Northern waters swiftly lose ice, and now anyone can travel through the North Pole by water, press service of Greenpeace-Russia reports.

Scientists predict that in five years Arctic icy cap would disappear. Satellite images, made several days ago, show a through channel in the arctic ice, piercing the most northern point of our planet.

Typically, drivers gaze along a curve as they negotiate it, but they also look at other parts of the road, the dashboard, traffic signs and oncoming vehicles. A new study finds that when drivers fix their gaze on specific targets placed strategically along a curve, their steering is smoother and more stable than it is in normal conditions.

United States consider Russian rocket engine RD-180 to be the best rocket engine on the world, claim RosCosmos officials.

RD-180 is a two-chamber variant of four-chamber kerosene engine RD-170. The engine owes better specific characteristics, than American analogues have, to closed circuit with reburning of exhaust generator gas in main combustion chambers.

Shipwrecks on coral reefs may increase invasion of unwanted species, according to a recent U.S. Geological Survey study. These unwanted species can completely overtake the reef and eliminate all the native coral, dramatically decreasing the diversity of marine organisms on the reef.

Would you be surprised to learn that nine people died last year on the highway you take to work everyday? Or would you be shocked to see that six teenagers died within five miles of your home in fatal car accidents? With the help of the interactive maps on www.saferoadmaps.org developed by University of Minnesota researchers - you can learn those facts and more by simply typing in your address.

Proposals to reign in wallet-draining gasoline prices by curbing speculation in oil markets would likely increase costs at the pump instead of trimming them, a University of Illinois economist says.

A transition to hydrogen vehicles could greatly reduce U.S. oil dependence and carbon dioxide emissions, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council, but making hydrogen vehicles competitive in the automotive market will not be easy.

As unwelcome as they are, higher gasoline prices do come with a plus side - fewer deaths from car accidents, says a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).

Acts of piracy and terrorism at sea are on the rise, but there is little evidence to support concerns from some governments and international organizations that pirates and terrorists are beginning to collude with one another, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today.

Scientists have found that one of the most intriguing phenomena in condensed-matter physics -- known as the quantum Hall effect -- can occur in nature in a way that no one has ever before seen.