A genetic similarity between snail fossils found in Ireland and the Eastern Pyrenees suggests humans migrated from southern Europe to Ireland 8,000 years ago.

The slimy creatures in Ireland today are almost identical to snails in Southern France and Northern Spain.

Whether an accidental visitor on a ship or brought along as a snack, the boat they were carried on did not appear to stop in Britain.

The findings are published in PLOS One.

As Britain emerged from the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, sea levels rose and landslides are thought to have triggered a great tsunami. Britain was transformed into an island, separated from mainland Europe and Ireland.

Land-dwelling animals were therefore no longer able to migrate from Europe over the seas without a little help.

It has long perplexed scientists that Ireland has plants and animals that are genetically different, and in some cases are even unique, to ones found in Britain.

Now scientists have found that a common garden snail, Cepaea nemoralis, is almost genetically identical to one found in the Eastern Pyrenees, but seems to have missed Britain on its journey over.

Dutch researchers drilling into the glaciers of Greenland have discovered that climate change occurs more rapidly than previously believed - indeed, the most recent ice age ended abruptly in just one year.

The NordGrip drilling project in Greenland has extracted ice cores from the ancient ice sheets there which reveal that the world's most recent ice age ended precisely 11,711 years ago. An ice core is a long cylinder drilled out of the ice, made up of layers of snow and ice that have fallen in the region for millennia. By examining the amount of snowfall buried in those layers, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen have determined the exact year the ice age halted and gave way to our current climate.

• The moon will appear 14 percent larger than normal during this year's 'supermoon'
• The moon will be about 222,000 miles from Earth

Prepare to howl.

The biggest and brightest full moon of the year graces the sky today as our celestial neighbor swings closer to Earth than usual.

The supermoon will appear 14 percent larger and 30 per cent brighter than normal - the outcome of a cosmic quirk as the moon orbits within about 222,000 miles (357,000 kilometers) of our planet.
Some viewers may think the shining orb looks more dazzling, but it's actually an optical illusion.

The glowing disc is simply larger on the horizon next to trees and buildings.

But don't worry if you missed it. The supermoon's effect should still linger until at least Tuesday.

A new asteroid has been discovered by two students from a Delhi school and the find has been confirmed by the international space community, an NGO for popularising space said Saturday. Shourya Chambial and Gaurav Pati from Amity International school in south Delhi's Pushp Vihar made the discovery as part of the All India Asteroid Search Campaign.

"The discovery has been confirmed by the international scientific community and the asteroid has been provisionally named as 2013 LS28," said Science Popularization Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) who organized the campaign with International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC).

"We are waiting for it to be placed in the world's official minor body catalogue maintained by International Astronomical Union (Paris)," it added.

According to Space, which has been organizing such camps since 2012 and is providing training to students and amateur astronomers for asteroid hunting, the project was started with an aim to increase the love for science, astronomy and scientific research in Indian students.

"The project has provided opportunities to more than 500 students and amateurs in India to discover asteroids till now, 15 new asteroids discoveries have been discovered," said Space.

Sachin Bahmba, of Space said: "Indian students have beaten students all over the world in asteroid discoveries and India is now looked upon as a leader in bringing revolutionary changes in the field of astronomy and space science education and research."

Most people don't know about the existence of quantum computers. Almost no one understands how they work, but theories include bizarre-sounding explanations like, "they reach into alternate universes to derive the correct answers to highly complex computational problems."

Quantum computers are not made of simple transistors and logic gates like the CPU on your PC. They don't even function in ways that seem rational to a typical computing engineer. Almost magically, quantum computers take logarithmic problems and transform them into "flat" computations whose answers seem to appear from an alternate dimension.

For example, a mathematical problem that might have 2 to the power of n possible solutions -- where n is a large number like 1024 -- might take a traditional computer longer than the age of the universe to solve. A quantum computer, on the other hand, might solve the same problem in mere minutes because it quite literally operates across multiple dimensions simultaneously.

A newly discovered crack in the Earth's crust could pull North America and Europe together and cause the Atlantic Ocean to vanish in about 220 million years, scientists say.

A new map of the seafloor off the coast of Iberia - the region of Europe that includes Portugal and Spain - has revealed what could be the birth of a new subduction zone.

Subduction zones happen when tectonic plates - the large rock slabs that make up the Earth's crust - crash into one another. The edge of the heavier plate slides, or subducts, below the lighter plate. It then melts back into the Earth's mantle - the layer just below the crust.

The discovery of this new subduction zone, published on June 6 in the journal Geology, could signal the start of an extended cycle that fuses continents together into a single landmass - or "supercontinent" - and closes our oceans.

This breakup and reformation of supercontinents has happened at least three times during Earth's approximately four-billion-year history.

In the far future, Earth's continents could "look very much like the Pangea," said study first author João Duarte, referring to a supercontinent that existed about 200 million years ago.

A mysterious group of viruses known for their circular genome has been detected in patients with severe disease on two continents. In papers published independently this week, researchers report the discovery of agents called cycloviruses in Vietnam and in Malawi. The studies suggest that the viruses - one of which also widely circulates in animals in Vietnam - could be involved in brain inflammation and paraplegia, but further studies are needed to confirm a causative link.

The discovery in Vietnam grew out of a frustrating lack of information about the causes of some central nervous system (CNS) infections such as encephalitis and meningitis, which can be fatal or leave lasting damage. "There are a lot of severe cases in the hospitals here, and very often we can't come to a diagnosis," says H. Rogier van Doorn, a clinical virologist with the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, Ho Chi Minh City. Extensive diagnostic tests turn up pathogens in only about half of patients with such infections, he says. Van Doorn and colleagues in Vietnam and at the University of Amsterdam's Academic Medical Center hoped that they might uncover new pathogens using a powerful new technique called next-generation sequencing.

The group sequenced all the genetic material in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples taken from more than 100 patients with undiagnosed CNS infections. One sample batch returned a promising lead: a viral sequence belonging to the Circoviridae family.

Probing the original patient samples, the scientists ferreted out the sequence in two of the samples - one from an adult and one from a child. Next, they expanded their search, testing samples from an additional 642 patients with CNS infections using a sensitive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test developed to specifically target the detected sequence. Roughly 4% of the samples tested positive, the team reported in mBio on Tuesday. Whole-genome sequencing confirmed that the virus, which the scientists have dubbed CyCV-VN, for cyclovirus-Vietnam, is novel; it belongs to a genus within the Circoviridae family called cycloviruses.

Bacterial DNA may integrate into the human genome more readily in tumors than in normal human tissue, scientists have found.

The researchers, affiliated with the University of Maryland School of Medicine's Institute for Genome Sciences, analyzed genomic sequencing data available from the Human Genome Project, the 1,000 Genomes Project and The Cancer Genome Atlas.

They considered the phenomenon of lateral gene transfer (LGT), the transmission of genetic material between organisms in a manner other than than traditional reproduction.

Scientists have already shown that bacteria can transfer DNA to the genome of an animal.

The researchers found evidence that lateral gene transfer is possible from bacteria to the cells of the human body, known as human somatic cells.

They found that bacterial DNA was more likely to integrate in the genome in tumor samples than in normal, healthy somatic cells. The phenomenon might play a role in cancer and other diseases associated with DNA damage.

"Advances in genomic and computational sciences are revealing the vast ways in which humans interact with an ever-present and endlessly diverse planet of microbes," says Matt Kane, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology in its Directorate for Biological Sciences, which funded the research.

Remember when Tupac made an appearance at last year's Coachella festival? It wasn't really Tupac but a holograph of the late rapper.

The holograph wasn't like watching a regular 3D TV image. You didn't need glasses, it was viewable to the entire audience, no matter what angle they were watching at, and it wasn't just a projected two dimensional image. It looked like Tupac was really on stage.

The engineers of the Object-Based Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, led by V. Michael Bove Jr. and his graduate student Dan Smalley, are working on technology that might enable that experience in your living room. The group is aiming to make true holographic videos not only a reality, but an affordable reality.

Sure, there have been other types of glasses-free 3D screens and devices, including the Nintendo 3DS handheld gaming system or various 3D TVs shown by Vizio and Toshiba, but those have suffered from poor viewing angles, causing the image to be distorted when you move off the right or left. They also aren't considered true holograms.

About This Podcast

After two weeks of traveling, Arnie is back in town to recount his adventures on this week's podcast. His first trip was to Canada to testify about the Pickering Nuclear Plant on Lake Ontario. His second trip was to southern California to speak at the conference "Fukushima Daiichi Accident: Lessons for California" alongside former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, former NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, and former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford. While Arnie was in California, we received the news that the San Onofre Nuclear Plant near San Diego was closing permanently. So, what happens at San Onofre now?

Comment: Listen in, and find out.