Astronomy and Astrophysics is publishing a new study of the orbital evolution of minor planets Ceres and Vesta, a few days before the flyby of Vesta by the Dawn spacecraft. A team of astronomers found that close encounters among these bodies lead to strong chaotic behavior of their orbits, as well as of the Earth's eccentricity. This means, in particular, that the Earth's past orbit cannot be reconstructed beyond 60 million years.

Astronomy and Astrophysics is publishing numerical simulations of the long-term evolution of the orbits of minor planets Ceres and Vesta, which are the largest bodies in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is 6000 times less massive than the Earth and almost 80 times less massive than our Moon. Vesta is almost four times less massive than Ceres.

These two minor bodies, long thought to peacefully orbit in the asteroid belt, are found to affect their large neighbors and, in particular, the Earth in a way that had not been anticipated. This is showed in the new astronomical computations released by Jacques Laskar from Paris Observatory and his colleagues.

Half of the extraordinary heat of the Earth that erupts on its surface volcanically and drives the titanic motions of the continents is due to radioactivity, scientists find.

This new discovery shows that the planet still retains an extraordinary amount of heat it had from its primordial days.

To better understand the sources of the Earth's heat, scientists studied antineutrinos, elementary particles that, like their neutrino counterparts, only rarely interact with normal matter. Using the Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) located under a mountain in Japan, they analyzed geoneutrinos - ones emitted by decaying radioactive materials within the Earth - over the course of more than seven years.

The specific amount of energy an antineutrino packs on the rare occasions one does collide with normal matter can tell scientists about what material emitted it in the first place - for instance, radioactive material from within the Earth, as opposed to in nuclear reactors. If one also knows how rarely such an antineutrino interacts with normal matter, one can then estimate how many antineutrinos are being emitted and how much energy they are carrying in total.

A team of scientists from the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) have rediscovered a colorful, spindly-legged toad, which they believed to have gone extinct.

Three of the missing long-legged rainbow toads were found up a tree after the team scoured the remote mountain forests of the Gunung Penrissen range of Western Sarawak, a boundary between Malaysia's Sarawak State and Indonesia's Kalimantan Barat Province for months.

"Thrilling discoveries like this beautiful toad, and the critical importance of amphibians to healthy ecosystems, are what fuel us to keep searching for lost species," the state-funded BBC quoted leader of the team Dr. Indraneil Das as saying.

Hundreds of bats watch over two of the oldest Portuguese libraries daily, in the University of Coimbra and the palace of Mafra. It's their ability to catch bugs that makes sure the books are kept safe.

Bats are the only mammal capable of flying and only do it during the night, making high-pitched sounds inaudible to the human ear, making it hard to study the 26 species known to exist in Portugal.

One night in 2008, Professor Jorge Palmeirim from the Science Faculty in the University of Lisbon, gathered his sound-equipment and went to King John's Library in Coimbra to try and understand which bats have been using the shelters in that place for over 200 years.

"I couldn't see them, just hear them, but according to the droppings I found, I can say that there live at least 2 different species of bats", says the professor.

Researchers using a camera on Maui have photographed the glow from atmospheric pressure disturbances generated by the March 11 tsunami, raising hopes that the technique could be used to predict the arrival of future waves.

The first observation of its kind was made from the Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing Station atop Haleakala by scientists in France, Brazil and the United States.

The March 11 earthquake in Japan generated a seismic sea wave that devastated parts of northern Honshu and caused millions of dollars of damage in Hawaii.

On the open ocean, such waves move at 500 mph but are only an inch high. Nevertheless, they put pressure on the atmosphere, scientists say.

"The atmosphere gets less and less dense as you get higher, and that allows the amplitude of the wave to grow," Jonathan Makela, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said by phone Thursday.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Today, surgeons face many limitations when it comes to helping a patient who suffers from a severe craniofacial injury, or an injury pertaining to the skull and the face. Most often a result of cancer or war-related circumstances, the injury is both psychologically and physically damaging.

Will the patient ever recover their appearance? Or more importantly, recover their ability to speak, breathe or eat correctly again?

Rebuilding the delicate facial bone structure of an individual is a complicated procedure. The surgeon constructs a facial frame with bone from other parts of the body (called autologous tissue), in order to guarantee the functionality of the specialized organs responsible for vital roles such as breathing, seeing, communicating and eating. Since there are no analogous bone structures to a person's face, the procedure depends on experience and skill. As Glaucio Paulino, program director of Mechanics of Materials at the National Science Foundation, noted, this procedure does not always generate the desired outcome.

"The middle of the face is the most complicated part of the human skeleton," said Paulino. "What makes the reconstruction more complicated is the fact that the bones are small, delicate, highly specialized and located in a region highly susceptible to contamination by bacteria."

Facial bones are unique and using bone tissue extracted from different parts of the body, such as the bones of the forearm, isn't the most effective form of recovery.

"The patient may be improved, but still suffer from significant deformity," said Paulino.

Have you ever thought that relatively advanced communication among animal species could be possible, or is the idea really just for the birds? Either way, you'd be right, as illustrated in the following guest-contribution from TGR correspondent Matthew Oakley, who is already familiar to many readers here for his work each week as engineer of The Gralien Report Podcast.

In 1963, Alfred Hitchcock bestowed upon the world his unsettling psychological thriller The Birds. Based on a short story by acclaimed author Daphne du Maurier, the film portrays the decimation of a small island's populace by birds. The film is a classic, and a must see for any film lover, as well as anyone with a true sense of imagination regarding the realm of possibilities existing beyond our known world. The idea that something so seemingly harmless - like, for instance, a flock of birds soaring through the sky - could at any point turn on us for the worse in such a way is terrifying, to say the least. And still, though based in science fiction as this story is, there may actually be real world evidence too that would entertain the idea that events like these could in fact occur.

After spiraling outward from Earth for four years, NASA's Dawn probe is set to slide into orbit around the potato-shaped asteroid Vesta early Saturday for a year-long look at an ancient "mini moon."

Three hundred fifty miles wide and heavily cratered, Vesta formed some 4.5 billion years ago, when the sun was still young. By probing its secrets, scientists hope to catch a glimpse of how the planets, including Earth, formed out of a swirling disk of gas and dust.

"We are exploring backward in time as far as we can," said lead mission investigator Christopher Russell of the University of California at Los Angeles. "There's going to be a whole bunch of surprises."

Unlike most smaller asteroids - thought to be nearly uniform lumps of rock - Vesta is a "mini moon," Russell said, made up of three layers: an iron core, a rocky mantle and an upper crust. Early in Vesta's existence, Russell said, lava welled up from its interior and cooled to form a crust of volcanic rock.

"Vesta is unique among the large asteroids," said Richard Binzel, professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's the only one covered with a volcanic surface."

Scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) have discovered two new brown dwarfs at estimated distances of only 15 and 18 light years from the Sun. For comparison: The next star to the Sun, Proxima, is located slightly more than 4 light years from the Sun, whereas the nearest known brown dwarfs, epsilon Indi Ba and Bb, also found at the AIP several years ago, are about 12 light years away.

Ralf-Dieter Scholz and his AIP colleagues used the recently published data of the NASA satellite WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) for their discovery. The two new Solar neighbors, named WISE J0254+0223 and WISE J1741+2553, attracted attention by the extreme contrast between their strong brightness in the infrared and their almost invisible appearance in optical light. In addition, both objects move at comparably large speed across the sky (proper motion), i.e. their positions are remarkably different with respect to earlier observations. This was a first hint of their vicinity that was confirmed by the comparison of their colours and magnitudes with those of other similar objects. The brighter of the two objects was visible on the night sky at the time of its discovery so that the AIP team could use the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona/USA for determining the spectral type and distance more accurately. Both objects belong to the coolest representatives of T-type brown dwarfs, just at the boundary to the predicted but not yet well-defined class of Y-type ultracool brown dwarfs.

Brown dwarfs are also called failed stars, since during their formation, they could not accumulate enough mass to ignite the natural nuclear fusion reactor in their core, that is the long-living energy source of stars. Therefore, their brightness decreases strongly with time. Presumably, most brown dwarfs have reached surface temperatures below the "oven temperature" of about 500 Kelvin (about 230 degrees Celsius), may be even as cool as the temperature at the surface of the Earth.

A gene linked to intellectual disability was found in a study involving the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) -- a discovery that was greatly accelerated by international collaboration and new genetic sequencing technology, which is now being used at CAMH.

CAMH Senior Scientist Dr. John Vincent and colleagues identified defects on the gene, MAN1B1, among five families in which 12 children had intellectual disability. The results will be published in the July issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Intellectual disability is a broad term describing individuals with limitations in mental abilities and in functioning in daily life. It affects one to three per cent of the population, and is often caused by genetic defects.

The individuals affected had similar physical features, and all had delays in walking and speaking. Some learned to care for themselves, while others needed help bathing and dressing. In addition, some had epilepsy or problems with overeating.

All were found to have two copies of a defective MAN1B1 gene, one inherited from each parent. These were different types of mutations on the same gene -- yet the outcome, intellectual disability, was the same in different families -- confirming that this gene was the cause of the disorder.