Penguins are the acrobatic athletes of the seas, and they can keep diving for long periods of time because they have exquisite control over how and when their muscles use oxygen, new research indicates.

The penguins can switch between two modes of oxygen use — either starving their muscles or giving them an extra shot of oxygen to keep them working — to achieve their amazing dives.

“It appears that there’s a little bit of plasticity or variability in what they do when they are diving,” said study researcher Cassondra Williams of the University of California in San Diego. “It’s much more complicated than we thought.”

For the first time in Gallup’s tracking of the issue, a majority of Americans (53%) believe same-sex marriage should be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages. The increase since last year came exclusively among political independents and Democrats. Republicans’ views did not change.

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Here we go again. A California religious radio impresario who predicted — wrongly — that the end of the world would begin on May 21 revised his prophesy on Monday, saying now that the end is due in October.

In a rambling, 90-minute speech, broadcast both online and on his stations, Harold Camping, whose Family Radio network paid millions of dollars to promote his prediction, said that he was stunned when the rapture did not happen on Saturday.

What he decided, apparently, was that May 21 had been “an invisible judgment day,” of the spiritual variety, rather than his original vision of earthquakes and other disasters leading to five months of hell on earth, culminating in a spectacular doomsday on Oct. 21 — something he had repeatedly guaranteed. On Monday, however, Mr. Camping seemed satisfied with his new interpretation, which apparently spared humankind its months of torture for a single day of destruction.

But his shifting soothsaying led to a barrage of questions from reporters, something Mr. Camping seemed to wave off with a wan smile and occasional flashes of emotion.

“The world has been warned,” said Mr. Camping, who said this would be his last interview. He added that his company — which had bought billboard space nationwide to promote the May 21 date — would not promote his new prediction, Oct. 21. “We don’t have to talk about this anymore,” he said.

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Almost 10 years later CC, aka Copy Cat, is still in the College Station area. She has a mate, Smokey, and they live with their three offspring in a cat mansion built by Dr. Duane C. Kraemer, an A&M researcher who helped bring CC into the world.

CC and her family seem like perfectly normal cats, which disappoints many guests hoping to see something more exotic, said Kraemer’s wife, Shirley, the head cat wrangler.

A&M’s cat-cloning operation was an offshoot of the Missyplicity Project to clone a dog named Missy with funding help from a company that wanted to market pet cloning. When the dog-cloning project had little success, researchers turned to cats. About 80 cat embryos were produced, but only one developed into a full-term pregnancy after being transferred to a surrogate mother.

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