Astronauts living and working in space will experience the detrimental effects of microgravity on the human body. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station, for example, have experienced altered vision and increased pressure inside their heads, symptoms termed as visual impairment intracranial pressure (VIIP) syndrome.

VIIP syndrome is thought to be related to the redistribution of body fluid toward the head during long-term microgravity exposure, but the exact cause is unknown. To investigate the impact of microgravity on the human brain, neuroradiologist Donna Roberts, from the Medical University of South Carolina, has used MRI to investigate the anatomy of the brain following space flight (N. Engl. J. Med. 377 1746).

"Exposure to the space environment has permanent effects on humans that we simply do not understand," said Roberts. "What astronauts experience in space must be mitigated to produce safer space travel for the public."

Hollywood movies have long dramatised the threat of Earth being wiped out in by an asteroid discovered at the 11th hour, only for disaster to be averted by all-American heroes such as Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck or a gristly Robert Duvall.

As NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office uses the asteroid "2012 TC4" to test its ability to respond to the existential threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEOs), we look at four methods the international community hopes could one day help us avoid going the way of the dinosaurs.

Scientists have developed technologies to strengthen the soil and selected plants, which may decorate the extreme North's regions

Permafrost causes certain problems and inconveniences in development of soil and use of its deposits, but Russian scientists and engineers adapt projects to those severe conditions. For example, specialists in St. Petersburg suggest adding pine resin into cement for construction in the Arctic, and experts in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District (Yamal) have found more than a hundred plants, which may decorate the extreme North's regions.

Scientists, representatives of businesses and authorities tell TASS about how the northern regions get adapted to the permafrost conditions.

People who both travel to and live at high altitudes typically cope with lower oxygen levels by increasing red blood cell production, which can help get more oxygenated blood to organs and tissues. But the increase in red blood cells also makes blood thicker, stickier, and more difficult to pump, putting a strain on the cardiovascular system and leading to health issues, including heart failure and high blood pressure.

Some populations that live at high altitudes, such as Tibetan highlanders, have evolved to limit increases in red blood cell numbers. In contrast, Andeans that live at high altitudes overproduce red blood cells, yet manage to avoid the negative consequences. In a study published today (November 2) in The American Journal of Human Genetics, researchers report the first clues as to how they skirt the risks of extra red blood cells: variants in sequences related to genes that regulate cardiovascular function and heart development.

The authors "look at a specific population that has a unique evolutionary history," says Tatum Simonson, who did not participate in the work but studies the physiology and genetics of high-altitude adaptation at the University of California, San Diego. "Because of that history, we can learn a lot about the genes that are involved in some of these responses to low oxygen and the phenotypes that are associated with them."

The researchers studied a group of Andean highlanders who speak a language called Aymara and live at elevations topping 3,600 meters. "We can't experiment genetically with humans, but nature has sometimes [done] experiments for us," says coauthor Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California, Berkeley. By examining what happens when humans live with different environmental stressors, "we can learn something about the interactions between our genetics and the environment."

Using a molecular method likely to become widely adopted by the field, researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health have discovered brain circuitry essential for alertness, or vigilance - and for brain states more generally. Strikingly, the same cell types and circuits are engaged during alertness in zebra fish and mice, species whose evolutionary forebears parted ways hundreads of millions of years ago. This suggests that the human brain is likely similarly wired for this state critical to survival.

"Vigilance gone awry marks states such as mania and those seen in post-traumatic stress disorder and depression," explained Joshua Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., director of the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which along with the National Institute on Drug Abuse, co-funded the study. "Gaining familiarity with the molecular players in a behavior - as this new tool promises - may someday lead to clinical interventions targeting dysfunctional brain states."

Men could get pregnant as early as "tomorrow" due to huge leaps in the transplantation of wombs, according to the outgoing president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

Dr. Richard Paulson told the society's annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas that there was no anatomical reason why a womb could not be successfully implanted into a transgender woman.

"You could do it tomorrow," he reportedly said in his address. "There would be additional challenges, but I don't see any obvious problem that would preclude it," he added, emphasizing that it was still a very complicated procedure.

Scientists studying the fossils of ancient woolly mammoths believe they've cracked the mystery of why so many are young males - and the answer is surprisingly close to home.

It appears that woolly mammoths and today's young males have at least one thing in common - without their moms, they were destined to wander the world alone before succumbing to an accidental death.

Many of the clueless young male mammoths got themselves into risky situations, and were swept into rivers, or fell through ice or bogs where they remained until scientists found them thousands of years later. That's according to research published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

A new study by Washington State University researchers answers longstanding questions about the formation of a rare type of diamond during major meteorite strikes.

Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our Sun, is known to host at least one terrestrial planet candidate in a temperate orbit. Here we report the ALMA detection of the star at 1.3 mm wavelength and the discovery of a belt of dust orbiting around it at distances ranging between 1 and 4 au, approximately.

Given the low luminosity of the Proxima Centauri star, we estimate a characteristic temperature of about 40 K for this dust, which might constitute the dust component of a small-scale analog to our solar system Kuiper belt. The estimated total mass, including dust and bodies up to 50 km in size, is of the order of 0.01 Earth masses, which is similar to that of the solar Kuiper belt. Our data also show a hint of warmer dust closer to the star.

We also find signs of two additional features that might be associated with the Proxima Centauri system, which, however, still require further observations to be confirmed: an outer extremely cold (about 10 K) belt around the star at about 30 au, whose orbital plane is tilted about 45 degrees with respect to the plane of the sky; and additionally, we marginally detect a compact 1.3 mm emission source at a projected distance of about 1.2 arcsec from the star, whose nature is still unknown.

Horses can tell the difference between dominant and submissive body postures in humans, even when the humans are not familiar to them, according to a new University of Sussex-led study.

The findings enhance our understanding of how animals can communicate using body posture across the species barrier, and are specifically helpful for informing horse handlers and trainers about the ways horses perceive human body language.

Psychology researchers worked with 30 domestic horses to see whether they were more likely to approach a person displaying a dominant body posture (involving the person standing straight, with arms and legs apart and chest expanded), or a submissive posture (slouching, keeping arms and legs close to the body, relaxed knees).

They found that even though the horses had been given food rewards previously by each person when in a neutral body posture, they were significantly more likely to approach the individual displaying a submissive rather than a dominant posture in follow-up trials.