New research by scientists at the University of York gives a fresh perspective on the physics of black holes. Black holes are objects in space that are so massive and compact they were described by Einstein as "bending" space. Conventional thinking asserts that black holes swallow everything that gets too close and that nothing can escape, but the study by Prof. Samuel Braunstein and Dr. Manas Patra suggests that information could escape from black holes after all.

The implications could be revolutionary, suggesting that gravity may not be a fundamental force of nature.

Prof. Braunstein says: "Our results didn't need the details of a black hole's curved space geometry. That lends support to recent proposals that space, time and even gravity itself may be emergent properties within a deeper theory. Our work subtly changes those proposals, by identifying quantum information theory as the likely candidate for the source of an emergent theory of gravity."

But quantum mechanics is the theory of light and atoms, and many physicists are skeptical that it could be used to explain the slow evaporation of black holes without incorporating the effects of gravity.

The research, which appears in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters, uses the basic tenets of quantum mechanics to give a new description of information leaking from a black hole.

The save-the-Earth rehearsal mission Don Quijote, commissioned by the European Space Agency, is planned to test the potential of a real life-or-death mission to deflect a mass-extinction-inducing asteroid from a collision course with Earth.

Currently at 'concept' stage, the Don Quijote Near Earth Asteroid Impact Mitigation Mission - has been modelled on a proposed flight to either 2002 AT4 or 1989 ML, both being near-Earth asteroids, though neither represent an obvious collision risk. However, subsequent studies have proposed Amor 2003 SM84 or even 99942 Apophis may be more suitable targets. After all, 99942 Apophis does carry a marginal (1 in 250,000) risk of an Earth impact in 2036.

Whatever the target, a dual launch of two spacecraft is proposed - an Impactor called Hidalgo (a title Cervantes gave to the original Don Quixote) and an Orbiter called Sancho (who was the Don's faithful companion).

While the Impactor's role is self-explanatory, the Orbiter plays a key role in interpreting the impact - the idea being to collect impact momentum and trajectory change data that would then inform future missions, in which the fate of the Earth may really be at stake.

Scientists have been finding evidence of life inside meteorites for well over 100 years - that, or the building blocks of life. The claims of life have been debunked every time, most recently just this past March. It always turns out to be a wishful interpretation of chemicals, minerals and tiny structures inside the meteorite that could be the fossilized husks of long-dead bacteria - but almost certainly aren't.

The building blocks, though, have proved a lot more convincing. As far back as the 1960s, it was clear that amino acids, which link up to form proteins, can and do form in space. And now scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., are claiming that another set of molecules crucial to life have also rained down on Earth: adenine and guanine, two of the four so-called nucleobases that, along with cytosine and thymine, form the rungs of DNA's ladder-like structure.

By itself, that wouldn't mean much, says Michael Callahan, lead author of a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "People have been finding nucleobases in meteorites since the late 1960s," he says. But they've always been among the handful of nucleobases common to organisms on Earth, so contamination on the ground after the meteorite landed has been the most likely explanation. "When I picked up on this research," says Callahan, a chemist with Goddard's Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory, "I was convinced that it was all contamination."

Find an ancient mosquito trapped in amber. Draw dinosaur blood from its belly. Extract DNA from that blood and insert it into a crocodile embryo. Hatch the egg. Feed the dino. Start an amusement park. Don't open the gates.

That series of steps might have sounded pretty fanciful back in 1993 when the blockbuster film Jurassic Park (based on the book by Michael Crichton) hit theaters. Today though, in the world of genome sequencing, transgenic (hybrid) animals, and bacteria built from scratch in the lab, the resurrection of extinct species sounds a little more feasible. Is it?

Turns out scientists might very well create dinosaurs or dinosaur-like creatures in the not-so-distant future. They won't do it in the way Crichton envisioned, though.

Forget trekking to the Amazon; new and mysterious species await discovery much closer to home. A new project is revealing the previously unknown inhabitants of our belly buttons.

The Belly Button Biodiversity project wants to know what miniscule organisms live on us and what we can learn from them. After analyzing swabs taken from 92 participants, researchers have found at least 1,400 species of bacteria - a number they say is conservative.

"About 600 or so don't match up in obvious ways with known species, which is to say either they are new to science or we don't know them well enough," said Rob Dunn, an associate professor in the North Carolina State University biology department, and the belly button principal investigator.

"The crazy thing about these species (is) we are discovering new things that are living on people. They are right there, incredibly close to us," Dunn said.

Once the researchers have the belly-button samples, the team runs a genetic analysis to determine the species present. They also attempt to culture the microbes in petri dishes; however, this technique doesn't work for many species, because they don't like the microbe food in the dishes. In fact, scientists have no idea what many of these species eat.

A hair-thin electronic patch that adheres to the skin like a temporary tattoo could transform medical sensing, computer gaming and even spy operations, according to a US study published Thursday.

The micro-electronics technology, called an epidermal electronic system (EES), was developed by an international team of researchers from the United States, China and Singapore, and is described in the journal Science.

"It's a technology that blurs the distinction between electronics and biology," said co-author John Rogers, a professor in materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Our goal was to develop an electronic technology that could integrate with the skin in a way that is mechanically and physiologically invisible to the user."

The patch could be used instead of bulky electrodes to monitor brain, heart and muscle tissue activity and when placed on the throat it allowed users to operate a voice-activated video game with better than 90 percent accuracy.

Is our universe just one of many? While the concept is bizarre, it's a real possibility, according to scientists who have devised the first test to investigate the idea.

The potential that we live in a multiverse arises from a theory called eternal inflation, which posits that shortly after the Big Bang that formed the universe, space-time expanded at different rates in different places, giving rise to bubble universes that may function with their own separate laws of physics.

The idea has seemed purely hypothetical, until now. In a new study, researchers suggest that if our universe has siblings, we may have bumped into them. Such collisions would have left lasting marks in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the diffuse light left over from the Big Bang that pervades the universe, the researchers say.

"It brings the idea of eternal inflation and bubble collisions into the realm of testable science," said research team member Daniel Mortlock, an astrophysicist at Imperial College London. "If it's not testable, it's hard to even call it science."

Life on Earth may have its origins in outer space, according to Nasa research.

Scientists have analysed meteorites that formed billions of years ago before falling to Earth.

The carbon-rich fragments were found to contain chemicals similar to one of the key components of DNA, the building blocks of life.

Tests show that the presence of these chemicals cannot be explained away by Earthly contamination, suggesting DNA's origins may lie in outer space.

The find comes from U.S. scientists, predominantly Nasa researchers, who analysed the chemical make-up of 12 meteorites.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers said their find has 'far-reaching implications'.

Last year, Arctic scientists discovered a new window into the Earth's violent past. Geochemical evidence from volcanic rocks collected on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic suggests that beneath it lies a region of the Earth's mantle that has largely escaped the billions of years of melting and geological churning that has affected the rest of the planet. Researchers believe the discovery offers clues to the early chemical evolution of the Earth.

The mantle "reservoir," as it is called, dates from just a few tens of million years after the Earth was first assembled from the collisions of smaller bodies. This reservoir likely represents the composition of the mantle shortly after formation of the core, but before the 4.5 billion years of crust formation and recycling modified the composition of most of the rest of Earth's interior.

"This was a key phase in the evolution of the Earth," says co-author Richard Carlson of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. "It set the stage for everything that came after. Primitive mantle such as that we have identified would have been the ultimate source of all the magmas and all the different rock types we see on Earth today."

Researchers say they have created the first ever animal with artificial information in its genetic code.

The technique, they say, could give biologists "atom-by-atom control" over the molecules in living organisms.

One expert the BBC spoke to agrees, saying the technique would be seized upon by "the entire biology community".

The work by a Cambridge University team, which used nematode worms, appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The worms - from the species Caenorhabditis elegans - are 1mm long, with just a thousand cells in their transparent bodies.

What makes the newly created animals different is that their genetic code has been extended to create biological molecules not known in the natural world.

Genes are the DNA blueprints that enable living organisms to construct their biological machinery, protein molecules, out of strings of simpler building blocks called amino acids.

Just 20 amino acids are used in natural living organisms, assembled in different combinations to make the tens of thousands of different proteins needed to sustain life.