Graphic photos published in an American newspaper show US soldiers posing with the mangled bodies of suspected Afghan suicide bombers.

Senior US and NATO officials moved quickly to condemn the pictures even before they were published on Wednesday by the Los Angeles Times, which received the photos from another soldier.

At a meeting of NATO allies in Brussels, Belgium, Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, apologised for the photographs. 

"This is war, and I know war is ugly, and is violent. And I know young people sometimes caught up in the moment make some very foolish decisions," he said.

"I am not excusing that."

Panetta said: "My apology is on behalf of the department of defence and the US government ... Again, that behaviour is unacceptable."

The desire to discover something new is certainly one of the most important motivators for scientists. But Denis Gebauer, who is now 34, got more than he bargained for during his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany. He built a new experimental setup to try and understand the formation of calcium carbonate -- a mineral with relevance to chemistry, geology, biology, climate change, and industry -- and soon was confronted with measurements that didn't make sense according to the conventional view of crystallization.

At first, Gebauer doubted his results. He subjected them to aggressive experimental scrutiny and discussed them extensively with colleagues. Eventually, he concluded that his measurements showed something real. "This finding opens up an entirely new view on crystallization," writes Helmut Cölfen, Gebauer's former Ph.D. supervisor, in an e-mail to Science Careers. Last month, Gebauer was awarded a Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize from the German Research Foundation for his "ground-breaking discoveries which revolutionised the scientific perspective of nucleation and crystallization."

Observations of a 'single' electron apparently splitting into two independent entities -- so-called quasi-particles -- are reported in this week's Nature.

An electron has been observed to decay into two separate parts, each carrying a particular property of the electron: a spinon carrying its spin - the property making the electron behave as a tiny compass needle - and an orbiton carrying its orbital moment - which arises from the electron's motion around the nucleus. These newly created particles, however, cannot leave the material in which they have been produced. This result is reported in a paper published in Nature by an international team of researchers led by experimental physicists from the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland) and theoretical physicists from the IFW Dresden (Germany).

A man in Texas says that a police officer fatally shot his dog at point blank range.

An Austin police officer who responded to the wrong house on a domestic disturbance call is accused of fatally shooting an innocent man's dog.

The dog's owner, Michael Paxton, was playing Frisbee with the Blue Heeler, named Cisco, on Saturday afternoon when the officer entered his property, ABC reported.

"While I was at gunpoint, my dog came from my backyard barking at the officer," Paxton wrote on the "Justice For Cisco" Facebook page. "I yelled for the officer to not shoot my dog, that he will not bite, but the officer immediately shot and killed my dog right in front of me."