Giants really did roam the earth some many hundreds of years ago. And no, these giants need not be just dinosaurs or some lurking water creature waiting to pounce on some unsuspecting smaller animal that would be their dinner.

Swiss researchers recently discovered the 100,000-year-old remains of what used to be an unknown giant camel species in central Syria. According to Professor Jean-Marie Le Tensorer of the University of Basel, the shoulders alone of the camel already stood at three meters high and the animal was around four meters tall, as big as a giraffe or an elephant. That's big. And you can bet there was plenty of water stored in that hump.

Tensorer and his team have been excavating at the desert site in Kowm since 1999 and found the first traces of a big animal in 2003. However, it was only recently that they were able to confirm that it was indeed a camel after more bones from several parts of the same animal were recently discovered.

From the location of the camel remains, it appears that a group of humans killed it while it was drinking from a spring. They were able to conclude this from the 100,000-year-old human remains as well as some flint tools which were discovered nearby in the desert steppe, which was once rich with water. The human bones have been transported back to Switzerland, where they underwent anthropological analysis.

European scientists announced today the discovery of two Jupiter-sized planets orbiting stars in the constellations of Andromeda and Delphinus.  These are some of the hottest planets ever discovered. Radiation from parent stars is causing them to lose their atmospheres. These were the first planets to be discovered by the U.K.'s SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets), which uses wide angle camera lenses that can detect variations in starlight caused by planetary transit.  The findings were confirmed by French scientists, working with their own high-powered instruments.

What is unique about this discovery is the fact that SuperWASP's telescopes are capable of looking at millions of stars at a time. Previously, the discovery of extra-solar planets required the painstaking observations of individual stars, using very expensive telescopes.  So far, 200 of these planets outside our own solar system have been found.  SuperWASP consists of a number of smaller telescopes that work with highly sensitive, high-tech cameras that can make observations of broad areas of the sky, capable of generating 60 gigabytes of data in one night.

These most recent discoveries are known as "hot Jupiters" - so-called because they are gas giants that orbit very close to their parent stars.  These discoveries come on the eve of the launching of a new 35-million Euro (about 40 million USD) satellite that will facilitate the observation of extra-solar planets. Between SuperWASP and the COROT Satellite,  discoveries of extra-solar planets should increase substantially, allowing astronomers to better understand planetary formation.

The Hubble Telescope has recently captured images of a rare Uranian solar eclipse. Basically, the planet Uranus and one of its icy moons, Ariel, were aligned in such a way that Ariel was casting a shadow onto the cloud tops of the planet. To an observer standing on Uranus' surface, this would have looked as a solar eclipse with the moon temporarily blocking the sun as it moves across the sky.

Though such occurrences are more common on other gas giants such as Jupiter, the event on Uranus is considered rare because the planet's orientation makes it difficult for an eclipse to happen.

Uranus is basically tilted on its side, unlike the other planets, and its moons orbit the planet above the equator. The satellites' paths aligns edge-on to the sun only every 42 years, when the sun shines directly over the equator. The last time that this phenomenon was observed was back in 1965, but it is only now with our present technology are accurate images available.