That's news to me

Zimbabweans are facing chaos and confusion as they try to deposit and spend their cash before it becomes worthless on 21 August. [...] "The first day they knocked the three noughts off people went into the supermarket near where I work and were going crazy buying everything [...] Then of course they got to the till and they didn't have enough money."

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said this week that they've developed a so-called nanowire bar-code system that could one day be used to create portable, quick-acting sensors designed to identify hundreds of airborne pathogens within minutes.

The garage is owned by the city; the software, by Robotic Parking of Clearwater, Florida. [...] If the robot shuts down, there is no practical way to manually remove parked vehicles.

A second video allegedly showing war crimes being committed against Serb civilians 11 years ago was broadcast in Serbia on Tuesday.

[T]he full moon's gravitational pull could trigger the eruption, they say. A full moon coincided with at least three of Mayon's 47 eruptions, including the two most recent ones in 2000 and 2001. [...] The volcano has erupted around 50 times over the past 400 years. One of the worst was in 1993 when at least 75 people were killed.

London's "great fogs" reached a peak in the late 1880s, then gradually declined, but very little is known about the nature and causes of air pollution at the time. [...] The towers and spires of the Parliament skyline provided markers for working out the position of the Sun in the paintings, giving accurate dates and times.

Cobalt green, as the dye is known, has been tested by a US team who believe it could be used in "spintronic" devices [at room temperature, unlike many other materials which must be supercooled]. Spintronics involves manipulating the magnetic properties of electrons to do useful computational work.

Zimbabwean migrant workers in South Africa suffer extortion by the police and are sometimes deported without due procedures, Human Rights Watch says. A report by the international rights organisation says farmers who employ migrants in the border province of Limpopo often ignore labour laws.

Scientists say they have identified a gene that will allow rice plants to survive being completely submerged in water for up to two weeks. Most rice plants die within a week of being underwater, but the researchers hope the new gene will offer greater protection to the world's rice harvest.

Harvard Medical School researchers found that over the past decade, 1 in 5 automated external defibrillators were recalled because of the potential for malfunction, and devices that failed were associated with 370 deaths. [...] In a 2004 study, the devices helped raise the cardiac arrest survival rate to 23 percent, compared with 14 percent with CPR alone.

Surgeons at Primary Children's Medical Center gave each girl one leg, split their liver and intestines and reconstructed their bladders and their pelvic rings. Kendra kept their one functioning kidney, while Maliyah will be put on dialysis and receive one of her mother's kidneys in a transplant operation in three to six months.

The meetings took place between 1995 and December 2004, when Skripal was arrested, and totaled more than 100,000 dollars (78,000 euros), Komissarov said. [...] The Russian agents whose identities he gave away were placed under surveillance and were eventually expelled back to Moscow by the countries where they were working, the paper said.

In contrast to existing methods of exterior observation or destructive sectioning of fossil embryos, synchroton-radiation X-ray tomographic microscopy (SRXTM) leaves the tiny fossils untouched but gives graphic details of their structure. [...] "The best analogy is with a medical CT scan ... but at 2-3,000 times the resolution," Donoghue said. "We can see details less than 1,000th of a millimeter in dimension."