Was the evolution of high-quality vision in our ancestors driven by the threat of snakes? Work by neuroscientists in Japan and Brazil is supporting the theory originally put forward by Lynne Isbell, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis.

In a paper published Oct. 28 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Isbell; Hisao Nishijo and Quan Van Le at Toyama University, Japan; and Rafael Maior and Carlos Tomaz at the University of Brasilia, Brazil; and colleagues show that there are specific nerve cells in the brains of rhesus macaque monkeys that respond to images of snakes.

The snake-sensitive neurons were more numerous, and responded more strongly and rapidly, than other nerve cells that fired in response to images of macaque faces or hands, or to geometric shapes. Isbell said she was surprised that more neurons responded to snakes than to faces, given that primates are highly social animals.

In a pair of landmark studies that exploit the genetic sequencing of the "missing link" cold virus, rhinovirus C, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have constructed a three-dimensional model of the pathogen that shows why there is no cure yet for the common cold.

Writing today (Oct. 28, 2013) in the journal Virology, a team led by UW-Madison biochemistry Professor Ann Palmenberg provides a meticulous topographical model of the capsid or protein shell of a cold virus that until 2006 was unknown to science.

Rhinovirus C is believed to be responsible for up to half of all childhood colds, and is a serious complicating factor for respiratory conditions such as asthma. Together with rhinoviruses A and B, the recently discovered virus is responsible for millions of illnesses yearly at an estimated annual cost of more than $40 billion in the United States alone.

The work is important because it sculpts a highly detailed structural model of the virus, showing that the protein shell of the virus is distinct from those of other strains of cold viruses.

"The question we sought to answer was how is it different and what can we do about it? We found it is indeed quite different," says Palmenberg, noting that the new structure "explains most of the previous failures of drug trials against rhinovirus."

It has baffled humans for millennia: how did life begin on planet Earth? Now, new research from a Texas Tech University paleontologist suggests it may have rained from the skies and started in the bowels of hell.

Sankar Chatterjee, Horn Professor of Geosciences and curator of paleontology at The Museum of Texas Tech University believes he has found the answer by connecting theories on chemical evolution with evidence related to our planet's early geology.

"This is bigger than finding any dinosaur," Chatterjee said. "This is what we've all searched for - the Holy Grail of science."

Thanks to regular and heavy comet and meteorite bombardment of Earth's surface during its formative years 4 billion years ago, the large craters left behind not only contained water and the basic chemical building blocks for life, but also became the perfect crucible to concentrate and cook these chemicals to create the first simple organisms.

He will present his findings Oct. 30 during the 125th Anniversary Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver.

As well as discovering how ancient animals flew, Chatterjee discovered the Shiva Meteorite Crater, which was created by a 25-mile-wide meteorite that struck off the coast of India. This research concluded this giant meteorite wreaked havoc simultaneously with the Chicxulub meteorite strike near Mexico, finishing the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Ironically, Chatterjee's latest research suggests meteorites can be givers of life as well as takers. He said that meteor and comet strikes likely brought the ingredients and created the right conditions for life on our planet. By studying three sites containing the world's oldest fossils, he believes he knows how the first single-celled organisms formed in hydrothermal crater basins.

"When the Earth formed some 4.5 billion years ago, it was a sterile planet inhospitable to living organisms," Chatterjee said. "It was a seething cauldron of erupting volcanoes, raining meteors and hot, noxious gasses. One billion years later, it was a placid, watery planet teeming with microbial life - the ancestors to all living things."

Jack Gallant perches on the edge of a swivel chair in his lab at the University of California, Berkeley, fixated on the screen of a computer that is trying to decode someone's thoughts.

On the left-hand side of the screen is a reel of film clips that Gallant showed to a study participant during a brain scan. And on the right side of the screen, the computer program uses only the details of that scan to guess what the participant was watching at the time.

Anne Hathaway's face appears in a clip from the film Bride Wars, engaged in heated conversation with Kate Hudson. The algorithm confidently labels them with the words 'woman' and 'talk', in large type. Another clip appears - an underwater scene from a wildlife documentary. The program struggles, and eventually offers 'whale' and 'swim' in a small, tentative font.

"This is a manatee, but it doesn't know what that is," says Gallant, talking about the program as one might a recalcitrant student. They had trained the program, he explains, by showing it patterns of brain activity elicited by a range of images and film clips. His program had encountered large aquatic mammals before, but never a manatee.

Groups around the world are using techniques like these to try to decode brain scans and decipher what people are seeing, hearing and feeling, as well as what they remember or even dream about.

The promising Comet ISON is steadily making its way closer to the sun and one avid amateur astronomer has snapped a series of spectacular photos of icy wanderer in action.

Veteran astrophotographer John Chumack took the new Comet ISON photos and shared the series with SPACE.com. The images, taken in color as well as black and white, show striking views of the approaching comet.

"Comet ISON is going strong!" Chumack wrote SPACE.com in an email. "I will be imaging the comet every clear night I get through Perihelion Passage, on Nov. 28, and throughout December and January." [See amazing photos of Comet ISON by stargazers]

On Nov. 28 - the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States - Comet ISON will approach within 730,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) of the sun, a close shave above the solar surface. If the comet survives the solar encounter, it could flare up brilliantly in the night sky, astronomers have said.

Chumack captured the new Comet ISON images on the morning of Oct. 9 from his dark-sky site at John Bryan State Park in Yellow Springs, Ohio, using a QHY8 cooled single shot color CCD camera and his homemade 16" Diameter F4.5 Newton telescope.

When I first learned about rhizocephalan barnacles I lost my appetite. I was taking a parasitology course, and even though I'd developed a thick skin, something about this insidious creature deeply disturbed me. Even now, the thought of one makes me shiver. I've never watched a movie monster, heard a fairy tale, or seen a video game with a villain more horrifying than this one. And unlike those monsters, this one is real. To understand the full terror of this monster, you have to put yourself in the place of another animal. These poor creatures are its victims, and you see them all the time. Imagine you're a crab, and for full effect, imagine you're male.

You're lingering on the shoreline, the warm sun on your back, cool water in your gills. You've reached a large size, dodging the many dangers of youth. Life is going well. But today you begin to feel strange - maternal almost - as if there is something growing inside you, and in fact, something is.

Its roots are crawling through your tissue, your gut, your brain. It's a rhizocephalan barnacle, and it's about to take you over.

Mozilla, the open-source software community responsible for the Firefox browser, has released a new download that allows users to identify who's tracking their Internet movements.

Dubbed "Lightbeam," the free Firefox extension will enable users to see which third party companies are monitoring their online presence, a move that Mozilla states will "illuminate the inner workings of the web."

The beautiful texts of ancient Greece have captivated our imaginations for thousands of years. From the tragedies of Sophocles to the epics of Homer, modern literature throughout the world continues to be inspired by these classics.

But the haunting music these poems were originally sung to have long since been lost, with researchers instead focusing on the meaning of the words. Now an expert from Oxford University has reconstructed the music, and rediscovered some of the instruments that played them - and he claims the recordings are 100 per cent accurate.

'There is no question that we can reconstruct what this fascinating music sounded like,' Dr Armand D'Angour, a musician and tutor in classics at Oxford University, told MailOnline.

'We have been left with clear instructions, thousands of years old, about how to create instruments used to play the music with mathematical precision.'

It's known by climatologists as the 'Little Ice Age', a period in the 1600s when harsh winters across the UK and Europe were often severe. The severe cold went hand in hand with an exceptionally inactive sun, and was called the Maunder solar minimum.

Now a leading scientist from Reading University has told me that the current rate of decline in solar activity is such that there's a real risk of seeing a return of such conditions. I've been to see Professor Mike Lockwood to take a look at the work he has been conducting into the possible link between solar activity and climate patterns.

According to Professor Lockwood the late 20th century was a period when the sun was unusually active and a so called 'grand maximum' occurred around 1985. Since then the sun has been getting quieter.

By looking back at certain isotopes in ice cores, he has been able to determine how active the sun has been over thousands of years. Following analysis of the data, Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years. He found 24 different occasions in the last 10,000 years when the sun was in exactly the same state as it is now - and the present decline is faster than any of those 24. Based on his findings he's raised the risk of a new Maunder minimum from less than 10% just a few years ago to 25-30%.

And a repeat of the Dalton solar minimum which occurred in the early 1800s, which also had its fair share of cold winters and poor summers, is, according to him, 'more likely than not' to happen.

As twin pregnancies go, it was happily uneventful. The identical baby girls lazed in the comfort of their mother's belly until they were full-term and born in a Dutch hospital. But after their birth, doctors noticed something was wrong. One girl was quite normal. The other had two vaginas, two colons and a spinal cord that split in two towards the bottom of her back.

It was the beginning of years of surgery and care for one of the twins. It was also the start of a mystery that took the best part of a decade to solve. From looking at the placenta, doctors knew the girls were identical twins. So how could twins who shared the same genes be so different?

It is well known that identical twins can grow into very different adults, and not just with respect to their personalities: physical differences become increasingly apparent with age. These are usually attributed to differences in environment. The girls' differences were profound and there from birth.

Resolving this mystery is helping to explain not just why identical twins can be different, but why we all turn out as we do. For over a century, the orthodoxy has been that we are the product of both our genes and our environment. Although there has been fierce argument about which is more important - the nature versus nurture debate - biologists have agreed that it must be a mixture of the two. But the latest findings suggest there is more to it: if we could reset the clock to the moment you were conceived and rerun your life over and over again, you would turn out differently every time despite having the same genes and being brought up in the same environment. Yet how is that possible? What else can there be besides nature and nurture?