AP - Take that, Andromeda! For decades, astronomers thought when it came to the major galaxies in Earth's cosmic neighborhood, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda. Not anymore. The Milky Way is considerably larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers once thought, Andromeda's equal.

AP - Five years after the NASA rover Spirit landed on Mars, the six-wheel robotic geologist and its twin Opportunity are still on the job.

AP - Storms swirled over the Northwest and Gulf Coast early Monday, dumping snow from Washington to Northern California and promising wind-swept showers for the Southeast.

AFP - The Milky Way, the Earth's home galaxy, is spinning much faster and has a mass 50 percent larger than previously believed, raising the probability of a collision with another galaxy, according to a report out Monday.

AFP - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered gas giant Gazprom to start cutting supplies to Ukraine bound for European consumers in response to Kiev's alleged siphoning from pipelines.

If you can get a refurbished iPhone for $99, are good deals in the offing for other popular smartphones, like the BlackBerry Storm and the Google G1? They may be if enough consumers, faced with a change of heart, decide to return them within 30 days.

Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs, looking to quell rumors about his health, said Monday his doctors have discovered a hormonal imbalance that has been causing his weight loss.

The International Consumer Electronics Show, the largest trade show in the U.S., opens this week in Las Vegas. But the economic downturn will temper the normally dizzying extravaganza, and some attendees are wondering if the whole technology trade show business is past its peak.

Cuba on Monday began accepting requests for electronic access to more than 3,000 documents from Ernest Hemingway's home on the island, including the unpublished epilogue of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and coded messages the author sent when using his yacht to hunt for German submarines during World War II.

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: The organizers of the International Year of Astronomy are using the Web to get you to step away from the computer and actually see the sky.

When English naturalist Charles Darwin explored the Galapagos Islands in the early 1800s, he, and countless scientists since, overlooked a hefty pink iguana.

The Milky Way is considerably larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers once thought, Andromeda's equal.

Two embryonic stars discovered just a few light years away from the Milky Way's center show that stars can form in the potentially destructive reach of the powerful black hole at our galaxy's center.

The water in Venus' atmosphere is gone with the wind, new detections suggest. This absence is strange, because astronomers think Venus and Earth likely began with similar amounts of water since they are about the same size and formed at the same time .

Seventeen previously unknown species of reptiles and amphibians have been found in the threatened rainforests of eastern Tanzania, Italian and Tanzanian scientists reported on Monday.