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Some of the schoolgirls abducted by militant group Boko Haram may never return home, Nigeria's influential former president Olusegun Obasanjo said, in some of the most pessimistic comments yet on their fate from a member of the country's elite. Obasanjo said President Goodluck Jonathan's administration had taken too long to respond to the April mass abduction. Once Jonathan's mentor and one of his strongest political allies, Obasanjo turned against him last December. "I believe that some of them will never return. We will still be hearing about them many years from now," Obasanjo told the BBC's Hausa-language radio service on Thursday, in comments echoed in an interview with Nigeria's Premium Times website. The warning from Obasanjo, who stepped down in 2007 and nurtured Jonathan's own rise to power, will dismay parents who have now waited 60 days for any news of their daughters, taken from a school in the village of Chibok in northeast Nigeri

U.S. producer prices fell in May after two month of solid gains, but the decline was not enough to change perceptions that inflation pressures are steadily creeping up. The Labor Department said on Friday its producer price index for final demand slipped 0.2 percent after advancing in April by 0.6 percent, which was the largest gain in 1-1/2 years. Economists, who had expected producer prices to edge up, saw the decline as a correction after gains in March and April, and said it did not change their view that prices were firming. "The net result is a pick-up. The net strengthening makes the modest acceleration in the more important consumer inflation measures more credible," said Jim O'Sullivan, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, New York. The government revamped the PPI series at the start of the year to include services and construction. Big swings in prices received for trade services have injected volatility into the series, making it

A breakthrough in the way energy is stored could lead to smaller class="mandelbrot_refrag"> electronics , more trunk space in a hybrid car and eventually clothing that can recharge a cellphone, according to researchers at the University of Central Florida. Nanotechnology scientist Jayan Thomas said in an interview he believes he has discovered a way to store energy in a thin sheath around an ordinary lightweight copper electrical wire. As a result, the same wire that transmits electricity can also store extra energy. "We can just convert those wires into batteries so there is no need of a separate battery," Thomas said. "It has applications everywhere."   true       The work will be the cover story in the June 30 issue of the material science journal Advanced Materials, and is the subject of an article in the current edition of science magazine Nature. Thomas's Ph.D. student Zenan Yu is co-author. Thomas said the process is relatively simple

Lunar rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts more than 40 years ago contain evidence of a Mars-sized planet that scientists believe crashed into Earth and created the moon, new research shows. German scientists using a new technique said they detected a slight chemical difference between Earth rocks and moon rocks. Scientists said more study would be needed to confirm this long-elusive piece of evidence that material from another body besides Earth contributed to the moon’s formation some 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists believe the moon formed from a cloud of debris launched into space after a Mars-sized body called Theia crashed into young Earth. Different planets in the solar system have slightly different chemical makeups. Therefore, scientists believed moon rocks might hold telltale chemical fingerprints of whatever body smashed into Earth. Until now, evidence was elusive. “We have developed a technique that guarantees perfect separation,” of oxygen isotopes from othe

Researchers at Florida Atlantic University plan to anchor turbines in the Gulf Stream's fast-moving waters off the state's east coast to test whether ocean currents can be converted into electricity. The project will be carried out with the support of the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management (BEOM), which for the first time has leased out federal waters as a test site. "The Gulf Stream contains a tremendous amount of energy, and this technology offers exciting potential to expand the nation's renewable energy portfolio," BOEM Acting Director Walter Cruickshank said in a press release this week announcing the deal. Near the end of the summer, scientists will begin anchoring buoys equipped with a variety of sensors to the ocean floor, in about 900 feet (300 meters) of water some 12 nautical miles off the Florida coast near Fort Lauderdale. The equipment will monitor the strength of the currents around the clock. Scientists will then conduct additional test

Current theory about the shape of the human face just got a big punch in the mouth. Two University of Utah researchers proposed on Monday that the face of the ancestors of modern humans evolved millions of years ago in a way that would limit injuries from punches during fist fights between males. Their theory, published in the journal Biological Reviews, is presented as an alternative to a long-standing notion that changes in the shape of the face were driven more by diet - the need for a jaw that could chew hard-to-crush foods such as nuts. "Studies of injuries resulting from fights show that when modern humans fight, the face is the primary target," biologist David Carrier said. "The bones of the face that suffer the highest rates of fracture from fights are the bones that show the greatest increase in robusticity during the evolution of early bipedal apes, the australopiths." These are also the bones that show the greatest difference between women and men i

The hot question of whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded like birds and mammals or cold blooded like reptiles, fish and amphibians finally has a good answer. Dinosaurs, for eons Earth's dominant land animals until being wiped out by an asteroid 65 million years ago, were in fact somewhere in between. Scientists said on Thursday they evaluated the metabolism of numerous dinosaurs using a formula based on their body mass as revealed by the bulk of their thigh bones and their growth rates as shown by growth rings in fossil bones akin to those in trees. The study, published in the journal Science, assessed 21 species of dinosaurs including super predators Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus, long-necked Apatosaurus, duckbilled Tenontosaurus and bird-like Troodon as well as a range of mammals, birds, bony fish, sharks, lizards, snakes and crocodiles. "Our results showed that dinosaurs had growth and metabolic rates that were actually not characteristic of warm-blooded or even cold-bl