Past Olympic Venues—Rotting, Renovated, Repurposed

Then: Beijing Water Cube

During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps amassed eight gold medals in the Water Cube (pictured).

The aquatic facility cost more than a hundred million U.S. dollars and won a host of architectural and engineering awards. It was also one of the world's largest competitive swimming centers, with seating for 17,000 people.

Now: Beijing Water Cube

Today the Water Cube—known for its innovative design and "bubble wrap" skin—is home to the largest indoor water park in Asia, featuring slides, wave pools, a lazy river, and other amusements.

It's not clear that such uses could ever make the balance sheets even out, Zimbalist said, but in China's case that might not have been the organizers' primary concern.

Then: Athens Olympic Stadium

Perhaps no Olympic venue has a richer or longer history than Athens's Panathinaiko, pictured in 1896 during the opening ceremony of the first modern Olympic Games.

Originally built in 330 B.C., the stadium—whose track has classic hairpin turns—featured many ancient athletic competitions.

Evangelis Zappas, who spearheaded the first Olympic revival of ancient Greek athletic contests, excavated the site in the late 1800s.

Wealthy businessperson Georgios Averoff paid for the Panathinaiko's restoration in white marble just in time to host the 1896 Olympics.

Now: Athens Olympic Stadium

The Olympic rings cast a shadow toward archery competitors in 2004, when Athens's Panathinaiko Stadium once again welcomed the world.

Despite Greece's financial problems, this ancient Olympic venue may be built to last.

un forgetable picture of japan tsunami march 11-2011

A house adrift off Japan is a reminder of the earthquake and tsunami that claimed some 20,000 lives on March 11, 2011

"Dramatic" New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces

Archaeological "gold mine" illuminates connection between king and sun god.

The Maya sun god as shark-man—one of his several guises on a newfound monument in Guatemala.

Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar.

Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya.

Unlike the relatively centralized Aztec and Inca empires, the Maya civilization—which spanned much of what are now Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico's Yucatán region —was a loose aggregation of city-states.

"This has been a growing awareness to us since the 1990s, when it became clear that a few kingdoms were more important than others," said Brown University archaeologist Stephen Houston, who announced the discovery of the new temple Thursday.

El Zotz, in what's now Guatemala, was one of the smaller kingdoms, but one apparently bent on making a big impression.

By 2010 archaeologists working on a hilltop near the ancient city center had discovered 45-foot-tall (13-meter-tall) Diablo Pyramid. Atop it they found a royal palace and a tomb, believed to hold the city's first ruler, who lived around A.D. 350 to 400.

New "Super Earth" Found at Right Distance for Life

Dim star would give any atmosphere red glow, like "evening all the time."

An artist's depiction of GJ 667Cc orbiting a red dwarf, with its binary companion stars in the distance.

A new planet—probably a rocky super-Earth—has been found squarely within its star's habitable zone, making it one of the best candidates yet to support life, its discoverers say.

The planet, dubbed GJ 667Cc, orbits a red dwarf star 22 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Scorpio. A binary pair of orange dwarf stars are part of the same system.

The new planet has a mass 4.5 times that of Earth and orbits its host star every 28 days.

The red dwarf is relatively dim, so the planet receives slightly less light from its star than Earth does from the sun. But most of the star's light is infrared, so the planet should absorb more of its incoming energy than Earth does from sunlight.

That means if the planet has a rocky surface—which is predicted for planets less than ten times Earth's mass—and an atmosphere, it could support liquid water and maybe life, said co-discoverer Guillem Anglada-Escudé, who conducted the work while at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

"If it has an atmosphere, it's probably reddish all the time, because the star is really red," Anglada-Escudé said. "It would be like being evening all the time."

For any hypothetical observers on the surface, the binary stars in the distance would be "very prominent in the sky, and it would be an exotic thing."

Rocky Planet Around Unexpected Star

Anglada-Escudé and colleagues found the new planet using public data from the European Southern Observatory, which hosts telescopes that can measure wobbles in a star's orbit caused by a planet's gravitational tug.

The new super-Earth was somewhat unexpected, because some planetary-formation models say that metal-poor stars such as GJ 667C shouldn't have terrestrial planets around them.

Shark Swallows Another Shark Whole.......

Munching on Bamboo (Shark)

A shark has been caught on camera making a meal of another shark along Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Released earlier this month, the pictures show a tasseled wobbegong halfway through swallowing a brownbanded bamboo shark.

The wobbegong sits with the dead bamboo shark in its mouth along Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

Both species of predator and prey involved in this rarely witnessed episode grow to similar sizes—approximately 39 to 59 inches (100 to 150 centimeters) from head to tail. The two sharks also share much of their ranges in the western Pacific, where they hang out on the seabed around coral reefs.

A tasseled wobbegong blends into its surroundings, assisted by reticular markings and intricate skin flaps that break up the outline of its flattened body.

Even though it's easy enough for a wobbegong to devour a big meal, scientists are unsure how the animal manages to process prey as large as other sharks.