Record-breakers in the news today

Internet search giant Google is paying a whopping $15m (£10.1m) in bonuses to four of its top executives for their performances last year.

Executive chairman and former boss Eric Schmidt will get $6m - the largest reward, with the rest of the money going to its top lawyer, chief financial officer and chief business officer.

Neither of Google's two co-founders, including chief executive Larry Page, will get a receive bonus though.

Among the many records the firm holds is the title for most valuable trademark.

The internet search giant topped Forbes' list of the Top Ten Most Valuable Trademarks with a value of $44.3 billion, placing it ahead of rivals such as Microsoft, Walmart, IBM and Vodafone.

A study of Neanderthal skulls published today suggests that they became extinct because they had larger eyes than our species.

As a result, more of their brain was devoted to seeing in the long, dark nights in Europe, at the expense of high-level processing.

The vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) has the largest eye-to-body ratio of any animal in the world.

Its body reaches a maximum length of 28 cm (11 in) while its eyes can have a diameter of 2.5 cm (0.9 in).

First discovered in 1903 by Carl Chun, the vampire squid has been found to reside in tropical waters at depths of over 600 m (1,970 ft).

Veteran heavy metal band Iron Maiden have announced plans to launch their own brand of beer.

The band are to release the 4.8%-strength ale called Trooper in pubs from May, and it will be available at this year's Download festival, where Maiden headline on June 15.

The strongest commercially available beer is Schorschbock 43 which is brewed by Schorschbräu, in Oberasbach, Germany, and has an alcohol volume of 43% as tested by Brau-Labor & Beratung laboratory services on 22 April 2010.

A former German army lieutenant who took part in a plot to assassinate German leader Adolf Hitler in 1944 has died.

Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist died aged 90 at his home in Munich last Friday, his wife Gundula confirmed this morning.

Mr von Kleist was just 22 when he volunteered to wear a suicide vest at a meeting with Hitler.

The earliest known literary use of the word assassination in English according to the Oxford English Dictionary is in Macbeth by William Shakespeare in 1605.

However the Assassins were known about and warned against long before that. The Assassins first appear, according to Bernard Lewis in his book "The Assassins", in the chronicles of the crusades, where it is the name for members of a sect in the Levant led by a mysterious figure known as the Old Man of the Mountains.

One early mention of the sect, according to Lewis, is in a report from an envoy sent to Egypt and Syria by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1175.