Contrary to what you may read on the Internet, the world is not going to end in 2012. A rogue planet named Nibiru is not on a collision course with Earth. And a solar flare won't toast the planet. It's all fiction, though the makers of the film "2012" may lead you to think otherwise. "I don't have anything against the movie. It's the way it's been marketed and the way it exploits people's fears," NASA scientist David Morrison at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., told Discovery News.

Morrison has launched a counter-attack through his "Ask An Astrobiologist" online column, which he says has gotten more than 1,000 questions about the end of the world. Scientific misinformation about 2012 has been ramping up for...

The propensity to believe in paranormal phenomena and superstitions appears to arise in the womb, suggests new research. The findings, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, further indicate that a reduced ability for analytical thinking may correspond with increased intuitive thinking, which has been associated with a belief in extrasensory perception (ESP), ghosts, telepathy and other paranormal phenomena.

Author Martin Voracek claims his new study's determinations "suggest (there are) biologically based, prenatally programmed influences on paranormal and superstitious beliefs." "Or, paraphrasing the probably best-known slogan from the defining X-Files television series: It may well be that some of the truth is in the womb, rather...

The company that has exclusive rights to salvage the Titanic is planning a possible expedition to the world's most famous shipwreck in 2010. The first expedition to the North Atlantic wreck site since 2004 is revealed in a filing by RMS Titanic Inc. in U.S. District Court, where four days of hearings are scheduled to begin Monday on the company's claim for a salvage award. Lawyers for RMS Titanic Inc. confirmed the expedition plans but declined to discuss them in detail.

"That is something that is being looked at right now but it's not in any way a done deal," attorney Robert W. McFarland said in an interview. He said the company would have more to say at this week's hearing. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith, a maritime jurist who considers the...

AS MEDIEVAL CASTLE bedrooms go, this one looks the part. Disturbing Flemish tapestries share the walls with stern portraits. On close inspection, the ornate fireplace's iron firedogs turn out to have devils' heads. This place is supposedly haunted by the ghost of Tom Skelton, a 16th-century jester said to have committed murder. The malevolent face of "Tom Fool" stares from a dimly lit oil painting just outside the bedroom.

My assignment is to stay overnight in the Tapestry Room at Muncaster Castle in Cumbria, UK. Having earlier reassured my editor that I laugh at ghost stories, my bravado is crumbling. I still don't believe in ghosts, but I'm scared the atmosphere will wind me up into a panic. Two previous guests have bolted in the night, one a...

A disused stone quarry on the Greek island of Crete which is riddled with an elaborate network of underground tunnels could be the original site of the ancient Labyrinth, the mythical maze that housed the half-bull, half-man Minotaur of Greek legend. An Anglo-Greek team of scholars who undertook an expedition to the quarry this summer believes that the site, near the town of Gortyn in the south of the island, has just as much claim to be the place of the Labyrinth as the Minoan palace at Knossos 20 miles away, which has been synonymous with the Minotaur myth since its excavation a century ago.

The 600,000 people a year who visit the ruins at Knossos are told the site was almost certainly the home of the legendary King Minos, who was supposed to have constructed the Labyrinth to...

A giant shark that could be up to 20ft long has sent shockwaves across Australian beaches after a great white was nearly bitten in half. A stunning picture shows a 10ft predator thrashing about with two massive chunks missing on either side of its body, off the Queensland coast. Experts said its rival may be 20ft (about six metres) long, judging by the size of the huge bites. The great white was savaged after it got snared on a drum line - a baited hook attached to a buoy - near North Stradbroke Island, east of Brisbane.

The wounded creature was still alive when a crew hauled it onto a boat, close to Deadman's Beach. "It certainly opened up my eyes. I mean the shark that was caught is a substantial shark in itself," Queensland Fisheries' Jeff Krause told...

The fossilised skull of a colossal "sea monster" has been unearthed along the UK's Jurassic Coast. The ferocious predator, which is called a pliosaur, terrorised the oceans 150 million years ago. The skull is 2.4m long, and experts say it could belong to one of the largest pliosaurs ever found: measuring up to 16m in length. The fossil, which was found by a local collector, has been purchased by Dorset County Council.

It was bought with money from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and it will now be scientifically analysed, prepared and then put on public display at Dorset County Museum. Palaeontologist Richard Forrest told the BBC: "I had heard rumours that something big was turning up. But seeing this thing in the flesh, so to speak, is just jaw dropping. It is...

Astronomers have confirmed that an exploding star spotted by Nasa's Swift satellite is the most distant cosmic object to be detected by telescopes. In the journal Nature, two teams of astronomers report their observations of a gamma-ray burst from a star that died 13.1 billion light-years away. The massive star died about 630 million years after the Big Bang. UK astronomer Nial Tanvir described the observation as "a step back in cosmic time".

Professor Tanvir led an international team studying the afterglow of the explosion, using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii. He told BBC News that his team was able to observe the afterglow for 10 days, while the gamma ray burst itself lasted around 12 seconds. The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is an...

Spider webs encased in amber which were discovered on an East Sussex beach have been confirmed by scientists as being the world's oldest on record. The amber, which was found in Bexhill by fossil hunter Jamie Hiscocks and his brother Jonathan, dates back 140 million years to the Cretaceous period. Professor Martin Brasier said they were the earliest webs to be incorporated into the fossil record. He has published his findings in the Journal of the Geological Society.

Professor Brasier, who is a palaeobiologist at the University of Oxford, said: "This amber is very rare. It comes from the very base of the Cretaceous, which makes it one of the oldest ambers anywhere to have inclusions in it." He added: "These spiders are distinctive and leave little sticky...

If there is something strange in a Gilford neighborhood, the Ghostbusters will not be at anyone's front door to help pursue the paranormal. As for Grace Herbert of Hoyt Road, she does not have a problem living inside a house where she has witnessed ghost activity and apparitions and experienced some interesting happenings involving the spirits of the dead.

It all started in 1973, when Herbert and her husband purchased the house at 324 Hoyt Road. The first apparition Herbert witnessed was an elderly woman lying in bed with her arms crossed in the upstairs bedroom, which she keeps as the guest room when people visit. Most of the activity she has witnessed has occurred either in that bedroom or in the living room downstairs, directly beneath the bedroom. "The people who...