"The females arrive to give birth and then leave. The young have all the food they need here and the reefs afford protection from large predators," an expert said.

A group of Ecuadorean scientists has discovered a hammerhead shark nursery where they have been born and sheltered for nearly a million years on the Galapagos Islands, the remote archipelago tucked away 1,000 kilometers off South America's Pacific coast.

"It was quite by chance that we found this natural nursery for baby hammerheads, a species that is under a high level of threat," Eduardo Espinoza, the biologist in charge of monitoring ecosystems in the Galapagos Marine Reserve, told AFP.

"It is a unique area, of great interest to conservationists."

Back in 2012, the Pacific ocean experienced the biggest volcanic eruption that the planet had seen in a hundred years. An enormous plume of volcanic material bubbled up out of the water with fantastic force, in a dramatic show that, sadly, nobody managed to catch on camera.

Eager to find out exactly what had happened deep below the sea, scientists from the University of Tasmania in Australia have sent a pair of diving robots to examine the volcano (called Havre) and the surrounding area. The results are a lot of fun: according to volcanologist Rebecca Carey who led the study, "what we found on the seafloor was almost entirely different from what we expected".

Whenever a scientist says that something is the opposite of what they were expecting, you know things are interesting. Throw in a giant underwater volcano, and things get even better.

While the volcano's activity wasn't viewed from up close, thanks to its location at the bottom of the ocean, flotsam from the eruption was visible on satellite images that have been taken from space. From this, in 2015 (three years after the eruption), the scientists were able to pinpoint the location of the volcano, and were able to track how the area had surrounding changed from before things went boom.

Given its predawn timing and the vagaries of winter weather, relatively few of us will get to watch the Moon's eerie glide through Earth's shadow on January 31st. And so ordinarily I wouldn't expect the news media to pay much attention to this event this event.

But Wednesday's total lunar eclipse is different. Depending on where you look for news, headlines are calling it a "super blue blood Moon" or "blue blood super moon" - a sky spectacle not seen in more than 150 years!

It's true that January 31st will be a busy day for Luna. First, there is indeed a total lunar eclipse, the first in nearly 2½ years visible anywhere. As we've noted elsewhere, those living near the West Coast and most everywhere around the Pacific Rim will have the best views. The Moon usually takes on a deep red or coppery color during totality, hence the often-used term "blood Moon" to describe its appearance. Those of us stuck on the East Coast of the U.S. will be challenged to see much of anything as the Moon sinks out of sight in the west as the Sun comes up.

Second, this event falls on the second full Moon of the month, what's often called a "Blue Moon." And, third, the eclipse comes just 27 hours after the Moon reaches perigee, its closest orbital point to Earth. Lots of you have no doubt heard this extra-close full Moon called a "super-moon."

Yes, it's an astronomical trifecta. But it's not nearly as rare as you might have heard.

Egypt is known for its magnificent pyramids and powerful pharaohs, but now the country is gaining fame among paleontologists, especially now that an international team has uncovered the remains of an 80-million-year-old dinosaur the size of a school bus that had bony plates embedded in its skin during its lifetime.

Egyptian researchers discovered the newfound sauropod - a long-necked, long-tailed herbivorous dinosaur named Mansourasaurus shahinae - in the Sahara Desert. The find is remarkable, given the rarity of dinosaur fossils in Africa from the Late Cretaceous (100 million to 66 million years ago), the period of time just before the 6-mile-long (10 kilometers) asteroid slammed into Earth and killed the nonavian dinosaurs, the researchers said.

"Africa remains a giant question mark in terms of land-dwelling animals at the end of the age of dinosaurs," study co-researcher Eric Gorscak, a postdoctoral research scientist at The Field Museum in Chicago, who started the project as a doctoral student at Ohio University, said in a statement. "Mansourasaurus helps us address long-standing questions about Africa's fossil record and paleobiology - what animals were living there, and to what other species were these animals most closely related?"

People tend to think of memories as deeply personal, ephemeral possessions - snippets of emotions, words, colors and smells stitched into our unique neural tapestries as life goes on. But a strange series of experiments conducted decades ago offered a different, more tangible perspective. The mind-bending results have gained unexpected support from recent studies.

In 1959, James Vernon McConnell, a psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, painstakingly trained small flatworms called planarians to associate a shock with a light. The worms remembered this lesson, later contracting their bodies in response to the light.

One weird and wonderful thing about planarians is that they can regenerate their bodies - including their brains. When the trained flatworms were cut in half, they regrew either a head or a tail, depending on which piece had been lost. Not surprisingly, worms that kept their heads and regrew tails retained the memory of the shock, McConnell found. Astonishingly, so did the worms that grew replacement heads and brains. Somehow, these fully operational, complex arrangements of brand-spanking-new nerve cells had acquired the memory of the painful shock, McConnell reported.

In subsequent experiments, McConnell went even further, attempting to transfer memory from one worm to another. He tried grafting the head of a trained worm onto the tail of an untrained worm, but he couldn't get the head to stick. He injected trained planarian slurry into untrained worms, but the recipients often exploded. Finally, he ground up bits of the trained planarians and fed them to untrained worms. Sure enough, after their meal, the untrained worms seemed to have traces of the memory - the cannibals recoiled at the light.

Until recently, very little was known about the genetic relationship between modern humans of the Upper Palaeolithic age (the period of time between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, also called the Late Stone age) and today's populations. But with direct DNA sequencing, researchers are discovering unexpected genetic connections between individuals on opposing sides of Eurasia. These suggest a complex history that may represent early gene flow across Eurasia or an early population structure that eventually led to Europeans and Asians.
In a review published in the journal Trends in Genetics, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing discuss what we know about the genetics of ancient individuals from Eurasia (Europe and Western Asia) between 45,000-7,500 years ago. The authors summarized work that investigated the genomes of more than 20 ancients in the Eurasian family tree, including the 45,000-year-old Ust'-Ishim individual from Central Siberia, for their paper.

"Aside from these individuals, it is a fact that sampling for the Eurasian region is sparse for all time periods except the present-day," says co-author Qiaomei Fu, a paleogeneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "But with the information from the several individuals available for ancient DNA sequencing we do have hints at interesting population structure, migration and interaction in East Asia."

Although self-driving cars are becoming more of a reality each day, the majority of Americans are wary of the idea, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

When asked whether they felt comfortable with the notion of "riding in an entirely self-driving car," a whopping 67 percent of Americans said they were "not comfortable." Only 27 percent said they were "comfortable" with the idea.

Males were significantly more likely than females to be on board with the idea, with 38 percent of men saying they were comfortable with the idea. That's compared to just 16 percent of females.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, millennials were the age group most likely to embrace such technology. Some 38 percent said they would be comfortable with the idea, compared to 27 percent of Gen-X respondents. Just 16 percent of baby boomers said they'd be comfortable with self-driving cars on the roads.

Workers looking forward to enjoying a long and leisurely retirement after years of toil, may need to think again.

New research shows that brain function declines rapidly as soon as people stop work and put their feet up.

A major British study which tracked 3,400 retired civil servants found that short-term memory declines nearly 40 per cent faster once employees become pensioners.

It appears that the lack of regular stimulation takes a heavy toll on cognitive function and speeds up memory loss and dementia, researchers warned.

Runners of all levels who want to improve their endurance, speed and/or strength may want to try cracking a smile during their workout, according to new research.

While it may go against all natural instincts, at least pretending you're enjoying your run by intentionally smiling has been found to improve your overall performance, according to new research by Ulster University in Northern Ireland and Swansea University in Wales.

According to the new study, a key psychological factor in the success of one's workout is the effort we feel we're putting into the activity. In other words, the less effort we think we're putting in, the easier we perceive the exercise to be and the likelier we are to progress.

The 'fake it till you make it' technique is favored by Olympic marathon gold medallist Eliud Kipchoge, a strategic smiler whose smiling helped him relax and ease his way to the finish line during his fastest-ever marathon.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has unveiled the "world's safest flamethrower," available for pre-order to prepare for a zombie apocalypse. Just in case, fire extinguishers are sold separately for an "exorbitant amount of money."

Musk's Boring Company - which has so far primarily specialized in "boring" tunnel construction - touted the new device on its official website on Saturday as a product "guaranteed to liven up any party!"

The handy device, which Musk says is "great for roasting nuts," will cost die-hard fans of the SpaceX and Tesla founder a hefty $500. However, to embrace the fire power that could be quite useful in case of a zombie apocalypse they will have to wait until spring.

"When the zombie apocalypse happens, you'll be glad you bought a flamethrower. Works against hordes of the undead or your money back!" Musk tweeted.