Future shirts and socks could clean themselves using just sunlight, chemists report - all you'll have to do is drape them over the balcony and voila, clean laundry. A coating of titanium dioxide makes this possible.

Titanium dioxide is found in products like solar panels and sunscreen - it absorbs ultraviolet light - and in several cleaning products, because it can be used to oxidize organic material. Cement, paint, windows and even odor-free socks contain TiO2, which is prized for its ability to kill microbes and break down dirt.

Other researchers have incorporated titanium dioxide into clothes before, but they don't get clean unless exposed to ultraviolet light, which isn't exactly practical. Mingce Long of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Deyong Wu of the Hubei University for Nationalities in Hubei, China, set out to create clothing with titanium dioxide coating that can self-clean using only sunlight.

Boston University scientists sifting through satellite photos found the largest crater seen to date in the Great Sahara Desert of North Africa. The 100-million-year old crater, known as Kebira, which means "large" in Arabic, is 19 miles wide.

The crater is on the northern tip of the Gilf Kebir region of southwestern Egypt near Libya. The meteorite that gouged out Kebira probably was three-quarters of a mile wide. The terrain around the crater is 100 million year-old sandstone. Two ancient rivers run through the crater site from the east and west.
The shock of such a large object crashing into Earth tens of millions of years ago may have left behind the field of yellow-green silica chips - the mysterious desert glass - seen today on the surface among the giant dunes of the Great Sand Sea in southwestern Egypt.

As a geologist who had spent most of his career studying the Earth's major deserts, Dr. Farouk El-Baz, now the director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University, knew that the glass formed after a massive meteorite hit the desert with enough energy to splatter chunks of melted sand across the extensive fields where fragments are common today. But beyond the glass, no evidence of such an impact had ever been found. El-Baz decided to take another look at satellite data of the Western Desert to see if he could find the elusive crater.

If you ever find yourself on a leisurely submarine ride through the northeastern Indian Ocean, be on the lookout for some amazing views: more than 50 large seamounts, or underwater mountains, dot the ocean floor, some rising as high as 3 miles (4,500 meters).

The Christmas Island Seamount Province, as the area is known, spans a 417,000-square-mile (1 million square kilometers) swath of seafloor.

Just how the massive underwater structures got there has been up for debate, but some new geochemical detective work may have solved the mystery.

The seamounts are made of recycled rocks from the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, said geochemist Kaj Hoernle of the University of Kiel in Germany. Their turbulent geological history explains the massive size and puzzling placement of these features.

Ubiquitous and mysterious

Tens of thousands of seamounts line the floors of the world's oceans, but exactly how most of these formed is unclear.

Some, like the Hawaiian - Emperor seamount chain that extends northwest from the Hawaiian Islands, formed over hotspots in the mantle, just as the islands themselves did. Other seamount chains were created when tectonic plate boundaries and other fractures in the ocean crust allowed lava to escape and harden at the surface.

But the Christmas Island Seamount Province doesn't fit either of these models, Hoernle said. The structures are too widespread and diffuse to have formed over a single hotspot; they're also aligned perpendicularly along breaks in the ocean crust, which means they didn't form above a fracture.

"We knew they were volcanic," Hoernle told OurAmazingPlanet, "but beyond that, it was more or less a mystery."

The Tōhoku earthquake that rattled Japan on 11 March changed Earth's gravitational field enough to affect the orbits of satellites. The satellites' altered courses suggest that the earthquake was stronger and deeper than instruments on Earth indicated.

These weren't just any satellites: they are the twin spacecraft of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), which fly 220 kilometres apart in a polar orbit about 500 kilometres above Earth. GRACE's job is to map the Earth's gravity field, and it does this by monitoring the effect of minute variations in the field on the trajectories of the satellites and the changing distance between them.

Earth's gravity field changes whenever there is a redistribution of mass on its surface. This may be a result of snowfall, flood, melting of ice caps - or earthquakes. "That perturbed gravitational field affects the satellite orbits," explains Shin-Chan Han of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Millions of genetically modified insects designed to destroy food crop pests could be released into the countryside.

The Government is considering plans by a British company for the 'open release' of a GM strain of the diamondback moth, which it has developed.

Diamondback moths attack cabbages, broccoli, cauliflowers and similar crops.

With the GM strain a lethal gene is inserted into the male of the species so that when they mate with wild females, their offspring die almost immediately, causing the population to crash.

That could lead to increasing crop yields and profits for farmers.

The company involved, Oxitec, is keen to begin trials next year, but it faces opposition from groups who say the untested technology could threaten wildlife and human health.

A commercial satellite operator says it has captured a rare image of China's first aircraft carrier as it sailed through the Yellow Sea, after going through an exercise that's the 21st-century equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack.

DigitalGlobe said the aircraft carrier showed up on a cloud-filled picture snapped on Dec. 8 by its polar-orbiting QuickBird satellite from a height of 280 miles (450 kilometers). An analyst spotted the ship while checking the image on Tuesday, the company said.

Experts have been hoping for a glimpse of China's aircraft carrier at sea. The former Soviet Union started building the ship, originally known as the Varyag, but never finished it. After the Soviet breakup, the Varyag ended up in the hands of the Ukrainian government. The ship was auctioned off to the Chinese in 1998, and since then the Varyag, rechristened the Shi Lang, has been under refurbishment for sea service. DigitalGlobe said this picture was taken during the carrier's second sea trial, approximately 62 miles (100 kilometers) south-southeast of the port of Dalian.

China says the Shi Lang will be used for research and training, and the project is thought to be part of the country's strategy to expand its presence as a naval power. The Chinese military is expected to build more copies of the ship in coming years. In fact, sources told Reuters in July that a second aircraft carrier was under construction.

"China's next moves have to be watched carefully, or there eventually could be a negative impact on maritime safety in Asia," Yoshihiko Yamada, a professor at Japan's Tokai University, told Reuters at the time.

Forget about slow-motion shots of a bullet destroying an apple or a hummingbird shaking off water. Making a slow-motion video of light beams bouncing around inside a 1-liter bottle required a new super-fast imaging system - one capable of taking 1 trillion frames a second. MIT's Media Lab has now made such a system possible by harnessing camera technology usually found in chemistry experiments.

An imaging system that makes light seem slow speaks for itself, especially when light travels 700 million miles an hour on a good day in a vacuum. But to better appreciate 1 trillion frames per second (fps), consider that the iPhone 4S camera shoots HD video at just 30 fps. Even Hollywood has relied upon a mix of digital wizardry and cameras shooting at 24 fps to capture its beloved slow-motion explosions. (Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson just recently stepped up his game by choosing to film The Hobbit prequels at 48 fps.)

"There's nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera," said Andreas Velten, a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Media Lab.

Modern humans possess brain structures larger than their Neanderthal counterparts, suggesting we are distinguished from them by different mental capacities, scientists find.

We are currently the only extant human lineage, but Neanderthals, our closest-known evolutionary relatives, still walked the Earth as recently as maybe 24,000 years ago. Neanderthals were close enough to the modern human lineage to interbreed, calling into question how different they really were from us and whether they comprise a different species.

To find out more, researchers used CT scanners to map the interiors of five Neanderthal skulls as well as four fossil and 75 contemporary human skulls to determine the shapes of their brains in 3D. Like modern humans, Neanderthals had larger brains than both our living ape relatives and other extinct human lineages.

The investigators discovered modern humans possess larger olfactory bulbs at the base of their brains. This area is linked primarily with smell, but also with other key mental functions such as memory and learning - central olfactory brain circuitry is physically very close to structures related to memory.

The U.S. Air Force is sending a single copy of a brand-new stealth drone to Afghanistan. Only maybe not just Afghanistan.

Officially, the General Atomics-made Avenger - a sleek, jet-powered upgrade of the iconic armed Predator and Reaper - is heading to Afghanistan as a combat-capable "test asset." The Air Force said in a statement that it loves how the Avenger's "internal weapons bay and four hardpoints on each wing," will give it "greater flexibility and will accommodate a large selection of next generation sensor and weapons payloads," as reported by Zach Rosenberg at Flightglobal.

Problem is, you don't really need those things in Afghanistan. Weapons bays are for stealth: most warplanes don't have them. And it's not like the Taliban has been firing radar-guided missiles at NATO aircraft. Besides, there are already dozens of armed drones in Afghanistan. One more isn't going to make much of a difference.

Which begs the question: Is the 41-foot-long Avenger really meant for Afghanistan? Or is it destined to patrol over Afghanistan's unruly neighbors, Iran and Pakistan, both of which do have radar-guided missiles? That was a job assigned to the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel before one of those drones crashed in Iran two weeks ago. We're sure the Air Force has a few more RQ-170s to throw at Iran and Pakistan. After all, the elusive 'bots have been spotted in Afghanistan, South Korea and Japan. But the Avenger, which debuted just two years ago, is newer and more capable than the Sentinel, which is widely believed to be a product of the early 2000s.

The most expensive weapons program in U.S. history is about to get a lot pricier.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, meant to replace nearly every tactical warplane in the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, was already expected to cost $1 trillion dollars for development, production and maintenance over the next 50 years. Now that cost is expected to grow, owing to 13 different design flaws uncovered in the last two months by a hush-hush panel of five Pentagon experts. It could cost up to a billion dollars to fix the flaws on copies of the jet already in production, to say nothing of those yet to come.

In addition to costing more, the stealthy F-35 could take longer to complete testing. That could delay the stealthy jet's combat debut to sometime after 2018 - seven years later than originally planned. And all this comes as the Pentagon braces for big cuts to its budget while trying to save cherished but costly programs like the Joint Strike Fighter.

Frank Kendall, the Pentagon's top weapons-buyer, convened the so-called "Quick Look Review" panel in October. Its report - 55 pages of dense technical jargon and intricate charts - was leaked this weekend. Kendall and company found a laundry list of flaws with the F-35, including a poorly placed tail hook, lagging sensors, a buggy electrical system and structural cracks.