Rare evidence of the long-held belief that humans are still evolving has been unearthed in the parish records of a French-Canadian island on the Saint Lawrence seaway, researchers say.

Ile aux Coudres is located 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Quebec City. Between 1720 and 1773, 30 families settled there and the population reached 1,585 people by the 1950s.

Poring over church registers containing detailed records of dates of births, marriages and deaths, researchers found the age of women when they had their first child fell from about 26 to 22 years over 140 years from 1799 to just before 1940.

After discounting environmental and social factors, they concluded this substantial change from one generation to the next "largely occurred at the genetic level."

"It is often claimed that modern humans have stopped evolving because cultural and technological advancements have annihilated natural selection," says the study led by Emmanuel Milot at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America's Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots' every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military's Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech's computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military's most important weapons system.

"We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back," says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. "We think it's benign. But we just don't know."

What toppled giant Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun, to its tilt is a long-standing puzzle. Scientists suspect it was left spinning on its side after a collision with an object about twice the size of Earth.

But that doesn't explain why Uranus's moons spin sideways, relative to their orbital planes, matching almost exactly their parent planet's 98-degree tilt.

Jupiter's spin axis, by comparison is tilted 3 degrees; Earth's, 23 degrees; Saturn and Neptune, 29 degrees.

The answer, suggests a team of scientists, is that Uranus was pummeled more than once. Computer models show a series of impacts by Earth-sized objects could have left Uranus on its side before its moons formed.

A single crash, the researchers say, would have left any moons accumulating from a cloud of materials surrounding Uranus spinning in the opposite direction from how they appear today.

The research has implications for understanding how the solar system -- and other planetary families beyond our solar system -- formed and evolved.

"Mars is not a dead planet -it undergoes climate changes that are even more pronounced than on Earth."

James Head, planetary geologist, Brown University

The prevailing thinking is that Mars is a planet whose active climate has been confined to the distant past. About 3.5 billion years ago, the Red Planet had extensive flowing water and then fell quiet - deadly quiet. It didn't seem the climate had changed much since. However, studies by scientists at Brown University have shown that Mars' climate has been much more dynamic than previously believed.

This high-resolution image above, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows the rock debris that Brown scientists believe was left by a glacier that rose at least one kilometer from the surrounding plain and flowed downward onto the canyon.

After examining this stunning high-resolution images taken by the Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers documented for the first time that ice packs at least 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) thick and perhaps 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) thick existed along Mars' mid-latitude belt as recently as 100 million years ago. In addition, the team believes other images tell them that glaciers flowed in localized areas in the last 10 to 100 million years - a blink of the eye in Mars's geological timeline.

This evidence of recent activity means the Martian climate may change again and could bolster speculation about whether the Red Planet can, or did, support life.

"We've gone from seeing as a dead planet for three-plus billion years to one that has been alive in recent times," said Jay Dickson, a research analyst in the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown and lead author. "[The finding] has changed our perspective from a planet that has been dry and dead to one that is icy and active."

Scientists say the Crab Pulsar is blasting out gamma rays at a higher rate than can be explained by current scientific models.

It's emitting the highest-energy gamma rays ever observed from a pulsar - a highly magnetized and rapidly spinning neutron star - at more than 100 billion electron volts. That's more than 50 billion times more energy than the visible light from the sun.

"This is the highest energy pulsar system ever detected," said Rene Ong, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and spokesperson for the VERITAS collaboration at the Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "It is a completely new and surprising phenomenon for pulsars."

All previous observations of pulsars have indicated that the radiation cuts off at the high energies the team observed.

"It means the radiation we detect must be a new component that was completely unexpected," says Ong.

The Crab Pulsar spins at about 30 times a second, emitting gamma rays through 'curvature radiation', an effect that creates a lighthouse-like beacon that winks on and off.

A new method of cloning produces working stem cells, but the technique has no clinical purpose due to its incompatibility with human tissue

Researchers from the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory have discovered what has previously prevented cloning methods from working properly, thus achieving a self-reproducing line of embryonic stem cells.

There have been many issues with cloning in the past. For instance, large numbers of human egg cells are required for the process, which are difficult to obtain, and there are ethical questions associated with the use of eggs in such research. While the introduction of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have dodged some of the ethical issues, they do not act entirely like embryonic stem cells.

In some cases, egg cells will just stop developing at some point. Even in some instances where adult DNA was successfully inserted into an egg cell to create a clone in animal models, such as Dolly the sheep, they can grow to have health problems and die at an early age.

Devastating freak waves the size of a 10-storey building can be more common than previously thought, say researchers.

The findings, by civil engineer Dr Alessandro Toffoli, of Swinburne University of Technology, and colleagues, have been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"They call them freak because they are not well understood," says Toffoli.

Freak waves are steep waves that can appear to come out of nowhere. They are hundreds of metres long can be two to three times higher than the surrounding waves at the time.

A NASA spacecraft has found an unusual three-planet system that consists of one super-Earth and two Neptune-size worlds orbiting a star similar to our sun, a new study reveals.

The planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope discovered the three planets around the star Kepler-18, which is only 10 percent larger than the sun and contains 97 percent of the sun's mass, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin said. The alien system could also host more planets than have been found so far, they added.

All three planets, which are designated Kepler-18b, c, and d, orbit much closer to their parent star than Mercury does to the sun. The planet Kepler-18b orbits closest to the star, taking 3.5 days to complete its journey. The planet is about 6.9 times the mass of Earth and is twice the size of our home planet, making planet b a so-called super-Earth, the researchers said.

Kepler-18c, which takes 7.6 days to orbit the star, is about 5.5 times larger than our planet, and has a mass equivalent to about 17 Earths. Kepler-18d has a 14.9-day orbit and is about seven times the size of Earth, with a mass of about 16 Earths. According to these figures, planets c and d qualify as low-density "Neptune-class" worlds, the researchers said.

The findings were presented Tuesday (Oct. 4) at a joint meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Science in Nantes, France. The study will be published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series in November.

Scientists have for the first time used a form of cloning to create personalized embryonic stem cells, an important advancement that could impact the study and treatment of diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

The researchers derived embryonic stem cells from individual patients by adding the nuclei of adult skin cells from patients with type-1 diabetes to unfertilized donor oocytes.

Stem cells are primitive cells that differentiate into the various tissues of the body. Scientists believe stem cells may someday be used in humans to create replacements for diseased or damaged organs.

The idea behind the current research is to take versatile stem cells from early-stage embryos that have been "cloned" to the same DNA as the patient, so that any cells are recognized as friendly by the patient's immune system. By comparison, conventional cloning involves taking an egg and removing its nucleus, which contains the vital DNA code. The core is then replaced with the nucleus of a cell from the donor, and the two parts are fused together using electricity.

"The specialized cells of the adult human body have an insufficient ability to regenerate missing or damaged cells caused by many diseases and injuries," said study leader Dr. Dieter Egli at The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Laboratory in New York City.

That song from Aladdin -- A Whole New World -- is a sneaky ditty. Just when you think you've managed to rid your head of its infectious melody, it has a funny way of skimming the clouds of memory and floating back into your consciousness.

Especially when Princeton University graduate student Noah Jafferis just developed a flying carpet that is neither animated, nor fictional. But you do have to stretch your imagination a little bit. The fully functional, miniature carpet is actually a 4-inch sheet of plastic, but the technology it employs is anything but exaggerated.

Jafferis' prototype "flies" using waves of electrical currents to drive thin pockets of air above a flat surface, but it won't be soaring and darting over palace kingdoms anytime soon. In fact, currently it can only travel at speeds of around one centimeter per second.

Professor James Sturm, lab leader of Jafferis' research team, told the BBC the "flying carpet" faces many challenges.

"What was difficult was controlling the precise behavior of the sheet as it deformed at high frequencies," he said. "Without the ability to predict the exact way it would flex, we couldn't feed in the right electrical currents to get the propulsion to work properly."