The life and death of the world's tallest species of bird is the focus of a new book being published by Craig Potton Publishing this month.

'First we killed them, then we ate them, and then we forgot about them,' says Quinn Berentson, author of Moa: The life and death of New Zealand's legendary bird. 'Human beings have not been kind to the moa, and the biggest insult is we've almost completely forgotten about them. Like most 'Kiwis' I realised I actually knew nothing about the really iconic and unique birds that made New Zealand famous around the world - the moa. Writing the book is my attempt to get the real story of the moa out there and remind us all what we lost.'

The moa are arguably the most unusual and unique family of birds that have ever lived but they became extinct reasonably quickly after the arrival of the Maori in New Zealand, and were a distant memory by the time European explorers arrived in the country. So the identification of their bones in the 1840s caused a worldwide sensation. 'The discovery was described at the time as "the zoological find of the century," and the surprising discoveries have persisted until the present day,' says Quinn.

'The moa has fascinated and bamboozled the finest minds in natural history for 170 years and so, rather than write an encyclopaedia, I've tried to tell the story of its rediscovery - with all the twists and turns, devious personalities and unlikely events - and summarize the latest scientific discoveries that have occurred in just the last few years and have totally changed our perception of the giant birds.

Basically almost everything we thought we knew about the moa has been turned on its head over the last 10 years because of advanced DNA analysis. It turns out for most of the last 170 years we had a totally mistaken view of what the birds looked like, how they lived and even where they lived. Now New Zealand scientists have finally solved many of the mysteries that baffled the best minds in natural science for the last century.'

'It's a serious book about a popular subject and will fill a real gap in our natural history literature,' says publisher Robbie Burton. 'It's a fascinating story and an important book that richly recounts and illustrates the life and death of the giant bird.

Pasadena, California -- The true identity of centaurs, the small celestial bodies orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Neptune, is one of the enduring mysteries of astrophysics. Are they asteroids or comets? A new study of observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) finds most centaurs are comets.

Until now, astronomers were not certain whether centaurs are asteroids flung out from the inner solar system or comets traveling in toward the sun from afar. Because of their dual nature, they take their name from the creature in Greek mythology whose head and torso are human and legs are those of a horse.

"Just like the mythical creatures, the centaur objects seem to have a double life," said James Bauer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Bauer is lead author of a paper published online July 22 in the Astrophysical Journal. "Our data point to a cometary origin for most of the objects, suggesting they are coming from deeper out in the solar system."

"Cometary origin" means an object likely is made from the same material as a comet, may have been an active comet in the past, and may be active again in the future.

In worms, the spread of death can be seen easily under a microscope as a wave of blue fluorescence travelling through its gut

Researchers from Wellcome Trust likened spread of blue glow travelling through the worm's body to that of the Grim Reaper, stalking death

The research could prove to be a useful model for understanding death in people and perhaps even lead to an increase in life expectancy

British scientists have captured death spreading like a wave through the body of a worm, by studying the blue fluorescence that travels cell-to-cell until the whole organism is dead.

Researchers from the Wellcome Trust and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) likened the spread of the blue glow travelling through the worm's body to that of the Grim Reaper, stalking death.

They believe that the research could eventually prove to be a useful model to understanding death in people and perhaps even lead to an increase in life expectancy.

Psychopaths do not lack empathy, rather they can switch it on at will, according to new research.

Placed in a brain scanner, psychopathic criminals watched videos of one person hurting another and were asked to empathise with the individual in pain.

Only when asked to imagine how the pain receiver felt did the area of the brain related to pain light up.

Scientists, reporting in Brain, say their research explains how psychopaths can be both callous and charming.


The team proposes that with the right training, it could be possible to help psychopaths activate their "empathy switch", which could bring them a step closer to rehabilitation.

Japanese mathematics professor Kokichi Sugihara spends much of his time in a world where up is down and three dimensions are really only two. Professor Sugihara is one of the world's leading exponents of optical illusion, a mathematical art-form that he says could have application in the real world.

Three sloped ramps are aligned along three of the four sides of a square. Each ramp appears to be sloped in the same direction but when a marble is placed at one end of the ramp it seems to defy gravity.

It's called an "anti-gravity slide". Only when the the entire structure is turned 180 degrees, is the illusion revealed.

Japanese mathematics professor Kokichi Sugihara from the Meiji Institute near Tokyo, has made a career of creating optical illusions. He's devised and built more than a hundred of them, like this one called "Perches and a Ring".

As we've written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America's apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.

Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition.

But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have indentified a witch's brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.

When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.

When an asteroid or comet slammed into Earth about 66 million years ago, most of our planet's species were wiped out in a mass extinction - including entire groups such as the nonavian dinosaurs, marine reptiles such as mosasaurs, and their flying kin the pterosaurs. But not all ecosystems suffered equally, and the dramatic difference in survival rates between marine species and freshwater ones has been particularly puzzling. A new study weighs in on the long-standing riddle.

According to some estimates, about three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth disappeared during the end-of-the-Cretaceous dino-killing impact. But marine ecosystems lost only about half of their species, and freshwater environments lost a mere 10% to 22%, says William Lewis, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

For instance, only about 10% of the major groups of bony fish died out, but species from all six groups of turtles alive at the time - and from most if not all groups of amphibians - survived the impact. The disparity with marine ecosystems began to make sense, he notes, when researchers began thinking of the mass extinction as a one-two punch: the fiery aftermath of the extraterrestrial impact, followed by a "nuclear winter"-like cold spell triggered by the smoke, soot, and myriad other tiny particles flung high into the atmosphere.

In the wake of the impact, creatures in marine and freshwater ecosystems experienced three particularly strong stresses: starvation brought about by the collapse of the food chain (and especially by the lack of photosynthesis), the reduction or loss of dissolved oxygen in the water, and low temperatures. But in many cases, species living in freshwater environments had advantages over sea creatures that bolstered their chances of survival, Lewis and his colleagues explain this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences. Not that the animals living in lakes and rivers escaped unscathed, Lewis says: "A lot of them died, too, it's just that many species as a whole were able to persist until conditions returned to something near normal."

The Earth will get another close shave Monday, when the 152 metre asteroid 2003 DZ15 makes a pass by our fair planet on the night of July 29^th/30^th at 3.5 million kilometres distant. This is over 9 times the Earth-Moon distance and poses no threat to our world.

This is much smaller than 2.75 kilometre 1998 QE2, which sailed by (bad pun intended) our fair world at 5.8 million kilometres distant on May 31st, 2013. The Virtual Telescope Project will be presenting a free online event to monitor the passage of NEA 2003 DZ15 starting Monday night July 29^th at 22:00 UT/6:00 PM EDT.

An Apollo asteroid, 2003 DZ15 was confirmed by the Lowell Observatory and NEAT's Mount Palomar telescope upon discovery in February 2003. This is its closest approach to the Earth for this century, although it will make a pass nearly as close to the Earth in 2057 on February 12^th.

When Timothy P. Murray crashed his government-issued Ford Crown Victoria in 2011, he was fortunate, as car accidents go. Mr. Murray, then the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, was not seriously hurt, and he told the police he was wearing a seat belt and was not speeding.

But a different story soon emerged. Mr. Murray was driving over 100 miles an hour and was not wearing a seat belt, according to the computer in his car that tracks certain actions. He was given a $555 ticket; he later said he had fallen asleep.

The case put Mr. Murray at the center of a growing debate over a little-known but increasingly important piece of equipment buried deep inside a car: the event data recorder, more commonly known as the black box.

About 96 percent of all new vehicles sold in the United States have the boxes, and in September 2014, if the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has its way, all will have them.

The boxes have long been used by car companies to assess the performance of their vehicles. But data stored in the devices is increasingly being used to identify safety problems in cars and as evidence in traffic accidents and criminal cases. And the trove of data inside the boxes has raised privacy concerns, including questions about who owns the information, and what it can be used for, even as critics have raised questions about its reliability.

Dolphins have previously shown the ability to perform simple math, rescue people and even spot mines for the military. A new study from British researchers shows that the marine mammals are capable of doing something else once thought to be unique to humans - call each other by name.

According to the new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, individual dolphins have a signature whistle that they use to identify themselves and each other.

Marine biologists had previously suspected that individual dolphins have a unique name, but the new study from scientists at the University of St. Andrew found that dolphins respond to hearing their identifier by repeating it back, as if to say, "I'm here!"

"If we look at complex ability in communication in human language, one of the key features that is important to us is that we can copy sounds, we can invent new sounds," study co-author Vincent Janik, a biologist at St Andrews University, told The Guardian. "We can then use those sounds and attach some kind of meaning to them and use them to refer to objects and to refer to external things in the world."