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Not So Cute: Dolphin Gang-Rape

Ever since Flipper appeared on our screens we’ve known dolphins to be highly intelligent, social creatures with an advanced communication system and the tendency to help humans when in trouble. Many of us have seen them performing tricks in captivity or watched them on television displaying the same manoeuvres in the wild. Some of us have even been lucky enough to swim with one. But how many of us are aware of their slightly less courteous behaviour?

Researchers have been studying the sexual behaviour of dolphins intensely for the last decade, after it was discovered they not only partake in homosexual activity, but also gang-rape and kidnap females who don’t reciprocate their sexual advances. More

Tablet wars: Google looks to take on Apple iPad

As the fanfare over Apple's new iPad reaches a fever pitch, Google is not standing idly by.

The search giant has already unveiled concept designs for its own version of a tablet, though it's unlikely that a Google tablet will hit store shelves until at least 2011.

Developers of Google Chrome OS, an open-source operating system that is set to debut in the second half of 2010, recently posted a mock tablet design on the developers' Web site chromium.org.

The design was actually unveiled two days before Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave the world its first glimpse at the iPad. But it wasn't widely noticed until this week. More

Moons Like Avatar's Pandora Could Be Found

The new science fiction blockbuster "Avatar" is set on habitable and inhabited moon Pandora, which orbits the fictional gas giant Polyphemus in the real Alpha Centauri system.

Although life-bearing moons like Pandora or the Star Wars forest moon of Endor are staples of science fiction, astronomers have yet to discover any moons beyond our solar system. However, they could be science fact, and researchers might soon not only be able to spot them, but also scan their atmospheres for key signs of life as we know it, such as oxygen and water.

"If Pandora existed, we potentially could detect it and study its atmosphere in the next decade," said astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

Gas giants in our own solar system have many moons, and if the same holds true with alien planets and their moons, "that's a lot of potential habitats," Kaltenegger said. More

Say 'cheese'? No, say 'quantum mechanics.'

Getting a digital camera for Christmas? Before you fire it up to capture Uncle Wally's fateful fifth trip to the punch bowl, take a moment to picture this: You've got a genuine scientific marvel in your mitts. In fact, it took nothing less than two Nobel prizes and a revolution in physics in order for you to point and shoot.

Why? Because to take a filmless picture, your camera or camcorder relies on, um, quantum mechanics. In particular, it exploits the fact -- revealed by Albert Einstein himself -- that a beam of light, which behaves like a wave in some circumstances, acts like a bunch of separate particles in other circumstances. (If that seems infuriatingly contradictory, suck it up. It's just how we do things in this cosmos. Or go complain to the management.) More

The Big Dipper Adds a Star

It's no secret that at community star parties I bring small, squat telescopes specifically to attract little kids in the crowd. And one of my favorite targets is the paired stars Alcor and Mizar in the Big Dipper's handle.

I tell the kids this is a "star with a secret." With just the slightest optical aid, they can make out both stars, along with an unrelated field star known as Sidus Ludoviciana that lurks nearby, creating a satisfying little triangle.

Then I ask them to train their attention on the brightest of the three, and they quickly realize that Mizar is actually a double star. I cap off my little spiel by noting that each of those two stars is itself double. So one star by eye in the Big Dipper's handle is really six stars. More

Trapped in his own body for 23 years - the coma victim who screamed unheard

For 23 years Rom Houben was ­imprisoned in his own body. He saw his doctors and nurses as they visited him during their daily rounds; he listened to the conversations of his carers; he heard his mother deliver the news to him that his father had died. But he could do nothing. He was unable to communicate with his doctors or family. He could not move his head or weep, he could only listen.

Doctors presumed he was in a vegetative state following a near-fatal car crash in 1983. They believed he could feel nothing and hear nothing. For 23 years.

Then a neurologist, Steven Laureys, who decided to take a radical look at the state of diagnosed coma patients, released him from his torture. Using a state-of-the-art scanning system, Laureys found to his amazement that his brain was functioning almost normally. More

Curious Cold War communications

It is still possible to hear so called numbers stations on the airwaves.

The mysterious short-wave stations broadcast a string of apparently random numbers, usually preceded by a well-known folk tune.

It is widely believed that they are run by intelligence agencies sending coded messages to their agents overseas.

The subject has achieved cult status, with many bands using recordings of the stations in their songs.

Simon Mason from Anlaby has written articles and books on the subject. He has also appeared on many radio and television programmes talking about this secretive world. More

Space Sights and Smells Surprise Rookie Astronauts

For rookie astronauts flying aboard the International Space Station, the food is good, the rocket thrusters are loud and there's an odd tang in the air - apparently from outer space.

"It's a very, very different environment than I expected," Discovery shuttle pilot Kevin Ford, a first-time spaceflyer, said from orbit late Friday.

One of things Ford wasn't ready for is the weird smell.

"From the [spacewalks] there really is a distinct smell of space when they come back in," Ford said from the station in a Friday night news conference. "It's like...something I haven't ever smelled before, but I'll never forget it. You know how those things stick with you." In the past, astronauts have described the smell of space as something akin to gunpowder or ozone. More

Is the Large Hadron Collider sabotaging itself from the future?

Explosions, scientists arrested for alleged terrorism, mysterious breakdowns — recently Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has begun to look like the world’s most ill-fated experiment.

Is it really nothing more than bad luck or is there something weirder at work? Such speculation generally belongs to the lunatic fringe, but serious scientists have begun to suggest that the frequency of Cern’s accidents and problems is far more than a coincidence.

The LHC, they suggest, may be sabotaging itself from the future — twisting time to generate a series of scientific setbacks that will prevent the machine fulfilling its destiny.

At first sight, this theory fits comfortably into the crackpot tradition linking the start-up of the LHC with terrible disasters. The best known is that the £3 billion particle accelerator might trigger a black hole capable of swallowing the Earth when it gets going. Scientists enjoy laughing at this one. More

Tapping into Mother Nature's R&D lab

If you want to find the world's savviest engineers, don't go to a laboratory. Go to nature.

San Diego's Qualcomm Inc. did that when it made a reflective display, derived from butterfly wings, that doesn't wash out in the sun and consumes much less power than traditional displays.

This new field of making products from nature's example, known as biomimicry, drew scientists, environmentalists and business executives to the San Diego Zoo this week for a conference on biomimicry Thursday and Friday, sponsored by the zoo and Qualcomm.

The zoo is promoting biomimicry to help its conservation efforts. If humans learn that nature is a treasure trove of engineering solutions perfected over millions of years, then conservation and environmental protection will take on commercial value, the reasoning goes. More

Exoplanets Clue To Sun's Curious Chemistry

A ground-breaking census of 500 stars, 70 of which are known to host planets, has successfully linked the long-standing "lithium mystery" observed in the Sun to the presence of planetary systems. Using ESO's successful HARPS spectrograph, a team of astronomers has found that sun-like stars that host planets have destroyed their lithium much more efficiently than "planet-free" stars.

"For almost 10 years we have tried to find out what distinguishes stars with planetary systems from their barren cousins," says Garik Israelian, lead author of a paper appearing this week in the journal Nature. "We have now found that the amount of lithium in Sun-like stars depends on whether or not they have planets." More

Australian scientists plan to regrow breasts after cancer

MELBOURNE – Australian scientists said they were to trial a revolutionary treatment which would allow women to regrow their breasts after cancer surgery.

Doctors from Melbourne's Bernard O'Brien Institute of Microsurgery said they had developed an implantable device that uses a woman's own fat cells to grow back breasts following a mastectomy.

"There is a dollop of fat that is put inside a device, a chamber, fed with the blood supply and then this dollop of fat will grow into the space and essentially feel normal to the patient," said lead researcher Phillip Marzella.

Resembling a perforated brassiere cup, Marzella said the chamber would eventually fill with fat as the initial deposit expands because "nature abhors a vacuum". More

Newfound Planet Orbits Backward

Planets orbit stars in the same direction that the stars rotate. They all do. Except one.

A newfound planet orbits the wrong way, backward compared to the rotation of its host star. Its discoverers think a near-collision may have created the retrograde orbit, as it is called.

The star and its planet, WASP-17, are about 1,000 light-years away. The setup was found by the UK's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory. The discovery was announced today but has not yet been published in a journal.

"I would have to say this is one of the strangest planets we know about," said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the discovery. More

Underground City Envisioned in Nevada

Sietch Nevada is a fascinating concept exhibited in Innovative Technologies and Climates at the University of Toronto. Fans of the science fiction novel Dune will immediately recognize this proposal - to build semi-subterranean terraced geometries in the Nevada desert.

"In Frank Herbert’s famous 1965 novel Dune, he describes a planet that has undergone nearly complete desertification. Dune has been called the “first planetary ecology novel” and forecasts a dystopian world without water.

The few remaining inhabitants have secluded themselves from their harsh environment in what could be called subterranean oasises. Far from idyllic, these havens, known as sietch, are essentially underground water storage banks.

Water is wealth in this alternate reality. It is preciously conserved, rationed with strict authority, and secretly hidden and protected," according to the Sietch Nevada project description. More

Tubular Clouds Defy Explanation

These long, crazy-looking clouds can grow to be 600 miles long and can move at up to 35 miles per hour, causing problems for aircraft even on windless days.

Known as Morning Glory clouds, they appear every fall over Burketown, Queensland, Australia, a remote town with fewer than 200 residents. A small number of pilots and tourists travel there each year in hopes of “cloud surfing” with the mysterious phenomenon. More

Snake with foot found in China

Dean Qiongxiu, 66, said she discovered the reptile clinging to the wall of her bedroom with its talons in the middle of the night.

"I woke up and heard a strange scratching sound. I turned on the light and saw this monster working its way along the wall using his claw," said Mrs Duan of Suining, southwest China.

Mrs Duan said she was so scared she grabbed a shoe and beat the snake to death before preserving its body in a bottle of alcohol.

The snake – 16 inches long and the thickness of a little finger – is now being studied at the Life Sciences Department at China's West Normal University in Nanchang. More

Evidence Found for Ancient Mars Lake

Several studies in recent years have claimed evidence for shorelines and other features that suggest ancient lakes on Mars. Firm evidence has remained elusive.

Now a University of Colorado at Boulder research team claims "the first definitive evidence of shorelines on Mars" in a statement released today.

The scientists see signs of "a deep, ancient lake," which would have implications for the potential for past life on Mars. Life as we know it requires water, and while Mars is dry now, if there was abundant water in the past -- as many studies have suggested -- then life would have been a possibility. There is, however, no firm evidence that life does or ever did exist on the red planet.

Researchers estimate the lake existed more than 3 billion years ago. It covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep -- roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain bordering the United States and Canada. More

Study links breastfeeding to high grades, college entry

NEW YORK – Breastfed babies seem more likely to do well at high school and to go on to attend college than infants raised on a bottle, according to a new US study.

Professors Joseph Sabia from the American University and Daniel Rees from the University of Colorado Denver based their research on 126 children from 59 families, comparing siblings who were breastfed as infants to others who were not. By comparing siblings, the study was able to account for the influence of a variety of difficult-to-measure factors such as maternal intelligence and the quality of the home environment.

The study, published in the Journal of Human Capital, found that an additional month of breastfeeding was associated with an increase in high school grade point averages of 0.019 points and an increase in the probability of college attendance of 0.014. More

Happy Trails With a Handy Guide

If a GPS unit talks in the woods, will anybody hear it?

Not my family, apparently. On a recent hike down to Dark Hollow Falls in Shenandoah National Park, I poked haplessly at the gadget slung around my neck, trying to watch a video on the small screen, while my mom and my boyfriend loped along ahead of my dad and me on the trail. My father, meanwhile, was half-listening to the chipper female voice coming from the machine, but mostly he was checking out the scenery, not the screen.

My family and I were at the park for our annual Father's Day getaway, and I roped them into trying out GPS Rangers, which the park introduced last summer. Each paperback-size Global Positioning System device, created by a company named BarZ Adventures, contains recorded tours of four popular hikes: to the top of Hawksbill Mountain, down a hill to Dark Hollow Falls, along a one-mile portion of the Appalachian Trail and on a ramble through Big Meadow. More

Mystery of Giant Ice Circles Resolved

Strange circles have once again appeared in the frozen surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia, as spotted by astronauts aboard the International Space Station this April. News reports described the ice rings as a puzzling phenomenon.

But experts say they can explain the mystery, and it's not aliens — methane gas rising from the lake floor represents the likely culprit.

Methane emissions can create a rising mass of warm water that begins swirling in a circular pattern because of the Coriolis force, or the phenomenon caused by the Earth's rotation that also helps create cyclones.

"Once the water mass reaches the underside of the ice on the surface of the lake, the warm water melts the ice in a ring shape," said Marianne Moore, a marine ecologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts who has spent much time studying Lake Baikal with Russian researchers. The lake is the largest (by volume) and deepest fresh water lake on Earth. More

New element named 'copernicium'

Discovered 13 years ago, and officially added to the periodic table just weeks ago, element 112 finally has a name.

It will be called "copernicium", with the symbol Cp, in honour of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

Copernicus deduced that the planets revolved around the Sun, and finally refuted the belief that the Earth was the centre of the Universe.

The team of scientists who discovered the element chose the name to honour the man who "changed our world view". More

Robotic Fish To Monitor Pollution

LONDON - A school of mechanical, battery-powered robots in the shape of fish will be released into a Spanish port to help monitor pollution there, scientists said Friday.

The 5-foot-long (1.5-meter-long) robots work by mimicking the swishing movements of a fish's tail, according to University of Essex robotics expert Huosheng Hu, whose team is manufacturing the machines.

He said the robo-fish would be equipped with sensors to monitor oxygen levels in the water, detect oil slicks spilled from ships or contaminants pumped into the water from underground pipes.

The robotic fish will patrol the harbor of Gijon, in northern Spain under a 2.5-million-pound ($3.6 million) grant from the European Union. Hu said Gijon was chosen because port authorities there had expressed an interest in the technology. More

Lesbian albatrosses and bisexual bonobos have last laugh on Darwin

Charles Darwin argued that sexual preferences can shape the progress of evolution, creating displays, such as the peacock’s tail, that are inexplicable by natural selection alone.

It’s safe to say, however, that he did not anticipate the lesbian albatrosses of Hawaii. Nor bisexual bonobos. Let alone sadomasochistic bat bugs or the gay penguins of New York. Homosexuality is so widespread among some animal species that it can reshape their social dynamics and even change their DNA, according to the first peer-reviewed survey of research on the subject. More

NASA's mission to bomb the Moon

NASA will tomorrow launch a spectacular mission to bomb the Moon. Their LCROSS mission will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a missile that will blast a hole in the lunar surface at twice the speed of a bullet.

The missile, a Centaur rocket, will be steered by a shepherding spacecraft that will guide it towards its target - a crater close to the Moon's south pole.

Scientists expect the blast to be so powerful that a huge plume of debris will be ejected.

The attack on the Moon is not a declaration of war or act of wanton vandalism. Space scientists want to see if any water ice or vapour is revealed in the cloud of debris.

Though the Moon mostly a dry airless desert, they believe ice could be trapped in crater shadows near the south pole which never receive any sunlight. If so it could provide vital supplies for a manned moonbase. More

Ultracapacitors can power cars, replace batteries

Forget hybrids and hydrogen-powered vehicles. EEStor, a stealth company in Cedar Park, Texas, is working on an “energy storage” device that could finally give the internal combustion engine a run for its money — and begin saving us from our oil addiction. “To call it a battery discredits it,” says Ian Clifford, the CEO of Toronto-based electric car company Feel Good Cars, which plans to incorporate EEStor’s technology in vehicles by 2008.

EEStor’s device is not technically a battery because no chemicals are involved. In fact, it contains no hazardous materials whatsoever. Yet it acts like a battery in that it stores electricity. If it works as it’s supposed to, it will charge up in five minutes and provide enough energy to drive 500 miles on about $9 worth of electricity. At today’s gas prices, covering that distance can cost $75 or more; the EEStor device would power a car for the equivalent of about 45 cents a gallon. And we mean power a car. “A four-passenger sedan will drive like a Ferrari,” Clifford predicts. More

Paleontologists Strike Fossil Gold in Colombia

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Carlos Jaramillo is 39 years old but loves to dig in the dirt -- especially the dry, flaky shale formations of Colombia's Guajira province. "If you talk to a paleontologist," he explained, "you're talking to a kid who never grew up."

For the past five years, Jaramillo and his team of paleontologists have been burrowing ground so rich in fossils that they have made the kinds of discoveries that thrill the scientific world. And they still have years of digging ahead of them at this site in the Cerrejon region of northeastern Colombia, a remote and oven-hot place not unaccustomed to drug traffickers and the occasional rebel column. More

Finally - A Cheap Electric Scooter

Here in the United States, the price of battery-powered scooters is hard to justify when compared to its gas-powered brethren.

KLD Technologies wants to change that with scooters it claims offer solid performance and cost about as much as a Vespa.

The scooters feature motors with something KLD Technologies calls nano-crystaline technology to improve efficiency over traditional iron-core motors. The company’s Neue drive eliminates the need for a transmission and will propel the scooters when they arrive in the U.S. next year. More

Extrasolar Planet Might Indeed Be Habitable

Scientists searching for a planet like Earth said they have found the smallest planet ever detected outside the solar system, less than twice the size of our own.

The exoplanet, a planet that orbits a star beyond the solar system, is called Gliese 581e after the star it circles. Because of its relatively small size it is likely rocky, like Earth, as opposed to gas giants such as Jupiter or Saturn, the astronomers said.

"It is the lightest planet detected outside the solar system so far," Dr. Gaspare Lo Curto, an astronomer at the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, told a news conference. More

Ancient DNA reveals some Neanderthals were redheads

Ancient DNA retrieved from the bones of two Neanderthals suggests that at least some of them had red hair and pale skin, scientists report this week in the journal Science. The international team says that Neanderthals' pigmentation may even have been as varied as that of modern humans, and that at least 1 percent of Neanderthals were likely redheads.

The scientists -- led by Holger Römpler of Harvard University and the University of Leipzig, Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona, and Michael Hofreiter of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig -- extracted, amplified, and sequenced a pigmentation gene called MC1R from the bones of a 43,000-year-old Neanderthal from El Sidrón, Spain, and a 50,000-year-old individual from Monti Lessini, Italy. More

Spain plugs in largest solar-tower power plant

Abengoa Solar of Spain on Monday reported successful tests of its second solar tower in operation, in which the sun's heat is used to make electricity.

The 531-foot solar tower, located near Seville, Spain, features a number of improvements on the first design and has exceeded the anticipated output. Called PS20, the installation is the largest in the world with a capacity of 20 megawatts, enough electricity to supply 10,000 homes, according to the company.

A solar tower configuration uses a field of heliostats, or mirrors, to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver held in the tower. The heat creates steam which turns a turbine to make electricity. The PS20 project has 1,255 of these heliostats, with each heliostat having a surface area of 1,291 square feet. More

Chimpanzees exchange meat for sex

Chimpanzees enter into "deals" whereby they exchange meat for sex, according to researchers. Male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts.

This is a long-term exchange, so males continue to share their catch with females when they are not fertile, copulating with them when they are. The team describe their findings in the journal PLoS One.

Cristina Gomes and her colleagues, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, studied chimps in the Tai Forest reserve in Ivory Coast. She and her team observed the animals as they hunted, and monitored the number of times they copulated. More

Meteorite Scavengers

NASA scientist Steve Chesley got a call at home last October with bracing news: A telescope in Arizona had spotted an SUV-size asteroid that appeared to be on a collision course with Earth. He raced to work, ran a computer calculation and saw something he had never seen before: a 100 percent chance of direct impact. He quickly checked to make sure the asteroid was the size advertised. It was. No reason to panic.

Hours later, the asteroid hit the atmosphere over northern Sudan's Nubian Desert and exploded 23 miles up with the force of a thousand tons of TNT. Witnesses saw the fireball and took pictures of the vapor trails in the sky. More

New Madrid fault system may be shutting down

A team from Purdue and Northwestern universities analyzed the fault motion for eight years using global positioning system measurements and found that it is much less than expected given the 500- to 1,000-year repeat cycle for major earthquakes on that fault. The last large earthquakes in the New Madrid seismic zone were magnitude 7-7.5 events in 1811 and 1812.

Estimating an accurate earthquake threat for the area, which includes parts of Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas and Kentucky, is crucial for the communities potentially affected, said Eric Calais, the Purdue researcher who led the study.

"Our findings suggest the steady-state model of quasi-cyclical earthquakes that works well for faults at the boundaries of tectonic plates, such as the San Andreas fault, does not apply to the New Madrid fault," said Calais, who is a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences. More

Mars Mission Has Some Seeing Red

PASADENA, Calif. -- In a "clean room" in Building 150 of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is something that looks very much like a flying saucer. It's a capsule containing a huge, brawny Mars rover, a Hummer compared with the Mini Coopers that have previously rolled across the Red Planet.

This is the Mars Science Laboratory, the space agency's next big mission to the most Earth-like planet in the solar system. But it's been a magnet for controversy, and a reminder that the robotic exploration of other worlds is never a snap, especially when engineers decide to get ambitious. More

Marijuana Chemical May Fight Brain Cancer

The active chemical in marijuana promotes the death of brain cancer cells by essentially helping them feed upon themselves, researchers in Spain report.

Guillermo Velasco and colleagues at Complutense University in Spain have found that the active ingredient in marijuana, THC, causes brain cancer cells to undergo a process called autophagy. Autophagy is the breakdown of a cell that occurs when the cell essentially self-digests.

The team discovered that cannabinoids such as THC had anticancer effects in mice with human brain cancer cells and people with brain tumors. When mice with the human brain cancer cells received the THC, the tumor growth shrank. More

Tiny “Lab-on-a-Chip” Can Detect Pollutants, Disease and Biological Weapons

For centuries, animals have been our first line of defense against toxins. A canary in a coalmine served as a living monitor for poisonous gases. Scientists used fish to test for contaminants in our water. Even with modern advances, though, it can take days to detect a fatal chemical or organism.

Until now. Working in the miniaturized world of nanotechnology, Tel Aviv University researchers have made an enormous — and humane — leap forward in the detection of pollutants.

A team led by Prof. Yosi Shacham-Diamand, vice-dean of TAU’s Faculty of Engineering, has developed a nano-sized laboratory, complete with a microscopic workbench, to measure water quality in real time. Their “lab on a chip” is a breakthrough in the effort to keep water safe from pollution and bioterrorist threats, pairing biology with the cutting-edge capabilities of nanotechnology. More

Sex chemistry 'lasts two years'

A team from the University of Pisa in Italy found the bodily chemistry which makes people sexually attractive to new partners lasts, at most, two years.

When couples move into a "stable relationship" phase, other hormones take over, Chemistry World reports.

But one psychologist warned the hormone shift is wrongly seen as negative.

Dr Petra Boynton, of the British Psychological Society, said there was a danger people might feel they should take hormone supplements to make them feel the initial rush of lust once more. More

Quadruple Saturn moon transit snapped by Hubble

On February 24, 2009, the Hubble Space Telescope took a photo of four moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet. In this view, the giant orange moon Titan casts a large shadow onto Saturn's north polar hood. Below Titan, near the ring plane and to the left is the moon Mimas, casting a much smaller shadow onto Saturn's equatorial cloud tops. Farther to the left, and off Saturn's disk, are the bright moon Dione and the fainter moon Enceladus.

These rare moon transits only happen when the tilt of Saturn's ring plane is nearly "edge on" as seen from Earth. Saturn's rings will be perfectly edge on to our line of sight August 10 and September 4, 2009. Unfortunately, Saturn will be too close to the Sun to be seen by viewers on Earth at that time. This "ring plane crossing" occurs every 14-15 years. In 1995-96, Hubble witnessed the ring plane crossing event, as well as many moon transits and even helped discover several new moons of Saturn. More

Going Where Darwin Feared to Tread

In biology's most famous book, "On the Origin of Species," Charles Darwin steered clear of applying his revolutionary theory of evolution to the species of greatest interest to his readers -- their own.

He couldn't avoid it forever, of course.

He eventually wrote another tome nearly as famous, "The Descent of Man." But he knew in 1859, when "Species" was published, that to jump right into a description of how human beings had tussled with the environment and one another over eons, changing their appearance, capabilities and behavior in the process, would be hard for people to accept. Better to stick with birds and barnacles. More

Update on the Aptera: nearly ready to ship

I'm accelerating and cornering — hard — on three wheels, little wisps of tire smoke curling out of the slender front wheel pants as steering is cranked in and "throttle" applied. And no, I'm not in an early Volkswagen GTI that hikes up its inside rear tire. Rather, I've been given a drive in the Aptera 2e, a soon-to-be-produced electric vehicle whose shape is slipperier than a Teflon-coated salmon on glare ice, and whose composite construction offers both light weight and impressive structural integrity.

Better yet, the 2e is scheduled to begin rolling off the Vista, California, assembly line this October for an as-yet-to-be-determined price between $25,000 and $40,000. Charge it overnight from your 110-volt home outlet, and it's claimed to have a range of 100 miles...in the carpool lane, if you wish. More

Nearly 50 new species of prehistoric creatures discovered in record time

In just four years a University of Portsmouth palaeontologist has discovered 48 new species from the age of the dinosaurs - while other scientists took 180 years to identify the same number.

Dr Steve Sweetman's discoveries, found hidden in mud on the Isle of Wight, are around 130 million years old and shed valuable light on the poorly understood world in which well known dinosaurs roamed.

Steve, a research associate with the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, has found in ancient river deposits, at least eight new dinosaurs, many different types of lizard, frogs, salamanders, and perhaps rarest of all from the time of the dinosaurs, six tiny mammals, some as small as a shrew. More

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- The big bang, black holes, dark matter, dark energy, extrasolar planets, brown dwarfs, quasars, pulsars, cosmic rays, the space-time continuum, galaxies and more galaxies. Do you see what Galileo started?

It's been 400 years since University of Padua professor Galileo Galilei, a precocious Italian of relatively modest achievement, had the bright idea of turning a modified spyglass toward the night sky. What he saw forever shattered the ancient Earth-centered cosmos.

Four centuries later, telescopes are among the greatest marvels of civilization, and they reveal daily that the universe is vaster, stranger and more violent than Galileo could have imagined. He incited what has become a compulsion to tunnel deeper into the sky, and the universe shows no sign of running out of surprises. More

Nuclear-powered passenger aircraft 'to transport millions'

Nuclear-powered aircraft may sound like a concept from Thunderbirds, but they will be transporting millions of passengers around the world later this century, the leader of a Government-funded project to reduce environmental damage from aviation believes.

The consolation of sitting a few yards from a nuclear reactor will be non-stop flights from London to Australia or New Zealand, because the aircraft will no longer need to land to refuel. The flights will also produce no carbon emissions and therefore make no contribution to global warming.

Ian Poll, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Cranfield university, and head of technology for the Government-funded Omega project, is calling for a big research programme to help the aviation industry convert from fossil fuels to nuclear energy. More

Scientists find hole in Earth's magnetic field

Recent satellite observations have revealed the largest breach yet seen in the magnetic field that protects Earth from most of the sun's violent blasts, researchers reported Tuesday. The discovery was made last summer by Themis, a fleet of five small NASA satellites.

Scientists have long known that the Earth's magnetic field, which guards against severe space weather, is similar to a drafty old house that sometimes lets in violent eruptions of charged particles from the sun. Such a breach can cause brilliant auroras or disrupt satellite and ground communications.

Observations from Themis show the Earth's magnetic field occasionally develops two cracks, allowing solar wind - a stream of charged particles spewing from the sun at 1 million mph - to penetrate the Earth's upper atmosphere. More

Electric car made of bamboo

"Bamgoo", an electric car with a body made out of bamboo, is displayed in Kyoto, western Japan. The sixty-kilogram single-seater ecologically friendly concept car, which measures 270 centimeters in length, 130 centimeters in width and 165 centimeters in height, is developed by Kyoto University Venture Business Laboratory, featuring bamboo articles in the Kyoto area. The car can run for 50 kilometers on a single charge.

Scientists High On Idea That Marijuana Reduces Memory Impairment

The more research they do, the more evidence Ohio State University scientists find that specific elements of marijuana can be good for the aging brain by reducing inflammation there and possibly even stimulating the formation of new brain cells.

The research suggests that the development of a legal drug that contains certain properties similar to those in marijuana might help prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease. Though the exact cause of Alzheimer's remains unknown, chronic inflammation in the brain is believed to contribute to memory impairment.

Any new drug's properties would resemble those of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive substance in the cannabis plant, but would not share its high-producing effects. THC joins nicotine, alcohol and caffeine as agents that, in moderation, have shown some protection against inflammation in the brain that might translate to better memory late in life. More

NASA probe shows Mercury more dynamic than thought

Earth's first nearly full look at Mercury reveals that the tiny lifeless planet took a far greater role in shaping itself than was thought, with volcanoes spewing "mysterious dark blue material." New images from NASA's Messenger space probe should help settle a decades-old debate about what caused parts of Mercury to be somewhat smoother than it should be.

NASA released photos, from Messenger's fly-by earlier this month, that gave the answer: Lots of volcanic activity, far more than signs from an earlier probe. Astronomers used to dismiss Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, as mere "dead rock," little more than a target for cosmic collisions that shaped it, said MIT planetary scientist Maria Zuber.

"Now, it's looking a lot more interesting," said Zuber, who has experiments on the Messenger probe. "It's an awful lot of volcanic material." More

Toyota's Winglet aims to usurp Segway

Prepare to step aside Segway, you had your chance to revolutionize personal transportation. Introducing the Toyota Winglet.

Still under development, Winglet's body has a 10.4 x 18-inch footprint and stands 1.5-, 2.2-, or 3.7-feet tall and features an electric motor capable of a max 6km/h cruising speed for up to 10km a jaunt.

Like the Segway, the user controls the Winglet by shifting his weight to move the transporter forward and back or to make tight turns.

Winglet will begin consumer testing at the Central Japan International Airport near Nagoya and Laguna Gamagori resort this Autumn with further testing in more crowded environments planned for 2009. It's planned to hit a production stride in 2010. More

Ancient Flying Reptile Bigger Than a Car

A fossil of a toothless flying pterosaur, with a body bigger than some family cars, represents the largest of these extinct reptiles ever to be found and has forced the creation of a new genus, scientists announced today.

Pterosaurs ruled the skies 115 million years ago during the dinosaur age. They are often mistaken for dinosaurs.

Mark Witton of the University of Portsmouth identified the creature from a partial skull fossil. Witton estimates the beast would have had a 5.5-yard (5-meter) wingspan. It stood more than a yard (about 1 meter) tall at the shoulder. More

New Flares of Activity Spotted on the Sun

After more than two years of very low sunspot activity and hardly any flares, the sun is ramping up activity now.

The sun's activity ebbs and flows on a roughly 11-year cycle. It can range from very quiet to violent space storms that knock out power grids on Earth and disrupt radio and satellite communications. The last peak was in 2000, and scientists have in recent months figured the low point was occurring. Fresh sunspots during October suggest the corner has been turned.

"I think solar minimum is behind us," said David Hathaway of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "Last month we counted five sunspot groups." he says. More

Solar panels on graves power Spanish town

MADRID, Spain — A new kind of silent hero has joined the fight against climate change.

Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a gritty, working-class town outside Barcelona, has placed a sea of solar panels atop mausoleums at its cemetery, transforming a place of perpetual rest into one buzzing with renewable energy.

Flat, open and sun-drenched land is so scarce in Santa Coloma that the graveyard was just about the only viable spot to move ahead with its solar energy program. The power the 462 panels produces — equivalent to the yearly use by 60 homes — flows into the local energy grid for normal consumption and is one community's odd nod to the fight against global warming. More

The 65 mpg Ford the U.S. Can't Have

If ever there was a car made for the times, this would seem to be it: a sporty subcompact that seats five, offers a navigation system, and gets a whopping 65 miles to the gallon. Oh yes, and the car is made by Ford Motor , known widely for lumbering gas hogs.

Ford's 2009 Fiesta ECOnetic goes on sale in November. But here's the catch: Despite the car's potential to transform Ford's image and help it compete with Toyota Motor and Honda Motor in its home market, the company will sell the little fuel sipper only in Europe. "We know it's an awesome vehicle," says Ford America President Mark Fields. "But there are business reasons why we can't sell it in the U.S." The main one: The Fiesta ECOnetic runs on diesel. More

Meet BigDog

BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog's legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight.

BigDog has an on-board computer that controls locomotion, servos the legs and handles a wide variety of sensors. BigDog’s control system manages the dynamics of its behavior to keep it balanced, steer, navigate, and regulate energetics as conditions vary. Sensors for locomotion include joint position, joint force, ground contact, ground load, a laser gyroscope, and a stereo vision system. Other sensors focus on the internal state of BigDog, monitoring the hydraulic pressure, oil temperature, engine temperature, rpm, battery charge and others. More

Study shows humans made fire 790,000 years ago

A new study conducted by Hebrew University shows that humans had the ability to make fire nearly 790,000 years ago, a skill that helped them migrate from Africa to Europe.

By analyzing flints at an archaeological site on the bank of the river Jordan researchers discovered that early civilizations had learned to light fires, a turning point that allowed them to venture into unknown lands.

A previous study of the site published in 2004 showed that man had been able to control fire - for example transferring it by means of burning branches - in that early time period. But researchers now say that ancient man could actually start fire, rather than relying on natural phenomena such as lightning. Advertisement That independence helped promoted migration northward, they say. More

Nearby star Epsilon Eridani has asteroid belts and planets

In the annals of planethood, astronomers consider the star Epsilon Eridani a member of the fabulous four. Along with Fomalhaut, Beta Pictoris and Vega, Epsilon Eridani is one of the first four stars scientists have found that has an icy ring of debris, an indication that the star has begun the process of forming planets.

Epsilon Eridani just got more fabulous: Researchers have discovered that the star, only 10.5 light-years from the sun, sports two inner asteroid belts in addition to the icy ring on the outskirts of the Epsilon Eridani system.

In both location and mass, Epsilon Eridani’s innermost asteroid belt is a virtual twin of the solar system’s asteroid belt. The second asteroid belt is farther out and about 20 times more massive than the solar system’s belt. This belt circles Epsilon Eridani at a distance roughly that at which Uranus orbits the sun. More

Wine Compound May Protect Against Radiation Exposure

The antioxidant resveratrol, found in many plants and in red wine, may help protect against radiation exposure, say University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers.

They gave acetyl-altered resveratrol to mice before exposure to radiation and found that the rodents' cells were protected from radiation-related damage. The team is conducting further studies to determine whether acetylated-resveratrol can help protect humans against radiation.

The findings were expected to be presented at the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology annual meeting, in Boston. The research, led by Dr. Joel Greenberger, chairman of the department of radiation oncology, is overseen by the university's Center for Medical Countermeasures Against Radiation.

The center's mandate is to identify and develop small molecules that can protect people against radiation in the event of a large-scale radiology or nuclear emergency. More

Robot powered by rat's brain in bizarre British experiment

It sounds like something out of a science fiction film, but British scientists have created a biological robot controlled by a blob of rat brain.

The wheeled machine is wirelessly linked to a bundle of neurons kept at body temperature in a sterile cabinet.

Signals from the 'brain' allow the robot to steer left or right to avoid objects in its path.

Researchers at the University of Reading are now trying to 'teach' the robot to become familiar with its surroundings. They hope the experiment will show how memories manifest themselves in nerve connections as the robot revisits territory it has been to before. More

Melting Glaciers Sculpted Mars Gullies

Some of the gullies that cut the sides of Martian craters were likely formed by meltwater from glaciers that existed a few million years ago, when Mars was wetter than it is now, a new study suggests.

The gully features are similar to ones seen in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, say the authors of the study, which is detailed in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. So this polar region of Earth can act as an analog for Mars' past.

The gullies, young features geologically speaking, were discovered in 2000 by NASA's orbiting Mars Global Surveyor, which is now out of commission. The discovery came as a surprise because scientists had thought that Mars was too dry in the past few million years to host liquid water at its surface, as it is today. More

GM engineer says rechargeable car is on schedule

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich.—Early versions of the Chevrolet Volt's battery packs are powerful enough to run the high-stakes rechargeable car, but dozens of issues remain before General Motors Corp. can start selling the revolutionary vehicle in 2010 as planned.

The Volt's chief engineer is on a tight schedule to figure out how the car will handle the batteries' weight, dissipate their heat and mechanically transfer their power to the wheels. That's not to mention the list of issues that have nothing to do with the fact that the car plugs in to the wall for recharging.

But the 47-year-old veteran GM engineer who was recruited from a GM post in Germany to run the high-profile project is driven by knowing the entire company's future could rest on it.

"At this point, there's nothing standing in our way of continuing to do what we said we're going to do," Andrew Farah, the Volt's chief engineer, said in a recent interview. More

Kindling new US energy resources

Anthony Mihalsky drives 100 miles each day, commuting from a suburb north of the Californian city of Los Angeles into the city centre each morning and back again at the end of the day. It is not an unusual distance in LA - this is a city built for cars.

Sure, the freeways are often congested, but, as far as I could see, the culture of the middle-classes and the affluent in LA is to shun any public transport on offer. But Anthony has made some important changes to his life in recent weeks.

With petrol prices hovering around four dollars per gallon, he decided to trade in his large four-wheel drive vehicle in exchange for a smaller sedan. More

Scientists Say We Can See Sound

Turning conventional neuroscience on its head, new research suggests the human visual system processes sound and helps us see.

Here's the basics of what was Neuroscience 101: The auditory system records sound, while the visual system focuses, well, on the visuals, and never do they meet. Instead, a "higher cognitive" producer, like the brain's superior colliculus, uses these separate inputs to create our cinematic experiences.

The textbook rewrite: The brain can, if it must, directly use sound to see and light to hear.

The study was published in the journal BMC Neuroscience. More

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