Eleven months ago, NASA's Stardust mission touched down in the Utah desert with the first solid comet samples ever retrieved from space. Since then, nearly 200 scientists from around the globe have studied the minuscule grains, looking for clues to the physical and chemical history of our solar system.

New analysis improves methods to render objects invisible

Scientists have discovered what appears to be a new kind of cosmic explosion - a "hybrid gamma-ray burst" - which will be the subject of four articles to be published in the journal Nature on 21 December 2006.