Botanists are baffled with the discovery of a new species of giant self-destructing palm tree in Madagascar which is said to flower only once in its 100 year life. According to botanist from the Kew Gardens in London, the 60-foot palm which has 16-foot leaves, because the moment it does, it spends so much energy that it dies.

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.

A web search reunited two South Florida sisters with their Russian cousin, after being separated for 70 years. The three were pulled apart back in 1937, when the Soviet Union forced their parents to flee to the United States, taking them along. Ossie Rasher, 81, and Sophia Altfield, 78, were reunited with their cousin Rosalie Berkovich, 80, after Berkovich's son scoured Google and found Rasher and Altfield's names on a genealogy website earlier this month. The three met up only a few weeks after.

"W00t," an exclamation of joy or excitement used by online gamers and hardcore Internet chat enthusiasts, is the word that best sums up 2007, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The word took the Word of the Year prize in Merriam-Webster's annual poll of favorite new terms such as "facebook," a verb that means to look up someone's profile on the popular online social networking site Facebook, and "blamestorm," to hold a meeting in order to find out who to blame.

Google said Thursday it will give $30 million to the first company that can land a rover on the moon and transmit a gigabyte of data. The contest is a joint offer of the Internet giant and the X Prize Foundation. The contest has a 2014 deadline. To earn at least $20 million, a company must meet contest requirements by 2012. Google also provides a $5 million prize for second place and $5 million for the team the goes beyond what is expected of them.