Ötzi the Iceman, a stunningly preserved mummy found in the Italian Alps in 1991, has living relatives in the region, new genetic analysis shows.

The study, published in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics, found that the 5,300-year-old mummy has at least 19 male relatives on his paternal side.

"We can say that the Iceman and those 19 must share a common ancestor, who may have lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago," study co-author Walther Parson, a forensic scientist at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Innsbruck, Austria, wrote in an email. "In that sense, those 19 are closer related to the Iceman than other individuals. We usually think about our families when we talk about relatives. However, these data demonstrate that DNA can also be used to trace relatives much further back in time."

An Internet-based system could be a useful tool for screening adults for mental health disorders and giving preliminary diagnoses, according to a new Dutch study.

This eDiagnostics system is already used in primary care practices in The Netherlands, the researchers say, but nowhere else, and more study is needed to determine if it is reliable, valid and cost-effective.

"Using the Internet to diagnose mental health problems in primary care seems very promising," writes lead author Ies Dijksman and colleagues from Maastricht University.

"The great advantage of an electronic system is that patients can complete diagnostic tests at home," Dijksman told Reuters Health in an email, adding that people may be quicker to reveal themselves over the Internet and provide genuine responses to questions because of their perceived anonymity.

New York - The line between life and death is not as clear as once thought, now that developments in the science of resuscitation have made it possible to revive people even hours after their heart has stopped beating and they are declared dead, medical experts say.

"Historically, when a person's heart stopped and they stopped breathing, for all intents and purposes, they were dead," said Dr. Sam Parnia, an assistant professor of critical care medicine at State University of New York at Stony Brook. "There was nothing you could do to change that," Parnia told an audience at the New York Academy of Sciences last week.

However, in the process of unraveling mysteries of death at the cellular level, scientists have learned that death does not occur in a single moment, but instead is a process. It is actually after a person has died -- by our current definition of death -- that the cells of the body start their own process of dying.

This process "could take hours of time, and we could potentially reverse that," Parnia said.

Any drop in USGS activity would impact lesser developed nations such as the Philippines, which run smaller-scale monitoring and rely on the USGS for global earthquake data, Robert Geller, a professor of seismology at Tokyo University, said by phone. It would also affect ordinary citizens in the U.S, he said.

"If a big quake occurred now, hypothetically, inside the U.S., disaster relief work might be slowed down if USGS data wasn't available to the government," Geller said. The effect of the shutdown depends on whether the agency has curtailed the monitoring itself or stopped putting the data online, he said.

Earthquake Risk

Despite the warning, the National Earthquake Information Center of the USGS at Golden, Colorado, does not expect delays in earthquake monitoring and said data is being gathered at the same rate as before the shutdown. "At this point we are getting earthquakes posted on our website on time, within 20 minutes for magnitude 5 and larger worldwide, and earlier for a national event," Jana Pursley, a geophysicist at the center, said today in a phone interview.

Going to the grocery store is about to get a lot more personal: one of the biggest names in food is preparing to launch "smart shelves" to gather intelligence on consumers and customize their shopping experience.

Mondelēz International, the parent company of Kraft Foods, plans on having their space-age smart shelves rolled out on supermarket floors sometime in 2015. And if all goes as planned, soon after the multi-national corporation behind products such as Chips Ahoy, Oreo, Wheat Thins and Ritz will begin collecting analytics about impulse buys and learn new ways to bring customers the products they crave.

Lightning strikes causing rocks to explode have for the first time been shown to play a huge role in shaping mountain landscapes in southern Africa, debunking previous assumptions that angular rock formations were necessarily caused by cold temperatures, and proving that mountains are a lot less stable than we think.

In a world where mountains are crucial to food security and water supply, this has vast implications, especially in the context of climate change.

Professors Jasper Knight and Stefan Grab from the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at Wits University used a compass to prove - for the first time ever - that lightning is responsible for some of the angular rock formations in the Drakensburg.

If you enjoy leaves turning, pumpkin patches and other rites of autumn, thank the giant impact event early in Earth's history which knocked our planet's axis off kilter, creating the seasons that we know and love today. But was there just one planet-tilting impact?

University of Western Ontario geologist Grant Young thinks there were two, separated by billions of years. He has been studying rocks from the Ediacaran Period, 540 to 635 million years ago and says he sees signs of massive changes to Earth's seasons and climate that can best be explained by a axis-shifting collision of a small planetary body into the ocean about 570 million years ago.

That's long after the famous smash up with a Mars-sized body that is credited with creating the Moon around 4 billion years ago and giving Earth its mild tilt and modern seasons. It was also at the time Earth was seeing the earliest animals, or metazoans, come into being.

"I think this might have stimulated the evolution of metazoans," Young told Discovery News.

The scenario he has presented in the October issue of GSA Today is that there was first the collision that created the Moon. But instead of that giving Earth its current tilt (which wobbles a bit, and is currently at 23.5 degrees), that first event knocked the planet over almost on its side. That orientation would give the poles a temperate climate without nights for half the year and the equator much less sunshine all year round.

Two controversial studies suggest antiviral mechanism called RNA interference may exist in vertebrates after all.

Organisms including plants, fungi and flies fight viruses using an elegant mechanism involving RNA snippets that mammals apparently ditched at some point in their evolutionary history. At least, that is what scientists thought - but two controversial reports published today suggest otherwise.

The RNA defence mechanism hinges on the fact that most viruses copy their RNA when they replicate. Invaded cells recognize viral RNA and automatically launch RNA interference, or RNAi, to stop the virus from multiplying and spreading to other host cells.

The RNAi process begins when an enzyme known as DICER chops a long strand of the virus RNA into chunks that are about 22 genetic letters long. Next, another one of the host cell's molecules ships the fragments off to the invading virus where they cling to the viral RNA, preventing its replication.

"It's an incredible system because it can be adapted to any virus," says Olivier Voinnet, a molecular biologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, and an author of one of the papers, which are published in Science^{1, 2}.

More than 1,000 old concrete buildings in Los Angeles and hundreds more throughout the county may be at risk of collapsing in a major earthquake, according to a Times analysis.

By the most conservative estimate, as many as 50 of these buildings in the city alone would be destroyed, exposing thousands to injury or death.

A cross-section of the city lives and works in them: seamstresses in downtown factories, white-collar workers in Ventura Boulevard high-rises and condo dwellers on Millionaires' Mile in Westwood.

Despite their sturdy appearance, many older concrete buildings are vulnerable to the sideways movement of a major earthquake because they don't have enough steel reinforcing bars to hold columns in place.

Los Angeles officials have known about the dangers for more than 40 years but have failed to force owners to make their properties safer. The city has even rejected calls to make a list of concrete buildings.

In the absence of city action, university scientists compiled the first comprehensive inventory of potentially dangerous concrete buildings in Los Angeles.

The scientists, however, have declined to make the information public. They said they are willing to share it with L.A. officials, but only if the city requests a copy. The city has not done so, the scientists said.

About 46 million years ago, a mosquito sunk its proboscis into some animal, perhaps a bird or a mammal, and filled up on a meal of blood. Then its luck turned for the worse, as it fell into a lake and sunk to the bottom.

Normally this wouldn't be newsworthy, and nobody would likely know or care about a long-dead insect in what is now northwest Montana. But somehow, the mosquito didn't immediately decompose - a fortuitous turn of events for modern-day scientists - and became fossilized over the course of many years, said Dale Greenwalt, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Greenwalt discovered the mosquito fossil after it was given to the museum as a gift, and he immediately realized the specimen's rarity.

It is, in fact, the only blood-engorged mosquito fossil found, Greenwalt told LiveScience. The fossil is even stranger because it comes from shale, a type of rock formed from sediments deposited at the bottom of bodies of water, as opposed to amber, the age-old remains of dried tree sap, in which insect remnants are generally better preserved.

"The chances that such an insect would be preserved in shale is almost infinitesimally small," Greenwalt said.

In their study, Greenwalt and his collaborators bombarded the mosquito fossil with molecules of bismuth, a heavy metal, which vaporizes chemicals found in the fossil. These airborne chemicals are then analyzed by a mass spectrometer, a machine that can identify chemicals based on their atomic weights, Greenwalt said. The beauty of this technique, called time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry, is that it doesn't destroy the sample - previously, similar techniques required grinding up portions of fossils, he added. The analysis revealed hidden porphyrins, organic compounds found in hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in blood, hidden in the fossilized mosquito's abdomen.