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Apple’s iPhone has been used for everything from following the 2008 election to deciding where to grab a bite on the go. Now, it’s helping lead-footed drivers avoid costly speeding tickets.

NMobile and Trapster are two mobile applications that provide up-to-date, detailed maps of speed-enforcement zones with live police traps, speed cameras or red-light cameras. After launching, each application pulls up a map pinpointing the locations of speed traps within driving distance. An audio alert will sound as vehicles approach an area tagged as harboring a speed trap.

Both applications rely on the wisdom of the crowds for their data. Users can report camera-rigged stop lights and areas heavily populated with radar-toting police officers through the application or on each company’s Web site. Eagle-eyed motorists using either application can also contribute information on the location of newly spotted speed traps from the road with a couple of taps on the iPhone.

Then, using the iPhone’s GPS location detection, the applications warn drivers when they are approaching known or reported traps.

For example, iBeer, an application that makes use of the smartphone’s accelerometer and sensors to simulate a frothy pint of ale, and Pocket First Aid and CPR Guide, which offers tutorials for treating conditions from snake bites to hypothermia, are both hovering among the ten most popular paid applications.

For start-up companies like Trapster, the popularity and capabilities of the iPhone has revolutionized the mobile application playing field.

“The game-changer was the iPhone,” said CEO and founder Peter Tenereillo, who saw a significant jump in Trapster’s user base after an iPhone-compatible version of the application was released in October. “We’ve had 100,000 people start using it in the last five weeks.”

Mr. Tenereillo estimates more than 100,000 data points are currently mapped worldwide on Trapster, which is free.

NMobile founder Shannon Atkinson declined to provide detailed data, though he did estimate that “well over 1,000” users had downloaded the application since it became available last week. (The application, originally priced at $9.99, is dropping to $4.99 Friday morning.)

To thwart false alarms and eliminate inaccuracies, Trapster enlists its community of nearly 200,000 members to rank speed traps on their accuracy. If multiple users confirm the location of a particular speed trap, the icon shows up as red. Less credible locations are colored green.

At NMobile, users submit speed detection hotspots which are then verified against news reports and public records before appearing on the map.

NMobile is only available for the iPhone, though Mr. Atkinson is hoping to expand to additional mobile operating systems, including Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Nokia’s Symbian. Trapster is currently available for the iPhone, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, Nokia smartphones and Windows Mobile.

Messrs. Atkinson and Tenereillo insist they’ve received only positive feedback from law enforcement officials and police officers regarding their products. “If the application gets people to slow down, I think it’s generally considered to be a good thing,” said Mr. Atkinson.

NMobile is planning to roll out additional features over the next few weeks, including live accident and traffic reports.

What makes the discovery even more unusual is the status of the new species: it’s extinct.

Ms. Boessenkool and her colleagues were studying an endangered New Zealand bird, the yellow-eyed penguin (Megadyptes antipodes), trying to determine if it was naturally rare or had perhaps been more abundant in the past. To do so they looked at living birds and museum specimens dating back hundreds of years, including many from a part of New Zealand’s South Island where yellow-eyed penguins are no longer found.

But genetic analysis, as well as morphological evidence from bones, pointed to a startling finding: the oldest specimens, from before the arrival of Europeans in the 17th century, were different from more recent birds. So different, the researchers report in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, that these oldest specimens actually represent a new species, which they named Megadyptes waitaha.

Ms. Boessenkool said she was shocked when the genetic analysis indicated that the birds that everyone thought were yellow-eyed penguins were something else. “I still remember the day when I was looking at these sequences and saying, ‘Why do I have these weird patterns here?’ ” she said. “We never expected to find another species.”

Ms. Boessenkool said that it was likely that before the first humans arrived in the 13th century, M. waitaha was able to outcompete the yellow-eyed penguins and thus ruled the roost, largely relegating yellow-eyes to smaller islands to the south. But then Polynesians arrived and within 200 years had wiped out many big animals and birds like the moa and, presumably, M. waitaha.

Their competitors gone, Ms. Boessenkool said, yellow-eyed penguins were able to take over.

The surface of Mars can be a bumpy place, particularly in the mid-latitudes. There, steep peaks are often surrounded by broad lobes of material that stretch away from the peaks for up to a dozen miles.

Scientists have long thought that those big bumps might contain water ice, but in what form and how much no one knew.

New evidence from radar surveys by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter strongly suggest that the lobes are pure ice in the form of glaciers, buried under a thin layer of soil and rock. If so, there may be an enormous amount of ice on Mars apart from the poles, potentially providing a convenient resource for human missions.

“It’s sort of like discovering Greenland,” said John W. Holt of the University of Texas, lead author of a study in Science describing the findings.

The spacecraft’s ground-penetrating radar instrument, aimed at several of these lobes in the Hellas basin in the southern hemisphere, picked up two reflected signals — one from the surface and another from something else underground. “That can really only happen with a limited number of materials,” Dr. Holt said, and all the evidence pointed to massive sheets of ice.

Every year, myths about the flu vaccine spread as widely as the flu itself.

Most people seem to know that the flu shot, which uses killed viruses, cannot cause symptoms. But its newer counterpart, the nasal spray FluMist, is slightly different. It uses live but weakened viruses, which can still replicate for as long as three weeks.

But that alone is not enough to cause sickness or result in passing the virus to others. In a report published in January, researchers at the Mayo Clinic noted that the amount of virus shed by people vaccinated with the spray is below what is needed to infect an adult. Children are slightly more susceptible. (One researcher was listed as a consultant for MedImmune, which makes FluMist.)

The picture of an elusive snow leopard, captured at an altitude of more than 13,000ft in India's Ladak's Hemis High Altitude National Park, was the reward for 13 months of effort for Steve Winter, a photographer for National Geographic magazine.
"I try to do stories that have never been done before," he told BBC News.

"They do involve an incredible amount of work with scientists and local people. We were lucky in this instance that we got incredible pictures.

"It was collaboration between myself, the team and the snow leopard," he joked.

The project involved 14 remote cameras in roughly 45 locations. It was a case of trial and error - one camera only delivered a picture of half of a leopard in five-and-a-half months.

Working in such harsh conditions, where temperatures plummeted to -40C (-40F), he asked the manufacturers for their advice on the performance of the cameras in extreme temperatures.

"We don't know, tell us when you get back," he recalled.

Commenting on the use of trigger cameras rather than being sat behind the lens, Mr Winter said: "They are something that needs to be used to get intimate portraits of elusive animals.

"I used to hate these cameras because they gave you a record of an animal.

"Images are all about composition and light. If I cannot control that as if I would as I put the camera up to my face, then essentially I have failed.

"So I asked myself that if I did not like these cameras, how can I like them more.

"It turns out that snow leopards are the perfect species on which to use these cameras. They always come to specific locations to mark their territory.

"So I viewed the locations as movie sets. I put the cameras there, I put the lights there.

"I knew the animal would come; it was just wanting for the actor to walk on stage and break the beam."