Svalbard and Jan Mayen

A POLAR BEAR was shot dead after attacking a German cruise ship worker on Norway's Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, authorities have confirmed.

The unnamed man in his 40s suffered head injuries shortly after landing on Spitsbergen island.

He was accompanying a tourist expedition from the MS Bremen of Hapag-Lloyd Cruises yesterday.

Norway has become the first country in the world to completely switch off its FM radios.

Listeners in the country will now have to choose between DAB (digital audio broadcasting) signal or not having the radio on at all. Except some rebellious radio stations, including Oslo's Metro Group, have defied the order and are continuing to broadcast despite the government order.

Scientists have already used plain old DNA to encode and store all 587,287 words of War and Peace, a list of all the plant material archived in the Svalbard Seed Vault, and an OK Go music video. But now, researchers have created for the first time a living library, embedded within, you guessed it: E. coli.

Five decades since it heralded a transformation in the way people obtained and used cash, the world's first ATM was turned into gold for celebrations of its fiftieth anniversary.

There is no denying that, generally speaking, the majority of travellers are interested in visiting the most popular destinations to enjoy their holidays. It is natural, people like to go were other people are. But there is that group of people who go out of their way to discover the less known places that are off the radar of most of us.

What would humanity do for food in case of a global disaster, such as climate change or nuclear war?

The annual Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition received a record 2700 entries by astrophotographers from 59 countries around the world and the judges faced their toughest challenge in choosing just 138 shortlisted images and narrowing those down to only 32 winning images.

All eyes will be on the skies March 20 for a total solar eclipse expected to offer spectacular views, if only in the far northern Svalbard archipelago and Faroe Islands.
      
A partial eclipse of varying degrees should also be visible, weather permitting, across most of Europe, northern Africa, central Asia and the Middle East.