Newsdesk Archive

Imagine how much you could save on your electricity bill if you could use the excess heat your computer generates to actually power the machine.Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have taken an important step toward harnessing that heat and converting it for practical use. The advance could lead to more energy-efficient appliances and information processing devices.

With the recent excitement surrounding Dennis Tito's announcement of Inspiration Mars -- an ambitious plan to take advantage of the fortuitous close approach and send a couple on a flyby of Mars to leave Earth in 2018 -- it's easy become myopic and consider the planets of our solar system as the next logical step in our collective exploration of, and expansion into, space.With that said, it's incredibly important to recognize that the planets are, from a technological and engineering standpoint, extremely challenging objects to both visit and ultimately return from due to their comparatively large gravitational fields.

Underwater images have helped produce what has been called "the most accurate map to date" of "Britain's Atlantis".Prof David Sear, of the University of Southampton, led the project off the Suffolk coast at Dunwich, which hundreds of years ago was a busy port.He said using acoustic imaging in the "murky waters" had resulted in maps of where buildings fell after being lost to coastal erosion."It's enabled us to see things for the first time, very clearly," he said.

For lovers of the paranormal who've grown weary of waiting for the Loch Ness monster to reappear, here's a new "monster" to feast your eyes upon.Three college students were filming a short movie as a class project at Lough Foyle, a large tidal estuary in County Donegal, Ireland, when something very odd moved through the water in front of them, UPI reports.

The moon generated a surprisingly intense magnetic field until at least 3.56 billion years ago, 160 million years longer than previously thought, a new study reports.These findings could shed light not just on the magnetic field of the moon, which is now extremely weak, but on that of asteroids and other distant worlds, investigators added.

Researchers have solved the riddle of how one of Africa's greatest civilisations survived a catastrophic drought which wiped out other famous dynasties. Geomorphologists and dating specialists from The Universities of Aberystwyth, Manchester, and Adelaide say that it was the River Nile which made life viable for the renowned Kerma kingdom, in what is now northern Sudan.Kerma was the first Bronze Age kingdom in Africa outside Egypt.

Starting in the 1980s, Alaska's Columbia Glacier began retreating, shrinking from 41 miles long (its originally documented length in 1794) to 36 miles long in 1995. This is what that change actually looks like from space.The images are part of the Timelapse project from Google and TIME, what Google calls "the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public." It comes from a collection of images taken between 1984 and 2012 as part of the Landsat program, a joint satellite mission between NASA and U.S. Geological Survey that has been snapping pics of Earth's surface since the early '70s.

More than a year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, crude oil continued to sicken Gulf Coast fish, according to a new study. Gulf killifish, which are considered sentinel species that can indicate broader environmental problems, suffered heart defects, delayed hatching and other problems.

Measurements of the chemical composition of Moon rocks suggest that Earth was born with its water already present, rather than having the precious liquid delivered several hundred million years later by comets or asteroids. And in finding a common origin for the water on Earth and the Moon, the results highlight a puzzle over the leading theory for the formation of Earth's satellite.

Plants might be able to eavesdrop on their neighbors and use the sounds they "hear" to guide their own growth, according to a new study that suggests plants use acoustic signaling to communicate with one another."We have shown that plants can recognize when a good neighbor is growing next to them," said study co-author Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Western Australia.

Almost a decade after manufacturers stopped using certain chemical flame retardants in furniture foam and carpet padding, many of the compounds still lurk in homes. New work to be presented today reaffirms that the chemicals may also still be hurting young children who were exposed before they were born.Researchers investigating the health impacts of prenatal exposure to flame retardants collected blood samples from 309 pregnant women early in their second trimester. Spikes in the levels of one class of flame retardant, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) correlated with behavior and cognition difficulties during early childhood.

Researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have spent many years studying the remains of a Stone Age community in Karleby outside the town of Falköping, Sweden. The researchers have for example tried to identify parts of the inhabitants' diet. Right now they are looking for evidence that fertilisers were used already during the Scandinavian Stone Age, and the results of their first analyses may be exactly what they are looking for.Using remains of grains and other plants and some highly advanced analysis techniques, the two researchers and archaeologists Tony Axelsson and Karl-Göran Sjögren have been able to identify parts of the diet of their Stone Age ancestors.

Many scientists have thought that dinosaur predecessors missed the race to fill habitats emptied when nine out of 10 species disappeared during the Earth's largest mass extinction, approximately 252 million years ago. The thinking was based on fossil records from sites in South Africa and southwest Russia. It turns out that scientists may have been looking for the starting line in the wrong places.

Researchers have announced fossils dating back to about 10 million years after the mass extinction of the dinosaurs suggest a line of animals considered the biological predecessors of the dinosaurs lived in what are now the African countries of Tanzania and Zambia many millions of years before and after the great die-off.The research is included in a paper appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In Manshiet Dahshur, 25 miles south of Cairo, the villagers recently extended the boundaries of the cemetery. For Ahmed Rageb, a carpenter who buried his cousin in the annexe, it was a logical decision. "We want to bury the dead," he said, strolling through the new cemetery after visiting his cousin's tomb. "The old cemetery is full. And there is no other place to bury my family.".

It is a city shrouded in myth, swallowed by the Mediterranean Sea and buried in sand and mud for more than 1,200 years. But now archeologists are unearthing the mysteries of Heracleion, uncovering amazingly well-preserved artifacts that tell the story of a vibrant classical-era port.

The rotting carcass of a mysterious-looking 'sea monster' has been found washed ashore on a New Zealand beach. A YouTube video filmed by Elizabeth Ann on Pukehina Beach shows the half-buried head of the carcass with jagged teeth and gaping jaws.Most of the rest of the creature's body is missing.The strange 30-foot long carcass washed up off the coast of the Bay of Plenty coast in New Zealand after storms in last month.The coastline is about 120-miles south east from the city of Auckland.

Up to 40% of patients with chronic back pain could be cured with a course of antibiotics rather than surgery, in a medical breakthrough that one spinal surgeon says is worthy of a Nobel prize.Surgeons in the UK and elsewhere are reviewing how they treat patients with chronic back pain after scientists discovered that many of the worst cases were due to bacterial infections.

Replacing missing teeth with new bioengineered teeth, grown from stem cells generated from a person's own gum cells, is a new method that will be vastly superior to the currently used implant technology.New research, published in the Journal of Dental Research and led by Professor Paul Sharpe, an expert in craniofacial development and stem cell biology at King's College London's Dental Institute, describes advances in the development of this method by sourcing the required cells from a patient's own gum.

Conservationists warned Monday that Hong Kong may lose its rare Chinese white dolphins, also known as pink dolphins for their unique colour, unless it takes urgent action against pollution and other threats.Their numbers in Hong Kong waters have fallen from an estimated 158 in 2003 to just 78 in 2011, with a further decline expected when figures for 2012 are released next month, said the Hong Kong Dolphin Conservation Society.

In the 1970s, a population of Arctic foxes on an island in the Bering Sea began to mysteriously decline. The animals were thin and mangy, and nearly all the cubs died. Today, only about 100 foxes remain.The animals were not felled by an infectious disease, a PLOS ONE study suggests. Instead, the foxes probably suffered from high mercury exposure as a result of eating seabirds and other marine animals.

Are you prepared to meet your robot overlords?The idea of superintelligent machines may sound like the plot of "The Terminator" or "The Matrix," but many experts say the idea isn't far-fetched. Some even think the singularity -- the point at which artificial intelligence can match, and then overtake, human smarts -- might happen in just 16 years.But nearly every computer scientist will have a different prediction for when and how the singularity will happen.

Imagine if your shirt could track your heart rate as you run, or if it could charge your cellphone on the go. Innovative fashion designers and engineers, who are pushing the envelope with "smart textiles," dream of designing garments that are not just embedded with devices, but actually are the devices. Welcome to the world of wearable computing.The development of smart textiles is a true fusion of fashion and technology. From manipulating nanoparticles in cotton, to incorporating knit antennas and transistors into garments, the computational fashion industry is reimagining how we use clothing in our everyday lives.

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.

All lightning on Earth may have its roots in space, new research suggests.Lightning flashes on Earth about 100 times per second, but what triggers lightning in thunderstorms remains mostly unknown. Especially odd is the fact that decades of analysis suggest electrical fields within thunderclouds have only a tenth or so of the strength needed to spark a lightning bolt.

Setting foot on Mars by the 2030s is human destiny and a US priority, and every dollar available must be spent on bridging gaps in knowledge on how to get there, NASA's chief said Monday.Addressing a conference of space experts at George Washington University, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that despite hard economic times the United States is committed to breaking new boundaries in space exploration.

Huge numbers of people on Earth are keen to leave the planet forever and seek a new life homesteading on Mars.About 78,000 people have applied to become Red Planet colonists with the nonprofit organization Mars One since its application process opened on April 22, officials announced Tuesday. Mars One aims to land four people on the Red Planet in 2023 as the vanguard of a permanent colony, with more astronauts arriving every two years thereafter.

The mysterious Martian mountain that beckons NASA's Curiosity rover was likely built primarily by wind rather than water, as previously believed, a new study suggests.Many scientists suspect that the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) Mount Sharp formed primarily from layers of lakebed silt, which is one of the main reasons that the mountain was selected as Curiosity's ultimate destination. But the new study holds that wind probably did most of the heavy lifting.

We may be routinely orbiting, roving, drilling and lasing Mars, searching for elusive traces of life and reconnoitering sites for future human missions, but that doesn't mean studies of the red planet don't throw up surprises. On the contrary.Take this March 21, 2013 observation by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of the southern edge of Acidalia Planitia, a plain located in the planet's northern hemisphere.

Ball lightning? Spectral orbs? Swamp gas? Early this morning, May 7, these eerie glowing trails were seen in the sky above the Marshall Islands and were captured on camera by NASA photographer John Grant. Of course, if NASA's involved there has to be a reasonable explanation, right?Although it might look like cheesy special effects, these colorful clouds are actually visible trails that were left by two sounding rockets launched from Roi Namur in the Marshall Islands, at 3:39 a.m. EDT on May 7. The rockets were part of the NASA-funded EVEX experiment to study winds and electrical activity in the upper atmosphere.

For centuries, Mexico's ancient city of Teotihuacan has concealed a mysterious secret, only recently revealed by the help of robots equipped with lasers and infrared cameras.The small, remote-controlled devices have explored several rooms beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, a structure described by Discovery as a "six-level pyramid decorated with snake-like creatures." The probes revealed hundreds of mysterious yellow orbs that range from four to 12 centimeters across. Indiana Jones would most certainly approve.

A satellite that can "weigh" the Earth's forests has just been given the go ahead by the European Space Agency.Biomass, as it will be known, is expected to launch in 2020.The spacecraft will carry a novel radar system that is able to sense the trunks and big branches of trees from orbit.

The proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is set to break 400 parts per million this month, levels not seen in 3 million years, according to one of the best climate records available.The Keeling Curve, a daily record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, has been running continuously since March 1958, when a carbon dioxide monitor was installed at Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. On its first day, the observatory measured a carbon dioxide concentration of 313 parts per million (ppm). That number means there were 313 molecules of carbon dioxide in the air for every 1 million air molecules.

New research from the University of Reading shows that Ice Age people living in Europe 15,000 years ago might have used forms of some common words including I, you, we, man and bark, that in some cases could still be recognized today.Using statistical models, Professor of Evolutionary Biology Mark Pagel and his team predicted that certain words would have changed so slowly over long periods of time as to retain traces of their ancestry for up to ten thousand or more years. These words point to the existence of a linguistic super-family tree that unites seven major language families of Eurasia (seven language families: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Dravidian, Chuckchee-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut).

Having a neighborly chat improves seed germination, finds research in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Ecology. Even when other known means of communication, such as contact, chemical and light-mediated signals, are blocked, chilli seeds grow better when grown with basil plants. This suggests that plants are talking via nanomechanical vibrations.Monica Gagliano and Michael Renton from the University of Western Australia attempted to grow chilli seeds (Capsicum annuum) in the presence or absence of other chilli plants, or basil (Ocimum basilicum). In the absence of a neighboring plant, germination rates were very low, but when the plants were able to openly communicate with the seeds more seedlings grew.

The team that discovered the remains of Richard III under a Leicester car park has made another find.A 1,700-year-old Roman cemetery has been identified beneath another car park in the city.Archaeologists from the University of Leicester believe the remains date back to 300AD.Researchers found 13 sets of remains of mixed age and sex as well as hairpins, belt buckles and other personal items at the site on Oxford Street.

As readers may know, I've been away in Canada for the last few weeks, and coupled with a rush at work, the Lost Worlds had rather ground to a halt. However, my trip to Alberta has been incredibly productive, so there's lots of things to come once I've cleared the inevitable work backlog that appears whenever one goes away. I want to start with a paper of mine that came out while I was away as this is the latest in a series of ongoing exchanges in the scientific literature on the origins and functions of the bewildering variety of crests and horns that appear on the heads and bodies so many dinosaur lineages (including some birds, but mostly the non-avian crowd).

It seems there is trouble in paradise for a rare monogamous species of monkey, after a University of Derby biologist found committed couples are targeted by aggressive singles determined to break up a happy home.For her study published in the journal PLoS ONE earlier this month (April 2013), Lecturer in Biology Maren Huck, spent almost 15 months in the sub-tropical gallery forest of Northern Argentina observing owl monkeys. The pairs of the species are, unusually for primates, monogamous.

It happened many years ago in my role as an editor at the international scientific journal, Nature, but the experience was so traumatic that I remember it as if it were yesterday. An outraged, elderly professor pinned me against a wall and harangued me for having rejected his paper on why human beings got up on their hind legs and walked. Human beings became bipeds, yelled the prof, to free their hands so that mothers could cuddle infants close to their chests. How could I have had the temerity, screamed the empurpled sage, to have rejected a paper that made so much sense?.

Most species of gigantic animals that once roamed Australia had disappeared by the time people arrived, a major review of the available evidence has concluded.The research challenges the claim that humans were primarily responsible for the demise of the megafauna in a proposed "extinction window" between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, and points the finger instead at climate change.

The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

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 U.S. 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 U.S. capital.

Alien? Subhuman primate? Deformed child? Mummified fetus? The Internet is buzzing over the nature of "Ata," a bizarre 6-inch-long skeleton featured in a new documentary on UFOs. A Stanford University scientist who boldly entered the fray has now put to rest doubts about what species Ata belongs to. But the mystery is not over.

Colossal numbers of cicadas, unhurriedly growing underground since 1996, are about to emerge along much of the U.S. East Coast to begin passionately singing and mating as their remarkable life cycle restarts.This year heralds the springtime emergence of billions of so-called 17-year periodical cicadas, with their distinctive black bodies, buggy red eyes, and orange-veined wings, along a roughly 900-mile stretch from northern Georgia to upstate New York.

How powerful was February's meteor that crashed into Russia? Strong enough that its explosive entry into our atmosphere was detected almost 6,000 miles away in Lilburn, Ga., by infrasound sensors -- a full 10 hours after the meteor's explosion. A Georgia Tech researcher has modified the signals and made them audible, allowing audiences to "hear" what the meteor's waves sounded like as they moved around the globe on February 15.

What will it take to get humans to Mars? That's the question on tap for hundreds of scientists, entrepreneurs, astronauts and government officials descending on Washington, D.C. this week for a summit on manned travel to the Red Planet.Speakers at the second annual "Humans 2 Mars Summit," running May 6-8 at George Washington University, include NASA chief Charles Bolden, Apollo moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, and space tourist Dennis Tito, who recently announced his own plan to send a married couple on a round-trip Mars flyby mission in 2015.See Liveblog here.

Scientists expressed alarm on Monday over the rapid acidification of the Arctic Ocean caused by carbon dioxide emissions, which could have dire consequences on the region's fragile ecosystem.Acidity levels in the planet's oceans have risen by 30 percent since the start of the industrial era, and are now at their highest levels in at least 55 million years, delegates said at a conference in Bergen, Norway dedicated to the subject.

The world's first gun made with 3D printer technology has been successfully fired in the US.The controversial group which created the firearm, Defense Distributed, plans to make the blueprints available online.The group has spent a year trying to create the firearm, which was successfully tested on Saturday at a firing range south of Austin, Texas.Anti-gun campaigners have criticised the project.

Ancient toothaches, smells, franken-mummies, and more!Scientific studies do a pretty good job of answering questions about how the world works. But often, researchers are pursuing things we never thought of as worth pursuing. Here we salute those tireless journeymen that have looked into the depths of our history and found the answers to things we never knew we were wondering.

Take a swab of saliva from your mouth and within minutes your DNA could be ready for analysis and genome sequencing with the help of a new device.University of Washington engineers and NanoFacture, a Bellevue, Wash., company, have created a device that can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods.The device will give hospitals and research labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations.

An international team of researchers, led by scientists at Boston University's Department of Earth and Environment, has found evidence that material contained in young oceanic lava flows originated at the Earth's surface in the Archean (>2.45 billions years ago). The new finding helps constrain the timing of the initiation of plate tectonics, the origin of some of the chemical heterogeneity in the Earth's mantle, and may shed light on how the chaotically convecting mantle could preserve such material for so long.

Seven years ago, Duke University engineers demonstrated the first working invisibility cloak in complex laboratory experiments. Now it appears creating a simple cloak has become a lot simpler."I would argue that essentially anyone who can spend a couple thousand dollars on a non-industry grade 3-D printer can literally make a plastic cloak overnight," said Yaroslav Urzhumov, assistant research professor in electrical and computer engineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering.

Scientists found people who are going grey build up hydrogen peroxide in the hair follicle, which causes hair to bleach itself from the inside out.However this could be reversed by "an antioxidant" cocktail that allows "re-pigmentation" of the hair.The discovery of what makes hair grey, published in the FASEB (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) journal, was actually made whilst investigating the skin disease vitiligo.

Representative Robert F. Hagan (D-Youngstown) has introduced a measure that would put marijuana legalization on the ballot before state voters. House Joint Resolution 6 would place a question on the Ohio ballot asking voters to approve allowing people 21 or older to purchase and use marijuana. Under this proposal marijuana would be sold only by state-licensed establishments and would be subject to a 15 percent excise tax.

An extreme pair of superdense stars orbiting each other has put Einstein's general theory of relativity to its toughest test yet, and the crazy-haired physicist still comes out on top.About 7,000 light-years from Earth, an exceptionally massive neutron star that spins around 25 times a second is orbited by a compact, white dwarf star. The gravity of this system is so intense that it offers an unprecedented testing ground for theories of gravity.

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.

Australia was first settled by between 1,000 and 3,000 humans around 50,000 years ago, but the population crashed during the Ice Age before recovering to a peak of some 1.2 million people around five centuries ago, a study said on Wednesday.Estimating the early population of Australia is a source of debate in anthropology, partly because it touches on how European colonisation affected the country's indigenous people.

WASHINGTON -- A NASA-led modeling study provides new evidence that global warming may increase the risk for extreme rainfall and drought.The study shows for the first time how rising carbon dioxide concentrations could affect the entire range of rainfall types on Earth.Analysis of computer simulations from 14 climate models indicates wet regions of the world, such as the equatorial Pacific Ocean and Asian monsoon regions, will see increases in heavy precipitation because of warming resulting from projected increases in carbon dioxide levels. Arid land areas outside the tropics and many regions with moderate rainfall could become drier.

Tropical cyclones of the future may have the Hawaiian islands in their cross hairs, according to a new study of how climate change will alter eastern Pacific Ocean storms near the end of the 21st century.In the middle of Earth's largest ocean and already in a warm clime, Hawaii seems like the last place to to worry about global warming. But as the air warms, the oceans are absorbing even more heat and that plays out in climate models that Hiroyuki Murakami, of the University of Hawaii, and his colleagues ran to see if they could tease out Hawaii's probably future.

Wanna help grandma keep her mind sharp? Consider throwing out her crossword puzzles and giving her a joystick. Because a study finds that elderly people who played a video game for at least 10 hours gained three years of protection from cognitive decline. Gamers also became quicker at processing information. The research is in the journal PLoS ONE.

Scientists have discovered the fossilized skeleton of a baby dinosaur representing a new species of coelurosaur, a group of theropods that includes ancient beasts like T. rex.With a skull that's barely taller than the diameter of a quarter, the remains are thought to have belonged to a dinosaur that was less than a year old when it died, and researchers think it measured just 3 feet (1 meter) long and weighed only 3 lbs. (1.3 kilogram).

For lovers of the paranormal who've grown weary of waiting for the Loch Ness monster to reappear, here's a new "monster" to feast your eyes upon.Three college students were filming a short movie as a class project at Lough Foyle, a large tidal estuary in County Donegal, Ireland, when something very odd moved through the water in front of them, UPI reports."Looks like we have our own Loch Ness monster!".

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Honey bees, which play a key role in pollinating a wide variety of food crops, are in sharp decline in the United States, due to parasites, disease and pesticides, said a federal report released on Thursday.Genetics and poor nutrition are also hurting the species, which help farmers produce crops worth some $20 billion to $30 billion a year.

The flight from San Fransisco to Phoenix took 18 hours and 18 minutes on Saturday - and didn't use a drop of fuel.A solar-powered airplane that developers hope eventually to pilot around the world landed safely in Phoenix on the first leg of an attempt to fly across the United States using only the sun's energy, project organizers said.

According to a new research by archaeologists from the University of Gothenburg, inhabitants of a small Neolithic farming village located in modern-day Sweden may have used fertilizers 5,000 years ago.Gothenburg archaeologists have spent many years studying the remains of a Stone Age settlement in Karleby outside the town of Falkoping.

More than three thousand years ago, in northeastern Louisiana, Native Americans built an enormous earthwork complex that is unique in all the world (Figure 1). At a minimum, the complex covers 162 hectares (400 acres) (Gibson 2001:4) and includes the second largest mound north of Mexico (Kidder 2011: 97). The earthwork builders built this complex using sophisticated geometric shapes. Moreover, they aligned these shapes to celestial events. The earthwork complex is known as Poverty Point.

Researchers are working on a true anti-graying cream that could make people produce their own youthful colors again. So far, it's worked in just a few people who have lost pigment in their hair and skin not from age, but from a condition called vitiligo. Because the cause of vitiligo pigment loss is the same as one possible cause of graying in old age, however, the prototype cream might be a step toward a real anti-graying cream. (But what would we do without those Just For Men commercials?)

Superheated plasma bursted from the sun's edge on May 1 in a gigantic rolling wave, said NASA, which published a dazzling video captured by its sun-watching spacecraft.This solar eruption is known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME, a kind of solar storm on the sun's outer atmosphere that can send electrically charged particles into space. When a CME explodes in our direction, it usually takes three days to arrive. CMEs can occur simultaneously with solar flares, another kind of sun storm involved in releasing energy associated with sunspots.

Males don't stand a chance in a warmer world, if they happen to be painted turtles. A temperature rise of around 1 °C is all it would take for the species to become 100 per cent female and earmarked for extinction.Painted turtles (Chrysemys picta), found in lakes and streams across North America, are one of many reptile species whose sex is determined by temperature. Eggs in warm nests are likely to hatch as females, while males hatch in cooler nests, although no one is sure why.

The Obama administration has agreed by July 1 to map out areas to protect nesting beaches for endangered loggerhead sea turtles as part of a legal settlement with conservation groups.The U.S. Department of Commerce agreed to the deadline for a preliminary proposal on the critical habitat of loggerheads in the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific oceans and in the Gulf of Mexico, under an agreement filed on Thursday in U.S. District Court in California.

A record number of endangered manatees are dying in Florida's algae-choked waterways. So far this year, 582 manatees have died, more year-to-date than any year on record, according to preliminary numbers from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC).A total of 247 of these have died in the southwest of the state due to an explosion of a red-hued algae called Karenia brevis, also known as a red tide.

Senior US government officials are to be briefed at the White House this week on the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years.The meeting is bringing together Nasa's acting chief scientist, Gale Allen, the director of the US National Science Foundation, Cora Marett, as well as representatives from the US Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.This is the latest indication that US officials are increasingly concerned about the international and domestic security implications of climate change.

Scientists have found a way to use thin slices of graphene to convert solar energy to direct current electricity. The discovery could lead to a whole array of new applications, including a whole new method of creating a sustainable energy source to power buildings of the future.

The UK Space Agency has announced that British scientists are now working with Nasa to develop the spacecraft, known as Sunjammer, which will use a 13,000 square foot solar sail to propel itself nearly two million miles towards the sun.The sail will then help control the spacecraft in a steady position in orbit around the sun where it will act as a kind of forward observatory of the star at the centre of our solar system.

The Earth's atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) is about to rise to 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in five million years, a scientist at The University of Queensland warned today.UQ Global Change Institute Director Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said the record 400ppm level of atmospheric carbon was expected this week, according to readings at the US Government's Earth Systems Research Laboratory in Hawaii.

When a massive star exhausts its fuel, it collapses under its own gravity and produces a black hole, an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravitational grip. According to a new analysis by an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), just before the black hole forms, the dying star may generate a distinct burst of light that will allow astronomers to witness the birth of a new black hole for the first time.

In the wake of the marijuana legalization victories in Colorado and Washington last November, and buoyed by a series of national public opinion polls showing support for pot legalization going over the tipping point, marijuana reform legislation is being introduced at state houses across the land at levels never seen before.While the mere fact that a bill has been introduced is no guarantee it's going to pass, that such bills are being introduced in record numbers speaks to how far the marijuana reform movement has come.

The London Psychiatry Centre has adapted a technology known as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, which focuses magnetic beams into the brain, to treat depression.These pulses increase the activity of neurons in the brain and change a patient's mood.

A Swiss-made, solar-powered airplane called Solar Impulse completed an 18-hour flight from San Francisco to Phoenix on Saturday, marking the first leg of a fuel-free odyssey across America.Adventurer Bertrand Piccard piloted the craft, which has the wingspan of a jumbo jet but the weight of a typical passenger car, to its landing at Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport at 12:30 a.m. MST (3:30 a.m. EDT).

A passenger aircraft had a narrow miss with an unidentified object over Glasgow, a report has revealed.The Airbus A320 was making its final approach to Glasgow Airport on 2 December when an object passed about 300ft underneath it.The pilot of the aircraft said the risk of collision with the object, which did not show up on radar, had been "high".A report by the UK Airprox Board said investigators were unable to establish what the object had been.

Hidden beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England, archaeologists have discovered a 1,700-year-old Roman cemetery that seemed to show no religious bias.The new discovery, found at the junction of Newarke and Oxford Streets, includes numerous burials and skeletal remains from 13 individuals, both male and female of various ages. The cemetery is estimated to date back to around A.D. 300, according to University of Leicester archaeologists who led the dig.

The oldest known hip from a great ape is now shedding light on the evolution of hominids, revealing the ancient creature may have adopted the upright posture often linked with humans and living great apes, researchers say.Scientists discovered the fossil skeleton of an ape near Barcelona in Catalonia in northeastern Spain in 2002, when a bulldozer was clearing the land for digging. They named it Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, or the ape from near the village of Els Hostalets de Pierola in Catalonia.

The solar system that humans call home may be a strange oddity when compared with the incredible diversity of planetary systems researchers are discovering in the Milky Way, astronomers say.Scientists now estimate the Milky Way galaxy contains at least as many planets as it does stars. So far, researchers have detected nearly 900 of these so-called exoplanets already, and several thousand more candidates are under investigation.

Forty years of research and development by Lockheed Martin into harnessing energy from steep differentials in ocean temperatures will see its first commercial deployment in China. There, a resort developer has partnered with the U.S. defense and aerospace giant to build a 10-megawatt power plant using ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) technology.

The United States has failed to take action to mitigate climate change thanks in part to the large number of religious Americans who believe the world has a set expiration date.Research by David C. Barker of the University of Pittsburgh and David H. Bearce of the University of Colorado uncovered that belief in the biblical end-times was a motivating factor behind resistance to curbing climate change.

How quickly are glaciers in Antarctica melting? Researchers are launching javelin-shaped devices out of airplanes to help answer that question and find out what's going on in some of the frozen continent's most inaccessible places.So far, scientists have deployed about 25 of these GPS-equipped javelins in Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier, and another four on the Antarctic Peninsula, said Hilmar Gudmundsson, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). The javelins will automatically record and relay their positions for two to three years, allowing researchers to figure out how quickly the glacier is flowing into the ocean. Preliminary measurements show that the Pine Island Glacier's march to the sea is speeding up, Gudmundsson told OurAmazingPlanet.

Scientists from the Smithsonian and the University of Rhode Island have found unsuspected linkages between the oxidation state of iron in volcanic rocks and variations in the chemistry of the deep Earth. Not only do the trends run counter to predictions from recent decades of study, they belie a role for carbon circulating in the deep Earth. The team's research was published May 2 in Science Express.

At this early stage in the search for extraterrestrial life in our solar system and beyond, the emphasis is on liquid water. Where it can exist on a planet's or moon's surface, so the thinking goes, life as we know it has a chance. Much of the observational and theoretical work in astrobiology therefore concerns the "habitable zone," the orbital band around stars where a rocky world's water neither freezes away nor boils off.In a new contribution to this effort, a recent study has looked at a little-explored influencer on the ability of water to remain liquid on a world's surface: atmospheric pressure.

Nasa is looking for haikus in the form of a 'message for Mars' that will accompany their Maven mission in NovemberI have not entered a literary contest since I was 11, when I was utterly convinced my poem was going to win (it didn't). But I think I'm going to have to brush up by poetry skills after learning that Nasa is looking for haikus in the form of a "message to Mars", and will take the three best, on a DVD, on board its Maven spaceship, due to begin a mission in November to study the upper Martian atmosphere.

A University of Iowa undergraduate student has discovered that a process occurring in Saturn's magnetosphere is linked to the planet's seasons and changes with them, a finding that helps clarify the length of a Saturn day and could alter our understanding of Earth's magnetosphere.Saturn's magnetosphere is the third largest structure in the solar system, eclipsed only by the magnetic fields of the sun and Jupiter. Unlike Earth, which has a visible rocky surface and rotates once every 24 hours, Saturn is composed mostly of clouds and liquid gas layers, each rotating about the planet at its own rate of speed. This variation in rotation made it difficult for scientists to pin down time for the planet.

In 1908, a huge explosion enveloped the skies over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, Russia. It is a well-known atmospheric airburst that flattened 80 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers (830 sq mi) of forest and launched a thousand conspiracy theories, spawning the inspiration behind an alien-packed X-Files episode. Was it an asteroid? A comet? Or some kind of bizarre alien weapon designed to kill large numbers of squirrels?

A research group at the University of Alicante (Spain) has invented an algae removal and treatment system that turns this underused residue into a renewable source of energy: biomass. The process involves several stages of washing, drying and compacting without leaving the beach. Therefore, according to the team led by Professor Irene Sentana Gadea, the system is cheaper, more efficient and more environmentally friendly than the procedure commonly followed now.

Police in China have broken up a criminal ring accused of selling meat from rats and foxes and selling it as lamb.Results released by The Ministry of Public Security after a three-month crackdown on food safety violators, show that authorities investigated more than 380 cases and arrested 904 suspects.

A study of sediment cores collected from the deep ocean supports a new explanation for how glacier melting at the end of the ice ages led to the release of carbon dioxide from the ocean.The study published in Nature suggests that melting glaciers in the northern hemisphere caused a disruption of deep ocean currents, leading to the release of trapped carbon dioxide from the Southern Ocean around Antarctica.

Near the moonscape summit of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, an infrared analyser will soon make history. Sometime in the next month, it is expected to record a daily concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of more than 400 parts per million (p.p.m.), a value not reached at this key surveillance point for a few million years.

The battle to curtail the global impact of aerosols has taken a step forward with the most extensive aerosol research project conducted in Europe so far.The project EUCAARI ('European Integrated Project on Aerosol Cloud Climate and Air Quality Interactions'), has resulted in a renewed understanding of how aerosols affect the planet's radioactive balance.

In the first study of its type in Canada, new research has shown caribou have a role to play in climate warming in the arctic. Despite declining herd numbers, caribou grazing is controlling plant growth in the arctic and reducing the effect of global warming.Caribou grazing has not previously been recognized as a key component to controlling tundra plant growth and therefore has been left out of models that project changes in arctic ecosystems and arctic warming.

Scientists studying how early land vertebrates evolved from fishes long thought that the animals developed legs for moving around on land well before their feeding systems and dietary habits changed enough to let them eat a land-based diet, but strong evidence was lacking. Now, for the first time fossil jaw measurements by Philip Anderson at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and others have tested and statistically confirmed this lag.

Pablo Picasso is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, having pioneered a variety of new styles in painting, sculpture, and other artistic forms. Besides introducing avant-garde art styles, he also innovated in the use of non-traditional materials. For example, a widely-held view has been that Picasso employed the ordinary house paint Ripolin in place of conventional artists' paints in some of his artwork. Over the years art historians have used different approaches in an attempt to determine which of Picasso's paintings incorporate Ripolin. This task is not as straightforward as one might suppose, because many of the ingredients in Ripolin were also present in the artists' paints used by Picasso.

When life gets messy, stress can make it hard to concentrate and keep a clear mind. But simply thinking about one's values can boost that problem-solving ability.The findings, published today (May 1) in the journal PLOS ONE, suggest that thinking about what's important in life can essentially protect people from some of the corrosive effects of stress."Simply thinking about a value can completely ameliorate all these negative effects that stress can have on your problem-solving performance," said study co-author J. David Creswell, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University.