About 1,500 New York customers of the power company Con Ed lost electricity Monday because of Quaker parrots nesting in the equipment.

Customers in Beechhurst, Queens lost power for about 45 minutes because of problems caused by the parrots' nests, the UPI reported.

There will be fewer banana peels to slip on if engineers at a university succeed in figuring out a cost effective way to turn them into cooking fuel.

In other words, people wanting to bake or fry their bananas might soon be able to do that by cooking over a banana briquette fire.

A Massachusetts man who wanted to quickly melt ice on a porch using a blowtorch instead has set a four-storey house on fire partly damaging it.

No one was injured from Monday's blaze that started when the flame on Vasco Silva's blowtorch ignited the vinyl siding on the back of his house in New Bedford and the flame quickly spread up to the third floor.

A tool bag slipped away from an astronaut repairing the joint of a solar panel of the International Space Station on Tuesday.

The tool bag the size of a small backpack floated away as the spacewalking Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper was wiping away lubricants from her gloves and a camera. The lubricant accidentally leaked from a grease gun.

Small, underground nuclear power plants, about the size of a hot tub, may soon provide electricity for communities. One mini reactor is capable of powering approximately 20,000 homes.

Designed by scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the technology is being developed for commercial use by Hyperion Power Generation, which announced recently that the first orders for the reactors have been placed. They have plans to start mass production in the next five years, according to Physorg.com.