Washington, March 18 : A team of scientists has made a new type of glass from opaque titanium and zirconium, which is harder, tougher and weighs less than stainless steel.

According to a report in Discovery News, the glass has been developed by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, US.

The scientists who developed and tested the opaque glass hope it could one day replace steel and aluminum in a wide variety of products, from golf clubs to airplanes.

"The problem with most (types of) glass is that they have very bad fatigue resistance," meaning they break easily, said Maximilien Launey, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Washington, March 18 : Scientists have found five specimens of 95 million year old fossils of Cretaceous octopuses, which reveals a much earlier origin for the modern octopus.

The five specimens have been found by palaeontologists in Cretaceous rocks in Lebanon, which have astonishingly preserved the octopuses' eight arms with traces of muscles and those characteristic rows of suckers.

The chances of an octopus corpse surviving long enough to be fossilized are so small that prior to this discovery only a single fossil species was known, and from fewer specimens than octopuses have legs.

Even traces of the ink and internal gills are present in some specimens.

Washington, Mar 18 : An upsurge of intense attraction and enduring physical effects, similar to what one feels in love at first sight, is how fans begin to develop a true passion for opera, according to a researcher.

To shed light on what it takes to develop a true passion for opera, Claudio Benzecry from the University of Connecticut in the USA observed and interviewed middle class opera fans who stand on the upper floors of the Colon Opera House in Buenos Aires.

He studied how the fans learnt to feel, believe, and behave in opera, which parts of the experience they highlighted and how they invested themselves once the initial moment of discovery subsided.

Hanoi  - Large supermarkets in Vietnam have stopped selling Johnson & Johnson products on news that the company's baby shampoo sold in the US contained chemicals that could cause cancer, the supermarkets said Wednesday.

A US consumer group, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, reported this week that it had found formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane in several varieties of Johnson's baby shampoo. The chemicals are considered probable carcinogens, and are banned from cosmetics in some countries, but not in the US.

"We got the order to stop selling most Johnson & Johnson's products, except for makeup powder, in our supermarket chain on Tuesday," said Nguyen Tuyet Thu, a sales manager at Coopmart, one of Vietnam's largest domestic chains.

Beijing - Chinese authorities on Wednesday rejected the takeover of China Huiyuan Juice Group Ltd, a leading producer of fruit juices, by the Coca Cola Company, the world's largest maker of beverages.

A takeover could have negative effects on competition, the Ministry of Commerce said in a statement, the official Xinhua news agency said. Coca Cola's bid failed to meet China's anti-monopoly law, the ministry added.

Washington, Mar. 18 : Following fears that the United States might cut off aid and assistance to Pakistan if political instability prevails, Pakistan's Ambassador to the US, Husain Haqqani, has expressed hope that the Obama administration's help to the country would remain unaffected despite the turmoil.

"The United States support and aid should be for the Pakistani people and should remain unaffected by developments in domestic politics. We expect the relationship between Pakistan and the US to remain strong and stable," The Daily Times quoted Haqqani, as saying.