Newsdesk Archive

Why smoke marijuana? Users would probably reply that numbed-out bliss is its own reward. But if smoothing out the harsh edges of reality is your goal, what bruises are you attempting to avoid?Newly published research suggests that, at least for some, the answer is: The intense discomfort of social exclusion.

Australian scientists have found a way to print large but extremely lightweight and flexible solar panels like money.World-leading scientists at the CSIRO said the A3-sized panels, which are created by laying a liquid photovoltaic ink onto thin, flexible plastic could soon mean everyone has the ability to print their own solar panels at home.

Waiting hours for a cellphone to charge may become a thing of the past, thanks to an 18-year-old high-school student's invention. She won a $50,000 prize Friday at an international science fair for creating an energy storage device that can be fully juiced in 20 to 30 seconds.The fast-charging device is a so-called supercapacitor, a gizmo that can pack a lot of energy into a tiny space, charges quickly and holds its charge for a long time.What's more, it can last for 10,000 charge-recharge cycles, compared with 1,000 cycles for conventional rechargeable batteries, according to Eesha Khare of Saratoga, Calif.

The massive ball of iron sitting at the center of Earth is not quite as "rock-solid" as has been thought, say two Stanford mineral physicists. By conducting experiments that simulate the immense pressures deep in the planet's interior, the researchers determined that iron in Earth's inner core is only about 40 percent as strong as previous studies estimated.

A team of researchers from the SETI Institute, the Mars Institute, NASA Ames Research Center, and the space robotics company Honeybee Robotics, has successfully completed a first series of field tests aimed at investigating how humans will explore and work on Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and eventually the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos.

Monsanto is a $58 billion multinational Pesticide-'n-Frankenfood corporation that has moved on from selling Agent Orange to its new business of patenting actual seed genomes and then suing farmers who try to grow crops without paying the Monsanto corporation. Who could be opposed to such a thing. Only the elites, clearly.Nobody really knows what sort of social and environmental consequences might result from the widespread use of genetically engineered Monsanto seeds that are resistant to Monsanto pesticides. I mean, what kind of weirdo would question whether that system has a downside? Latte-swilling, Mark Bittman-worshipping elitists, according to Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant.

The H1N1 virus strain that caused a 2009 swine flu outbreak in humans was detected in northern elephant seals off the coast of central California.Scientists say this is the first time marine mammals have been found to carry the H1N1 flu strain, which originated in pigs. The seals seem to have picked up the virus while at sea, but it's unclear how this happened."We thought we might find influenza viruses, which have been found before in marine mammals, but we did not expect to find pandemic H1N1," Tracey Goldstein, an associate professor with the UC Davis One Health Institute and Wildlife Health Center, said in a statement.

France became the 14th country to legalise same-sex marriage Saturday after President Francois Hollande signed it into law following months of bitter political debate.Hollande acted a day after the Constitutional Council threw out a legal challenge by the right-wing opposition, which had been the last obstacle to passing the bill into law. The legislation also legalises gay adoption.

Eighty thousand years ago the Earth began to cool, marking the start of the last Ice Age. Experts are still discovering how the big freeze affected the giant mammals which prowled its dramatically changing landscape.Scientists are helping to uncover the secrets of giant Ice Age beasts like the sabretooth cat - by foraging in crates of dirt which were collected during the building of a car park.

As suicide rates climb steeply in the US a growing number of psychiatrists are arguing that suicidal behaviour should be considered as a disease in its own right, rather than as a behaviour resulting from a mood disorder.They base their argument on mounting evidence showing that the brains of people who have committed suicide have striking similarities, quite distinct from what is seen in the brains of people who have similar mood disorders but who died of natural causes.

Electric cars may still play second fiddle to gas-guzzlers here on Earth, but they've dominated the Martian driving scene for more than a decade.NASA's tiny Sojourner rover hit the red dirt in 1997, followed by the golf-cart-size twins Spirit and Opportunity in 2004. And last August, the 1-ton Curiosity rover dropped in to determine whether Mars could ever have supported microbial life.All three generations of six-wheeled NASA rovers have used electric power systems of various design and complexity to find their way around the Red Planet.

Earth-bound scientists are on track to get their hands on asteroid soil, straight from the source, in 2023. An asteroid-sampling mission, planned for launch in 2016, is moving into development, NASA and the University of Arizona announced yesterday.The mission, called the Origins-Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer or OSIRIS-REx, will land a spacecraft on the asteroid Bennu, scoop up at least two ounces of its dirt, and bring the sample back to Earth for testing.

A new study has shown that levels of key white blood cells, which are responsible for fighting off infections, become lower in men as they get older compared to women.The average life expectancy for men in the UK is 79 years old, while for women it is 82 years old. In some parts of the world, such as Japan, the gap is even larger, with women living on average nearly six years longer.

Troodon formosus, a small North American theropod dinosaur, incubated its eggs in a similar way to brooding birds, according to paleontologists at the University of Calgary and Montana State University.Using egg clutches found in Alberta and Montana, the researchers closely examined the shells of fossil Troodon eggs. In a paper published in the journal Paleobiology, they concluded that Troodon, which was known to lay its eggs almost vertically, would have only buried the egg bottoms in mud.

China wasn't known for its agriculture until domesticated rice was introduced. Yet now, archaeologists have made an intriguing find. They've discovered that people in subtropical China may have practiced agriculture 5,000 years ago--long before the arrival of rice in the region.

Abdu Ibrahim Mohammed was 15 years old when he began trekking with caravans of camels to collect salt in a sun-blasted desert basin of north Ethiopia that is one of the hottest places on earth.Now 51 and retired, he has passed his camels to his son to pursue this centuries-old trade in "white gold" from the Danakil Depression, where rain almost never falls and the average temperature is 94 degrees Fahrenheit (34.4 Celsius).

The peak period for baby-making sex in ancient Egypt was in July and August, when the weather was at its hottest.Researchers made this discovery at a cemetery in the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt whose burials date back around 1,800 years. The oasis is located about 450 miles (720 kilometers) southwest of Cairo. The people buried in the cemetery lived in the ancient town of Kellis, with a population of at least several thousand. These people lived at a time when the Roman Empire controlled Egypt, when Christianity was spreading but also when traditional Egyptian religious beliefs were still strong.

Historical artefacts can be used as a powerful tool to reinforce group identity and forge a nation-state, but their use can have adverse consequences such as the oppression of minorities.A diagram is used to summarise the complex identity relationships between states and nations. The power of historical artefacts derives from the duality of their nature; they are both a concrete proof of an historical fact and the basis for an abstract construction of meaning. Three case studies are used to provide examples of the use and abuse of archaeology.

A mysterious creature believed to be living in the woods of northern New Mexico has caught the attention of a team of biologists and researchers who believe they've discovered likely evidence of a genuine Bigfoot.Recently members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization visited the Jemez Mountains after thermal video taken by high school students captured what they believe could publicly prove the existence of the evasive ape-like creature.The students behind the video that shows an estimated 7-foot tall figure say they were doing a project in the woods in 2011 when they captured it walking along a ridge line.

The moon has a new hole on its surface thanks to a boulder that slammed into it in March, creating the biggest explosion scientists have seen on the moon since they started monitoring it.The meteorite crashed on March 17, slamming into the lunar surface at a mind-boggling 56,000 mph (90,000 kph) and creating a new crater 65 feet wide (20 meters). The crash sparked a bright flash of light that would have been visible to anyone looking at the moon at the time with the naked eye, NASA scientists say.

On May 31, 2013, asteroid 1998 QE2 will sail serenely past Earth, getting no closer than about 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers), or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon. And while QE2 is not of much interest to those astronomers and scientists on the lookout for hazardous asteroids, it is of interest to those who dabble in radar astronomy and have a 230-foot (70-meter) -- or larger -- radar telescope at their disposal.

IF YOU are hoping for parole, you better hope the judge has just eaten. A recent study of the behaviour of parole board judges revealed this interesting human trait. The law isn't supposed to put the rumbling of stomachs above fact and reason, but that's the problem when those charged with administering it are human.Computers may be able to help. Software tools are already important in the legal world, especially for big cases like company mergers, where algorithms help people comb through vast piles of documents.

Whether we're listening to Bach or the blues, our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us feel, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley. For instance, Mozart's jaunty Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major is most often associated with bright yellow and orange, whereas his dour Requiem in D minor is more likely to be linked to dark, bluish gray.

The helicopter appears as a speck on the horizon, moving slowly on a dead-straight path over the black volcanic island. Beneath it hangs a huge metal cone: an industrial-scale hopper that is sending a steady stream of blue pellets raining down on the scrubby landscape of Pinzón, one of the Galapagos Islands.Erin Hagen watches through her binoculars. She is standing on the deck of the Sierra Negra, one of three vessels moored just off the island on this morning in November 2012. When the helicopter reaches the rocky shoreline, it changes course, heads across the ocean and hovers just above the boat.

Smoking cannabis may prevent the development of diabetes, one of the most rapidly rising chronic disorders in the world.If the link is proved, it could lead to the development of treatments based on the active ingredient of cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), without its intoxicating effects.

Researchers have pinpointed a set of biological markers that could help diagnose PTSD--and, eventually, treat it.A molecular imaging study has pinpointed a set of biological markers that could help diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder more accurately, and might even lead to a pharmacological treatment in the future.

An experiment buried beneath the ice of the South Pole has for the first time seen the particles called neutrinos originating outside our Solar System.They are produced in our atmosphere and in the Universe's most violent processes, but the IceCube experiment has seen the first "cosmic neutrinos".It detected 28 of the exceptionally fast-moving neutrinos - but it remains unclear exactly where they came from.The pioneering finds could herald an entirely new branch of astronomy.

On April 27, NASA's Fermi and Swift satellites detected a strong signal from the brightest gamma-ray burst in decades. Because this was relatively close, it was thousands of times brighter than the typical gamma-ray bursts that are seen by Swift every few days. Scientists are now scrambling to learn more.We already knew that when the biggest stars run out of fuel, they don't fade quietly away. Instead, they explode in a blaze of glory known as a supernova. These stellar explosions are often bright enough to be seen by us even though they are in galaxies billions of light-years from our own Milky Way galaxy home.

Scientists searching for signs of life beyond our solar system should keep an open mind, for planets very different than Earth may well be habitable, a prominent researcher says.While it may seem natural to zero in on "alien Earths," such a narrow focus would exclude many potentially life-supporting exoplanets, whose diversity continues to astound astronomers, says Sara Seager of MIT.And researchers can't afford to be so picky, she adds, since they'll be able to get in-depth looks at just a handful of alien worlds for the foreseeable future.

From Ireland to the Balkans, Europeans are basically one big family, closely related to one another for the past thousand years, according to a new study of the DNA of people from across the continent.The study, co-authored by Graham Coop, a professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, will be published May 7 in the journal PLoS Biology.

India's tigers are facing extinction owing to a collapse in the variety of their mating partners, according to new research carried out by scientists at Cardiff University.India is a refuge for approximately 60% of the world's wild tigers, yet even here their numbers remain low and genetic diversity is declining rapidly making them increasingly vulnerable to extinction.

A $15m computer that uses "quantum physics" effects to boost its speed is to be installed at a Nasa facility.It will be shared by Google, Nasa, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers.Unlike standard machines, the D-Wave Two processor appears to make use of an effect called quantum tunnelling.

"Why are people so fascinated with @Cmdr_Hadfield?" the tweeter asked. "Can someone enlighten me?"The answers were swift and sharp and unsurprising. "Dude, he's a frigging astronaut!" one replied. "Um, he's an astronaut?" another offered. "What else do you need?" Someone else explained things with a little more detail: "He's inspiring a generation of kids (my kids!) to grow up to be scientists & astronauts and not the Kardashians.".

American astronauts could be forced to fly on Russian spacecraft beyond 2017 if Congress continues to cut funding for private crewed vehicles, NASA chief Charles Bolden says.On Tuesday (April 30), NASA announced that it will pay $70.7 million each for six more seats aboard Russian Soyuz space capsules. The $424 million deal keeps Americans launching to the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz through 2016, with return and rescue services extending until June 2017.

Astronomers are closer than ever to finding a true alien Earth, though the process may be slowed by budget cuts, scientists told members of Congress late last week.Officials from NASA, the National Science Foundation and the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute gave testimony to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee on Thursday about the state of exoplanet research, saying researchers were closing in on planets around other stars that are the same size and distance from their suns as Earth.

The central principle of quantum mechanics--that the act of measuring a quantum object actually changes it--has some pretty amazing potential in the world of cryptography. And Los Alamos National Laboratory just revealed that it has been using a new design of quantum cryptography setup for more than two years.

Human cloning has been used to produce early embryos, marking a "significant step" for medicine, say US scientists.The cloned embryos were used as a source of stem cells, which can make new heart muscle, bone, brain tissue or any other type of cell in the body.The study, published in the journal Cell, used methods like those that produced Dolly the sheep in the UK.However, researchers say other sources of stem cells may be easier, cheaper and less controversial.

Pope Celestine V was an elderly, possibly frail man. After living as a self-flagellating hermit in Italy, he served as pontiff for only five months before resigning at the end of the 13th century. Since his death, the so-called "Hermit Pope" has been the subject of much speculation and intrigue, with legend holding that the he was murdered by his successor, Boniface VIII.During examinations of Celestine's remains, a small, mysterious hole found on his skull led some to believe he died from trauma to the head. But a recent examination of the pope's skeleton suggests this murder theory might be false.

In the pitched debate over genetically modified (GM) foods and crops, it can be hard to see where scientific evidence ends and dogma and speculation begin. In the nearly 20 years since they were first commercialized, GM crop technologies have seen dramatic uptake. Advocates say that they have increased agricultural production by more than US$98 billion and saved an estimated 473 million kilograms of pesticides from being sprayed. But critics question their environmental, social and economic impacts.

Northwestern University scientists have struck gold in the laboratory. They have discovered an inexpensive and environmentally benign method that uses simple cornstarch -- instead of cyanide -- to isolate gold from raw materials in a selective manner.This green method extracts gold from crude sources and leaves behind other metals that are often found mixed together with the crude gold. The new process also can be used to extract gold from consumer electronic waste.

The best way to feed the 9 billion people expected to be alive by 2050 could be to rear billions of common houseflies on a diet of human faeces and abattoir blood and grind them up to use as animal feed, a UN report published on Monday suggests. Doing so would reduce the pressure on the Earth's forests and seas as food sources.The case for houseflies - or other insects like crickets, beetles, bees, wasps, caterpillars, grasshoppers, termites and ants - becoming a major industrial food source is being taken seriously by governments, says the report, because they grow exceptionally fast and thrive on the waste of many industrial processes.

Earth's global thaw has reached Mount Everest, the world's tallest peak, researchers said Tuesday at the Meeting of the Americas in Cancun, Mexico.Glaciers in the Mount Everest region have shrunk by 13 percent in the last 50 years and the snowline has shifted upward by 590 feet, Sudeep Thakuri, a graduate student at the University of Milan in Italy, said in a statement. Located in the Himalaya Mountains on the border between China and Nepal, Everest's summit is 29,029 feet above sea level.

Researchers have published their most advanced calculation for the likely impact of melting ice on global sea levels.The EU-funded team says the ice sheets and glaciers could add 36.8cm to the oceans by 2100.Adding in other factors, sea levels could rise by up to 69cm, higher than previous predictions.

New images of a possible lost city hidden by Honduran rain forests show what might be the building foundations and mounds of Ciudad Blanca, a never-confirmed legendary metropolis.Archaeologists and filmmakers Steven Elkins and Bill Benenson announced last year that they had discovered possible ruins in Honduras' Mosquitia region using lidar, or light detection and ranging. Essentially, slow-flying planes send constant laser pulses groundward as they pass over the rain forest, imaging the topography below the thick forest canopy.

Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world's oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany.A barrage of tests proves the marijuana possessed potent psychoactive properties and casts doubt on the theory that the ancients only grew the plant for hemp in order to make clothing, rope and other objects.They apparently were getting high too.

Vietnamese rubber firms bankrolled by an arm of the World Bank and Germany's Deutsche Bank are driving a land-grabbing crisis in Southeast Asia, activists said Monday.Indigenous ethnic minorities are bearing the brunt of the seizures, which have affected tens of thousands of villagers and led to the clearance of swathes of protected forests, according to campaign group Global Witness.

Bees are back in the news this spring, if not back in fields pollinating this summer's crops. The European Union (EU) has announced that it will ban, for two years, the use of neonicotinoids, the much-maligned pesticide group often fingered in honeybee declines. The U.S. hasn't followed suit, though this year a group of beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups sued the EPA for not doing enough to protect bees from the pesticide onslaught.

Deforestation in the Amazon region could significantly reduce the amount of electricity produced from hydropower, says a new study.Scientists say the rainforest is critical in generating the streams and rivers that ultimately turn turbines.If trees continue to be felled, the energy produced by one of the world's biggest dams could be cut by a third.The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Like small children, scientists are always asking the question 'why?'. One question they've yet to answer is why nature picked quantum physics, in all its weird glory, as a sensible way to behave. Researchers Corsin Pfister and Stephanie Wehner at the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore tackle this perennial question in a paper published today in Nature Communications.

Bacteria that live in the gut have been used to reverse obesity and Type-2 diabetes in animal studies.Research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that a broth containing a single species of bacteria could dramatically alter the health of obese mice.It is thought to change the gut lining and the way food is absorbed.

The US adolescents who signed up for the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) in the 1970s were the smartest of the smart, with mathematical and verbal-reasoning skills within the top 1% of the population. Now, researchers at BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) in Shenzhen, China, the largest gene-sequencing facility in the world, are searching for the quirks of DNA that may contribute to such gifts. Plunging into an area that is littered with failures and riven with controversy, the researchers are scouring the genomes of 1,600 of these high-fliers in an ambitious project to find the first common genetic variants associated with human intelligence.

A WORLD-RENOWNED archaeologist has warned that people should be concerned about the issue of resurrecting extinct species."We are, quite seriously, on the brink of being able to do this, so it's quite an important question for people to start grappling with," she told the Radio Times.Japanese scientists have already extracted the bone marrow from woolly mammoth remains found in Siberia to look at the DNA with a view to resurrecting a mammoth, she said.

Citizen scientists, environmentalists and anyone who lives near a power plant -- your services are requested. Climate change scientist Kevin Robert Gurney needs your help in a grand undertaking: the mapping of all the power plants in the world.It's a big job, and he and the people in his lab cannot do it alone.

The bond between dogs and humans is ancient and enduring. They snuggle up to us at night, gambol by our side during daily walks, and flop adoringly at our feet when we crash on our couches. But new research shows that the connection runs deeper than you might think. It is embedded in our genes.

When the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans discovered the 4,000-year-old Palace of Minos on Crete in 1900, he saw the vestiges of a long-lost civilization whose artefacts set it apart from later Bronze-Age Greeks. The Minoans, as Evans named them, were refugees from Northern Egypt who had been expelled by invaders from the South about 5,000 years ago, he claimed.

he Canadian astronaut who became a music sensation when his zero-gravity version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" went viral on the web returned to Earth along with two crewmates on Tuesday after a five-month stint on the International Space Station.Chris Hadfield landed safely in central Kazakhstan with his American and Russian colleagues. Their Soyuz space capsule descended under an orange parachute and raised clouds of dust as it ignited an engine to cushion its landing about 150 km (90 miles) southeast of the town of Zhezkazgan.

More than half of common plant species and a third of animals could see a serious decline in their habitat range because of climate change.New research suggests that biodiversity around the globe will be significantly impacted if temperatures rise more than 2C.But the scientists say that the losses can be reduced if rapid action is taken to curb greenhouse gases.The paper is published in the journal, Nature Climate Change.

Two months ago, the Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), a Bush-era law that allows the NSA to wiretap American citizens without a warrant. Now, the full scope of the US government's warrantless surveillance schemes is becoming known.

Are you stricken by back pain? If so you are not alone: one in five people are. But help is at hand. In addition to the usual recommendations to take painkillers and keep active is a brand new one: a course of antibiotics.Two research papers from the University of Southern Denmark, published in the European Spine Journal this week, suggest that chronic lower-back pain (defined as lasting more than three months) may be caused by bacterial infection.

Eleven of the 13 Neanderthals who lived in northern Spain's El Sidron cave were right-handed, indicating that these cousins of modern humans had a brain structure similar to that of Homo sapiens, a study published in Plos One magazine said.Researchers, among them members of Spain's CSIC research council, analyzed grooves in more than 60 Neanderthal dental pieces.Manual laterality "reflects specialized organization of the brain, so its evolutionary origin has been the subject of research for decades," project director Antonio Rosas said.

Around 2 million years ago, early human ancestors known as Oldowan hominin started to exhibit a number of adaptations that required greater daily energy expenditures, including an increase in brain and body size, heavier investment in their offspring and significant home-range expansion. Demonstrating how these early humans acquired the extra energy they needed to sustain these shifts has been the subject of much debate among scientists.

The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto Monday over an Indiana farmer accused of having pirated the genetically-modified crops developed by the agribusiness giant.The high court was unanimous in its decision, ruling that laws limiting patents do "not permit a farmer to reproduce patented seeds through planting and harvesting without the patent holder's permission.".

A new analysis has found a link between exposure to Agent Orange and lethal forms of prostate cancer among US Veterans. Published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the findings suggest that Agent Orange exposure history should be incorporated into prostate screening decisions for Veterans.

Tommy Chong, the veteran star of the dope-fuelled Cheech and Chong films, says he has beaten prostate cancer with a combination of cannabis use and a special diet.Chong, 74, was diagnosed with cancer in June last year following a three-year period in which he said he had been drug free.

A team of 70 scientists from the U.S., China, Australia and Japan today reports having sequenced and annotated the genome of the "sacred lotus," which is believed to have a powerful genetic system that repairs genetic defects, and may hold secrets about aging successfully. The scientists sequenced more than 86 percent of the nearly 27,000 genes of the plant, Nelumbo nucifera, which is revered in China and elsewhere as a symbol of spiritual purity and longevity.

Chickens likely raised with arsenic-based drugs result in chicken meat that has higher levels of inorganic arsenic, a known carcinogen, according to a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.Related: UK retailers relax rules on GM poultry feed

Flaming cauldrons of molten metal have long been the primary venues for steel production. But blast furnaces require a lot of coal, which means greenhouse gas pollution. In fact, worldwide, steelmaking is responsible for 5 percent of annual emissions.But scientists working on a way to harvest oxygen from the iron oxide in lunar soil for future moon bases realized that they happened on a better way to make steel here on Earth. The trick? Produce steel the way we make aluminum: use electricity rather than flame.

Extracting a rare dinosaur from a cliff in a working mine is no easy task, but Dr Donald Henderson explains why the effort has been worth itOn Monday, March 21, 2011 the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta received word that the remains of either a plesiosaur or an ichthyosaur had been discovered in the Milllennium Mine operated by the petroleum company Suncor Inc. This mine is located about 30 km north of the town of Fort McMurray (population ~50,000) in northeastern Alberta (about 800km north of Drumheller), and is one of the places where bitumen rich sand is mined and refined into various petroleum products.

A Jetstream aircraft became the first to fly "unmanned" across UK shared airspace last month.An on-board pilot handled the take-off, from Warton, near Preston in Lancashire, and landing, in Inverness.But during the 500-mile journey, the specially adapted plane was controlled by a pilot on the ground, instructed by the National Air Traffic Services.There were no passengers, but the 16-seater aircraft flew in airspace shared with passenger carriers.

Invisibility cloaks have been around in various forms since 2006, when the first cloak based on optical metamaterials was demonstrated. The design of cloaking devices has come a long way in the past seven years, as illustrated by a simple, yet highly effective, radar cloak developed by Duke University Professor Yaroslav Urzhumov, that can be made using a hobby-level 3D printer.As envisioned by Harry Potter and DARPA, invisibility cloaks are an important new direction for camouflage technology. In contrast to conventional stealth technology, which concentrates on reducing the detection signature (radar cross section, heat signatures, optical detection, etc.) of an object, invisibility cloaks work by making it seem as if radar and light flows around the cloaked object. When successfully accomplished, neither the cloaked object nor the cloak will be detected.

An anti-cocaine vaccine has been used successfully on non-human primates, bringing it one step closer to approval for use in human addiction therapy.The vaccine (dAd5GNE) combines elements of the common cold virus with the particle GNE, which mimics cocaine. The vaccine works by preventing the dopamine high associated with taking cocaine.

We all know that the Earth rotates beneath our feet, but new research from ANU has revealed that the center of the Earth is out of sync with the rest of the planet, frequently speeding up and slowing down.Associate Professor Hrvoje Tkalcic from the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and his team used earthquake doublets to measure the rotation speed of Earth's inner core over the last 50 years.

For the second time in just two weeks, the discovery of a lost city has been announced. This one is in the Kalahari Desert in Africa, now one of the most desolate places on Earth. It appears to be similar in many ways to the Nazca site in Peru, only much larger. The 'city' was found by a crowd-sourced research project using Google Maps, and has not yet been explored on the ground. Until that happens, the exact nature of the find cannot be determined.

The only way forward is back: to retrace our steps and seek to return atmospheric concentrations to around 350ppmThe data go back 800,000 years: that's the age of the oldest fossil air bubbles extracted from Dome C, an ice-bound summit in the high Antarctic. And throughout that time there has been nothing like this. At no point in the preindustrial record have concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air risen above 300 parts per million (ppm). 400ppm is a figure that belongs to a different era.

Scientists have studied two dead stars that give us a glimpse, they say, of what our Solar System might look like a few billion years from now.Our Sun will expand outwards when its nuclear fuel runs low and will ultimately blow off its outer layers.Some of the inner planets will be consumed in the process and asteroids will be thrown out of their orbits.A Cambridge-led team says it has seen evidence for this big upheaval in the atmospheres of the two burnt-out stars.

Two spacewalking astronauts may have fixed an ammonia leak outside the International Space Station today (May 11), perhaps bringing the outpost's vital cooling system back up to full strength.Clad in bulky spacesuits, NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn replaced a pump control box thought to be responsible for the leak of ammonia, which cools down the orbiting lab's systems. It looks like this fix did the trick, as no ammonia flakes were seen streaming into space when Mission Control turned on the newly installed gear.

An ancient astronomical alignment in southern Peru has been discovered by researchers between a pyramid, two stone lines and the setting sun during the winter solstice. During the solstice, hundreds of years ago, the three would have lined up to frame the pyramid in light.The two stone lines, called geoglyphs, are located about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) east-southeast from the pyramid. They run for about 1,640 feet (500 meters), and researchers say the lines were "positioned in such a way as to frame the pyramid as one descended down the valley from the highlands.".

The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.

Eye tracking technology received new attention recently due to its inclusion in the Samsung Galaxy IV phone, where it can (with mixed results, according to reviewers) let users scroll the screen with their eyes or dim the screen when they look away. Clearly this is a technology that has the potential for a lot of clever applications. But what are the privacy implications?

In an interview with ABC News/Yahoo! News last Friday, former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) said statements by U.S. Air Force nuclear missile launch officers--regarding mysterious aerial objects interfering with the functionality of American ICBMs--make clear that top government officials are lying to the public when they claim to have no knowledge of national security-related UFO incidents.Gravel first gained national recognition in 1971, by placing the still-classified Pentagon Papers--which documented U.S. government malfeasance during the Vietnam War--into the public record.

Scientists at the UnIversity of Edinburgh in the UK suggest that the heart-health benefits of sun exposure may outweigh the risk of developing skin cancer.In the landmark study, the researchers found that when sunlight touches our skin, a compound called nitric oxide that helps lower blood pressure, is released into our blood vessels.

Annular eclipse creates 'ring of fire' in Australia and south PacificThe moon glided between the Earth and sun, blocking everything but a dazzling ring of light, for the few skygazers lucky enough to see Friday's "ring of fire" eclipse in northern Australia and the south Pacific.The celestial spectacle is the second solar eclipse visible from northern Australia in six months. In November, a total solar eclipse plunged the country's north-east into darkness, delighting astronomers and tourists who flocked to the region from across the globe to witness it.

It makes a certain amount of logical sense: If you believe the end times are nigh, why would you support policies, like taxes, designed to prepare society for the future? Especially if they come at some small personal cost? That's precisely the attitude that many Americans possess, a team of political scientists have discovered, and it prevents them from joining other Americans in passing policies that involve planning ahead.

In 1987, Adrian Raine, who describes himself as a neurocriminologist, moved from Britain to the US. His emigration was prompted by two things. The first was a sense of banging his head against a wall. Raine, who grew up in Darlington and is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was a researcher of the biological basis for criminal behaviour, which, with its echoes of Nazi eugenics, was perhaps the most taboo of all academic disciplines.

GAINESVILLE, Florida (Reuters) - After a two-year battle with cancer, Joseph Fitzgerald was determined to leave his final resting place to Mother Nature.On a quiet February day in rural Florida, Fitzgerald's body was carried through the Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery on a bamboo stretcher made by family members.

Morocco on Friday officially launched the construction of a 160-megawatt solar power plant near the desert city of Ouarzazate, the first in a series of vast solar projects planned in the country.The largest of its kind in the world, according to Mustapha Bakkoury, the head of Morocco's solar energy agency MASEN, the thermo-solar plant will cost 7 billion dirhams (630 million euros) and is slated for completion in 2015, the official MAP news agency reported.

Eroded channels and chasms from catastrophic floods between martian basins are the strongest evidence yet that there were once large, deep bodies of water on early Mars, according to a new study using the latest imagery and topographic data.The outflow channels of Mars have been a puzzle ever since they were first spotted in images from the Viking spacecraft four decades ago. In that time every sort of mechanism has been called on to carve them -- among them winds, lava and carbon dioxide-powered debris flows. But none has settled the issue.

Pulling from 20 years of research since the first discoveries of planets beyond our solar system, scientists have concluded that Earth and its sibling worlds comprise what appears to be a relatively rare breed in a diverse cosmic zoo that includes a huge variety of planet sizes, orbits and parent stars.The most common systems contain one or more planets one to three times bigger than Earth, all orbiting much closer to their parent stars than Earth circles the sun, says astronomer Andrew Howard, with the University of Hawaii.

NASA and private sector experts now agree that a man or woman could be sent on a mission to Mars over the next 20 years, despite huge challenges.The biggest names in space exploration, among them top officials from the US space agency and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, will discuss the latest projects at a three-day conference starting Monday in the US capital.

Devious sci-fi aliens have hatched many plots to conquer humanity, from the Machiavellian Martians of "The War of the Worlds" books to the current hit movie "Oblivion." However, the invaders' ambitions frequently fail, perhaps because nature has already tried many of these assaults on us or other species.Here are eight ways the natural world has outdone the best laid plans of Martians.

A Russian billionaire has revealed controversial plans to upload his own brain and become immortal by 2045.32 year-old Dmitry Itskov believes technology will allow him to live forever in a hologram body.His '2045 initiative' is described as the next step in evolution, and over 20,000 people have signed up on Facebook to follow its progress, with global conferences planned to explore the technology needed.'We are in the process of creating focus groups of experts,' said Itskov.

Plague may have helped finish off the Roman Empire, researchers now reveal.Plague is a fatal disease so infamous that it has become synonymous with any dangerous, widespread contagion. It was linked to one of the first known examples of biological warfare, when Mongols catapulted plague victims into cities.

Scientists still don't know why hundreds of baby southern right whales are turning up dead around Patagonia, a decade after observers first saw signs of the worst die-off on record for the species, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).With no evidence of infectious diseases or deadly toxins in whale tissue samples, scientists are scrambling to determine a cause of death. Some are even pointing a finger at blubber-eating birds.

Plants can communicate the onset of an attack from aphids by making use of an underground network of fungi, researchers have found.Instances of plant communication through the air have been documented, in which chemicals emitted by a damaged plant can be picked up by a neighbour.But below ground, most land plants are connected by fungi called mycorrhizae.

Giant asteroids may have wiped out Mars's magnetic field. The energy released by massive collisions upset the heat flow in the planet's iron core that produced the magnetism, according to a new study. The finding offers a solution to the mystery of the disappearing magnetic field and sheds light on early Earth conditions.A planet's magnetic field results from a process called convection. Within the core, molten iron rises, cools, and sinks. The convection induces a magnetic field, in a system known as a dynamo.

A 105-year-old Texas woman has earned a place in almost all headlines by revealing the most unlikely secret to her long life.Strangely, her key to longevity is bacon. Yes, you read it right; 105-year-old Pearl Cantrell loves to eat bacon and feasts on it almost every day. Her story, for sure, will be a subject of research for most health scientists.Pearl Cantrell, who's mostly referred to as the '105-year-old bacon woman', said in an interview with a local NBC station, "I love bacon and I eat it everyday. I don't feel as old as I am, that's all I can say."

Light and sound waves can be passed around objects, making them invisible since there is no shadow behind the object, by means of special meta-materials. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology researchers, who previously developed the world's first three-dimensional invisibility cloak for visible light, now succeeded in demonstrating that these special materials can also be used to specifically influence the propagation of heat. A structured plate of copper and silicon was shown to conduct heat around a central area without the edge being affected."For the thermal invisibility cloak, both materials have to be arranged smartly," explains Robert Schittny from KIT, the first author of the study which was presented in the Physical Review Letters journal.

Researchers developed a portable way to produce ultracold atoms for quantum technology and quantum information processing, a scientific breakthrough that was published and featured on the front cover of Nature Nanotechnology.The new technique is crucial for the measurement of atomic quantum states in compact devices, which is needed for a variety of practical applications, including quantum computers (and the all-knowing 'tricorder' scanning device from Star Trek...). For example, many of the most accurate measurement devices, including the atomic clocks needed for GPS satellites, work by observing how atoms transfer between individual quantum states. The highest precision is obtained with long observation times, often using slow-moving ultracold atoms that need to be prepared in a large apparatus.

The Big Bang is somewhat of a mystery to scientists. They have long wondered why during this critical point in our Universe's history, more matter than antimatter was created. Now, they've discovered a clue that may eventually provide the answer to that question. Researchers have found the first direct evidence of pear-shaped nuclei in exotic atoms.The fact that the Big Bang created more matter than antimatter explains the origins of our very existence. Antimatter is essentially the opposite of matter; they are particles that have the same mass but opposite charge from their matter counterparts."If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created at the Big Bang, everything would have annihilated, and there would be no galaxies, stars plants or people,"...

Daily measurements of CO2 at the authoritative "Keeling lab" on Hawaii have topped 400 parts per million for the first time. The station, which sits atop the Mauna Loa volcano, has the longest continuous measure of the concentration of the gas, stretching back to 1958.The last time CO2 was regularly above 400ppm was about 3-5 million years ago - before modern humans existed. The climate back then was also considerably warmer than it is today, according to scientists.Carbon dioxide is regarded as the most important of the manmade greenhouse gases, a product principally of burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.