurus rex is a distant relative of chickens filled in more gaps, showing that the dinosaur was far more closely related to living birds than to alligators. Hubble telescope captures crashing galaxies WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Images of colliding galaxies show them spinning, sliding and slipping into one another, wreaking stellar destruction that will give birth to new and larger galaxies. The Maryland-based Space Telescope Science Institute released 59 new images from the Hubble Space Telescope on Thursday to celebrate the 18th anniversary of its launch. |