Like a plot from a horror film, there's a virus that brainwashes caterpillars, forces them to march up trees, then turns them to goo.

Now scientists at Penn State University have found the single gene that enables the virus to carry out its dark deeds.

The caterpillars would normally return to the ground to hide after feeding on leaves, but the baculovirus reprogrammes them to stay in the trees, melts them, then drips down among the remains to infect more of the creatures.

Researcher Kelli Hoover, writing in Science, said: 'When gypsy moth caterpillars are healthy and happy, they go up into the trees at night to feed on leaves, and then climb back down in the morning to hide from predators during the day.

No-fly zones will come into effect on the moon for the very first time by the end of this month! Why, even buffer zones that spacecraft may have to avoid will come into existence. The reason: avoiding any spraying of rocket exhaust or dust onto certain historical sites and artefacts on the moon.

The historical sites are of course the Apollo landing sites and artefacts present on the moon. And the "recommendations" are for preserving and protecting these historical sites. There are currently more than three dozen historical sites that preserve the more than four-decade-old remains.

"Apollo 11 and 17 sites [will] remain off-limits, with ground-travel buffers of 75 metres and 225 metres from each respective lunar lander," states the July 20 guidelines of NASA. Science journal had obtained the guidelines.

A startling mix of human and primitive traits found in the brains, hips, feet and hands of an extinct species identified last year make a strong case for it being the immediate ancestor to the human lineage, scientists have announced.

These new findings could rewrite long-standing theories about the precise steps human evolution took, they added, including the notion that early human female hips changed shape to accommodate larger-brained offspring. There is also new evidence suggesting that this species had the hands of a toolmaker.

Fossils of the extinct hominid known as Australopithecus sediba were accidentally discovered by the 9-year-old son of a scientist in the remains of a cave in South Africa in 2008, findings detailed by researchers last year. Australopithecus means "southern ape," and is a group that includes the iconic fossil Lucy, while sediba means "wellspring" in the South African language Sotho.

Two key specimens were discovered - a juvenile male as developed as a 10- to 13-year-old human and an adult female maybe in her late 20s or early 30s. The species is both a hominid and a hominin - hominids include humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and their extinct ancestors, while hominins include those species after Homo, the human lineage, split from that of chimpanzees.

Los Angeles - California astronomers have found the closest, brightest supernova of its kind in 25 years, catching the glimmer of a tiny self-destructing star a mere 21 million light years from Earth and soon visible to amateur skywatchers.

The discovery, announced on Wednesday, was made in what was believed to be the first hours of the rare cosmic explosion using a special telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego and powerful supercomputers at a government laboratory in Berkeley.

The detection so early of a supernova so near has created a worldwide stir among astronomers, who are clamoring to observe it with every telescope at their disposal, including the giant Hubble Space Telescope.

Scientists behind the discovery at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley say the extraordinary phenomenon -- labeled by the rather obscure designation PTF 11kly -- will likely become the most-studied supernova in history.

"It is an instant cosmic classic," said Peter Nugent, the senior scientist at UC Berkeley who first spotted it.

Last week, an artificial intelligence computer named Cleverbot stunned the world with a stellar performance on the Turing Test - an IQ test of sorts for "chatbots," or conversational robots. Cleverbot, it seems, can carry on a conversation as well as any human can.

In the Turing Test - conceived by British computer scientist Alan Turing in the 1950s - chatbots engage in typed conversations with humans, and try to fool them into thinking they're humans, too. (As a control, some users unknowingly chat with humans pretending to be chatbots.) At a recent Turing competition, Cleverbot fooled 59 percent of its human interlocutors into thinking it was itself a human. Analysts have argued that, because the chatbot's success rate was better than chance, the computer passed.

So what magnificent algorithm lies in the gearbox of this brilliant machine, which can seem more human than not? How have its programmers equipped it with so much conversational, contextual and factual knowledge?

The answer is very simple: crowdsourcing. As the chatbot's designer, Rollo Carpenter, put it in a video (above) explainer produced by PopSci.com, "You can call it a conversational Wikipedia if you like."

Asian nation is concerned about whether Android is blocking competitors' search engines

Has Google Inc. been playing dirty with Android? That's the allegation raised by some South Korean rivals. The smartphone and tablet OS may be dominating in sales, but it's also drawing increasing antitrust scrutiny in both the U.S. and South Korea.

South Korea antitrust regulators' pending investigation of the Android accusations heated up this week with authorities raiding Google's Seoul offices, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

In South Korea, search portal firms NHN Corp. (SEO:035420) and Daum Communications Corp. (KDQ:035720) have accused Google of using their control of Android to block rival search portals on smartphones. The companies do not accuse Google of overtly blocking their portals, rather they say that Google's bundling of a search engine with Android and making it labor intensive to "swap in" a different search amounts to an anticompetitive tactic.

Your wedding ring, the gold chain around your neck... even the platinum in your catalytic converter. For all of these you can thank a slew of meteorites that pelted Earth around 3.9 billion years ago, says new research.

Certain metals like gold, platinum, nickel, tungsten and iridium are attracted to iron, which comprises the Earth's core. So when the Earth first formed as a molten mass, all of these elements should have migrated to the core, leaving the outer layers of Earth stripped of its precious metals.

Yet as hopeful '49-ers knew, Earth's crust is laced with these enticing elements. Geologists have posed several theories to explain this puzzle, but one suggests that Earth was bombarded with meteorites between 3.8 and 4 billion years ago, studding the early crust with our favorite shiny metals. These metals then became incorporated into the modern mantle over time.

This idea is supported by the presence of craters on the moon, which date back to the same time, suggesting that the moon was also hit. Now, research published today in Nature, provides further evidence in favor of this explanation.

A team led by Matthias Willbold of the University of Bristol, U.K., sampled ancient rocks from southwest Greenland that formed some of the Earth's earliest crust, predating the proposed bombardment, and compared those with newer rocks from other places representing the modern mantle.

As early as Sept. 8th, NASA's GRAIL mission will blast off to uncover some of the mysteries beneath the surface of the Moon. That cratered gray exterior hides some tantalizing things - even, perhaps, a long-lost companion.

If a paper published recently in the journal Nature* is right, two moons once graced our night skies. The proposition has not been proven, but has drawn widespread attention.

"It's an intriguing idea," says David Smith, GRAIL deputy principal investigator at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "And it would be a way to explain one of the great perplexities of the Earth-Moon system - the Moon's strangely asymmetrical nature. Its near and far sides are substantially different."

The Moon's near side, facing us, is dominated by vast smooth 'seas' of ancient hardened lava. In contrast, the far side is marked by mountainous highlands. Researchers have long struggled to account for the differences, and the "two moon" theory introduced by Martin Jutzi and Erik Asphaug of the University of California at Santa Cruz is the latest attempt.

Scientists agree that when a Mars-sized object crashed into our planet about 4 billion years ago, the resulting debris cloud coalesced to form the Moon. Jutzi and Asphaug posit that the debris cloud actually formed two moons. A second, smaller chunk of debris landed in just the right orbit to lead or follow the bigger Moon around Earth.

"Normally, such moons accrete into a single body shortly after formation," explains Smith. "But the new theory proposes that the second moon ended up at one of the Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system."

The Black Death arrived in London in the fall of 1348, and although the worst passed in less than a year, the disease took a catastrophic toll. An emergency cemetery in East Smithfield received more than 200 bodies a day between the following February and April, in addition to bodies buried in other graveyards, according to a report from the time.

The disease that killed Londoners buried in East Smithfield and at least one of three Europeans within a few years time is commonly believed to be bubonic plague, a bacterial infection marked by painful, feverish, swollen lymph nodes, called buboes. Plague is still with us in many parts of the world, although now antibiotics can halt its course.

But did this disease really cause the Black Death? The story behind this near-apocalypse in 14th century Europe is not clear-cut, since what we know about modern plague in many ways does not match with what we know about the Black Death. And if plague isn't responsible for the Black Death, scientists wonder what could've caused the sweeping massacre and whether that killer is still lurking somewhere.

Now, a new study using bone and teeth taken from East Smithfield adds to mounting evidence exhumed from Black Death graves and tantalizes skeptics with hints at the true nature of the disease that wiped out more than a third of Europeans 650 years ago.

This team of researchers approached the topic with open minds when they began looking for genetic evidence of the killer.

"Essentially by looking at the literature on the Black Death there were several candidates for what could have been the cause," said Sharon DeWitte, one of the researchers who is now an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of South Carolina.

Their first suspect: Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes modern plague, including bubonic plague.

Dolphins do not whistle, but instead "talk" to each other using a process very similar to the way that humans communicate, according to a new study.

While many dolphin calls sound like whistles, the study found the sounds are produced by tissue vibrations analogous to the operation of vocal folds by humans and many other land-based animals.

Communicating similar to the way that humans do solves what would otherwise be a major dolphin problem.

"When we or animals are whistling, the tune is defined by the resonance frequency of some air cavity," said Peter Madsen, lead author of the research appearing in Royal Society Biology Letters. "The problem is that when dolphins dive, their air cavities are compressed due to the increasing ambient pressure, which means that they would produce a higher and higher pitch the deeper they dive if they actually whistle."

Madsen, a researcher in the Department of Biological Sciences at Aarhus University, and his team studied how dolphins communicate by digitizing and reanalyzing recordings made in 1977 of a 12-year-old male bottlenose dolphin.