Diamonds from deep underground now reveal that the activities of life can have effects far beneath Earth's surface, researchers find.

All life on Earth is based on carbon. This element moves through the atmosphere, oceans and the planet's crust in a pattern called the carbon cycle. Humans and other life on Earth are part of this cycle - for instance, we and other species live off nutrients made with carbon, such as sugars, fats and proteins, and also exhale carbon dioxide and emit the gas with our cars and factories.

The most well-known parts of the carbon cycle occur at or near the Earth's surface, but recent studies have hinted the carbon cycle might extend much deeper into the Earth's interior than is generally thought. For instance, oceanic crust loaded with carbon-rich sediment could delve, or subduct, to mix with the upper mantle layer of hot rock that reaches about 410 miles (660 kilometers) down, or even to the lower mantle below that. If true, more than just Earth's thin crust might play a role in this key cycle - a much larger fraction of the planet might be involved as well.

However, proof that such cycling occurs has proven difficult to come by.

Now "superdeep" diamonds from Brazil reveal the carbon cycle does indeed reach deep into the mantle.

NASA is ready to move forward with the development of the Space Launch System -- an advanced heavy-lift launch vehicle that will provide an entirely new national capability for human exploration beyond Earth's orbit. The Space Launch System will give the nation a safe, affordable and sustainable means of reaching beyond our current limits and opening up new discoveries from the unique vantage point of space.


The Space Launch System, or SLS, will be designed to carry the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, as well as important cargo, equipment and science experiments to Earth's orbit and destinations beyond. Additionally, the SLS will serve as a back up for commercial and international partner transportation services to the International Space Station.

"This launch system will create good-paying American jobs, ensure continued U.S. leadership in space, and inspire millions around the world," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "President Obama challenged us to be bold and dream big, and that's exactly what we are doing at NASA. While I was proud to fly on the space shuttle, tomorrow's explorers will now dream of one day walking on Mars."

Researchers in Australia have discovered that dolphin colonies living around Melbourne are a species unlike any other in the world, they revealed on Thursday.

The dolphins that frolic in Port Phillip Bay and the Gippsland Lakes, numbering around 150, were originally thought to be one of the two recognised bottlenose species.

But Monash University PhD researcher Kate Charlton-Robb found they were different by comparing skulls, DNA and physical traits with specimens dating back to the early 1900s.

Scientists at the University of Glasgow say they have taken their first tentative steps towards creating 'life' from inorganic chemicals potentially defining the new area of 'inorganic biology'.

Professor Lee Cronin, Gardiner Chair of Chemistry in the College of Science and Engineering, and his team have demonstrated a new way of making inorganic-chemical-cells or iCHELLs.

Prof Cronin said: "All life on earth is based on organic biology (i.e. carbon in the form of amino acids, nucleotides, and sugars, etc.) but the inorganic world is considered to be inanimate.

"What we are trying do is create self-replicating, evolving inorganic cells that would essentially be alive. You could call it inorganic biology."

The cells can be compartmentalised by creating internal membranes that control the passage of materials and energy through them, meaning several chemical processes can be isolated within the same cell -- just like biological cells.

Like a milk mustache that just won't go away, a shared genetic signature marks many Europeans and Indians as descendants from a common milk-drinking ancestor within the last 7,500 years.

The majority of Europeans and Indians who can drink milk share the mutation known as -13910T. Scientists already knew that the mutation was what allowed most European adults to drink milk.

"To our surprise we found that the -13910T mutation was also common in India - especially in those populations with a tradition of milk drinking," said Toomas Kivisild of Cambridge University, senior author of the study, in a press release.

"Not only that, but by looking at nearby genetic regions we could show that the Indian -13910T has the same origin as that found in Europeans; that it could lead back to the same few people who may have migrated between Europe and India," said Kivisild.

Laughing with friends releases feel-good brain chemicals, which also relieve pain, new research indicates. Until now, scientists haven't proven that like exercise and other activities, laughing causes a release of so-called endorphins.

"Very little research has been done into why we laugh and what role it plays in society," study researcher Robin Dunbar, of the University of Oxford, said in a statement. "We think that it is the bonding effects of the endorphin rush that explain why laughter plays such an important role in our social lives."

Chuckle it up

Dunbar and colleagues thought our guffaws might turn on the brain's endorphins, a long debated, but unproven idea. These pain-relieving chemicals are created in response to exercise, excitement, pain, spicy food, love and sexual orgasm, among other things.

In addition to giving us a "buzz," these endorphins raise our ability to ignore pain. So the researchers used the endorphins' pain relief to determine if laughter causes an endorphin release. They first tested participants for their pain threshold, then exposed them to either a control or a laugh-inducing test, and then tested pain levels again.

The tests included humorous videos (clips of the TV shows Mr. Bean and Friends) and a live comedy show during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Because laughter is such a social activity (it's 30 times more likely to happen in a social context than when alone), the participants were tested both in groups and alone.

The lab-based pain tests included wrapping a participant's arm in a frozen wine-cooling sleeve or a blood-pressure cuff. The pain tests were administered until the patient said they couldn't take it anymore. At the live shows, the researchers tested pain by having participants squat against a wall until they collapsed.

Icy body Dione may have dilute layer of oxygen air, study says.

Saturn's icy moon Dione has an atmosphere, albeit a thin one, astronomers have discovered.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft revealed Dione's atmosphere during a recent close flyby of the Saturnian satellite.

Cassini's data showed that Dione leaves behind "fingerprints" as it sweeps through Saturn's huge magnetic field.

"If a moon did not possess an atmosphere at all - if it was simply an ice ball - the magnetic field lines wouldn't be disturbed at all upstream of the moon, because you need conductivity to disturb the field," said study co-author Sven Simon.

A six tonne NASA satellite is set to fall uncontrolled out of orbit, potentially raining debris over swathes of the planet including Britain, the US space agency has admitted.

The $750 million (£468 million) Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) satellite, launched 20 years ago to study climate change, is set to breach the atmosphere within weeks.

In a new alert issued this week, officials warned pieces could land in densely populated areas on six continents including parts of Britain, Europe, North and South America and Asia.

Nasa claimed the risk to public safety from the "dead" satellite - which is orbiting just over 155 miles above the earth with an inclination of 57 degrees - was "extremely small".

But senior space agency officials admitted they were "concerned" about the risk to billions of people when it starts falling uncontrolled out of orbit at any stage from later this month.

When British amateur astronomers Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson independently saw a brightening of a small region of the Sun about 150 years ago, in 1859, they saw a very powerful event now called a solar flare. Since American astronomer George Ellery Hale discovered about 100 years ago that sunspots are regions of strong magnetism on the Sun, astronomers have linked magnetic storms on Earth to sunspots and to the solar-activity cycle. For roughly the last 50 years, solar flares have been categorized and detected by the x-rays they give off. The current classification of flares goes, in increasing power at their peak, A, B, C, M, X.

Last Wednesday, scientists reported that they haven't been noticing most of the solar flares' energy. In a NASA Press Conference, held simultaneously with the release of a paper online in The Astrophysical Journal, they reported on new results based on observations with NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. Since its launch on February 11, 2010, SDO has detected over a couple of hundred solar flares with its extreme-ultraviolet measuring instrument and with its cameras that take images also in that part of the spectrum beyond the violet, the ultraviolet. (Far into the ultraviolet is known as the extreme ultraviolet.) Several analyses have now shown that at least a group of the most powerful flares, which are detected in x-rays by satellites such as the GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite) series of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, give off more energy about 90 minutes later than the x-ray peak than occurred in that first detected peak. This hitherto undetected second peak may not be quite as powerful at its maximum as the first peak but covers a somewhat longer time, rising to its peak and falling more slowly than the x-ray peak. It can thus contain more energy than the first peak.

A sophisticated new camera system can detect lies just by watching our faces as we talk, experts say.

The computerised system uses a simple video camera, a high-resolution thermal imaging sensor and a suite of algorithms.

Researchers say the system could be a powerful aid to security services.

It successfully discriminates between truth and lies in about two-thirds of cases, said lead researcher Professor Hassan Ugail from Bradford University.

The system, developed by a team from the universities of Bradford and Aberystwyth in conjunction with the UK Border Agency, was unveiled today at the British Science Festival in Bradford.