At the outset, the researchers wanted to learn something about how ancient hominids used their landscape - that is, whether they covered far distances, or stayed closer to home. The goal was to discover whether their travel habits contributed to their becoming bipedal, since moving on two legs is far more efficient and takes less energy than using all fours.

But, as is often the case with science, they found something unexpected, a novel insight into the social behavior of our earliest human ancestors. It turns out that the males of two bipedal hominid species that roamed the South African savannah more than a million years ago were the stay-at-home types, compared to the wandering females, who went off on their own, leaving the men behind.

This surprising finding may not necessarily be an indication of early human feminist leanings, nor a declaration of female independence - although it might be, said lead researcher Sandi Copeland, visiting assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Denver, who also is affiliated with the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Honolulu - The Army on Thursday conducted its first flight test of a new weapon capable of traveling five times the speed of sound.

The Army launched the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon from the military's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai at about 1:30 a.m.

The weapon's "glide vehicle" reached Kwajalein Atoll - some 2,300 miles away - in less than half an hour, said Lt. Col. Melinda Morgan, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

Earlier this year, the Congressional Research Service said in a report the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon is part of the military's program to develop "prompt global strike" weapons that would allow the U.S. to strike targets anywhere in the world with conventional weapons in as little as an hour.

The Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, are developing a similar vehicle.

The Pentagon said the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon, or AHW, vehicle is designed to fly long ranges within the earth's atmosphere at speeds that are at least five times the speed of sound.

The objective of Thursday's test was to collect data on technologies that boost the hypersonic vehicle and allow it to glide. The Army was also testing how the vehicle performed in long-range flight.

The Congressional Research Service report said the AHW would be able to maneuver to avoid flying over third party nations as it approached its target. The weapon would use a precision guidance system to home in on the target, it said.

When NASA's New Horizons cruises by Pluto in 2015, the images it captures could help astronomers determine if an ocean is hiding under the frigid surface, opening the door to new possibilities for liquid water to exist on other bodies in the solar system. New research has not only concluded such an ocean is likely, but also has highlighted features the spacecraft could identify that could help confirm an ocean's existence.

Pluto's outer surface is composed of a thin shell of nitrogen ice, covering a shell of water ice. Planetary scientists Guillaume Robuchon and Francis Nimmo, both of the University of California at Santa Cruz, wanted to find out whether or not an ocean could exist underneath this icy shell, and what visible signs such an ocean might produce on the surface.

The pair modeled the thermal evolution of the dwarf planet and studied the behavior of the shell to see how the surface would be affected by the presence of an ocean below.

Nearly a year ago a small, bright white storm emerged on Saturn's northern hemisphere. This storm has now wrapped around the planet, creating a colossal atmospheric disturbance that has become the largest storm seen on the planet since 1990. And the Cassini spacecraft has been there to see it all.

"It is the singular distinction of being in orbit, and able to turn a scrutinizing eye wherever it is needed, that has allowed us to be present to witness this extraordinary phenomenon," said Carolyn Porco, the Cassini Imaging Team Leader. "The storm has spread to become a planet-encircling colossus, a wide kaleidoscopic band of commingled waves, vortices, and eddies, all in continuous swirling motion .... a mesmerizing display of snaking, sensuous, churning, turning, chaotic, roiling atmospheric turmoil."

If Porco sounds like she's waxing poetic, she has good reason. The images put out by the Cassini imaging team today are a "sublime visual extravaganza," and both true and false color images are gorgeous to behold.

The wavefunction is a real physical object after all, say researchers.

At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online on 14 November¹ reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents - with an answer that could rock quantum theory to its core. Whereas many physicists have generally interpreted the wavefunction as a statistical tool that reflects our ignorance of the particles being measured, the authors of the latest paper argue that, instead, it is physically real.

"I don't like to sound hyperbolic, but I think the word 'seismic' is likely to apply to this paper," says Antony Valentini, a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum foundations at Clemson University in South Carolina.

Valentini believes that this result may be the most important general theorem relating to the foundations of quantum mechanics since Bell's theorem, the 1964 result in which Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell proved that if quantum mechanics describes real entities, it has to include mysterious "action at a distance".

Found in rocks throughout Earth's crust, zircons are some of the oldest bits of mineral on Earth. These tiny crystals are so durable - and some are so ancient, dating to just 150 million years or so after our world formed - that geologists have long viewed the tiny bits of minerals embedded within them as a kind of time capsule, offering a peek at conditions on the early Earth. But a new study suggests that these so-called inclusions are not as pristine as scientists thought, raising doubts about conclusions that researchers have drawn from them, from the rise of early oceans to the movements of the ancient continents.

In the new study, researchers led by geologist Birger Rasmussen of Curtin University in Bentley, Australia, analyzed more than 7000 zircons from a portion of the Jack Hills of Western Australia, where rocks are between 2.65 billion and 3.05 billion years old. These zircons ended up in the Jack Hills rocks after eroding from rocks that were even more ancient, and the researchers painstakingly sorted the individual crystals from other bits of minerals. Many of the individual, centimeter-sized pebbles in the silicate-rich conglomerate have been heavily metamorphosed - stretched, flattened, and sometimes chemically altered when tectonic activity carried them deep within Earth, where pressures and temperatures are hellish. Zircons in the rocks were exposed to the same conditions. "These zircons have been absolutely hammered," Rasmussen says.

A total of 485 zircons held inclusions, and about a dozen or so of these contained radioactive trace elements that allowed the researchers to determine their ages. Those ages fell into two clumps - one of about 2.68 billion years and another of about 800 million years. "This was a big surprise to us," Rasmussen says, especially because the zircons themselves ranged in age from 3.34 billion and 4.24 billion years old.

The biggest volcanic eruptions of the past half eon had seemed a likely culprit in the greatest mass extinction Earth has seen. Now the closest look yet at events 252 million years ago is linking those eruptions even more closely not only to the biotic cataclysm in the sea but also to the mass extinction on land.

An international group of scientists led by paleontologist Shu-zhong Shen of Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China intensively sampled the fossil record, they report today in Science. They examined nine rock outcrops across South China, not just the couple of sites most closely sampled in the past. Each sampling site spanned the mass extinction 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian period. The sites included records from the sea, where fully 90% of species disappeared, as well as from the land.

Shen and his colleagues also used volcanic minerals to gauge when and how fast things happened at each site. Occasional volcanic eruptions had layered minerals throughout the outcrops. In order to date these minerals, the group used the steady decay of radioactive uranium to lead. Even though the eruptions happened a quarter-billion years ago, the method gave them an error of only about 100,000 years. Improvements to the mass spectrometer that counted uranium and lead atoms and to the sample preparation procedure had reduced the dating error by a factor of four.

Data from a NASA planetary mission have provided scientists evidence of what appears to be a body of liquid water, equal in volume to the North American Great Lakes, beneath the icy surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa.

The data suggest there is significant exchange between Europa's icy shell and the ocean beneath. This information could bolster arguments that Europa's global subsurface ocean represents a potential habitat for life elsewhere in our solar system. The findings are published in the scientific journal Nature.

"The data opens up some compelling possibilities," said Mary Voytek, director of NASA's Astrobiology Program at agency headquarters in Washington. "However, scientists worldwide will want to take a close look at this analysis and review the data before we can fully appreciate the implication of these results."

NASA's Galileo spacecraft, launched by the space shuttle Atlantis in 1989 to Jupiter, produced numerous discoveries and provided scientists decades of data to analyze. Galileo studied Jupiter, which is the most massive planet in the solar system, and some of its many moons.

Two sunken islands almost at the site of Tasmania have been discovered in the Indian Ocean west of the Australian city of Perth.

The researchers who found the islands during a recent sea voyage think that they were once part of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, which could have ramifications for our understanding of how that giant landmass broke apart.

"The data collected on the voyage could significantly change our understanding of the way in which India, Australia and Antarctica broke off from Gondwana," said team member Joanne Whittaker, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney.

The islands were found during a three-week voyage to map the seafloor of the Perth Abyssal Plain that concluded last week. Travelling on the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) vessel Southern Surveyor, the scientists discovered the islands through detailed seafloor mapping and by dredging rock samples from the steep slopes of the two islands that now are covered by about a mile (1.5 kilometers) of ocean water.

"The sunken islands charted during the expedition have flat tops, which indicates they were once at sea level before being gradually submerged," Whittaker said in a statement. The rocks retrieved from the islands also surprisingly suggested the islands weren't always underwater.

Researchers are fairly confident now that whoever wrote the Duqu malware also was involved in some way in developing the Stuxnet worm. They're also confident that they have not yet identified all of the individual components of Duqu, meaning that there are potentially some other capabilities that haven't been documented yet.

Despite its huge public profile, Duqu is not a widespread piece of malware. In fact, there probably aren't more than a few dozen infections at this point, experts say. The malware is being used in highly specific attacks against carefully chosen targets, and in virtually every known case, the attackers have used different encryption methods and different files. This makes detection difficult, and it also shows that the attackers aren't in a hurry. They're taking their time and being quite careful about the way that they conduct the attacks.

"I'd guess there are somewhere less than fifty infections around the world. It's a very small number of targets," Costin Raiu, director of global research and analysis at Kaspersky Lab, who has done much of the analysis of Duqu, said in a podcast interview.