A loving gaze helps firm up the bond between parent and child, building social skills that last a lifetime. But what happens when mom is blind? A new study shows that the children of sightless mothers develop healthy communication skills and can even outstrip the children of parents with normal vision.

Eye contact is one of the most important aspects of communication, according to Atsushi Senju, a developmental cognitive neuroscientist at Birkbeck, University of London. Autistic people don't naturally make eye contact, however, and they can become anxious when urged to do so. Children for whom face-to-face contact is drastically reduced - babies severely neglected in orphanages or children who are born blind - are more likely to have traits of autism, such as the inability to form attachments, hyperactivity, and cognitive impairment.

To determine whether eye contact is essential for developing normal communication skills, Senju and colleagues chose a less extreme example: babies whose primary caregivers (their mothers) were blind. These children had other forms of loving interaction, such as touching and talking. But the mothers were unable to follow the babies' gaze or teach the babies to follow theirs, which normally helps children learn the importance of the eyes in communication.

New computer simulations from a researcher at Ohio State University cast even more doubt on acclaimed explorer Richard E. Byrd and whether the first-ever flight to the North Pole was truly a success.

According to Byrd, on May 9, 1926 he and co-pilot Floyd Bennett beat the competition and became the first men to fly over the North Pole, reportedly making the trip much faster than anticipated.

Even at the time his trip was met with skepticism, but Byrd stuck to his story and left a legacy as first person to fly over the North Pole. He was ultimately awarded the Medal of Honor for the flight and went on to explore the Antarctic. Skeptics went on to question Byrd's own notes and airspeed calculations long after he died.

"The flight was incredibly controversial," Gerald Newsom, emeritus professor of astronomy at Ohio State said in a statement. "The people defending Byrd were vehement that he was a hero, and the people attacking him said he was one of the world's greatest frauds. The emotion! It was incredibly vitriolic."

Now, Newsom reports that his supercomputer simulations of atmospheric conditions on the day of the flight and analysis of Byrd's navigation techniques show that Byrd came close - that he was geographically near the North Pole - but likely didn't make it to the pinpoint North Pole.

"I worked out that if Byrd did make it, he must have had very unusual wind conditions. But it's clear that he really gave it a valiant try, and he deserves a lot of respect," Newsom said.

"This type of analysis by itself will not resolve any controversy over whether Byrd reached the pole. But it does indicate that he was considerably more likely to have ended up short of his goal than to have exceeded it."

Newsom's study appears in a recent issue of the journal Polar Record.

A team of international researchers has found evidence of periodontitis, tooth decay, and accident-related dental damage in a mummy from 3,300 BC known as Ötzi.

Their findings provide clues about the dietary patterns of the Neolithic iceman and on the evolution of medically significant oral pathologies (European Journal of Oral Sciences, April 9, 2013).

The Neolithic mummy Ötzi, which was discovered 20 years ago, displays an astoundingly large number of oral diseases and dentition problems that are still widespread today, the researchers noted.

He suffered from heavy dental abrasions, had several carious lesions -- some severe -- and had mechanical trauma to one of his front teeth, likely due to an accident, according to lead author Frank Rühli, MD, PhD, from the Centre for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.

Co-author Roger Seiler, DMD, examined Ötzi's teeth using computed tomography and concluded that the loss of the periodontium has always been a very common disease, as the discovery of Stone Age skulls and the examination of Egyptian mummies has previously shown.

The huge asteroid impact thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago may have painted the sky a blazing-hot red and sparked a cataclysmic global firestorm, researchers say.

Most scientists believe the mass die-off known as the K-T extinction - which saw up to 80 percent of all species vanish - was caused by an asteroid or comet that carved out the 112-mile (180 kilometers) Chicxulub crater in what is today Mexico.

Researchers who created a new model of the disaster say the impact would have sent vaporized particles of rock high above the planet's atmosphere, where they would have condensed into sand-grain-sized bits. Falling back to Earth, the hot ejected rock material may have dumped enough heat in the upper atmosphere to cause it to bake at 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1,482 degrees Celsius), turning the sky red for several hours.

This infrared "heat pulse" would have acted like a broiler oven, igniting tinder below and cooking every twig, bush, tree, and basically every living thing not shielded underground or underwater, the researchers say.

"It's likely that the total amount of infrared heat was equal to a 1 megaton bomb exploding every four miles over the entire Earth," study researcher Douglas Robertson, of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, said in a statement.

Scientists reason they have identified a transitional communication 'missing link' between human speech and the sounds monkeys make.

According to a story filed by The Register, researchers have been studying Gelada baboons, which live in the Ethiopian highlands. They have discovered similarities between the lip-smacking sounds that these primates make and to patterns in human speech.

Thore Bergman, Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, said the noises are strikingly similar to those made by human beings, to the point that he said it sounded like people talking while he was in their proximity.

Bergman said,

"I would find myself frequently looking over my shoulder to see who was talking to me, but it was just the geladas. It was unnerving to have primate vocalizations sound so much like human voices."

Can money buy immortality? Russian Internet mogul Dmitry Itskov believes that through his newest venture he'll be able to give humans the ability to live forever through his 2045 Initiative.

By the year 2045, Itskov's group aspires to create the technology in which the person's consciousness is transferred into "hologram-like human avatars." Itskov's idea might not be technologically possible now, but that doesn't mean it isn't plausible in the near future.

However, if there's one constant so far in the history of men pursuing the eternal life, it's that none of them have succeeded.

The nose is a highly specialized organ, and for years it has been assumed that it is the only part of the human body which is finely attuned to receiving and process odors.

However, a new study presented at 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans reported that heart, blood, lung and other cells have the same receptors for sensing odors that are present in the nose.

"Our team recently discovered that blood cells - not only cells in the nose - have odorant receptors," said the study's lead researcher Peter Schieberle, director of the German Research Center for Food Chemistry.

"In the nose, these so-called receptors sense substances called odorants and translate them into an aroma that we interpret as pleasing or not pleasing in the brain," he continued. "But surprisingly, there is growing evidence that also the heart, the lungs and many other non-olfactory organs have these receptors. And once a food is eaten, its components move from the stomach into the bloodstream."

"But does this mean that, for instance, the heart 'smells' the steak you just ate? We don't know the answer to that question," Schieberle said.

This is a future we would be wise to avoid, writes Evgeny Morozov

Let's give credit where it is due: Google is not hiding its revolutionary ambitions. As its co-founder Larry Page put it in 2004, eventually its search function "will be included in people's brains" so that "when you think about something and don't really know much about it, you will automatically get information".

Science fiction? The implant is a rhetorical flourish but Mr Page's utopian project is not a distant dream. In reality, the implant does not have be connected to our brains. We carry it in our pockets - it's called a smartphone.

So long as Google can interpret - and predict - our intentions, Mr Page's vision of a continuous and frictionless information supply could be fulfilled. However, to realise this vision, Google needs a wealth of data about us. Knowing what we search for helps - but so does knowing about our movements, our surroundings, our daily routines and our favourite cat videos.

Some of this information has been collected through our browsers but in a messy, disaggregated form. Back in 1996, Google didn't set out with a strategy for world domination. Its acquisition of services such as YouTube was driven by tactics more than strategy. While it was collecting a lot of data from its many services, from email to calendar, such data were kept in separate databases - which made the implant scenario hard to accomplish.

This only applied to men who have hair loss from the top and in front of their heads. Those with a receding hairline are reportedly not affected.

Discovery Date: March 24, 2013

Magnitude: 18.1 mag

Discoverer: A. Boattini (Catalina Sky Survey)
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2013-F58.