Boffins offer 'lava' thesis, poohpooh alien/Elvis theories

Space boffins believe they may be on the verge of discovering a vast, hidden network of tunnels beneath the surface of the Moon.

The tunnels aren't thought to be the work of long-extinct (or perhaps still surviving) intelligent moon aliens, perhaps driven to adopt a subterranean existence by a notional disappearing atmosphere aeons ago. Nor is any involvement by Tibetans, Elvis or others seeking a secluded dwelling far from prying human eyes suspected.

A new game promises to take shoot 'em up gameplay into a thrilling new dimension.

Battle Tag, from Just Dance publishers Ubisoft, revives the real-world thrills and spills of laser quest, albeit with a couple of neat video gaming twists. Players don hit-detecting vests, pick up their laser pistols and then proceed diving over the furniture as they endeavor to blast their rivals while not being shot themselves. Needless to say any expensive ornaments or family pets should be placed out of danger before play commences, as things are bound to get messy.

This is an intriguing step beyond console gaming for Ubisoft. Consoles still play a key part of the action, though. In the first place the console acts as a glorified scoreboard, recording all hits while telling players to "try to be less pathetic than last time" and other such encouraging exhortations. Meanwhile a sensor unit boasts a 300-metre range, meaning that the blasting action can easily extend into the garden, down the street and into the local park if required. "Survival" and "Deathmatch Versus" modes are offered for two teams of players.

Archaeologists working at the World Trade Centre site in New York have found the remains of a wooden ship apparently buried there more than 200 years ago.

The remains of the 30ft length of a wood-hulled vessel were found when workers excavating the site, where a new World Trade Centre is being built, hit a row of wood timbers, The New York Times reported.

"They were so perfectly contoured that they were clearly part of a ship," said archaeologist A. Michael Pappalardo.

The archaeologists have been working on the site - scene of the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 - to document historical material uncovered during construction.

Historians and archaeologists are analyzing a treasure trove of Qin dynasty documents that promise to tell us more about life in the time of the First Emperor of China - Qin Shi Huang.

Qin Shi Huang unified China in 221 BC after conquering the other Chinese states. His reforms were numerous. He forced all of China to use a single currency, brought in a uniform system of rules and started construction of the Great Wall. He is perhaps best known for the Mausoleum he constructed with life-size Terracotta warriors nearby.

He died in 210 BC and in the ensuing chaos a new emperor, Han Gaozu, came to power. He inaugurated the Han Dynasty, a ruling line that would reign over China for 400 years.

The document discovery was made in 2002 in Liye City. It's an ancient settlement located in the area of modern day Xiangxi.

They were discovered when a construction team, working on a middle school, came across a well. When archaeologists ventured in they found a stash of 18,000 documents that were written on slips of bamboo and wooden boards. In addition they also found about 18,000 blank documents - stationary that was not used.

An extrasolar planet nearly as big as Jupiter is circling so close to its parent star -- a year passes in just 3.5 days -- that its atmosphere is being baked off into space, creating a comet-like tail.

The planet, known as HD 209458b, is located about 153 light-years away.

Scientists had suspected since 2003 that stellar winds would be strong enough to sweep the planet's atmosphere into space and had even modeled what it would look like, says Jeffrey Linsky, with the University of Colorado in Boulder, who led a team that used Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to make observations.

"We have measured gas coming off the planet at specific speeds, some coming toward Earth. The most likely interpretation is that we have measured the velocity of material in a tail," Linsky said in a press statement.

Things happeneing on Mercury that "we clearly do not understand," expert says.

The space weather report for Mercury: stormy, with a chance of power surges.

New data from the third and final flyby of the MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) spacecraft have revealed surprisingly intense electromagnetic storms in Mercury's magnetic "tail," part of the planet's magnetic field.

Such tails form when the solar wind - charged particles streaming from the sun - pushes on a planet's magnetic field. The deformed field flows around the planet in a windsock shape, like river water flowing around a rock.

All eight planets in the solar system except Mars and Venus have magnetic fields and tails, although Mercury's field is the smallest and weakest.

A New Zealand-based technology company has today unveiled a robotic exoskeleton which could change the lives of disabled people.

Rex, short for Robotic Exoskeleton, was developed over four years and had its first public demonstration in Auckland today.

The company behind the technology, Rex Bionics, is understood to have kept the project under wraps since 2006.

Its official website said only that it had designed a disability aid using "the latest robotic techniques" but offered little other information.

Boffinry excitement in superconducting circles

Topflight boffins believe they may be on the track of the fabled room-temperature superconductor, a technology which - if achieved - promises to revolutionize various fields including hover trains, electric power, mighty dimension-portal atom smashers and even supercomputing.

The new science relates to the study of copper-oxide superconductors. A superconductor is a material which carries an electric current without any resistance: naturally, as a result, it is excellent for generating tremendously powerful magnetic fields. These are useful for such purposes as building MRI scanners, mag-lev hover trains and colossal very-fabric-of-spacetime-rending particle punchers such as the famous Large Hadron Collider.

A blast of the brightest X-rays ever detected from beyond our Milky Way galaxy's neighborhood temporarily blinded the X-ray eye on NASA's Swift space observatory earlier this summer, astronomers now report. The X-rays traveled through space for 5-billion years before slamming into and overwhelming Swift's X-ray Telescope on 21 June.

The blindingly bright blast came from a gamma-ray burst, a violent eruption of energy from the explosion of a massive star morphing into a new black hole.

"This gamma-ray burst is by far the brightest light source ever seen in X-ray wavelengths at cosmological distances," said David Burrows, senior scientist and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and the lead scientist for Swift's X-ray Telescope (XRT).

Although the Swift satellite was designed specifically to study gamma-ray bursts, the instrument was not designed to handle an X-ray blast this bright.

"The intensity of these X-rays was unexpected and unprecedented" said Neil Gehrels, Swift's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He said the burst, named GRB 100621A, is the brightest X-ray source that Swift has detected since the observatory began X-ray observation in early 2005.

Strangely shaped dust clouds, resembling spilled liquids, are silhouetted against a colourful background of glowing gas in this newly released Hubble image. The star-forming region NGC 2467 is a vast cloud of gas - mostly hydrogen - that serves as an incubator for new stars.

Some of these youthful stars have emerged from the dense clouds where they were born and now shine brightly, hot and blue in this picture, but many others remain hidden.

The full beauty of this object and hints of the astrophysical processes at work within it are revealed in this super-sharp image from Hubble. Hot young stars that recently formed from the cloud are emitting fierce ultraviolet radiation that is causing the whole scene to glow while also sculpting the environment and gradually eroding the gas clouds.

Studies have shown that most of the radiation comes from the single hot and brilliant massive star just above the centre of the image. Its fierce radiation has cleared the surrounding region and some of the next generation of stars are forming in the denser regions around the edge.

One of the most familiar star-forming regions is the Orion Nebula, which can be seen with the naked eye. NGC 2467 is a similar but more distant example.

Such stellar nurseries can be seen out to considerable distances in the Universe, and their study is important in determining the distance and chemical composition of other galaxies. Some galaxies contain huge star-forming regions, which may contain tens of thousands of stars. Another dramatic example is the 30 Doradus region in the Large Magellanic Cloud.