Lake Buena Vista, Florida -Scientists employed by the Walt Disney Company have developed technology that allows them to replicate, with near perfect accuracy, the very versatile human face.

Documents posted on the official Disney Research website details plans for what they refer to as physical face cloning.

"We propose a complete process for designing, simulating and fabricating synthetic skin for an animatronics character that mimics the face of a given subject and its expressions," the document states.

Scientists and researchers based in a Zürich lab were motivated by the idea of translating the company's ability to create realistic virtual worlds - seen, for example, in movies released by Disney-owned Pixar - into tangible actuality.

"We are naturally intrigued by the prospect of creating virtual humans in the likeness of ourselves - and it is not far-fetched to say that this is also a driving force for computer graphics research," the document noted in its introduction. "While the latter strives to photorealistically [sic] create human characters on a computer screen, animatronics aims at creating physical robot characters that move and look like real humans."

In the middle of a cow pasture on California's Sherman Island, a group of engineering students in bright blue polo shirts fussed over a strange looking contraption.

The device garnering all the attention was perched atop a mound of dirt and mud.

As the clanging of wrenches and scurrying of blue shirts subsided, a gentle whir emanated from the great gizmo, which began spinning smoothly like the blades of a bread mixer.

Faster and faster, the pile of dirt began to tremble, shaking the ground of the surrounding field.

"It feels a little bit like we're on a waterbed," said Scott Brandenberg, a UCLA assistant engineering professor.

A massive so-called galaxy cluster, one of the largest structures in the universe, has been discovered about 5.7 billion light years from Earth and credited with setting several important new cosmic records, U.S.-based researchers said.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in a news release that observations of the cluster, which has shown a prodigious rate of star formation, may force astronomers to rethink how such colossal structures and galaxies that inhabit them evolve over time.

Known officially by an alphabet soup of numbers and letters as SPT-CLJ2344-4243, the cluster has been nicknamed "Phoenix," after the mythological bird that rose from the dead.

That's partly due to the constellation in which it lies. But Michael McDonald, a Hubble fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the Phoenix was also a great way of thinking about the latest astronomical marvel.

Astronomers using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have caught two clusters full of massive stars that may be in the early stages of merging. The clusters are 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy to our Milky Way.

What at first was thought to be only one cluster in the core of the massive star-forming region 30 Doradus (also known as the Tarantula Nebula) has been found to be a composite of two clusters that differ in age by about one million years.

The entire 30 Doradus complex has been an active star-forming region for 25 million years, and it is currently unknown how much longer this region can continue creating new stars. Smaller systems that merge into larger ones could help to explain the origin of some of the largest known star clusters.

Lead scientist Elena Sabbi of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., and her team began looking at the area while searching for runaway stars, fast-moving stars that have been kicked out of their stellar nurseries where they first formed. "Stars are supposed to form in clusters, but there are many young stars outside 30 Doradus that could not have formed where they are; they may have been ejected at very high velocity from 30 Doradus itself," Sabbi said.

The sun is nearly the roundest object ever measured. If scaled to the size of a beach ball, it would be so round that the difference between the widest and narrow diameters would be much less than the width of a human hair.

The sun rotates every 28 days, and because it doesn't have a solid surface, it should be slightly flattened. This tiny flattening has been studied with many instruments for almost 50 years to learn about the sun's rotation, especially the rotation below its surface, which we can't see directly.

Now Jeff Kuhn and Isabelle Scholl (Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa), Rock Bush (Stanford University), and Marcelo Emilio (Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa, Brazil) have used the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite to obtain what they believe is the definitive -- and baffling -- answer.

Because there is no atmosphere in space to distort the solar image, they were able to use HMI's exquisite image sensitivity to measure the solar shape with unprecedented accuracy. The results indicate that if the Sun were shrunk to a ball one meter in diameter, its equatorial diameter would be only 17 millionths of a meter larger than the diameter through its North-South pole, which is its rotation axis.

Ancient pollen and charcoal preserved in deeply buried sediments in Egypt's Nile Delta document the region's ancient droughts and fires, including a huge drought 4,200 years ago associated with the demise of Egypt's Old Kingdom, the era known as the pyramid-building time.

"Humans have a long history of having to deal with climate change," said Christopher Bernhardt, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. "Along with other research, this study geologically reveals that the evolution of societies is sometimes tied to climate variability at all scales - whether decadal or millennial."

Bernhardt conducted this research as part of his Ph.D. at Penn, along with Benjamin Horton, an associate professor in Penn's Department of Earth and Environmental Science. Jean-Daniel Stanley at the Smithsonian Institution also participated in the study, published in July's edition of Geology.

While your DNA is unique, it also tells the tale of your family line. It carries the genetic history of your ancestors down through the generations. Now, says a Tel Aviv University researcher, it's also possible to use it as a map to your family's past.

Prof. Eran Halperin of TAU's Blavatnik School of Computer Science and Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology, along with a group of researchers from University of California, Los Angeles, are giving new meaning to the term "genetic mapping." Using a probabilistic model of genetic traits for every coordinate on the globe, the researchers have developed a method for determining more precisely the geographical location of a person's ancestral origins.

The new method is able to pinpoint more specific locations for an individual's ancestors, for example placing an individual's father in Paris and mother in Barcelona. Previous methods would "split the difference" and place this origin inaccurately at a site between those two cities, such as Lyon.

Published in the journal Nature Genetics, this method has the potential to reveal the ancestry, origins, and migration patterns of many different human and animal populations. It could also be a new model for learning about the genome.

New analysis reveals that some men may be asking for more than their fair share when they visit their local lady of ill repute.

In addition to the usual quickie, these men are looking for love, and in all the wrong places. In fact, these men are so ready to find their soul mates that they're willing to put their money on the line, just so long as they get their "just desserts" first.

Going deep undercover and on assignment, Christine Milrod and Ronald Weitzer took to the virtual streets, analyzing the goings on in an online forum board where sex workers are rated for their abilities, an extra-adult hot-or-not if you will.

Using the aliases "Weinenrubber" and "Milrod," the two analyzed more than 2,400 postings on the adult forum board and found something rather interesting. Somewhere in between conversations about "Best Back Alleys for Two Backs," and "Is That Syrup?" an interesting trend began to emerge. According to their super-sexy findings, nearly one-third of these conversations included talk about actual, true emotional intimacy between a man and his "Hired Hand."

In fact, many of these men were so head over heels for their ladies-in-heat that they expressed a real desire to turn them into proper domestic house-kittens, sharing their innermost thoughts and a lovely serving of ice cream at the end of the day.

According to "Milrod," these studies only confirm what other "experts" have been noticing in recent years: Relationships between sex workers and their conglomerate of bosses have slowly morphed into a multi-headed beast, one which goes on dates and calls one another for rides to and from the airport.

If a man and his whore continue to engage in this sort of casual sex, the two may eventually form a very real love story, one which they will never share with their parents, resulting children and anyone over the age of 30.

How old are you? A glimpse at your brain may hold the answer.

Researchers can now tell with 92 percent accuracy how old a person is just by looking at magnetic resonance images (MRI) of his or her brain. The results apply to people ranging in age from 3 to 20, spanning an active period of brain development and maturation.

"I refer to it as a carnival trick," said study researcher Timothy Brown, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine. "It's like, step right up, give me your MRI and I can guess your age."

Of course, Brown added, this age-estimating ability is more than a gimmick. It could offer researchers insight into abnormal brain development, allowing them to catch developmental problems early.

As the brain develops and grows, different features mature at different rates. Researchers have long tracked these individual features - the thickness of the cortex, for example, or the size of certain regions - but have found that people vary widely in the sizes of many brain areas, making it difficult to pin down developmental timing.

"Any single feature doesn't reflect a person's maturity or age, because you have this really complicated interweaving set of characteristics that are changing," Brown told LiveScience.

Despite evidence that the earliest examples of creatures such as mammals and reptiles gave birth to live young, they actually may have laid eggs, a scientist argues.

"These eggs are probably out there, but nobody has looked hard enough for them or they have not been recognized," says University of Bonn, Germany, paleobiologist P. Martin Sander, who details his analysis in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Science.

Both mammals and reptiles envelop their developing embryos in protective layers, something that ultimately helped their ancestors conquer the land and that still helps their offspring survive.

Mammals often keep these membrane-bundled offspring within them, giving birth to live young, while reptiles generally lay their membrane-swaddled progeny in eggs.

The fact that mammals and reptiles wrap their embryos within these defenses makes them known as amniotes, which first evolved about 310 million years ago.

The fossil record of amniotic eggs and embryos is paltry, leaving scientists little knowledge about when, how and why they evolved.