"Until now, it was thought males injected themselves with sperm by accident during mating. But that is definitely not the case here: the sperm was clearly injected by another giant squid."

There is another possibility that cannot be totally excluded, Miske added, which is that the infusion of sperm happened during group sex.

However, that is unlikely given that chance encounters between giant squid, rare, multi-tentacled creatures which live at depths of between 300 and 1 000 metres below sea level, are few and far between.

A beautiful 18-year-old Tucson softball player has suffered severe burns over 80 percent of her body but has been nowhere near a fire.

In an extremely rare, often fatal and little-known severe toxic reaction to a medical drug, Samantha Grasham's body caught fire - from the inside out - blistering most of her skin, as well as her mouth, throat, esophagus and airway, perhaps leaving her scarred for life.

She spent nearly three weeks in the Burn Unit at St. Mary's Hospital, as doctors there worked to save her life and her skin.

As happens in most of these strange cases of what is known as Stevens-Johnson syndrome, there was no warning that Grasham would react so severely to a medication.

Most people never know they are at risk, and doctors often do not recognize the syndrome when they see it. Yet many common drugs - including prescription painkillers and antibiotics - even over-the-counter pain and fever medicines for children - are linked to this "fire in the flesh."

The building will be thoroughly modern. The midtown Modern, scheduled to open in late November after being closed for two and a half years, is 630,000 square feet of straight walls, floors and ceilings with no obtrusive columns or dead-end hallways. It is a building with "a harmonic precision," Mr. Lowry said.

But simple architecture is not always simple. Making a precise, rectilinear museum in a city that refuses to bend very much requires lots of logistical contortions. To cite a small example, the builders had to cut a notch out of one of museum's facades to preserve the view of St. Thomas Church from 54th Street. And in New York City many unions are involved, each with its own schedule. That makes a precisionist structure, where quarter-inch goofs can throw off the whole thing, extremely tricky to build.

[...]

The first and biggest obstacle to the Modern's seamlessness was the 54-story residential tower between the old and the new parts of the museum. The goal was to allow visitors to pass from old to new without ever knowing they had left the museum, Mr. Lowry said. But the tower, with its 248 residents, could not be razed. So the Modern got permission to "slice through the tower," Mr. Lowry said, "to penetrate the four feet of concrete that supported the tower." To insure that the tower, pierced by the Modern's passages and escalators, would not collapse, steel braces had to be installed in the lower nine floors.