A diet rich in starchy foods may have led to high rates of tooth decay in ancient hunter-gatherers, says a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Research by a team from Oxford University, the Natural History Museum, London, and the National Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Heritage (INSAP) in Morocco challenges the long-held view that dental disease was linked to the advent of farming. Their research shows widespread tooth decay occurred in a hunter-gathering society in Morocco several thousand years before the dawn of agriculture.

The research team analysed 52 sets of adult teeth from hunter-gatherer skeletons found in Taforalt in Morocco, dating between 15,000 and 13,700 years ago. Unexpectedly, they found evidence of decay in more than half of the surviving teeth, with only three skeletons showing no signs of cavities. Previously, scholars had thought that high rates of dental disease were associated with agricultural societies that grew domesticated plant crops.

From January to August of last year, John Bohannon submitted an academic study to 304 peer-reviewed scientific journals. All of the them were open access journals, a newer breed of digital-only academic publications that are free for readers but often charge researchers to publish. Bohannon's study concerned a molecule, extracted from a lichen, that appeared to show promise as a treatment for cancer. It was accepted for publication by 157 of the journals - slightly over half.

There was only one problem. Bohannon isn't a scientist; he's a journalist. And he completely made up the study.

Actually he did more than that. He deliberately inserted unscientific material to test whether or not it would be caught by the journals' peer reviewers. The "cure for cancer" proposition of the study, for instance, should have seriously raised some eyebrows, though in 157 cases, it did not. A bit subtler, though as much a red flag for scientists, was Bohannon's claim that the lichen-based molecule could be used as a treatment for humans, though it hadn't gone through a clinical trial. This, too, was missed by half of the journals. What little feedback Bohannon did receive had more to do with the formatting of his manuscript than the content itself.

Bohannon's sting operation was not the first of its kind. There are many more examples of fake studies getting published in academic journals. Taken together, they point to serious flaws in academic publishing at large: Journals are too eager to publish surprising studies, and the rigor of peer review is faltering.

Though Bohannon (or his editors at Science, the preeminent American scientific journal where he published the details of his hijinx) blamed open access journals, fake (or at least extremely dubious) studies have also been published in traditional, subscription-based journals.

Sydney - Amid a plague of reports that Windows 8 is dying the death of Mucho No Sales, with only 3.6 percent of computers running 8.1, "excitement" is again on the chopping block with Windows 9, codenamed Threshold.

Sydney Morning Herald:

Of course, these plans could change. But it's almost certain that Microsoft isn't too happy with the adoption rate of Windows 8.1, which stood at just 3.6 per cent this month.

Mashable and every news outlet under the sun is already thrashing the news that yet another tin egg has been laid and hatched at what used to be a plausible company producing good products. Even a computer service guy told me last week, "Don't get Win 8. It's one good, one bad with Microsoft: XP Good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad."

The trouble is he's right. What was wrong with 7? Not much, as far as I can see. There was nothing wrong with XP, either. Instead of a natural progression from XP to 7, we got a knee jerk "Hey, it's whatever year it is. Let's release some pile of crap."

Add to this the "clean install and to hell with your games" motif, and you may be wondering why Microsoft is pretending to be much more than a phone company. There's a reason for that. A lot of developers make a lot of money producing this garbage. It's a club, not a company strategy any more.

It's like DVD zoning, "media players" and other garbage. It's the same data, with proprietary strings attached, making lots of money for geriatrics and people who know PR but don't know a damn thing about computers or users.

Let's get this straight- While you're using binary, all else is window dressing, pun intended. What's wrong with something better than binary? Trinary or nonary, for example? We didn't find that in the cornflakes packet and nobody bothered to think about it. So we clunk along... forever, presumably.

The most abundant photosynthetic organism in the world sheds countless little sacs into the oceans, which could be having a dramatic impact on marine ecosystems, according to a new study. These microbial buds contain proteins and genetic material, which may influence the growth of other marine microbes and even protect them against viruses.

The oceans comprise the world's largest ecosystem, and cyanobacteria - single-celled organisms that get their energy through photosynthesis - are the keystone group. One type of cyanobacteria, Prochlorococcus, is the most abundant photosynthetic organism on the planet, numbering in the billion billion billions. These tiny organisms account for about 10% of all photosynthesis on Earth, which forms the base of the food chain and provides the atmosphere with oxygen. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) led by biological oceanographer Sallie Chisholm have found that cyanobacteria may play an even bigger role in the ecosystem than previously thought.

A massive ancient subglacial trough -- deeper than the Grand Canyon -- has been discovered by a team of UK experts.

The research involved scientists from Newcastle University, the University of Bristol's Glaciology Centre, the British Antarctic Survey and the universities of Edinburgh, Exeter, and York. They charted the Ellsworth Subglacial Highlands -- an ancient mountain range buried beneath several kilometres of Antarctic ice -- by combining data from satellites and ice-penetrating radars towed behind snowmobiles and on-board small aircraft.

The researchers spent three seasons investigating and mapping the region in West Antarctica, uncovering a massive subglacial valley up to 3 kilometres deep, more than 300 kilometres long and up to 25 kilometres across. In places, the floor of this valley is more than 2000 metres below sea level.

The mountain range and deep valley were carved millions of years ago by a small icefield similar to those of the present-day Antarctic Peninsula, or those of Arctic Canada and Alaska.

Scientists aren't exactly sure where a mysterious new meteorite came from, but its bright green hue is certainly bringing one super planet to mind.

While it's probably not from Krypton, the newest member of the Field Museum's meteorite collection is puzzling scientists.

While most meteorites look like a black or grey chunk of rock, this one is bright green and looks more gem-like than other meteorites in the collection, according to museum officials. Even more perplexing is the rock's chemical composition, which has proven impossible to classify.

The meteorite, named Northwest Africa 7325, was found in South Morocco in early 2012 and likely comes from an asteroid in the space between Mars and Jupiter, officials said.

Hey, remember Comet C/2012 S1 ISON? Who can forget the roller-coaster ride that the touted "Comet of the Century" took us on last year. Well, ISON could have one more trick up its cosmic sleeve - although it's a big maybe - in the form of a meteor shower or (more likely) a brief uptick in meteor activity this week.

In case you skipped 2012 and 2013, or you're a time traveler who missed their temporal mark, we'll fill you in on the story thus far.

Comet ISON was discovered by Artyom Novichonok and Vitali Nevski on September 21^st, 2012 as part of the ongoing International Scientific Optical Network (ISON) survey. Shortly after its discovery, researchers knew they had spotted something special: a sungrazing comet already active at over 6.4 Astronomical Units (A.U.s) from the Sun. The Internet then did what it does best, and promptly ran with the story. There were no shortage of Comet ISON conspiracy theories for science writers to combat in 2013. It's still amusing to this day to see predictions for comet ISON post-perihelion echo through calendars, almanacs and magazines compiled and sent to press before its demise.

There may exist technologies that are dangerous to know. Perhaps not just "to know", but rather "to sell". Quite often we read about "free energy" and/or "instant communication" technologies. There is usually some kind of a scam involved nearby. That does not necessarily mean that there is nothing but scam. What is true and what is not - that's the million dollar question. Hartmut Müller's "Global Scaling" is one such example, as we will see below.

Usually there is some kind of a "theory" going around, a "theory" that tries to package the claims of those who patent, produce and try to sell extraordinary gadgets into attractive and colorful shiny boxes. Without a theory, who will buy them? The same, or almost the same gadget can be wrapped up in different theories in different parts of the world. These theories more often than not claim to be based on some mathematics and some physics. Since I am both, a little bit of a mathematician and a little bit of a physicist, trying to be rationally irrational and open-minded, I like to read all the "strange" stuff that I can find. And what I read, I share.

Just before Christmas I ordered a book by A. G. Parkhomov "Earth, Cosmos, Man" - only available in Russian - so it's a lucky thing that I learned to speak and read Russian almost before I learned my mother tongue, Polish. I hope to write more about Parkhomov's exciting research on nuclear phenomena after studying his book. But it is only this morning that I received an email telling me that the book has been shipped. Therefore I had to change my plans and reschedule my posting of articles in this series. Which is not that difficult because there are lots of exciting new things that happen every day and that are worth sharing.

For instance, just a few days ago I stumbled upon the subject of "The Theory of Global Scaling" [1] , "Time Wave", "free gravitational phones" etc, and the strange story of the "inventor", Hartmut Müller. Apparently, with gravitational phones, you can call free, person to person, using "shock gravity waves".

Scientist at the Vostok Antarctic station are to gather dust from the comet ISON, which was disintegrated by the sun in late November 2013. They hope their luck will help them find the "basic building blocks" of life.

The Russian scientists manning the station will take three attempts to harvest space dust. The first will be between Tuesday and Wednesday this week, then again between Friday and Saturday, and also sometime in late January, Sergey Bulat from St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics, told RIA Novosti.

Bulat and his colleagues initially scheduled their dust hunt for December, when the comet was expected to pass Earth on its way back into outer space after grazing the sun. But its destruction called for a change of plan.

"We expected the comet to survive and hoped to gather some large particulates in December. Now if we get something, it would be particulates from the coma [the major part of the head of a comet] and tail left when it was approaching the sun," he explained.

NASA's asteroid-hunting ship came out of hibernation last month, and it has already spotted its first space rock.

The asteroid - 2013 YP139 - lacks a catchy name, but it's a marker of progress in NASA's mission to locate, land on, and reroute an asteroid by 2025.

Its spotter, a spacecraft known as NEOWISE, emerged from two years of dormancy in December to continue searching the sky for potential targets. It found 34,000 asteroids in its first run, so the latest find should be the first of many more discoveries.

A few facts about 2013 YP139:

It's currently 27 million miles from Earth, but could come within 300,000 miles of our planet's orbit - nearly as close as the moon - making it a potentially hazardous asteroid.

Scientists estimate its diameter at .4 miles. By comparison, the meteor that streaked over Russia last year, exploding with the force of 20 atomic bombs, injuring 1,500 people, and damaging thousands of buildings, measured only about 65 feet. NASA says impact by an asteroid bigger than a half-mile in diameter would have "worldwide effects."

It's as dark as a piece of coal, but gives off high amounts of infrared light.

The asteroid - unlike the super-hot stars that provide its backdrop - is close to room temperature.

Separately, NASA also announced Tuesday that it has found the first asteroid of 2014 to reach planet Earth: a 6-to-9-foot rock that entered the atmosphere on New Year's Day before it broke up over the Atlantic Ocean.