Many enigmatic cases of infertility could be explained by a newfound mutation that keeps sperm from reaching eggs, a new study suggests.

These findings could improve screening and treatment of infertile couples, an international team of researchers said.

Infertility affects 10 to 15 percent of the U.S. population, with about half of those cases involving problems with male fertility. One of the mysteries of infertility is that sperm quality and quantity seem to have little to do with whether or not a man is fertile.

The Andromeda Galaxy is revealed in unprecedented detail in four archive observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. They show stars and structure in the galaxy's disc, the halo of stars that surrounds it, and a stream of stars left by a companion galaxy as it was torn apart and pulled in by the galaxy's gravitational forces.

These four observations made by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys give a close up view of the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (M 31). Observations of most galaxies do not show the individual stars - even the most powerful telescopes cannot normally resolve the cloudy white shapes into their hundreds of millions of constituent stars.

In the case of the Andromeda Galaxy, however, astronomers have a few tricks up their sleeves. Firstly, images from Hubble Space Telescope have unparalleled image quality as a result of the telescope's position above the atmosphere. Secondly, M 31 is closer to our own galaxy than any other spiral galaxy (so close that it can even be seen with the naked eye on a very dark night). And thirdly, these observations avoid the crowded centre of the galaxy, where the stars are closest together and hardest to separate from each other.

The resulting images offer a different perspective on a spiral galaxy. Far from being an opaque, dense object, Hubble reminds us that the dominant feature of a galaxy is the huge voids between its stars. Thus, these images do not only show stars in the Andromeda Galaxy (and a handful of bright Milky Way stars that are in the foreground): they also let us see right through the galaxy, revealing far more distant galaxies in the background.

An excavation crew have unearthed a skull at the bottom of Pearl Harbor that archeologists suspect is from a Japanese pilot who died in the historic attack on Dec. 7, 1941.

Archaeologist Jeff Fong of the Naval Facilities Engineering Command Pacific said the early analysis has made him "75 percent sure" that the skull belongs to a Japanese pilot.

The items found with the skull provided some clues to its origin: forks, scraps of metal and a Coca-Cola bottle from the 1940s.

Fifty-five Japanese airmen were killed and 29 of their aircraft were shot down in the attack, while some 2,400 US service members died. No Japanese remains have been found at Pearl Harbor since the Second World War.

Pearl Harbor is home to the USS Arizona Memorial, which sits on top of the battleship that sank during the attack. It still holds the bodies of more than 900 men.

Just like our animal skin - clad ancestors, we gather food with zeal, lust over the most capable mates, and have an aversion to scammers. And we do still wear plenty of animal skins. But does more separate us from our Stone Age forebears than cartoonists and popular psychologists might have us believe?

At first blush, parsing the modern human in terms of behaviors apparently hardwired into the brain over eons of evolution seems like a tidy, straightforward exercise. And 30 years ago, when the field of evolutionary psychology was gaining steam, some facile parallels between ancient and modern behaviors lodged themselves in the popular conceptions of human evolution. "It's very easy to slip into a very simplistic view of human nature," says Robert Kurzban, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, citing the classic Flintstones stereotype.

Advances in neuroscience and genetics now suggest that the human brain has changed more rapidly - and in different ways - than was initially thought, according to a new paper published online July 19 in PLoS Biology.

"There's been a lot of recent evolution - far more than anyone envisioned in the 1980s when this idea came to prominence," says Kevin Laland, a professor at the University of Saint Andrew's School of Biology in Scotland and co-author of the new paper. He and his colleagues argue that today's better understanding of the pace of evolution, human adaptability and the way the mind works all suggest that, contrary to cartoon stereotypes, modern humans are not just primitive savages struggling to make psychological sense of an alien contemporary world.

Some of the most incredible minds on Earth lack this ability to filter irrelevant facts, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that to a savant, the irrelevant IS relevant, and incredibly so. Somehow their brains are able to store and access incredible loads of information, even perceiving and relating to this information in an entirely different way.

Stephen Wiltshire is considered an autistic savant. He has an ability which can certainly be described as a "super power". Sometimes referred to as the "human camera", Wilshire has the unnerving ability to draw exact replicas of intricate structures, buildings and landscapes - virtually anything he lays eyes on - after a quick glance. Without taking notes or drawing rough sketches, Wiltshire methodically replicates what his eyes have seen down to the exact number of windows in tall skyscrapers.

While watching a video (see below) of Stephen drawing Rome, it almost seems as if he is a character straight from NBC's popular TV series Heroes - born with a superhuman ability. Like many other savants, Wiltshire's mind is a mystery. He did not speak his first words, "pencil" and "paper" until he was five years old. Savants like Wiltshire seem to have been born fundamentally different.

Imagine being able to learn one of the most difficult languages on Earth, Icelandic, in just 7 days. Well known Savant, Daniel Tammet, makes is look easy. His extraordinary abilities are linked to synesthesia. He "feels" numbers in terms of texture, shape and color. Some scientists believe that the epileptic seizures he suffered as a small child, which nearly ended his life, somehow unlocked the door to an incredible ability that may be inherent in all humans.

Individuals have been known to develop extraordinary abilities much later in life, or after severe brain trauma. Alonzo Clemons, for example, developed an incredible talent, which appears to have emerged directly following a head injury as a child. He can see a fleeting image (on a television screen for example) of any animal, and in less than 20 minutes sculpt a perfect replica of that animal in three-dimensional accuracy. The wax animal is correct in each and every detail, down to each fiber and muscle.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite - temporarily designated P4 -- was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet.

The new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. It has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 648 miles (1,043 km) across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter (32 to 113 km).

"I find it remarkable that Hubble's cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles (5 billion km)," said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who led this observing program with Hubble.

The finding is a result of ongoing work to support NASA's New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015. The mission is designed to provide new insights about worlds at the edge of our solar system. Hubble's mapping of Pluto's surface and discovery of its satellites have been invaluable to planning for New Horizons' close encounter.

"This is a fantastic discovery," said New Horizons' principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "Now that we know there's another moon in the Pluto system, we can plan close-up observations of it during our flyby."

The new moon is located between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, which Hubble discovered in 2005. Charon was discovered in 1978 at the U.S. Naval Observatory and first resolved using Hubble in 1990 as a separate body from Pluto.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has returned some remarkable new imagery of the asteroid Vesta, now that it is safely in orbit around the 530km-wide rock.

The pictures reveal the ancient body's craters, slopes and grooves in detail that is far beyond the vision of Earth-bound telescopes, including Hubble.

Dawn scientists will have a busy year interpreting the asteroid's features.

They will be looking for some fresh insight on how such objects came into being 4.6 billion years ago.

It is often said the asteroids, which dominate a region of space between Mars and Jupiter, are the rubble that was left over after the planets proper had formed.

A consortium led by scientists at the University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School has constructed the world's most detailed genetic map.

A genetic map specifies the precise areas in the genetic material of a sperm or egg where the DNA from the mother and father has been reshuffled in order to produce this single reproductive cell. The biological process whereby this reshuffling occurs is known as "recombination." While almost every genetic map built so far has been developed from people of European ancestry, this new map is the first constructed from African American recombination genomic data.

"This is the world's most accurate genetic map," said David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, who co-led the study with Simon Myers, a lecturer in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford.

The researchers were surprised to find that positions where recombination occurs in African Americans are significantly different from non-African populations.

Investigators recently discovered that Ganymede, in orbit around Jupiter, is the only moon in our entire solar system to feature a magnetic field. Thus far, studies only identified such structures on planets such as Earth and some of the gas giants.

One of the easiest way to check for the existence of magnetic fields is to try and see whether the object you are interested in features auroras at its poles. The northern/southern lights are always produced by the interactions between a magnetosphere and charged particles from the Sun.

The latter come in waves, and slam against specific layers of the atmosphere, that repel the. However, there is currently no known mechanism through which a magnetosphere can exist without a magnetic field. And the existence of a magnetic field calls for some very specific properties.

For example, as far as our planet goes, the magnetosphere is created by the motions of the solid core inside a thick layer of magma in the mantle. The core is made up almost entirely out of iron, and so the motion creates a huge dynamo effect.

Shot? Blown up? Chill out until you reach hospital

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is offering money to researchers looking at identifying and controlling timing mechanisms in cells, including those of the human body.

The blue sky gazing loon-collective notes that no single "master switch" has been found to control genes' activities.

But it hopes that the "Biochronicity" programme will find a way to understand and predict "temporal features of biological systems".

The four-year programme will start by identifying "episequences and validation in experimental biological systems".

After two years, DARPA hopes to move to Phase II, which aims to conduct Live Fire Tests.