PARIS (Reuters) - A major expedition to measure the thickness of the Arctic pack ice was cancelled on Tuesday after the mission's airship was torn from its moorings in southern France by gale-force winds and smashed into a house.

French explorer Jean-Louis Etienne had planned to depart on March 1 from Paris on a 10,000-kilometer (6,200 mile) voyage that was expected to provide a benchmark for monitoring the impact of global warming on the Polar Basin.

Common in many US homes (and perhaps homes in other countries) is the folding attic stair. More akin to a step ladder than a stair, the device, which folds into the ceiling below an attic, is used to gain occasional access to the space to expand storage options or for maintenance of equipment that might be residing there. The opening for the stair is fairly standard at about 2 feet by 5 and is covered when closed by a sheet of thin plywood attached to the ladder and its spring-loaded closing/opening mechanism.

At first glance, the red ship hardly looks like a herald of the future. Even its owner admits the hull needs a coat of paint and the interior some spit and polish.

But in a few weeks, the Elding -- Icelandic for "Lightning" -- will be transformed into the world's first hydrogen-equipped commercial vessel, the latest sign that Iceland is pushing hard to become the first nation to break free from the constraints of fossil fuel.

MEXICO CITY (23 January 2008)—At the end of January, more than 200,000 crop varieties from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East—drawn from vast seed collections maintained by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)—will be shipped to a remote island near the Arctic Circle, where they will be stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a facility capable of preserving their vitality for thousands of years.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that field mice have evolved a unique way of ensuring faster fertilisation, a phenomenon which could explain some cases of infertility in humans.

Entrepreneur Richard Branson on Wednesday unveiled a model of the spaceship he hopes will be the first to take paying passengers into space on a regular basis as soon as next year.

Branson, whose Virgin Galactic is charging $200,000 for a short trip into space, said his SpaceShipTwo will start test flights later this year.

New studies show that the Antarctic ice sheet is melting faster than previously anticipated. If this jump is indicative of a trend due to global warming the entire antarctic ecology could be threatened much sooner than expected.

In a first-of-its-kind study, an international team led by Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and the University of California, Irvine, estimated changes in Antarctica's ice mass between 1996 and 2006 and mapped patterns of ice loss on a glacier-by-glacier basis.

Biofuels made from plants and waste will prove an increasingly efficient and cheap substitute for oil in many areas over the coming five years, industry analysts said.

As long as crude sells at prices towards $100 per barrel, there will be strong demand for cheaper biofuels and manufacturing technology will improve, Vinod Khosla, founder of venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, told Reuters.

The American Medical Association (AMA) published a report in 2007 reviewing research data on the addictive potential of video games. The report suggests that gaming addiction is likely to be a subset of Internet addiction and may cause negative physical, psychosocial, or behavioral problems. The condition most frequently occurs in players of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs).

A new study of worldwide technological competitiveness suggests China may soon rival the United States as the principal driver of the world’s economy — a position the U.S. has held since the end of World War II. If that happens, it will mark the first time in nearly a century that two nations have competed for leadership as equals.