Using new DNA sequencing techniques, researchers have tracked down the gene defect underlying a rare disease called Proteus syndrome that causes bone and skin tissue to grow to sometimes grotesque proportions. The mutation may explain the affliction of the Elephant Man, a deformed Englishman whose tragic life in the late 1800s has been portrayed on stage and film.

Proteus syndrome, named for the shape-shifting Greek sea god, is thought to affect only a few hundred people. Skin and other tissues grow abnormally, leading to enlarged feet, hands, and tumors that can cause pain and other problems and sometimes require amputation. Because the disease doesn't run in families, and only some parts of the body are affected, German dermatologist Rudolf Happle hypothesized in 1987 that instead of resulting from an inherited mutation that permeates all the cells of a new embryo, it might be caused by a spontaneous mutation that appears in one cell early in development. The resulting person would then be a mix of normal cells and ones with the mutation. (Happle speculates the mutation would be fatal to an embryo if it affected all cells.)

But confirming that "mosaic" hypothesis hasn't been easy because geneticists could not follow their typical strategy of tracking the gene by studying families in which some members inherit the disease and others don't, says Leslie Biesecker, chief of the National Human Genome Research Institute's Genetic Diseases Research Branch in Bethesda, Maryland, who has studied Proteus patients for 16 years.

Some birds massage each other, according to a new study that found the stress levels of both masseuses and their subjects are lowered after their quality time together.

The study, published in the latest issue of Royal Society Biology Letters, further determined that subordinates seem to enjoy massages the most when they are given by their superiors.

It may be that subordinates are more likely to be the stressed ones in a group," Andy Radford, author of the study, told Physorg.com. "So if they get a massage from a usually threatening dominant individual, it's particularly relaxing, because it means they're accepted and so feel secure."

Radford, a researcher in the School of Biological Sciences at the Unviversity of Bristol, focused his attention on green woodhoopoes, large tropical birds native to Africa. After receiving massage-like grooming by another bird, they reduce their activity levels and relax in a sort of happy stupor for a noticeable period.

Other birds engage in such behavior too, apparently even with other species. Check this out:

Cancer patients may feel like they have alien creatures or parasites growing inside their bodies, robbing them of health and vigor. According to one cell biologist, that's exactly right. The formation of cancers is really the evolution of a new parasitic species.

Just as parasites do, cancer depends on its host for sustenance, which is why treatments that choke off tumors can be so effective. Thanks to this parasite-host relationship, cancer can grow however it wants, wherever it wants. Cancerous cells do not depend on other cells for survival, and they develop chromosome patterns that are distinct from their human hosts, according to Peter Duesberg, a molecular and cell biology professor at the University of California-Berkeley. As such, they're novel species.

He argues that the prevailing theories of carcinogenesis, or cancer formation, are wrong. Rather than springing from a few genetic mutations that spur cells to grow at an uncontrolled pace, cancerous tumors grow from a disruption of entire chromosomes, he says. Chromosomes contain many genes, so mis-copies, breaks and omissions lead to tens of thousands of genetic changes. The result is a cell with completely new traits: A new phenotype.

The first in a long-sought type of asteroid companion to Earth has now been discovered, a space rock that always dances in front of the planet along its orbital path, just beyond its reach.

The asteroid, called 2010 TK7, is nearly 1,000 feet (300 meters) across and currently leading the Earth by about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers).

The asteroid is the first in a category known as Earth's Trojans, a family of space rocks that could potentially be easier to reach than the moon, even though its member asteroids can be dozens of times more distant, researchers said. Such asteroids, which have long been suspected but not confirmed until now, could one day be valuable destinations for missions, especially loaded as they might be with elements rare on Earth's surface, they added.

To imagine where Trojan asteroids are, picture the sun and Earth as being two points in a triangle whose sides are equal in length. The other point of such a triangle is known as a Trojan point, or a Lagrangian point after the mathematician who discovered them. The sun and Earth have two such points, one leading ahead of Earth, known as its L-4 point, and one trailing behind, its L-5 point.

The legendary winged creature long known as the earliest bird, Archaeopteryx, might have just been dethroned, scientists reveal.

Instead, a newfound fossil from China suggests Archaeopteryx was not a bird after all, but one of many birdlike dinosaurs, a finding that could force scientists to rethink much of what they thought they knew about the origin and evolution of birds.

Archaeopteryx lived about 150 million years ago in what is now Bavaria in Germany, back when Europe was an archipelago of islands in a warm shallow tropical sea. First discovered 150 years ago, the carnivorous fossil, with its blend of avian and reptilian features, seemed an iconic evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds, bolstering Darwin's theory of evolution published just two years before the fossil discovery. Its place as the earliest and most primitive known bird made it central to the scientific understanding of the evolution of birds and flight.

Still, for decades, there have been doubts as to whether Archaeopteryx was really a bird.

"What's happened over the past 15 or 20 years is that so many of the seemingly uniquely birdlike characteristicsof Archaeopteryx, such as feathers, a wishbone and a three-fingered hand, became a lot less unique," anatomist and paleontologist Lawrence Witmer at Ohio University told LiveScience. "We've started finding a lot of dinosaurs with feathers, and lots and lots have a wishbone, even T. rex, for this progressive erosion of the avian status of Archaeopteryx."

A half dozen of the most titanic volcanic eruptions in Earth's history - including one potentially linked with the extinction of the dinosaurs - might all stem from the same ancient reservoir of super-hot rock near the Earth's core, scientists find.

Gigantic deluges of lava known as flood basalts have been linked with mass extinctions throughout history. For instance, a series of colossal volcanic eruptions near the end of the Age of Dinosaurs between 67 million to 63 million years ago created the mammoth Deccan Traps lava beds in India, which originally may have covered as much as 580,000 square miles (1.5 million square kilometers), more than twice the area of Texas.

The origins of these catastrophic outpourings of lava are unclear. New clues began emerging last year with research into flood basalts that erupted 62 million years ago in Baffin Island (part of the Canadian Arctic) and West Greenland, which suggested they came from a part of the Earth's mantle layer - the hot molten layer between the core and the surface crust - nearly as old as the 4.5 billion-year-old Earth itself.

"It basically survived intact since Earth's core formed," said study researcher Matthew Jackson, a geochemist at Boston University.

Though scientists believed volcanoes on the Moon to be long dead, a recent discovery suggests they were active as recently as 800 million years ago, which is fairly recent in geological time. Even weirder, volcanoes studied on the far side of the Moon appear to have erupted with a very unusual kind of lava, made of a super-viscous liquid rock almost never seen on the satellite.

Like the Mt. Saint Helens volcano, pictured above, these recently-discovered Moon volcanoes formed giant lava domes that probably erupted in gouts of superheated gas and ash.

When you look at the Moon, you're seeing the aftermath of hundreds of volcanic eruptions. All those dark spots on the satellite's surface are deposits left from basalt rocks - mostly ejected onto the Moon's surface after meteorite hits. Until now it was believed that all volcanoes on the Moon erupted with liquid basalt, a thin, runny lava that spreads rapidly. But the shape and mineral composition of the newfound volcanoes resemble those of "dome volcanoes" on Earth. They're not predominantly basalt; instead they've erupted with rocks and minerals whose liquid form is viscous, like honey.

People who live in high latitude regions have bigger eyeballs and brains than other individuals, according to new research.

The increase in brain and eye size allows people to see better in places that receive less light than areas closer to the equator, according to the new study, published in the latest issue of the journal Royal Society Biology Letters.

The effect is most extreme at the poles.

"Someone living on the Arctic Circle would have an eyeball that is 20 percent larger than someone living on the equator," co-author Robin Dunbar told Discovery News.

"People living at high latitudes have greater visual acuity than those who live at the equator," added Dunbar, who is head of the Institute of Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

"The whole point is that they need to have better vision to compensate for the lower light levels at high latitudes, as indicated by the evidence we provide that visual acuity under ambient/natural light conditions remains constant with latitude."

The common Guiana dolphin has just divulged its sixth sense: the ability to sense electric fields. It is the first placental mammal known to pull off this trick, new research finds.

The dolphin, which bears live young like other placental mammals, most likely uses its sixth sense to find prey in the murky coastal waters it inhabits.

"Most of the animals which do this do this to find prey," said study researcher Wolf Hanke, of Rostock University in Rostock, Germany. "All of the dolphins' prey items, like crayfish, all of them generate electric fields to some degree."

The Guiana dolphin looks like the familiar bottlenose dolphin; it is only slightly smaller. It lives close to estuaries, inlets and other protected shallow waters off the north and eastern coasts of South America.

For centuries people have pondered the meaning of dreams. Early civilizations thought of dreams as a medium between our earthly world and that of the gods. In fact, the Greeks and Romans were convinced that dreams had certain prophetic powers. While there has always been a great interest in the interpretation of human dreams, it wasn't until the end of the nineteenth century that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung put forth some of the most widely-known modern theories of dreaming. Freud's theory centred around the notion of repressed longing -- the idea that dreaming allows us to sort through unresolved, repressed wishes. Carl Jung (who studied under Freud) also believed that dreams had psychological importance, but proposed different theories about their meaning.

Since then, technological advancements have allowed for the development of other theories. One prominent neurobiological theory of dreaming is the "activation-synthesis hypothesis," which states that dreams don't actually mean anything: they are merely electrical brain impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memories. Humans, the theory goes, construct dream stories after they wake up, in a natural attempt to make sense of it all. Yet, given the vast documentation of realistic aspects to human dreaming as well as indirect experimental evidence that other mammals such as cats also dream, evolutionary psychologists have theorized that dreaming really does serve a purpose. In particular, the "threat simulation theory" suggests that dreaming should be seen as an ancient biological defence mechanism that provided an evolutionary advantage because of its capacity to repeatedly simulate potential threatening events - enhancing the neuro-cognitive mechanisms required for efficient threat perception and avoidance.

So, over the years, numerous theories have been put forth in an attempt to illuminate the mystery behind human dreams, but, until recently, strong tangible evidence has remained largely elusive.