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Astronomers have a new candidate in their search for the nearest black hole to Earth. It's about 1,000 light-years away, or roughly 9.5 thousand, million, million km, in the Constellation Telescopium.

Could "shadow life" be lurking in the deep ocean? Never mind Mars, alien life may be thriving right here on Earth, a major science conference has heard.

Our planet's murky deep sea sediments are a buzzing hotbed of life, according to a report in Nature magazine. Scientists suggest between 60 to 70% of all bacteria live deep beneath the surface of the Earth, far from the Sun's life-giving rays.

Tiny, irregularly shaped fossils from South Australia could be the oldest remains of simple animal life found to date. The collection of circles, anvils, wishbones and rings discovered in the Flinders Ranges are most probably sponges, a Princeton team claims.

It is often assumed that the science-based worldview implies that life on this planet is a meaningless accident in a universe that is indifferent to our existence.

Life may have survived a cataclysmic global freeze some 700 million years ago in pockets of open ocean. Researchers claim to have found evidence in Australia that turbulent seas still raged during the period, where micro-organisms may have clung on for life.

Oxygen levels on Earth reached a critical threshold to enable the evolution of complex life much earlier than thought, say scientists. The evidence is found in 1.2-billion-year-old rocks from Scotland.

Earth's most ancient rocks, with an age of 4.28 billion years, have been found on the shore of Hudson Bay, Canada. Writing in Science journal, a team reports finding that a sample of Nuvvuagittuq greenstone is 250 million years older than any rocks known.

Tiny tubes thought to have been etched into South African rocks by microbes are at least 3.34 billion years old, scientists can confirm. The tubules could therefore represent the earliest "trace" evidence of activity by life on Earth.

The exact moment when a 550-million-year-old cell began to divide has been captured in an exquisite 3D image. The picture is one of a series taken by researchers examining ancient fossil embryos from Guizhou Province, China.

Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks has published a CIA memo examining the implications of the US being perceived as an "exporter of terrorism". The three-page report from February 2010 says the participation of US-based individuals in terrorism is "not a recent phenomenon".

The "war on terror" has made the world a more dangerous place and created divisions which make conflict more likely, says Amnesty International. The campaign group used its annual report on Wednesday to accuse governments of trampling over human rights in the name of fighting terrorism.

President Bush will soon make a decision on whether to declare war on Iraq and attempt to topple Saddam Hussein. The markets are left asking whether the stuttering US economy is playing any part in the decision.

The world stands accused of double standards in its thirst to end the scourge of international terrorism. Aid donors and relief agencies, a report says, are concentrating increasingly on politically strategic countries like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Afghanistan has undergone momentous change in the decade which followed the US-led operation to remove the Taliban from power in October 2001. Billions of dollars in foreign assistance have poured into the country, most of it spent on military operations.

Could better co-ordination have prevented the Pentagon crash? US air defence was disastrously unprepared for the 11 September 2001 attacks, a special commission has said.

US President George Bush has said there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 11 September attacks.

The financial toll of America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was laid bare yesterday when a congressional committee estimated the cost of both conflicts at $1.6 trillion (£771bn) and rising - $20,000 for every family of four in the US.

In the five years since 9/11, a clear-cut and well-supported "war on terror" declared by President Bush has become confused and divisive.

The BBC's world affairs editor John Simpson was accompanying a convoy of US special forces and Kurdish fighters when it came under attack from an American warplane. At least 10 people were killed, including a Kurdish translator working with the BBC team, Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed.