A landmark Australian research trial has found that blood, like good red wine, improves with age - at least when it's stored for transfusion.

In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Research Centre at Monash University in Melbourne led teams in five countries to investigate the effect of the age of transfused red blood cells on critically ill patients.

The trials involved 5000 intensive care patients in Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Ireland and Saudi Arabia. Analysis concluded the transfusion of older stored red blood cells is safe and, surprisingly, associated with fewer side effects.

We already know that climate change has a hold on the earth's surface processes, such as erosion and fluctuations in sea levels... but do surface processes in turn have an influence on volcanic activity? This was the question raised by geologists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE, Switzerland) working in partnership with the University of Orléans, University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris and the ICTJA-CSIC Institute in Barcelona. The researchers analysed volcanic data from the Messinian salinity crisis in the Mediterranean Sea, when the Strait of Gibraltar was blocked and the Mediterranean temporarily isolated from the Atlantic. After observing a sharp rise in volcanic activity during this period, and testing various scenarios, the geologists concluded that the increase in magmatic activity could only be explained by the almost total drying out of the Mediterranean. These results, which you can read all about in the journal Nature Geoscience, reveal the influence of surface processes - largely controlled by climate - on volcanic activity.

It is known that the Strait of Gibraltar was shut on a temporary basis during the Messinian Era (more precisely, from 5.96 to 5.33 million years ago) and that the Mediterranean Sea was isolated from the Atlantic. In fact, as far back as the 1970s scientists found layers of salt several hundred metres thick on the seabed. The only explanation for their formation is that there was no or very limited connection between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The scientists also discovered huge underwater canyons dating back to the same period, hollowed out by rivers running over land that is now submerged, suggesting that the sea level was much lower at the time. This also points to the massive drying up of the Mediterranean with enormous geographical and climatic disruption across the entire basin. This hypothesis, however, continues to be a source of debate.

Nevertheless, a team of UNIGE-led geologists has provided new evidence of the Mediterranean's drying up and the forcing of surface processes on magmatic activity.

Russian astronomer Marat Gilfanov managed to shed light on the origin of the world-famous supernova that flared up in the sky in 1572 and drastically changed scientists' perspective of astronomy at the time.

"The explosion of the [Tycho Brahe] supernova in the constellation of Cassiopeia in 1572 showed the whole world that the sky is not perennial as Aristotle wrote, and that the universe is constantly evolving," Russian astronomer Marat Gilfanov and his foreign colleagues said in a study published by the journal Nature Astronomy.

To understand the essence of the study, a small introduction to the nature of supernova might be needed.

In the Arctic, the Inuits have adapted to severe cold and a predominantly seafood diet. After the first population genomic analysis of the Greenland Inuits (Fumagalli, Moltke et al. 2015, Science doi:10.1126/science.aab2319), a region in the genome containing two genes has now been scrutinized by scientists: TBX15 and WARS2. This region is thought to be central to cold adaptation by generating heat from a specific type of body fat, and was earlier found to be a candidate for adaptation in the Inuits.

Now, a team of scientists led by Fernando Racimo, Rasmus Nielsen et al. have followed up on the first natural selection study in Inuits to trace back the origins of these adaptations.

To perform the study, they used the genomic data from nearly 200 Greenlandic Inuits and compared this to the 1000 Genomes Project and ancient hominid DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans. The results, published in the advanced online edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution, provide convincing evidence that the Inuit variant of the TBX15/WARS2 region first came into modern humans from an archaic hominid population, likely related to the Denisovans.

Legendary weapons manufacturer Kalashnikov has unveiled a flying motorbike which could be unleashed by Vladimir Putin if Russia goes into battle.

In a clip of the device being tested, shot in a hangar, a helmeted pilot is seen climbing aboard the small aircraft, which resembles a car roof rack surrounded by eight propellers.

The pilot for the Kalashnikov Concern group, which is based in the city of Izhevsk in central Russia's Udmurt Republic region, is seen sitting surrounded by the propellers and with a battery to power them mounted behind him.

Russia and the US have agreed to build a new space station called Deep Space Gateway in the moon's orbit, the head of Russia's Roscosmos space agency said, adding that the first modules could be ready between 2024 and 2026.

"We [Roscosmos and NASA] have agreed to join the project to build a new international Deep Space Gateway station in [the] moon's orbit," Roscosmos head Igor Komarov said, as cited by Interfax.

The official was speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia on Wednesday.

The first stage of the project will involve the construction of the orbital part of the station, Komarov announced.

He added that the technologies involved can later be used on the moon's surface and, potentially, on Mars.

To the unaided eye the famous, bright star Antares shines with a strong red tint in the heart of the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion). It is a huge and comparatively cool red supergiant star in the late stages of its life, on the way to becoming a supernova ^[1].

A team of astronomers, led by Keiichi Ohnaka, of the Universidad Católica del Norte in Chile, has now used ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile to map Antares's surface and to measure the motions of the surface material. This is the best image of the surface and atmosphere of any star other than the Sun.

The VLTI is a unique facility that can combine the light from up to four telescopes, either the 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes, or the smaller Auxiliary Telescopes, to create a virtual telescope equivalent to a single mirror up to 200 metres across. This allows it to resolve fine details far beyond what can be seen with a single telescope alone.

"How stars like Antares lose mass so quickly in the final phase of their evolution has been a problem for over half a century," said Keiichi Ohnaka, who is also the lead author of the paper. "The VLTI is the only facility that can directly measure the gas motions in the extended atmosphere of Antares - a crucial step towards clarifying this problem.The next challenge is to identify what's driving the turbulent motions."

Using the new results the team has created the first two-dimensional velocity map of the atmosphere of a star other than the Sun. They did this using the VLTI with three of the Auxiliary Telescopes and an instrument called AMBER to make separate images of the surface of Antares over a small range of infrared wavelengths. The team then used these data to calculate the difference between the speed of the atmospheric gas at different positions on the star and the average speed over the entire star ^[2]. This resulted in a map of the relative speed of the atmospheric gas across the entire disc of Antares - the first ever created for a star other than the Sun..

Your visual attention is drawn to parts of a scene that have meaning, rather than to those that are salient or "stick out," new research from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis reveals. The findings overturn the widely-held salience model of visual attention.

Our eyes perceive a wide field of view in front of us, but we only focus our attention on a small part of this field. How do we decide where to direct our attention, without thinking about it?

The dominant theory in attention studies is "visual salience," Professor John Henderson, who led the research, said. Salience means things that "stick out" from the background, like colorful berries on a background of leaves or a brightly lit object in a room.

Stimulation of the vagus nerve allows patient who had been in a persistant vegetative state for 15 years to track objects with his eyes and respond to simple requests
A 35-year-old man who had been in a persistant vegetative state (PVS) for 15 years has shown signs of consciousness after receiving a pioneering therapy involving nerve stimulation.

The treatment challenges a widely-accepted view that there is no prospect of a patient recovering consciousness if they have been in PVS for longer than 12 months.

Since sustaining severe brain injuries in a car accident, the man had been completely unaware of the world around him. But when fitted with an implant to stimulate the vagus nerve, which travels into the brain stem, the man appeared to flicker back into a state of consciousness.

He started to track objects with his eyes, began to stay awake while being read a story and his eyes opened wide in surprise when the examiner suddenly moved her face close to the patient's. He could even respond to some simple requests, such as turning his head when asked - although this took about a minute.

A Russian security company run by Kaspersky Lab's co-founder is introducing a smartphone that prevents Google and other apps from snooping on users, seeking to capitalize on the country's tensions with the U.S.

The Taiga phone, designed by Moscow-based InfoWatch Group and named after desolated forests in Siberia, runs its own Android-based firmware that lets apps run on the device but stops them from collecting data. The phone also has a built-in agent that gives the administrator -- such as a corporate IT department -- control over what apps will work on the device and what content the user can access or share.

"Most smartphone apps collect certain data on users and send it to outside servers," said Natalya Kaspersky, head of InfoWatch. "When people use personal phones at work, their corporate emails, documents and job-related photos come under threat of being -- maliciously or accidentally -- leaked to third parties."