A dramatic and surprising magnetic effect of light discovered by University of Michigan researchers could lead to solar power without traditional semiconductor-based solar cells.

The researchers found a way to make an "optical battery," said Stephen Rand, a professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics and Applied Physics.

In the process, they overturned a century-old tenet of physics.

"You could stare at the equations of motion all day and you will not see this possibility. We've all been taught that this doesn't happen," said Rand, an author of a paper on the work published in the Journal of Applied Physics. "It's a very odd interaction. That's why it's been overlooked for more than 100 years."

Light has electric and magnetic components. Until now, scientists thought the effects of the magnetic field were so weak that they could be ignored. What Rand and his colleagues found is that at the right intensity, when light is traveling through a material that does not conduct electricity, the light field can generate magnetic effects that are 100 million times stronger than previously expected. Under these circumstances, the magnetic effects develop strength equivalent to a strong electric effect.

Scientists have created genetically modified cattle that produce "human" milk in a bid to make cows' milk more nutritious.

The scientists have successfully introduced human genes into 300 dairy cows to produce milk with the same properties as human breast milk.

Human milk contains high quantities of key nutrients that can help to boost the immune system of babies and reduce the risk of infections.

The scientists behind the research believe milk from herds of genetically modified cows could provide an alternative to human breast milk and formula milk for babies, which is often criticised as being an inferior substitute.

They hope genetically modified dairy products from herds of similar cows could be sold in supermarkets. The research has the backing of a major biotechnology company.

The work is likely to inflame opposition to GM foods. Critics of the technology and animal welfare groups reacted angrily to the research, questioning the safety of milk from genetically modified animals and its effect on the cattle's health.

EU-funded researchers have developed an innovative new technique that can for the first time map both the connections and functions of nerve cells in the brain, moving scientists one step closer to the development of a computer model of the brain.

The study, published in Nature, was carried out by a group of neuroscientists from University College London (UCL) and was funded in part by a European Research Council starting grant under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

There are estimated to be 100 billion nerve cells ('neurons') in the brain, each connected to thousands of other nerve cells - resulting in an approximate total of 150 trillion connections (or 'synapses').

Astronomers said yesterday they believed the first galaxies formed just 200 million years after the Big Bang, a finding that challenges assumptions of how the Universe grew from infancy into childhood.

Their evidence comes from a remote galaxy whose glimmer of light was teased open to reveal the presence of truly ancient stars.

"We have discovered a distant galaxy that began forming stars just 200 million years after the Big Bang," said lead author Johan Richard, an astrophysicist at the Lyon Observatory, southeastern France.

"This challenges theories of how soon galaxies formed and evolved in the first years of the Universe. It could even help solve the mystery of how the hydrogen fog that filled the early Universe was cleared.''

The oldest galaxy previously detected and confirmed was created some 480 million years after the Big Bang.

To all appearances, the new finding could lay a claim on being the record-beater.

NASA says its troubled James Webb Space Telescope, which could help find life out in space and insights into the early universe, likely won't launch until 2018.

In November, an independent panel recommended the launch date be pushed back from 2014 to 2015, blaming poor program management and overly optimistic schedules, NewScientist.com reported Tuesday.

Now NASA says over-budget telescope, successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, probably will be delayed even further.

Testifying at a congressional budget hearing Monday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the agency now thinks 2018 "is a reasonable launch date."

The November panel said the telescope would require an extra $500 million to hit a 2015 launch date, and warned the launch could slip to 2017 or 2018 with a leaner budget.

In June 1908, an explosion rocked a remote, swampy area in central Siberia, in Russia; it came to be known as the "Tunguska event." A later expedition to the site found that 20 miles of trees had been knocked down and set alight by the blast. And today, it is understood that Tunguska's devastation was caused by a 100-foot asteroid that had entered Earth's atmosphere, causing an airburst.

Some 13,000 years earlier, just after the end of the last ice age, the Earth's climate had begun to warm up to temperatures like we enjoy today, when an occurrence thought by some researchers to be an extraterrestrial impact set off an "impact winter". And caused a return to ice age conditions that lasted another thousand years, or so. The "Younger Dryas event," as it is known, coincided with the end of the prehistoric Clovis culture. And the mass extinction of almost all of the giant animals that lived on North America at the time.

Before the Younger Dryas event, much of north America had an ecology similar to what we see today in the lush African savanna. And after the YD event more then 35 genera had vanished. The giant sloth, short faced bear, dire wolves, saber toothed cats, a species of camel, horses, and two species of elephant were wiped out by the YD event. And that's just the short list. All of that astonishing biodiversity was blown away.

Perhaps the single most important paper on the subject of the Younger Dryas, is the 2007 paper by R.B. Firestone et al, and titled: Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling.

In that paper, a team of twenty six scientists, studying sedimentary deposits presented a whole suite of compelling evidence for a massive impact event of a comet that appears to have broken up, and scattered, fragments all across North America. The multiple, air bursts are thought to have triggered wide spread bio mass burning on a continental scale. As well as causing a return to ice age conditions, and the extinction of many species. Including the mega fauna like mastodons, wooly mammoths, and giant sloths.

A giant vortex at the south pole of Venus is actually a shape-shifter that changes form at least once a day, at times bizarrely taking on the appearance of a giant letter "S" or the number "8," a new study reveals.

Venus, the second closest planet to the sun, possesses giant, hot and essentially permanent vortexes of clouds whirling fast at its poles. These result from how Venus' atmosphere circulates much faster than any other rocky planet's in the solar system - the cloud-level atmosphere of Venus on average spins 60 times faster than the planet's surface.

The vortexes cannot really be called storms, as scientists have seen neither rain nor lightning in them.

Past images suggested the roughly 1,200-mile-wide (2,000-kilometer) southern polar vortex was only a spinning oval shape. However, new infrared pictures from the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) on the European Space Agency's Venus Express mission revealed far more detail than past images, showing that the vortex's internal structure changes shape at least every 24 hours.

Most years, Spaniards encounter just one giant squid as long as a city bus along their northern shores - a fishermen might haul one up from the depths accidentally, or beachgoers might stumble across a carcass stranded on a beach. So it was surprising in 2001 when five squid littered the beaches over a 2-month period and in 2003 when four washed up or were found floating at sea near death in a single month.

At the time of the strandings, ships offshore were exploring for oil and gas with air guns, which produce high-intensity, low-frequency sounds. Some researchers suspected that the loud noises were harming the squid, just as they are known to harm marine mammals. A new study supports that hunch, reporting massive damage to the sound-detecting structures of squid and other cephalopods that were exposed to loud noises.

In recent years, scientists have gathered evidence that sonar and other humanmade noises may hurt everything from whales to crustaceans. But they didn't know whether this audio pollution could perturb cephalopods - the animal group that includes cuttlefish, squid, and octopuses - because researchers have only recently demonstrated their ability to hear.

Researchers said Sunday they had solved a conundrum about human perception that has stumped philosophers and scientists alike since it was first articulated 323 years ago by an Irish politician in a letter to John Locke.

Imagine, William Molyneux wrote to the great British thinker, that a man blind from birth who has learned to identify objects -- a sphere and a cube, for example -- only through his sense of touch is suddenly able to see.

The puzzle, he continued, is "Whether he Could, by his Sight, and before he touch them, know which is the Globe and which the Cube?"

For philosophers of the time, answering "Molyneux's question," as it was known ever after, would resolve a fundamental uncertainty about the human mind.

Empiricists believed that we are born blank slates, and become the sum total of our accumulated experience.

So-called "nativists" countered that our minds are, from the outset, pre-stocked with ideas waiting to be activated by sight, sound and touch.

If a blind man who miraculously recovered his sight could instantly distinguish the cube from the globe it would mean the knowledge was somehow innate, they argued.

More recently, this "nurture vs. nature" debate has found its counterpart in modern neuroscience.

Russia is planning a massive increase in its space launches and may even build a base on the moon as part of a manned mission to Mars in the next two decades, according to reports.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday that his country's plans go well beyond transporting crews to the International Space Station. With a 2010-2011 space budget estimated at 200 billion rubles ($7.09 billion), Russia is the world's fourth-largest spender on space after U.S. space agency NASA, the European Space Agency and France, Reuters reports.

"Russia should not limit itself to the role of an international space ferryman. We need to increase our presence on the global space market," Putin is quoted as having said at his residence outside Moscow. The meeting was planned specifically to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering space flight.