The discovery of a new arm in the Milky Way suggests that our galaxy is warped, say astronomers.

In 1852, Stephen Alexander, an astronomer at the College of New Jersey, put forward the radical suggestion that the Milky Way galaxy is a spiral.

But while today's astronomers agree on this general shape, they disagree over the precise structure of the spiral and in particular on the number of arms.

Astronomers have named at least 6 arms and in the 1990s, evidence emerged that the galaxy had a central bar. The uncertainty is easy to understand. Our view of the galaxy shows the nearer stars superimposed on the ones that are further away. And much of the opposite side of the Milky Way galaxy is obscured entirely by the central mass of stars at the centre.

Recently, however, a clearer picture has begun to emerge. The growing consensus is that the Milky Way has a central bar with two main arms, called the Perseus Arm, which passes with a few kiloparsecs of the Sun, and the Scutum-Centaurus Arm. (The other arms are now thought to be minor structures made up largely of gas.)

A Serb living in Austria has elected to have his hand amputated so that he can be fitted with a working bionic limb. The 26-year-old Milo's biological hand was intact but useless, as a nerve injury stemming from a motorcycle accident ten years ago robbed him of feeling and movement in that extremity. Now, an Austrian doctor--not without controversy--has amputated Milo's hand and is replacing it with a robotic version that responds to nerve signals in his forearm.

Milo lost his hand function when his motorcycle skidded off the road into a lamppost in 2001, and while his injured arm and leg healed, an injury to his shoulder called a brachial plexus left his right arm without feeling. By transplanting some muscle and nerve tissue into his arm from his leg, Professor Oskar Aszmann was able to restore feeling down through the forearm.

Milo's hand, however, never recovered. But with the nerve tissue in his forearm restored, electric signals from his brain to his forearm were boosted, allowing for another less conventional option: discard the useless hand and replace it with a robotic one.

At the 50th anniversary celebration of NASA on October 1, 2008, Stephen Hawking, then Newton's heir as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, was asked the question, "Are we alone?" His answer was short and simple: "probably not."

Hawking outlined three possibilities: One, that there is no life out there; and two, somewhat pessimistically, that when intelligent life gets smart enough to send signals into space, it is also busying itself with stockpiling nuclear bombs.

Hawking, known not only for his sharp mind, but his also for his biting sense of humor, prefers option number three: "Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare," he quickly added: "Some would say it has yet to occur on earth. "We should be careful if we ever happen upon extraterrestrial life, Hawking warns. Alien life may not have DNA like ours: "Watch out if you would meet an alien. You could be infected with a disease with which you have no resistance."

What we normally think of as 'life' is based on chains of carbon atoms, with a few other atoms, such as nitrogen or phosphorous, Hawking observed in his lecture, Life in the Universe. We can imagine that one might have life with some other chemical basis, such as silicon, "but carbon seems the most favorable case, because it has the richest chemistry."

The Earth was formed largely out of the heavier elements, including carbon and oxygen. Somehow, Hawking observes, "some of these atoms came to be arranged in the form of molecules of DNA. One possibility is that the formation of something like DNA, which could reproduce itself, is extremely unlikely. However, in a universe with a very large, or infinite, number of stars, one would expect it to occur in a few stellar systems, but they would be very widely separated."

Strange jets of water rising from deep in the ocean repeatedly trigger anomalies in wind, rainfall and sea surface temperature across the tropical Atlantic, scientists find.

Decades of research have revealed that the oceans impact climate in a multitude of ways, most notably with the ocean-atmosphere phenomena known as El Niño and La Niña events, where patterns of warmth and cold in the Pacific regularly wreak havoc worldwide.

Scientists wanted to understand how the oceans influenced the tropical Atlantic around the equator. Previously, researchers had thought the Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans were the main sources for climate fluctuations there.

Now oceanographers have discovered regular climate fluctuations in the tropical Atlantic are apparently caused by hitherto unknown deep jets of water traveling from the abyss up about 9,800 feet (3,000 meters).

"To date, when trying to explain tropical climate variations, we have always looked upwards, specifically to the atmosphere," said researcher Peter Brandt, a physical oceanographer at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany. "Our new data, for the first time, direct our attention towards the depths of the ocean, thereby opening new perspectives."

The inner core of the Earth may be melting, scientists now find.

This melting could actually be linked to activity at the Earth's surface, the researchers said, and added that the discovery could help explain how the core generates the planet's magnetic field.

The Earth's inner core is a ball of solid iron about 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) wide, about the same size as the moon. This ball is surrounded by an outer core made up mostly of liquid iron-nickel alloy, a highly viscous mantle layer and, topping it off, a solid crust that forms the surface of the planet.

As the Earth cools from the inside out, the molten outer core is slowly freezing. This is leading the solid inner core to grow at a rate of approximately 1 millimeter per year.

However, scientists now find that the inner core might be melting at the same time.

"The standard view has been that the inner core is freezing all over and growing out progressively, but it appears that there are regions where the core is actually melting," said researcher Sebastian Rost, a seismologist at the University of Leeds in England. "The net flow of heat from core to mantle ensures that there's still overall freezing of outer core material and it's still growing over time, but by no means is this a uniform process."

In the Bulgarian seaside resort town of Sozopol, archaeologists have unearthed an ancient temple of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, the private television channel bTV Reported on May 18 2011.

The finds were made at Cape Skamnii in the ancient town of Sozopol. Numerous statues and other artifacts have been found, indicating that the site was, indeed, a temple dedicated to Demeter and Persephone.

The temple dates back to the fourth or fifth century BC, according to archaeologists. The excavation works at Cape Skamrii began only a month ago, but already several other artifacts were found before this latest discovery, which promises that the area will be rich in secrets from 27 centuries ago, according to leading researcher Krustina Panayotova.

The amount of information carried in the arrangement of words is the same across all languages, even languages that aren't related to each other. This consistency could hint at a single common ancestral language, or universal features of how human brains process speech.

"It doesn't matter what language or style you take," said systems biologist Marcelo Montemurro of England's University of Manchester, lead author of a study May 13 in PLoS ONE. "In languages as diverse as Chinese, English and Sumerian, a measure of the linguistic order, in the way words are arranged, is something that seems to be a universal of languages."

Language carries meaning both in the words we choose, and the order we put them in. Some languages, like Finnish, carry most of their meaning in tags on the words themselves, and are fairly free-form in how words are arranged. Others, like English, are more strict - "John loves Mary" means something different from "Mary loves John."

A planet 20 light years away is the first outside our solar system to be declared 'habitable' by scientists.

The rocky 'exoplanet' Gliese 581d meets key requirements for sustaining Earth-like life, including rainfall and possibly even watery oceans.

The planet orbits a red-dwarf star similarly called Gliese 581, on its outer fringes called the 'Goldilocks zone', where the temperature is not so hot that water boils away, nor so cold that water is perpetually frozen.

But even though it may be technically habitable, the Gliese 581d would not make a comfortable dwelling for humans.

Gravity is twice what is on Earth, doubling the weight of anyone standing on the surface, and the atmosphere is dense with carbon dioxide.

"Big Becky" finally returns from her underground adventure

Canada has stepped up its clean power offerings by completing a significant expansion [press release] of its Niagara River hydroelectric power capacity. Stretching 6.3 miles (10.2 km), the tunnel bumps Canada's already substantial 4.4 GW generating capacity upwards by 182.65 MW (~4.2%). And all of that wouldn't have been possible without "Big Becky".

I. Big Becky

Big Becky is a massive tunnel-boring machine (TBM). She gets her name from Sir Adam Beck, a prominent Canadian politician who served in Ontario's Legislative Assembly. Sir Beck was an outspoken advocate of power grids and hydroelectric power and helped oversee the creation of the Queenston Chippawa power station, which was later renamed the Sir Adam Beck Station in his honor. The first station went online in 1922, three years before Sir Beck's death from Anemia (at age 68); a second station, named Sir Adam Beck Station II, went live in 1954.

The Sir Beck plants carried water in a tunnel a mere 1.24 miles (2 km), before depositing it in an open cut, above ground. The new tunnel aimed to be over five times as long. To accomplish that, state of the art excavation techniques would be needed.

Flare five times more powerful than those previously seen.

An enormous flare which erupted from the remnants of an exploded star in a faraway constellation has left Nasa scientists baffled.

Last month, the famous Crab Nebula supernova, first observed in 1731, gave off a flare five times more powerful than any previously seen from the object.

On April 12, Nasa's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope first detected the outburst, which lasted six days.