What colors were the first birds? Our avian friends appeared about 150 million years ago, and some prehistoric bird fossils have been found with their feathers nearly intact. But the colors faded away long ago, leaving paleontologists in the dark about the original hues. Now a research team employing state-of-the-art chemical imaging has found traces of the plumes' ancient pigments. The new techniques might eventually tell scientists not only what colors prehistoric birds sported but also why they evolved highly pigmented plumage in the first place.

Today's birds display a panoply of colors: Robins have orange breasts, canaries are usually yellow, and blackbirds - well, despite the name, they often mix basic black with bright hues of yellow and red. Ornithologists think birds evolved these colors to attract mates, camouflage themselves from predators, and recognize fellow members of their species in the crowded sky. Very recently, scientists have been able to detect pigment-containing granules, called melanosomes, in some very early bird fossils, as well as in their immediate ancestors, the dinosaurs. And they have made educated guesses about the color of the pigments in the melanosomes based on the granules' sizes and shapes.

Australian researchers on Thursday said they discovered that prehistoric animals had excellent sight.

Scientists from the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide examined a 515 million-year-old fossilized eyes found on Kangaroo Island of South Australia, and found that the prehistoric animals had "compound eyes" with more than 3,000 lenses each.

This means that some of the earliest animals had very powerful eyesight with similar vision to living creatures today.

The team concluded that sharp vision must have evolved very rapidly soon after the first predators appeared 540 million years ago.

According to University of South Australia paleontologist Dr. Jim Jago, he was surprised to find complex eyes, like those of living insects, in such primitive animals.

"It was a fluke, to be honest," he said in a statement released on Thursday.

The brain works differently when memorizing the face of a person from one's own race than when attempting to remember the face of someone of another race, new biological evidence suggests.

The well-documented "other-race effect" finds that people are less likely to remember a face from a racial group different from their own. Northwestern University researchers set out to determine what causes this rift in perception and memory by using electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, which measure brain activity, while participants viewed photos of various faces.

The researchers found that brain activity increases in the very first 200 to 250 milliseconds when seeing both same-race and other-race faces. Previous research has associated this very early phase, known as the N200 brain potential, with the perceptual process of individuation. That process involves making out the unique facial features of each person, such as the shape of their eyes and nose.

A few weeks ago I got a Facebook friend request from a cute young blonde thing named Marjorie. I did not know Marjorie from Adam, but she was certainly enthusiastic about friending me. She even initiated a chat session before I had a chance to respond.

In fact, she continues to chat me periodically at random, even though we are not officially "friends." When I asked why, she says she just "wants 2 b yr frnd."

There was something strangely familiar about Marjorie, and it took me a couple of days to figure it out. Her profile photo - the only one on her page - was of country star Taylor Swift. (On closer inspection, one can see the MTV Awards logo behind her. Duh.)

Astronomers are puzzled by the announcement that the masses of the largest objects in the Universe appear to depend on which method is used to weigh them. The new work was presented at a specialist discussion meeting on 'Scaling Relations of Galaxy Clusters' organised by the Astrophysics Research Institute (ARI) at Liverpool John Moores University and supported by the Royal Astronomical Society.

Clusters of galaxies are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the Universe containing thousands of galaxies like the Milky Way and their weight is an important probe of their dark matter content and evolution through cosmic time. Measurements used to weigh these systems carried out in three different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum: X-ray, optical and millimetre wavelengths, give rise to significantly different results.

Eduardo Rozo, from the University of Chicago, explained that any two of the measurements can be made to fit easily enough but that always leaves the estimate using the third technique out of line. Dubbed the 'Axis of Evil', it is as if the Universe is being difficult by keeping back one or two pieces of the jigsaw and so deliberately preventing us from calibrating our weighing scales properly.

In the last week, there's been a lot of static electricity in the air.

First, a Northwestern University scientist overturned the conventional wisdom about how static electricity works.

Then, a small tsunami off the Cornish coast of England caused the sea to recede 150 feet or more - and people's hair to stand on end with static electricity.

What?

First, let's look at how static electricity works.

The new theory of static electricity

For a long time, it was thought that static electricity occurred when electrons came off the surface of one object and moved to another, creating an imbalance in charge.

But Bartosz Grzybowski, a physical chemist at Northwestern University, and his colleagues published a study in Science showing that the two objects in contact exchange more than ions. They actually exchange small bits of matter.

The Northwestern researchers expected to see that the positive and negative ions in two objects that had static electricity were uniformly distributed. But with a Kelvin force probe microscope, which measures the level of charge on various parts of the surface of an object, they showed that such charges aren't uniform; they're clumped into positive and negative regions about ten nanometers across.

With spectroscopy techniques, the researchers showed that when rubbed together, the materials' surfaces exchanged these nano-sized pieces of charged material.

This means if you rub a balloon on your head and your hair stands up, tiny pieces of balloon - these positive and negative clumps - actually stick to your hair.

However, they still do not know exactly how that forms static electricity.

A planetary scientist at the University of Arizona has determined Neptune's rotation.

According to the first accurate measurements of the planet's rotational period, a day on Neptune lasts about 15 hours, 57 minutes and 59 seconds.

University of Arizona planetary scientist Erich Karkoschka has discovered one of the largest improvements in determining the rotational period of a gas planet in almost 350 years since Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini made the first observations of Jupiter's Red Spot.

"The rotational period of a planet is one of its fundamental properties," Karkoschka, a senior staff scientist at the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, said in a statement. "Neptune has two features observable with the Hubble Space Telescope that seem to track the interior rotation of the planet. Nothing similar has been seen before on any of the four giant planets."

Giant gas planets rotate more like giant blobs of liquid, unlike rocky planets, which behave like solid balls spinning in a more straightforward path. Gas planets' rotation involves a lot of sloshing, swirling and roiling, which has made it difficult for astronomers to get an accurate idea of how fast they spin around.

"If you looked at Earth from space, you'd see mountains and other features on the ground rotating with great regularity, but if you looked at the clouds, they wouldn't because the winds change all the time," Karkoschka said in a statement. "If you look at the giant planets, you don't see a surface, just a thick cloudy atmosphere."

"On Neptune, all you see is moving clouds and features in the planet's atmosphere. Some move faster, some move slower, some accelerate, but you really don't know what the rotational period is, if there even is some solid inner core that is rotating."

An international team of researchers has now succeeded in generating a bacterium possessing a DNA in which thymine is replaced by the synthetic building block 5-chlorouracil (c), a substance toxic for other organisms. The genetic information of all living cells is stored in the DNA composed of the four canonical bases adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T).

The experimental work was based on a unique technology that enables the directed evolution of organisms under strictly controlled conditions. Large populations of microbial cells are cultured for prolonged periods in the presence of a toxic chemical -- in this case, 5-chlorouracil -- at sublethal levels, thereby selecting for genetic variants capable of tolerating higher concentrations of the toxic substance.

In response to the appearance of such variants in the cell population the concentration of the toxic chemical in the growth medium is increased, thus keeping the selection pressure constant. This automated procedure of long term evolution was applied to adapt genetically engineered Escherichia coli bacteria unable to synthesize the natural nucleobase thymine to grow on increasing concentrations of 5-chlorouracil.

After a culture period of about 1000 generations descendants of the original strain were obtained which used 5-chlorouracil as complete substitute for thymine. Subsequent genome analysis revealed numerous mutations in the DNA of the adapted bacteria. The contribution of these mutations to the adaptation of the cells towards the halogenated base will be the subject of follow-up studies.

A drug has been discovered which scientists believe can reverse the effects of premature ageing and could extend human life by more than a decade.

Rapamycin, which has been nicknamed the "forever young" drug, was created from a chemical found in the soil on Easter Island, one of the most remote places on Earth and 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile.

It was used in experiments on children suffering from Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS), a rare genetic condition in which ageing is hyper-accelerated and sufferers die of "old age" at around 12 years.

HGPS causes a dangerous process whereby a protein called progerin builds up in every cell of the body, causing them to age prematurely.

Rapamycin cleaned the cells of progerin, which swept away the defects and left healthy cells.

©RIA Novosti

At 7.14 a.m. local time (12.14 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time), an explosion occurred near the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in East Siberia's Krasnoyarsk Territory, not far from the Vanavara trading post, now Vanavara town, the administrative center of the Evenki Autonomous Area's Tungussko-Chunsky District.