Researchers at John Hopkins University have come up with a new, simpler 12-month calendar.

The team used computer programs and mathematical formulas to create the new calendar in which each new 12-month period is identical to the one before.

Under the new calendar, if Christmas fell on a Sunday in 2012, it would also fall on a Sunday in 2013, 2014 and beyond.

Also, the months September, March, June and December would have 31 days, while the rest would have 30.

"Our plan offers a stable calendar that is absolutely identical from year to year and which allows the permanent, rational planning of annual activities, from school to work holidays," Richard Conn Henry, an astrophysicist in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, said in a press release.

"Think about how much time and effort are expended each year in redesigning the calendar of every single organization in the world and it becomes obvious that our calendar would make life much simpler and would have noteworthy benefits."

They said the new calendar would also be convenient for birthdays and holidays by making them fall on the same day of the week every year.

Time in the womb is obviously important for the development of the fetal brain. But pregnancy is also a time for changes in Mom's brain - changes that may prepare women to become better mothers.

These changes still are little-understood, concludes a review published in the December issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Pregnant women often complain about "pregnancy brain" or "mommy brain," a memory fog that seems to produce lost car keys and misplaced cell phones. One 2010 study suggested that high levels of sex hormones could be to blame for the frustrating lapses in concentration. But in many ways, the changes that happen in a mom-to-be's brain during pregnancy remain mysterious.

"Pregnancy is a critical period for central nervous system development in mothers," review author Laura Glynn, a psychologist at Chapman University in California, said in a statement. "Yet we know virtually nothing about it."

Trade group expects industry to 'survive'

The United States has ended a 30-year tax subsidy for corn-based ethanol that cost taxpayers $6 billion annually, and ended a tariff on imported Brazilian ethanol.

Congress adjourned for the year on Friday, failing to extend the tax break that's drawn a wide variety of critics on Capitol Hill, including Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Critics also have included environmentalists, frozen food producers, ranchers and others.

The policies have helped shift millions of tons of corn from feedlots, dinner tables and other products into gas tanks.

Environmental group Friends of the Earth praised the move.

"The end of this giant subsidy for dirty corn ethanol is a win for taxpayers, the environment and people struggling to put food on their tables," biofuels policy campaigner Michal Rosenoer said Friday.

Close your eyes. Picture your closest friend. Maybe you see her blue eyes, long nose, brown hair. Perhaps even her smile.

If you saw her walking down the street it would match your imagined vision. But what if you saw nothing at all?

James Cooke, 66, of Islip, N.Y., can't recognize other people. When he meets someone on the street, he offers a generic "hello" because he can't be sure if he's ever met that person before. "I see eyes, nose, cheekbones, but no face," he said. "I've even passed by my son and daughter without recognizing them."

Software developed for closed-circuit television systems can identify individuals and track them across entire networks of cameras.

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but when he returned from 'cross the seas, did he bring with him a new disease?

New skeletal evidence suggests Columbus and his crew not only introduced the Old World to the New World, but brought back syphilis as well, researchers say.

Syphilis is caused by Treponema pallidum bacteria, and is usually curable nowadays with antibiotics. Untreated, it can damage the heart, brain, eyes and bones; it can also be fatal.

The first known epidemic of syphilis occurred during the Renaissance in 1495. Initially its plague broke out among the army of Charles the VIII after the French king invaded Naples. It then proceeded to devastate Europe, said researcher George Armelagos, a skeletal biologist at Emory University in Atlanta.

"Syphilis has been around for 500 years," said researcher Molly Zuckerman at Mississippi State University. "People started debating where it came from shortly afterward, and they haven't stopped since. It was one of the first global diseases, and understanding where it came from and how it spread may help us combat diseases today."

It came suddenly from the distant reaches of the Constellation Sagittarius, some 50,000 light years away. For a brief instant, a couple of tenths of a second, on December 27, 2004 an invisible burst of energy the equivalent of half a million years of sunlight shone on Earth. Many orbiting satellites electronics were zapped and the Earth's upper atmosphere was amazingly ionized from a massive hit of gamma ray energy.

The source of the invisible attack was a rare magnetar SGR 1806-20 on the other side of the Milky Way. These soft gamma ray repeaters, SGRs, occur when twisted magnetic fields attempt to re-align themselves and crack the magnetar's crust releasing the awesome burst or pulse of energy with a death-zone of a few light years. Magnetars have magnetic fields 1000 times those of ordinary pulsars -so powerful as to be lethal at a distance of 1000 kilometers.

Astronomers have cataloged well over 1000 pulsars, and estimate the number of quiet neutron stars to be vastly more at some 100 million given the 10-billion-year life of the Milky Way's disk. The odds are that one is nearby, gliding silently past Earth, of no danger. The tonest fraction of neutron stars have morphed into magnetars, believed to be the offspring of the most massive stars, hypergiants that don't have enough mass to evolve into black holes.

Fortunately for Earth, the nearest GRB candidate seems to be thousands of light-years away. Maybe... Data from satellites and observatories around the globe showed a jet from a powerful stellar explosion witnessed on March 19, 2008 aimed almost directly at Earth.

NASA's Swift satellite detected the explosion - formally named GRB 080319B - at 2:13 a.m. EDT that morning and pinpointed its position in the constellation Bootes. The gamma-ray burst became bright enough for human eyes to see. Observations of the event are giving astronomers the most detailed portrait of a burst ever recorded.

A team of scientists announced Wednesday they have discovered a rare 600-million-year old microscopic fossil, raising the possibility that the theory of cell evolution may face a major overhaul.

The fossil, which researchers are saying could force scientists to rethink the evolutionary process, is a remarkable new fossil discovery of an amoeba-like micro-organisms that lived 570 million years ago.

The team of scientists announced the discovery on Wednesday, saying the recent dig was surprising as it was rare.

"We were very surprised by our results - we've been convinced for so long that these fossils represented the embryos of the earliest animals - much of what has been written about the fossils for the last ten years is flat wrong. Our colleagues are not going to like the result," said Dr. Phillip Donoghue, professor at University of Bristol, and a lead author of the article.

Last week Iranian engineer claim to hijack U.S. drone by hacking GPS system using GPS spoofing. On December 14, residents of a small town in northern Syria reported seeing unidentified aircraft circling overhead, and dropping several small items attached to mini-parachutes , which entered Syrian airspace through the Turkish border. The gadgets, pictured here, look suspiciously like surreptitious listening devices. Residents say the question is : who dropped them, and why?

The sources explained that the aircrafts that dropped the devices were American, not Turkish. They added that the aircrafts took off from Incirlik air base, southeast of Adana, which is 130 km away from the city of Afrin, mainly to belong to the Kurdish nationalists.

Planetary magnetic fields are generated by flows in the hot, liquid iron cores of the planets. Measurements made by Mariner 10 in 1974/75 showed that Mercury also has a magnetic field. According to the standard models, the dynamo effect in its metal core should generate similar field strengths to those on Earth.

Mercury's magnetic field is 150 times weaker than that of our planet, however. This has recently been confirmed by the NASA space probe Messenger. How can the large discrepancy in the field strength be explained?

This question has now been answered by a group headed by Karl-Heinz Glassmeier at the Technische Universität Braunschweig. Scientists have now presented a new explanation: the solar wind counteracts Mercury's internal dynamo and thus weakens its magnetic field.

The solar wind - a constant stream of charged particles - plays a significant role. At an average distance from the Sun of only 58 million kilometers - around one third of the distance of the Earth - Mercury is much more exposed to these particles.