Female woolly mammoth was found frozen in a Siberian ice tomb in May

The creature will be on display in Tokyo until September

Scientists think she got stuck in a swamp and died over 39,000 years ago

Blood sample found at the scene could be used to clone the beast

A female woolly mammoth, which was found frozen in Russia in May, has gone on display in an exhibition hall in Tokyo.

The 39,000-year-old mammoth will be on display at the hall in Yokohama in the south of the Japanese city from 13 July until September 16.

Visitors and tourists will be able to come and view the extinct creature that was discovered in an ice tomb in the New Siberian Islands, or Novosibirsk Islands, earlier this year.

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It almost seems like a mystical correlation. Babies conceived at certain times of the year appear healthier than those conceived during other times. Now, scientists have shown that the bizarre phenomenon is actually true - and they think they may know why it happens.

The work is "a really long-overdue analysis," says economist Douglas Almond of Columbia University, who was not involved in the study. "This is maybe not quite a smoking gun," he says, "but it's much stronger than the previous evidence."

As early as the 1930s, researchers noticed that children born in winter were more prone to health problems later in life: slower growth, mental illness, and even early death. Among the proposed explanations were diseases, harsh temperatures, and higher pollution levels associated with winter, when those expectant mothers and near-term fetuses might be most vulnerable.

But recently, as economists looked at demographics, the picture got more complicated. Mothers who are nonwhite, unmarried, or lack a college education are more likely to have children with health and developmental problems. They are also more likely to conceive in the first half of the year. That made it hard to tease out the socioeconomic effects from the seasonal ones.

Economists Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt of Princeton University took a new approach to resolving this long-standing question, using data from the vital statistics offices in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania about births between 1994 and 2006. To control for socioeconomic status, their study looked only at siblings born to the same mother. And lo and behold, seasonal patterns persist, they report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Next generation sequencing (NGS) techniques have allowed scientists to sequence DNA at faster rates than ever before, and in the process they have begun to revolutionize fields as disparate as anthropology and botany.

The technology is also now being used to screen embryos for in vitro fertilization (IVF), and the first child to ever pass though that screening process was recently born in the United States.

Developed in the UK at the University of Oxford, the embryo screening process is designed to scan the embryo for genetic abnormalities that could lead to a miscarriage, defective genes or mitochondrial DNA mutations.

"Next generation sequencing provides an unprecedented insight into the biology of embryos," said Dr. Dagan Wells at Oxford's Biomedical Research Centre, who helped to develop the screening process and reported on the child birth at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

Hearing voices in one's head may precede a trip to a neurologist. But not necessarily, if you're riding a train equipped with Sky Go. German ad agency BBDO Deutschland has teamed up with Sky Go to produce a new kind of advertising that beams messages to a person's head as they ride on a train.

Huh?

It works using a small box-like device called a Sky Go module, which delivers audio advertisements in the form of vibrations across the train's windows. When a commuter leans her head against the window, the vibrations get transmitted to her skull and through the bones in her ear in a way that allows her to hear the message.

Scuba divers have discovered a primeval underwater forest off the coast of Alabama.

The Bald Cypress forest was buried under ocean sediments, protected in an oxygen-free environment for more than 50,000 years, but was likely uncovered by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said Ben Raines, one of the first divers to explore the underwater forest and the executive director of the nonprofit Weeks Bay Foundation, which researches estuaries.

The forest contains trees so well-preserved that when they are cut, they still smell like fresh Cypress sap, Raines said.

The stumps of the Cypress trees span an area of at least 0.5 square miles (0.8 kilometers), several miles from the coast of Mobile, Alabama, and sit about 60 feet (18 meters) below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite its discovery only recently, the underwater landscape has just a few years to be explored, before wood-burrowing marine animals destroy the ancient forest.

Scientists are a step closer to solving part of a 165-million-year-old giant jigsaw puzzle: the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana.

Finding the past position of Earth's continents is a finicky task. But pinning down their wanderings plays a key role in everything from understanding ancient climate to how Earth's mountains and oceans evolved. Through "plate reconstruction" models, geoscientists illustrate how Earth's continents crunch together and split apart.

Before it cracked into several landmasses, Gondwana included what are today Africa, South America, Australia, India and Antarctica. The big continents - Africa and South America - split off about 180 million to 170 million years ago. In recent years, researchers have debated what happened next, as the remaining continents rocketed apart. For example, different Gondwana reconstruction models had a 250-mile (400 kilometers) disagreement in the fit between Australia and Antarctica, an error that has a cascading effect in plate reconstructions, said Lloyd White, a geologist at Royal Holloway University in Surrey, England.

"If Australia's in the wrong position by that amount, then when we try to build these models of what the Earth used to look like, it can have a flow-on effect around the globe," White told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

Crime scene investigation got a boost into the 21st century this past week, as a team of researchers at the University of Leicester, in the UK, announced the development of a new technique for gathering fingerprints that can even find hidden prints.

Due to TV and movies, the techniques used up until now are pretty familiar to everyone - an investigator brushes a special powder onto the surfaces at a crime scene, and the powder sticks to the sweat and oils left behind when anyone at the scene touched something. The contrast between the colour of the powder and whatever the fingerprint is on lets the investigators see the print and get a record of it. Since the chance of two people having the same fingerprints is extremely slim (something like 1 in 64 billion), it gives them a good chance to identify who was there and narrow down who the criminal was.

Criminals know about this though, and they've exploited one of the weaknesses of the technique, by literally wiping away the evidence. Even the most thorough criminal can miss something, though, and it's these missed or 'hidden' fingerprints that investigators have to rely upon. Quite often, though, the quality of the print isn't good enough for it to be used in court.

However, now steps in the research team from the University of Leicester, with a new, and incredibly accurate way of lifting and reading these prints.

This new method uses the fact that the residue of sweat and oils our skin leaves behind is insulating - that is, it doesn't conduct electricity. If the surface underneath the print is conductive, like a metal knife or bullet casing, a special coloured 'electro-active' film is applied that transfers the colour only to the conductive surface, and even the thinnest amount of residue will prevent the colour from being transferred. This reveals the fingerprint in negative, with extremely fine detail.

A species of Indonesian parrot can solve complex mechanical problems that involve undoing a series of locks one after another, revealing new depths to physical intelligence in birds.

A team of scientists from Oxford University, the University of Vienna, and the Max Planck Institute, report in PLOS ONE a study in which ten untrained Goffin's cockatoos [Cacatua goffini] faced a puzzle box showing food (a nut) behind a transparent door secured by a series of five different interlocking devices, each one jamming the next along in the series.

To retrieve the nut the birds had to first remove a pin, then a screw, then a bolt, then turn a wheel 90 degrees, and then shift a latch sideways. One bird, called 'Pipin', cracked the problem unassisted in less than two hours, and several others did it after being helped either by being presented with the series of locks incrementally or being allowed to watch a skilled partner doing it.

Watch a video of cockatoos solving the puzzle box: http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/group/kacelnik/lb_movie_s1.mov

The scientists were interested in the birds' progress towards the solution, and on what they knew once they had solved the full task.

Astronomers have for the first time detected a population of ultrashort radio bursts with properties that strongly suggest that they originate from outside the Milky Way Galaxy. Lasting for a few thousandths of a second and estimated to erupt roughly every 10 seconds, the mysterious bursts are likely to be caused by a previously unknown class of radio-emitting phenomenon, researchers report in Science¹.

"This is one of the most important radio discoveries in the last couple of decades," says Scott Ransom, an astronomer at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, who was not part of the study.

Although radio signals that vary over days to months have been recorded from distant galaxies for decades, ultrashort signals from beyond the Milky Way had never been definitively detected, notes study co-author Dan Thornton, an astronomer at the University of Manchester, UK.

He and his colleagues embarked on a search for extragalactic radio bursts after a report in 2007 suggested that one such signal had been tentatively found².

Using archived data from the 64-metre Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia - the same instrument that had recorded the tentative single burst - Thornton and his collaborators found four bursts that seemed to come from outside the Galaxy.

A unmanned Russian Proton-M rocket exploded moments after leaving the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today, destroying its payload of three satellites intended for Russia's Glonass GPS system. Fortunately nobody was injured, but local news service Interfax is reporting that nearly 500 tons of fuel from the craft has contaminated the crash site. There's no word on what caused the disaster, but this model's recent history is fraught with equipment failures -- so if you'd like to see the latest disaster (spoiler: explosions), the video resides after the jump.