A 300,000-year Neanderthal reign over Eurasia may have ended in dark skies. Researchers uncovered layers of volcanic ash that they say represents eruptions around the Caucasus region of southwestern Russia about 40,000 years ago -- just around the time when Neanderthal numbers began to fall and allow for the rise of modern humans.

Such suggestive findings come from the Mezmaiskaya cave in southwestern Russia, which shows evidence of Neanderthal activity up until the volcanic ash layer. Then the former cave inhabitants seemingly disappear without a trace.

That represents another piece of evidence for paleoanthropologists who believe that catastrophic eruptions led to a volcanic winter and wild climate changes that crippled the Neanderthal population in northern Eurasia. By contrast, the theory says, modern humans lived farther south at the time and would have been unaffected by the volcanoes.

The theory has not gone unchallenged, and the latest study won't settle the debate.

Answering e-mail while toggling between telephone conversations. Monitoring social networking sites while working. Supervising the kids' homework while listening to the news and cooking dinner. The abundance of contemporary distractions offers many reasons to curse multitasking.

But a UCLA anthropologist refuses to join the chorus. In a new book that explores the long history of multitasking, Monica L. Smith maintains that human beings should appreciate their ability to sequence many activities and to remember to return to a task once it has been interrupted, possibly even with new ideas on how to improve the activity.

"I don't think it's worth saying multitasking is bad," said Smith, the author of A Prehistory of Ordinary People (University of Arizona Press). "We can do it, and that is astonishing."

In fact, Smith, an associate professor of anthropology, contends that the multitasking is the ability that separates human beings from animals: "Multitasking is what makes us human."

Few may remember the 1982 film, Firefox about the Soviet fighter jet controlled by the pilot's mind. The film, starring Clint Eastwood, set out on a premise that technology using the mind as its commander would be a weapon so dangerous that "it would change the structure of our world."

Or, as software developer Robert Oschler has discovered, you can use it to watch YouTube.

Oschler is a pioneer on an emerging frontier - a place where the boundaries between man and machine are less defined, and where technological boundaries fade. Using what is known as an electroencephalogram (EEG), he has replaced a keyboard and a mouse with his own thoughts and emerging notions.

His tool of choice is a consumer EEG headset, the Emotiv EPOC. The device sports 14 electrodes that wrap around the user's head, a built-in gyroscope, and the ability to detect emotions.

His interest in the technology isn't based in monetary gain. "It's fascinating. That's what it's really about," Oschler said, adding that it "can't even be compared" to writing a Web app - both in terms of capabilities, and unrefined geek-style coolness.

"It opens up a whole new range of software that has never been possible, and a whole new way of working with computers that has never been possible before," Oschler said.

Like in the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that was re-imagined in the film Blade Runner, Oschler's work has merged emotion into the computer system.

Dosing meerkats with the hormone oxytocin makes them spend more time and energy helping others in their group, according to a new study.

And it doesn't just affect one or two of meerkats' wide range of cooperative or 'pro-social' behaviours - it boosts a broad spectrum.

This finding may hold the answer to why social animals don't just help out with tasks they will directly benefit from, like digging burrows - they also do things for the good of the group that actually cost them as individuals, like giving food they've caught to other group members' young.

'All the co-operative behaviours seem to be controlled at a high level by the same pathway,' says Dr Joah Madden of the University of Exeter, lead author of the paper, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 'One of the big questions in animal behaviour has been why individuals behave cooperatively. Until now, studies have typically looked at just one behaviour and tried to find explanations for it in isolation, rather than looking at altruistic behaviour as a whole syndrome.'

Madden and co-author Professor Tim Clutton-Brock of the University of Cambridge gave intramuscular injections of either oxytocin or a control saline solution to 36 wild meerkats from four groups living in South Africa's Kuruman River Reserve. They then counted how often they behaved cooperatively over the next half hour.

With new tools that can grab individual strands of DNA and stretch them like rubber bands, Rice University scientists are working to unravel a mystery of modern genomics. Their latest findings, which appear in Physical Review Letters, offer new clues about the physical makeup of odd segments of DNA that have just one DNA base, adenine, repeated dozens of times in a row.

These mysterious 'poly(dA) repeats' are sprinkled throughout the human genome. Scientists have also found them in the genomes of animals, plants and other species over the past decade. But researchers do not know why they are there, what function they perform or why they occur only with the DNA base adenine and not the other three DNA bases - cytosine, guanine and thymine.

'Previous investigations of poly(dA) have suggested that adenine bases stack in a very uniform way,' said Ching-Hwa Kiang, a co-author of the new study and assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Rice. 'Our investigation focused on what happens when single strands of poly(dA) were stretched and these stacks were pulled apart.'

Kiang's research group specialises in studying the physical and mechanical properties of proteins and nucleic acids, and their primary tool is one of the mainstays of nanotechnology research - the atomic force microscope, or AFM. The business end of an AFM is like a tiny phonograph needle. The tip of the needle is no more than a few atoms wide, and the needle is at the end of an arm that bobs up and down over the surface of what is being measured. While nanotechnologists use the device to measure the thickness of samples, Kiang's group uses it in a different way.

The ancient Greeks' vision of a geometrical Universe seemed to come out of nowhere. Could their ideas have come from the internal gearing of an ancient mechanism?

Two thousand years ago, a Greek mechanic set out to build a machine that would model the workings of the known Universe. The result was a complex clockwork mechanism that displayed the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets on precisely marked dials. By turning a handle, the creator could watch his tiny celestial bodies trace their undulating paths through the sky.

The mechanic's name is now lost. But his machine, dubbed the Antikythera mechanism, is by far the most technologically sophisticated artefact that survives from antiquity. Since a reconstruction of the device hit the headlines in 2006, it has revolutionized ideas about the technology of the ancient world, and has captured the public imagination as the apparent pinnacle of Greek scientific achievement.

Now, however, scientists delving into the astronomical theories encoded in this quintessentially Greek device have concluded that they are not Greek at all, but Babylonian - an empire predating this era by centuries. This finding is forcing historians to rethink a crucial period in the development of astronomy. It may well be that geared devices such as the Antikythera mechanism did not model the Greeks' geometric view of the cosmos after all. They inspired it.

'Honest, the wolf's chewing my trouser leg now' says Cerf

Less than three per cent of IPv4 address space is still to be allocated, after two huge chunks were given to American and European ISPs.

ARIN and RIPE, which administer IP addresses on either side of the Atlantic, each received two /8 address blocks in November. A fifth block went to their African equivalent.

The moves leave only seven /8 blocks - 2.7 per cent of the total of 256 - unallocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

For years, warnings have been issued that the internet in its current incarnation is running out of space for new devices. Now that reality is imminent.

Implementation flaw only: 'perfect security' still coming

A hack against systems running quantum key cryptography only worked because of implementation errors, according to new research.

A paper published in September demonstrated how the avalanche photo-detectors as used in quantum cryptography rigs might be blinded, essentially causing equipment to malfunction without generating an error indicating that a key exchange needed to be abandoned.

Using the ruse, a potential eavesdropper might be able to gain information about a secret encryption key being exchanged over a supposedly super-secure optical fibre link. Normally any attempt to observe the key exchange would interfere with the process, producing so many errors that a key exchange is abandoned.

Preliminary research has found that children with autism are more likely to have impaired mitochondrial function (structures within cells responsible for energy production) and mitochondrial DNA abnormalities than typically developing children, according to a study in the December 1 issue of JAMA.

"Limited scientific advances have been made regarding the causes of autism, with general agreement that both genetic and environmental factors contribute to this disorder," the authors write. Some reports have suggested that mitochondrial dysfunction may influence processes highly dependent on energy, such as neurodevelopment, and contribute to autism. However, most reports involved only 1 or a few isolated cases, according to background information in the article.

Cecilia Giulivi, Ph.D., of the University of California, Davis, and colleagues tested the hypothesis that children with full syndrome autism would have dysfunctional mitochondria in peripheral blood lymphocytes (white blood cells). The researchers used data collected from patients ages 2 to 5 years who were a subset of children participating in the Childhood Autism Risk From Genes and Environment study, a population-based investigation with confirmed autism cases and age-matched, genetically unrelated, typically developing controls, that was launched in 2003 and is still ongoing. Mitochondrial dysfunction and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) abnormalities were evaluated in lymphocytes from 10 children with autism and 10 controls.

The Geminid meteor shower, which peaks this year on Dec. 13th and 14th, is the most intense meteor shower of the year. It lasts for days, is rich in fireballs, and can be seen from almost any point on Earth.

It's also NASA astronomer Bill Cooke's favorite meteor shower - but not for any of the reasons listed above.

"The Geminids are my favorite," he explains, "because they defy explanation."

Most meteor showers come from comets, which spew ample meteoroids for a night of 'shooting stars.' The Geminids are different. The parent is not a comet but a weird rocky object named 3200 Phaethon that sheds very little dusty debris - not nearly enough to explain the Geminids.

"Of all the debris streams Earth passes through every year, the Geminids' is by far the most massive," says Cooke. "When we add up the amount of dust in the Geminid stream, it outweighs other streams by factors of 5 to 500."

This makes the Geminids the 900-lb gorilla of meteor showers. Yet 3200 Phaethon is more of a 98-lb weakling.

3200 Phaethon was discovered in 1983 by NASA's IRAS satellite and promptly classified as an asteroid. What else could it be? It did not have a tail; its orbit intersected the main asteroid belt; and its colors strongly resembled that of other asteroids. Indeed, 3200 Phaethon resembles main belt asteroid Pallas so much, it might be a 5-kilometer chip off that 544 km block.