For updates on the Discovery mission, the astronauts, and to find out when Discovery is passing overhead, visit NASA Shuttle and Space Station.

The borna virus is only one fossil virus found in the DNA of every human. Other viruses are retroviruses, which are viruses uses RNA to make DNA, like the HIV virus.

Scientists have only begun to research these fossil viruses, buried deep in our DNA.

Blackcap warblers in central Europe have a genetically determined migration route that takes them to the Mediterranean when the weather cools in the fall. Well, it used to take them to Spain… now some populations go to England instead.

Why England? Bird feeders. People feed birds during the winter in England, and the birds evolved to take advantage of that. 30% of blackcap warblers now migrate to England.

Since food is readily available during the winter in England, and it’s a shorter route back to their summer home in Germany and Austria, the birds get to summer nesting sites earlier, and the English-winter birds mate with each other and not with the Spanish-winter birds.

This is called “reproductive isolation” and it’s one of the first steps in creating new species. The warblers are still the same species–they can still mate and produce fertile children–but they’re beginning to look different, fly differently, and eat a different diet.

More details, and some excellent photos here: Feeding Birds Could Create New Species.

Darwin published the first edition of his book on the evolution of species one hundred and fifty years ago, in November of 1859.

Darwin was curious about many things, and was interested in how land snails–like the European snail that ends up being eaten in the French dish escargot–could get to islands, because they don’t survive in salt water. After discovering that a short bath in salt water didn’t kill them, he decided that perhaps they got there on floating logs.

But more modern scientists have discovered that land snails come in right-handed and left-handed versions. The right-handed versions are more common, but there are more left-handed snails in Asia than elsewhere. Why? Well, it turns out that some snakes have evolved jaws that work better on the right-handed snails than on the left-handed ones. So as the right-handed snails get eaten more often, the left-handed snails are more likely to survive and reproduce, so there are more left-handed snails where there are more snakes that eat right-handed snails. Evolution and natural selection in action!

Read all about it here: In Snails and Snakes, Features to Delight Darwin.

Craters are clearly visible in this NASA photo of the Earth's Moon.

People have always said that the moon is dry and barren – no ice caps, no water. But recently scientists began to think that might not be true. So NASA researchers came up with the idea of crashing a spacecraft into a lunar crater and then analyzing the dust from the impact. The crash  took place October 9th, 2009. Now NASA has  announced that there is definitely water (in the form of ice) on the moon! Check out the story here: Water on the Moon!

Acacia trees provide shelter and food for ants by secreting a sweet nectar that the ants eat; thorns protect the trees from most herbivores and the ants sting other herbivores that approach. But this particular spider–Bagheera kiplingi–dodges the ants and eats the leaf tips of the acacia.

Bagheera is the name of a black panther–a particularly stealthy predator–in Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories, part of The Jungle Book, first published in 1894. The person who first describes and names a new species of plant or animal gets to choose the name. The two people who named this spider–George and Elizabeth Peckham, who described the spider in 1896–must have liked the book!