For $1,000, you can adopt a security camera in Lancaster.

That's because the Lancaster Community Safety Coalition is embarking on an "Adopt-A-Camera" campaign to raise funds that will help pay for the coalition's 161 surveillance cameras deployed around the city.

"It's an idea that came from our volunteers," said LCSC managing director Wes Farmer.

Added coalition resource development chairman DJ Risk, "Our all-volunteer committee believes this fundraiser will generate interest among individuals and businesses who wish to support LCSC's efforts in enhancing Lancaster's community safety."

Risk said the use of cameras to identify suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings illustrates "how Lancastrians should feel safer. because of LCSC's video evidence project."

The moon generated a surprisingly intense magnetic field until at least 3.56 billion years ago, 160 million years longer than previously thought, a new study reports.

These findings could shed light not just on the magnetic field of the moon, which is now extremely weak, but on that of asteroids and other distant worlds, investigators added.

Earth's magnetic field is created by its internal dynamo, which itself is generated by the planet's churning molten metal core. Research increasingly suggests that the moon once had a dynamo as well, with evidence of magnetism found in lunar rocks returned by Apollo astronauts.

Models of the moon's core suggest its dynamo should have lasted only until about 4.1 billion years ago. However, last year, scientists revealed that the moon possessed a magnetic field for much longer than previously thought, with a powerful dynamo in its core from 4.2 billion years ago to at least 3.72 billion years ago.

Researchers have proposed two possibilities to explain why the moon's dynamo lasted so long. One possible explanation is that giant cosmic impacts set the moon lurching enough to drive its dynamo. Another explanation has to do with how the moon's core spins around a slightly different axis than its surrounding mantle layer, generating wobbles - known as precession - that could dramatically stir its core.

The cosmic-impact idea is supported by the fact that the moon experienced massive collisions until around 3.7 billion years ago, such as the one that created the 715-mile-wide (1,150 kilometers) Mare Imbrium, among other craters.

A humble moth has been identified as having the sharpest hearing in the animal kingdom - up to 150 times more sensitive than a human's.

The greater wax moth (Galleria mellonella) lays its eggs in beehives, where the larvae feed on the wax and debris of the honeycombs.

Now, new research published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters has shown it has extremely high frequency sensitivity in its simply constructed ear.

It is capable of sensing sound frequencies up to 300 kHz, the highest recorded in any creature in the natural world.

Humans hear in the 2 to 5 kHz range.

The researchers said it is an example of a well-known animal with a newly discovered, extraordinary, sensory characteristic.

It also reflects on the 'co-evolution' of animals, as the moth's development is intertwined with that of their predators, bats.

The furry mammals find their way in complete darkness using a biological sonar system called echolation.

When we think of our early human ancestors, we typically picture them roaming as hunter-gatherers across wide African grasslands or arid dusty plains.

But according to a highly controversial scientific theory being debated in London this week, we should abandon this conventional scene and instead imagine our ancestors up to their necks in water, splashing after fish and clams, their primitive lives spent entirely amid wetlands, lakes and rivers.

So says the 'aquatic ape' theory which puts forward the idea that our distant ancestors spent a million years swimming and paddling in water. It argues that this perpetually damp experience shaped us into the hugely successful species that we are today.

The theory also claims to explain many of our most puzzling human quirks - such as why we have evolved as naked primates who walk on two legs rather than four; why we are prone to obesity; and why we have unusually big brains and noses.

This idea, that our forebears evolved during a prolonged period of aquatic living, has resurfaced this week after years of being drowned out by scornful academic laughter.

It was first proposed in England by the eminent zoologist Sir Alister Hardy in 1960. He suggested that around seven million years ago our ancestors lived in an area of Ethiopia that became flooded. To survive they foraged for food in shallow waters. After about a million years the flood waters receded.

Nasa said in a bulletin on its website that while the rate of ammonia leaking from the section of the cooling system has increased the crew were in no danger.

Nasa has insisted that the crew of the International Space Station are safe despite a radiator leak in its power system.

The six-member crew of the space station, which is in orbit 370 km above the earth, reported seeing small white flakes floating away from an area outside the craft yesterday.

Mission Control used external cameras along with images captured by crew members to narrow down the leak's location.

Nasa said in a bulletin on its website that while the rate of ammonia leaking from the section of the cooling system has increased the crew were in no danger.

Ammonia runs through multiple radiator loops to cool the station's power system.

NASA said the leak is increasing from one previously leaking loop that can be bypassed if needed.

The water found on the moon, like that on Earth, came from small meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites in the first 100 million years or so after the solar system formed, researchers from Brown and Case Western Reserve universities and Carnegie Institution of Washington have found.

Evidence discovered within samples of moon dust returned by lunar crews of Apollo 15 and 17 dispels the theory that comets delivered the molecules.

The research is published online in Science Express today.

The discovery's telltale sign is found in the ratio of an isotopic form of hydrogen, called deuterium, to standard hydrogen. The ratio in the Earth's water and in water from specks of volcanic glass trapped in crystals within moon dust match the ratio found in the chondrites. The proportions are far different from those in comet water.

The moon is thought to have formed from a disc of debris left when a giant object hit the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, very early in Earth's history. Scientists have long assumed that the heat from an impact of that size would cause hydrogen and other volatile elements to boil off into space, meaning the moon must have started off completely dry. But recently, NASA spacecraft and new research on samples from the Apollo missions have shown that the moon actually has water, both on and beneath its surface.

As the sun rose over Australia on Friday morning, May 10th, the solar disk turned into a ring of fire. The day began with an annular solar eclipse:
Nicole Hollenbeck took the picture from inside the narrow path of annularity about 70km south of Newman, Australia. At the time, more than 95% of the sun's diameter was covered by the Moon.

In an annular eclipse the Moon is not quite big enough to cover the entire solar disk. A blinding ring of solar fire juts out around the Moon, overwhelming the sun's delicate corona. It may not be the same as totality, but annularity has a charm and beauty all its own. Browse the gallery for more images from the eclipse zone.

Brevard County - Kennedy Space Center, Florida - NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft has discovered a pair of stars that have taken over the title for the third-closest star system to the sun. The duo is the closest star system discovered since 1916.

Both stars in the new binary system are "brown dwarfs," which are stars that are too small in mass to ever become hot enough to ignite hydrogen fusion. As a result, they are very cool and dim, resembling a giant planet like Jupiter more than a bright star like the sun.

"The distance to this brown dwarf pair is 6.5 light-years - so close that Earth's television transmissions from 2006 are now arriving there," said Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a researcher in Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.

"It will be an excellent hunting ground for planets because the system is very close to Earth, which makes it a lot easier to see any planets orbiting either of the brown dwarfs."

The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

In fossil remnants of iron-loving bacteria, researchers of the Cluster of Excellence Origin and Structure of the Universe at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), found a radioactive iron isotope that they trace back to a supernova in our cosmic neighborhood. This is the first proven biological signature of a starburst on our Earth. The age determination of the deep-drill core from the Pacific Ocean showed that the supernova must have occurred about 2.2 million years ago, roughly around the time when the modern human developed.

Most of the chemical elements have their origin in core collapse supernovae. When a star ends its life in a gigantic starburst, it throws most of its mass into space. The radioactive iron isotope Fe-60 is produced almost exclusively in such supernovae. Because its half-life of 2.62 million years is short compared to the age of our solar system, no supernova iron should be present on Earth. Therefore, any discovery of Fe-60 on Earth would indicate a supernova in our cosmic neighborhood. In the year 2004, Fe-60 was discovered on Earth for the first time in a ferromanganese crust obtained from the floor of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Its geological dating puts the event around 2.2 million years ago.

So-called magnetotactic bacteria live within the sediments of Earth's oceans, close to the water-sediment interface. They make within their cells hundreds of tiny crystals of magnetite (Fe3O4), each approximately 80 nanometers in diameter. The magnetotactic bacteria obtain the iron from atmospheric dust that enters the ocean. Nuclear astrophysicist Shawn Bishop from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen conjectured, therefore, that Fe-60 should also reside within those magnetite crystals produced by magnetotactic bacteria extant at the time of the supernova interaction with our planet. These bacterially produced crystals, when found in sediments long after their host bacteria have died, are called "magnetofossils."

A few heavy, unstable atoms have pear-shaped nuclei, research suggests.

The lopsided nuclei, described today (May 8) in the journal Nature, could be good candidates for researchers looking for new types of physics beyond the reigning explanation for the bits of matter that make up the universe (called the Standard Model), said study author Peter Butler, a physicist at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom.

Odd shapes

Whereas most atoms have spherical or football-shaped nuclei, atoms with pear-shaped nuclei at their centers have been predicted to exist. But finding them proved difficult. [See Video of the Strange Pear-Shaped Nuclei]

To find them, Butler and his colleagues used a particle accelerator called REX-ISOLDE at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, or CERN, in Switzerland to accelerate radioactive ions of radon-220 and radium-224 until they reached about 10 percent of the speed of light.

"The [Large Hadron Collider] LHC makes all the big news, but in order to get the particles to high energy it uses a whole chain of low accelerators. What we use is one that is pretty ancient by accelerator standards," Butler said.