Discoveries

A never-used, $21.8-million children's museum the city built next to Hansen Dam Recreation Center on Los Angeles' northern edge is back on track to become an attraction and an educational asset after years as a municipal white elephant. After more than two years of discussions with operators of the nonprofit Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, the City Council has approved putting an additional $18.1 million into the project, which will enable Discovery to equip the 57,000-square foot San Fernando Valley site with environmental and other science exhibits.

Let's get one thing straight right away: Zombies aren't real. The government knows it, the police know it and even so-called “zombie preppers,” the subject of Discovery Channel's new special “Zombie Apocalypse,” premiering Tuesday night, know it. But that doesn't mean they aren't all taking steps to prepare for the onslaught anyway. “Something is coming down the road,” says Shawn Beatty, a Missouri high school teacher and zombie prepper who appears in the special, stockpiling supplies and weapons.

Cable programming giant Discovery Communications has gone on a $2-billion spending spree in an effort to significantly boost its international presence. Discovery, parent of several popular U.S. cable channels including Discovery, TLC and Animal Planet, has struck a deal to acquire Scandinavian programmer SBS Nordic from Germany's ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG, and has formed a strategic alliance with French media giant TF1 that includes a 20% equity stake in its popular Eurosport Group and four pay-TV channels in France.

After the coffee. Before roaming around New York for the day. The Skinny: We're coming to you this morning from New York, where it's sunny but cold. The Fix needed a change of a scenery for a few days, so if you see someone walking down the street screaming, "I'm blogging here," that's just me. Friday's headlines include a preview of the weekend box office, a big deal from Discovery Communications and L.A. Reid quitting "The X Factor. " Daily Dose: In a recent interview at the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey, "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart said that when he first took over the show in 1999, he almost quit because he thought the staff members were jerks.

Mercury may be a scorching hunk of rock just next door to the sun, but planetary scientists have discovered nearly pure frozen water and even some organic material in the planet's frigid polar regions. The findings from the Messenger spacecraft orbiting the planet cap the decades-long search for water on the second-hottest planet in the solar system and may help scientists better understand the origins of the molecular building blocks for life on Earth. The new research "doesn't mean we have life on Mercury," said UCLA planetary scientist David Paige, lead author of one of three papers published Thursday by the journal Science.

Discovery Communciations has developed a taste for Middle Eastern food. The cable programming giant whose holdings include Discovery Channel and TLC has struck a deal to acquire Dubai-based Takhayal Entertainment, the parent company of Fatafeat, a popular food network in the region. "The acquisition of Takhayal, the premier company for cuisine and culinary programming in the Middle East, significantly strengthens our portfolio in this important region and adds content in a genre that has proved popular with our viewers around the globe," said  Mark Hollinger, chief executive of Discovery Networks International.  Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but people with knowledge of the transaction put the price at less than $10 million.

There's gold in them thar hills! Or is there? Three seasons into Discovery Channel's "Gold Rush," the hardscrabble crew at the center of the gritty reality show is again mining for millions in Alaska and the Klondike. The displaced blue-collar workers, friends and family members on a desperate make-or-break treasure hunt have yet to hit the mother lode. The cable channel, on the other hand, has already struck it rich with a series that regularly draws more male viewers on Friday nights than anything else on television, broadcast networks included.

There are countless dirty jobs, and someone's got to do them -- but now we won't get to see Mike Rowe trying his hand at them: Discovery is pulling the plug on on its long-running reality series "Dirty Jobs. " Rowe, the show's host/creator/executive producer, announced the news in a blog post Wednesday . "A few weeks ago, I was officially informed that Dirty Jobs had entered into a new phase," he wrote. "One I like to call, 'permanent hiatus.' Or in the more popular industry vernacular, canceled.

As Curiosity prepares for Thanksgiving on Mars, rover fans have been left hanging about a discovery from the Red Planet that a NASA official has billed as a big one. Just you wait, NASA says. Not everyone wants to. Curiosity's Facebook page had one early-morning comment from a fan: "WHAT IS IT?!?!"  Mars watchers were expressing the same sentiments on Twitter. PHOTOS: Awesome images from space NPR stirred things up Tuesday with a report in which John Grotzinger, principal investigator for the rover mission, called the news a discovery for the history books: "This data is ... looking really good ," he said.  The scientist told NPR it would be several weeks before NASA had anything to say. Researchers are being very careful to make sure they get it right before they blab.

It was among early man's greatest technological feats: a fully engineered weapon that combined a wooden shaft, mixed adhesives and a stone that had been chiseled to a lethal point. To many anthropologists, the creation of the stone-tipped, or hafted, spear was a watershed moment in human evolution. Not only did it amplify the killing power of early hunters, it also demonstrated clearly that they had developed the capacity for complex and abstract reasoning. Pinning down this moment in prehistory has been difficult, however.