A research team led by Umar Mohideen, a physicist at the University of California, Riverside, has demonstrated in the laboratory that the Casimir force - the small attractive force that acts between two close parallel uncharged conducting plates - can be changed using a beam of light, making the remote operation of micromachines a possibility.

An old woman who had found a large sum of money in cash while she was traveling in a train found nothing better than flush the bills down the toilet, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reported on Friday.