The magnetic fields of sunspot 1069 are in a state of considerable agitation today. Click here to launch a 16-hour time-lapse movie from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)

The magnetic turmoil you just observed is giving rise to repeated explosions. The sunspot is literally crackling with C-class solar flares. Because of the sunspot's location near the sun's western limb, these explosions are not directed toward Earth. It's just a good show. Readers with backyard solar telescopes are encouraged to monitor the action.

Many people alive today possess some Neanderthal ancestry, according to a landmark scientific study.

The finding has surprised many experts, as previous genetic evidence suggested the Neanderthals made little or no contribution to our inheritance.

The result comes from analysis of the Neanderthal genome - the "instruction manual" describing how these ancient humans were put together.

Between 1% and 4% of the Eurasian human genome seems to come from Neanderthals.

But the study confirms living humans overwhelmingly trace their ancestry to a small population of Africans who later spread out across the world.

The most widely-accepted theory of modern human origins - known as Out of Africa - holds that the ancestors of living humans (Homo sapiens) originated in Africa some 200,000 years ago.

Ancient burial ground in cave of Beaker culture discovered in Morocco's city of Khemisset.

Khemisset - Archaeologists in Morocco uncovered an ancient burial ground in a cave east of the capital Rabat, digging up human skeletons dating back 5000 years, they said Friday.

It is the first time that human skeletons dating from the end of the Neolithic period to the Bronze Age have been discovered in Morocco, Youssef Bokbot said, leading the team carrying out the digs.

"Seven skeletons and four graves will allow us to identify very precisely the funeral rites of the Beaker culture, a first", Bokbot said of the discovery in a cave near Khemisset, 80 kilometres (50 miles) from Rabat.

"The copper objects that we found confirmed humanity's evolution, the passage from stone to metal, a real transformation", the archaeologist added.

The digs, which began in 2006, were in a cave 18 kilometres (11 miles) from Khemisset.

Archaeologist Ma Baoguang recently found some 1,000 hieroglyphic rock paintings in Yangce Town, Biyang County of east-central China's Henan province, according to the report from www.dahe.cn.

Ma went to Yangce with his students for an archaeological investigation on the eve of the May Day holiday. They spent over a week there and have found approximately 1,000 rock paintings of various types within an area of 5 square kilometers in villages such as Chenzhou, Tangligou, Xuzhuang, Leigutai, Anzhai, and Guogang.

Ma told reporters that he was deeply impressed by a large cambered stone which is 8 meters long and 3.7 meters wide. There are more than 500 small craters of different sizes on the surface of the stone and several relatively larger craters that are 13 to 20 centimeters in diameter and three to seven centimeters in depth. These craters are connected by various lines, forming a very large ancient diagram (as shown in the above picture).

"It is quite incredible that a large stone goat carries 'Hetu and Luoshu' (map of the Yellow River and the book of the Luo River) on its back," Ma said.

Halley's Comet was last seen passing near the earth 24 years ago. The Comet passes through our inner solar system every 76 years. As most of us having an interest in astronomy know that the Halley's Comet is a huge piece of rock orbiting our sun at a very high speed. The reason that the Halley's Comet is called a Comet and not a planet is that it travels at speeds much greater than planets. Planets travel at a relatively slow speed whereas comets travel at extremely fast speeds leaving behind a trail of meteors and meteorites that are usually called the comet's cosmic dust.

There is still a long time before the Halley's Comet can be seen again, but nowadays the comet is at such a position (far away from the earth obviously) that its cosmic dust can be seen in form of some meteor showers near the earth. The shower is expected to become visible 3 to 4 days before and after May 6th.

If you have made a difficult decision and want to stick to it, go and wash your hands.

A study has revealed that hand washing, long associated with absolving the mind of guilt, can also erase any doubts about everyday choices.

The latest research, reported in the journal Science, looked at whether the phenomenon extends to decisions with little or no moral implications by asking a set of volunteers to pick between two CDs or two jams.

Scientists found the 40 volunteers were less likely to try to justify their choice if they washed their hands just after making it.

The first scientific results from ESA's Herschel infrared space observatory are revealing previously hidden details of star formation. New images show thousands of distant galaxies furiously building stars and beautiful star-forming clouds draped across the Milky Way. One picture even catches an 'impossible' star in the act of formation.

Presented today during a major scientific symposium held at the European Space Agency (ESA), the results challenge old ideas of star birth, and open new roads for future research.

Ultra-fast pulses from a powerful laser can create droplets of water out of thin air, according to a new study. With the right conditions and large enough droplets, the researchers say, the technique could be used to make rain on demand.

Rain forms when water condenses around tiny particles in the atmosphere. Most of the time, dust or pollen do the job, but humans have long attempted to speed the process by seeding clouds with chemicals like silver iodide. Those chemicals provide the so-called "condensation nuclei" that trigger the consolidation of water into raindrops.

A breakthrough about the formation and maintenance of tree-like nerve cell structures could have future applications in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases and the repair of injuries in which neurons are damaged. The findings by the international team led by Prof. Benjamin Podbilewicz of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Biology are published in the May 6th issue of Science Express.

While biologists have known for years that many neurons form complicated tree-like structures, it was not known HOW the neurons form and maintain them. To unravel this mystery, the team first studied the dynamic development of two neurons (called PVDs) required for reception of strong mechanical stimuli in the round worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). [Prof. Podbilewicz cites Martin Chalfie, the Nobel laureate from Columbia University, as having previously shown that when a worm is hit on the body, it responds by moving away, demonstrating that the PVDs are necessary for C. elegans to sense pain.]

How closely are Neanderthals related to us?

They are so closely related that some researchers group them and us as a single species. "I would see them as a form of humans that are bit more different than humans are today, but not much," says Svante Pääbo, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, whose team sequenced the Neanderthal genome.

The common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals lived in Africa around half a million years ago. After that, the ancestors of Neanderthals moved north and eventually made it to Europe and Asia. Our ancestors, meanwhile, stuck around Africa until about 100,000 years ago before eventually conquering the globe. Neanderthals died out around 28,000 years ago.

How did they sequence the Neanderthal genome?

Bone contains DNA that survives long after an animal dies. Over time, though, strands of DNA break up, and microbes with their own DNA invade the bone. Pääbo's team found ways around both problems with 38,000 and 44,000-year-old bones recovered in Croatia: they used a DNA sequencing machine that rapidly decodes short strands and came up with ways to get rid of the microbial contamination.

They ended up with short stretches of DNA code that computers stitched into a more complete sequence. This process isn't perfect: Pääbo's team decoded about 5.3 billion letters of Neanderthal DNA, but much of this is duplicates, because - assuming it's the same size as the human genome - the actual Neanderthal genome is only about 3 billion letters long. More than a third of the genome remains unsequenced. "It's pretty darn good for something that's 38,000 years old," says Edward Green, a team member now at the University of California, Santa Cruz.