A scan of brain activity can effectively read a person's mind, researchers said Thursday. British scientists from University College London found they could differentiate brain activity linked to different memories and thereby identify thought patterns by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Barely two years after it opened, a unique Arctic "doomsday" stockpile of all the world's crop seeds has reached the half-million species mark, the foundation that oversees it said Thursday. A mold-resistant wild bean from Costa Rica, a vulnerable strawberry from a bear-infested part of Russia's Kuril islands and a host of American soybeans are among the latest additions to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Leena Peltonen-Palotie, one of the world's leading molecular geneticists, has died of cancer at the age of 57, the Academy of Finland said Thursday. During her 37-year career, Peltonen-Palotie's team identified genetic mutations associated with various conditions -- including lactose intolerance, schizophrenia, obesity and heart disease -- and established how these lead to the onset of illness.

The world's most powerful atom smasher will be brought up to unprecedented power by early April, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research said on Wednesday. "We hope to have collisions at 7. 0 TeV (teraelectronvolts) at the end of March or the beginning of April," CERN spokesman James Gillies told AFP.

American scientists have for the first time unlocked the genetic code of an entire family, and made a startling discovery -- that parents pass on fewer mutations than previously thought. Scientists had long believed that each parent passed on some 75 genetic mutations to their children. But the result of research by a team at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and the University of Utah found this was nowhere near the case, according to their study published in Thursday's edition of Science Express.

If you thought the mating business was already a jungle, where the pitfalls are looks, social rank, purchasing power, verbal skills and even subconscious smells, get ready to be dismayed for it is even more complex than thought. Scientists in Germany have discovered that men who are stressed make an unconventional choice in sexual preference, says a report on Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, published by Britain's Academy of Sciences.

The massive earthquake which struck the west coast of Chile last month moved the entire city of Concepcion more than three meters (10 feet) to the west, scientists said Monday. Preliminary measurements drawn from global positioning stations showed that Concepcion, Chile's second largest city, is now 3.

Chileans will be feeling aftershocks from the devastating 8. 8-magnitude earthquake for months and possibly years to come, scientists said Friday, as three strong tremors rocked the country. "The larger the earthquake, the larger the aftershocks, the more of them and the longer they're going to last," said John Bellini, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Colorado.

A huge asteroid that smashed into Earth with the force of a billion atomic bombs wiped out the dinosaur, scientists said Thursday, hoping to lay to rest a long-running debate over a mass extinction 65 million years ago. An international panel of experts reviewed 20 years' worth of evidence about might have caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which wiped out more than half of all species on the planet, including dinosaurs.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) said Thursday it had approved a 200-million-euro (273-million-dollar) loan to boost scientific research and development in Serbia. The EIB said the loan would be used to upgrade science infrastructure and try to lure back Serbian experts who have gone abroad in search of better working conditions and pay.