The remains of a giant rat, estimated to weigh about a ton, was discovered in Uruguay proving that mammoth rodent once roamed the face of the earth some four million years ago. Archaeologists said they have unearthed the half-meter long skull of the giant prehistoric rat, which by any standard, is bigger than a bull, in a chunk of rock in Rio de La Plata on the coast of Uruguay.

A virtual nuclear fusion reaction has been modeled on a supercomputer running for 20 minutes on bicycle power pedaled by 10 cyclists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The students duly claimed a world record for human-powered computing, saying the task produced more computations in those 20 minutes than all of humanity did in the first 3,000 years of civilization. They also said that more arithmetic calculations were computed than were done on the entire earth up to 1960.

Two prison officers have been sent to jail by a court in northern Vietnam for helping a woman on death row get pregnant, according to an official Thursday. The People's Court of Hoa Binh City found Nguyen Thuyen and Bui Van Quyet guilty of allowing a male prisoner visit 40 year old Nguyen Thi Oanh to have sex so that she could become pregnant and take advantage of a Vietnamese law which states that pregnant women and those with children under three cannot be put to death.

A couple from Hell won $115,001 in lottery in the Fantasy 5 drawing held Wednesday, which is Halloween. John and Sue Wilson, who live in the unincorporated town 45 miles west of Detroit, received the windfall from the Michigan Lottery.

Afrol News on Thursday ran a satiric comic strip panel on the United Republic of Tanzania. Located in East Africa and bordered by Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and the Indian Ocean, the tiny nation is one of the poorest countries on earth. As is the case in much of Africa, Tanzania has had more than its share of problems, but perhaps not as many problems as Zimbabwe has had.