A group of rabbis, along with Jewish Kabbalah mystics, took to the skies over Israel Monday, praying and blowing ceremonial trumpets in hopes of warding off swine flu.

About 50 Jewish holy men were aboard an aircraft that circled the country in hopes of stopping the spread of the H1N1 virus. While in the air, the men chanted prayers and blew into the horns, called "shofars," BBC News reported.

Japanese scientists have learned that a turtle starts developing its shell while it is still an embryo in what they describe as the folding of its upper body wall on itself.

The team of scientists from the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan said in their report appearing in the journal Science that a turtle embryo looks like that of a chick and mice with the muscles and skeleton in similar position until the change in its body plan occurs.

A colony of chimpanzees went on a picnic of sorts at a zoo here Sunday afternoon, forcing the evacuation of several thousand visitors.

About 30 chimps slipped out of their outdoor enclosure at the Chester Zoo about lunchtime and invaded the area where keepers prepared their food.

The new owners of the file-sharing Website The Pirate Bay plans to pay users for sharing downloaded files and other contents to peers.

"We are going to set up a system where the file-sharer actually makes money," said Hans Pandeya, chief executive of Global Gaming Factory (GGF), according to BBC. GGF recently bought The Pirate Bay for $7.7 million and will turn the site into a legal file-sharing Website.

A 12-year-old girl who miraculously survived a plane crash off the coast of Comoros Islands is well and talked to her father and uncle Wednesday from a hospital bed in Moroni.

Paris-based Kassim Bakari, father of the survivor named Baya, quoted her daughter as telling him by phone that she was thrown into the waters when the Yemenia plane crashed into the Indian Ocean while trying to land at an airport in Comoros' largest island of Njazidja.