A group of vigilante angels have returned to fight crime on New York trains and scientists have filmed the flight of little snails called sea butterflies for the very first time.

Take a look at these and our selection of other great feature stories scoured from across the web this week.

In the late 1970s, crime on the New York subway system became so rife a small group of vigilantes decided to do a Batman and fight back.

Pledging to protect the innocent, the Guardian Angels, dressed in vibrant red, patrolled the city's trains for years before silently fading away - until now.

The islands of the Seychelles were once exploited for fish and coconuts but now they're prized for giant tortoises and inquisitive magpie-robins, brought back from extinction after fewer than 15 were left alive.

Still the native wildlife residents are under threat from unlikely foreign invaders, however, not from man this time but tiny alien birds so blazingly red they appear to be on fire.

In the snow-clad town of Pisky, there are 18 people left from a pre-war population of 4000.

The remaining residents are old, sick, marooned in an area of devastation where the occasional gunshot still rings out - but for one bumble bee keeper and his wife, love still survives.

From fake Facebook posts on dying mothers to cancer blog cons, the number of online hoaxes is on the rise.

After Taryn Wright exposed an elaborate fake tragedy on Facebook she found herself leading a squad of online detectives . She found it doesn't take long for a crowd to become a mob on the internet.

David Murphy at John Hopkins University in Baltimore and his team have captured video of 'flying' free-swimming sea snails for the first time.

The little sea snails are so admired for their graceful looks they are known as sea butterflies.

For the FBI, domestic counter-terrorism sometimes entails stings - finding people who might commit violent acts in the future and testing how far they’re willing to go.

A new documentary reveals the tangled role of paid sources in FBI. terrorism investigations.

It has been two years since Boko Haram escalated its seven-year rampage across Nigeria with the kidnapping of 276 girls in Chibok.

Yohana, 17, was one of those taken. After months of interviews with journalist Monica Mark, she tells her story, revealing life inside the deadly terror group.

From the smashed village of al-Rabiaa, newly taken by the Syrian army from the retreating rebels of Jabhat al-Nusra, you can watch shells exploding across the valley and hear guns whack out their shells every 30 seconds.

It's a war zone bombarded by fire but the Syrian army still talk of a future state with all its borders intact.

The Big Bang? Never happened. Not according to the group of believers who call themselves The Thunderbolts Project.

They subscribe to an idea called "electric universe", where it is electric currents that birth planets and light the stars.