Slumdog shacks worth £100,000: Soaring property prices in the Mumbai slum made famous by film

Shacks in the Mumbai shanty town made famous in the hit film Slumdog Millionaire are selling for more than £100,000 each as developers cash in on India's growing economy.

Nearly 500 families lived in the Bandra slum in tiny corrugated iron shacks back when Danny Boyle's rags-to-riches movie was filmed.

But now the number has dwindled to just 250 after many residents were bought out by property developers who offered them sums in the region of 8,000,000 rupees - about £102,000 - to move off the land.

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New Water Budget for Earth

Investigating the history of water on Earth is critical to understanding the planet's climate. One central question is whether Earth has always had the same amount of water on and surrounding it, the same so-called "water budget." Has Earth gained or lost water from comets and meteorites? Has water been lost into space? New research into Earth's primordial oceans conducted by researchers at the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen and Stanford University revisits Earth's historical water budget.

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Milky Way's Black Hole Davouring Asteroids

 The giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way may be vaporizing and devouring asteroids, which could explain the frequent flares observed, according to astronomers using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

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Surface of Mars an Unlikely Place for Life After 600-Million-Year Drought, Say Scientists

Mars may have been arid for more than 600 million years, making it too hostile for any life to survive on the planet's surface, according to researchers who have been carrying out the painstaking task of analysing individual particles of Martian soil. Dr Tom Pike, from Imperial College London, will discuss the team's analysis at a European Space Agency (ESA) meeting on 7 February 2012.

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Revisiting the 'Pillars of Creation'

 In 1995, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took an iconic image of the Eagle nebula, dubbed the "Pillars of Creation," highlighting its finger-like pillars where new stars are thought to be forming. Now, the Herschel Space Observatory has a new, expansive view of the region captured in longer-wavelength infrared light.

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Ancient Popcorn Discovered in Peru

People living along the coast of Peru were eating popcorn 1,000 years earlier than previously reported and before ceramic pottery was used there, according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences co-authored by Dolores Piperno, curator of New World archaeology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and emeritus staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

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Pink Core of Omega Nebula:Image Captured by ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT)

 A new image of the Omega Nebula, captured by ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), is one of the sharpest of this object ever taken from the ground. It shows the dusty, rose-coloured central parts of this famous stellar nursery and reveals extraordinary detail in the cosmic landscape of gas clouds, dust and newborn stars.

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Debris of Pacific Ocean, Possibly Heading to US

ScienceDaily (Dec. 29, 2011) — Debris from the tsunami that devastated Japan in March could reach the United States as early as this winter, according to predictions by NOAA scientists. However, they warn there is still a large amount of uncertainty over exactly what is still floating, where it's located, where it will go, and when it will arrive. Responders now have a challenging, if not impossible situation on their hands: How do you deal with debris that could now impact U.S. shores, but is difficult to find.

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