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Automatic firing: Raytheon's Phalanx gun system, which searches for enemy missiles and automatically destroys incoming projectiles

Militaries around the world 'very excited' about replacing soldiers with robots that can act independently

U.S. leads the way with automated weapons systems, but drones still need remote control operator authorisation to open fire

Human Rights Watch calls for worldwide ban on autonomous killing machines before governments start using them

Fully autonomous robots that decide for themselves when to kill could be developed within 20 to 30 years, or 'even sooner', a report has warned.

Militaries across the world are said to be 'very excited' about machines that could deployed alone in battle, sparing human troops from dangerous situations.

The U.S. is leading development in such 'killer robots', notably unmanned drones often used to attack suspected militants in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere.

It's already made the most detailed map yet of Earth's gravity fields, but the GOCE satellite isn't done yet: Now it's lowering its orbit and coming closer and closer to Earth to make an even better map.

The data from the GOCE satellite, which is run by the European Space Agency, is enormously useful to scientists such as geologists and climatologists and to oil companies and government officials. Measurements from the satellite have been used to visualize what is going on beneath the Earth's surface. The satellite has helped track the underground movement of lava and detect changes in gravity caused by melting glaciers, and it has produced the first high-resolution map of the boundary between Earth's crust and mantle.

But by lowering its orbit from 158 miles (255 kilometers) high to 146 miles (235 km) - which is about 310 miles (500 km) lower than most Earth observation satellites - the satellite is likely to produce an even more accurate map, the ESA says. The satellite is descending by about 980 feet (300 meters) a day and is slated to reach its new orbit in February.

The maps produced by the satellite show the "geoid" of the Earth, a hypothetical surface around the planet at which the planet's gravitational pull is the same everywhere. Anything with mass has a gravity field that attracts objects toward it. The strength of this gravity field depends on the mass of the body. Since Earth's mass isn't spread out evenly, its gravity field is stronger in certain areas than in others. The strength of Earth's gravity varies depending on the depth of an ocean trench or height of a mountain, as well as the density of material.

Over dense areas, where gravity is stronger, the geoid moves away from the real surface of the planet, and where gravity is weaker, the geoid moves closer to the real surface. Mapping this geoid helps to conduct precise measurements of ocean circulation, sea-level changes and the mass of polar ice sheets, according to an ESA news release.

A new study of stem cells derived from skin tissue has challenged the commonly held notion that a person's cells all share the same DNA sequence, arguing instead that genetic variation may occur to a greater extent than experts had previously believed.

Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine set out to challenge the theory that human cells are comprised of identical genetic material, and that a body's functions are governed by that blueprint. They set out to test a competing hypothesis - that as DNA is copied from mother to daughter cells, deletions, duplications, and alternations to the sequence of the DNA could occur, and could affect entire groups of genes.

According to the university, that notion has been "incredibly difficult to test," but Dr. Flora Vaccarino, a professor of child psychology at Yale, and colleagues did so by using whole genome sequencing to analyze induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) taken from the upper, inner arms of a pair of different families.

They spent 24 months characterizing those iPS cell lines and comparing them to the skin cells from which they originated, and while the genomes of each cell group were similar, Dr. Vaccarino's team was able to pinpoint multiple deletions or duplications that involved thousands of base pairs of DNA, the university explained.

The sun unleashed a monster eruption of super-hot plasma Friday (Nov. 16) in back-to-back solar storms captured on camera by a NASA spacecraft.

The giant sun eruption, called a solar prominence, occurred at 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT), with another event flaring up four hours later. The prominences was so large, it expanded beyond the camera view of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which captured high-definition video of the solar eruption.

In the video, a colossal loop of glowing red plasma erupts from the lower left of the sun, arcing up and out of frame as it blasts away from the star.

"The red-glowing looped material is plasma, a hot gas made of electrically charged hydrogen and helium," officials with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, which oversees the SDO mission, explained in a description. "The prominence plasma flows along a tangled and twisted structure of magnetic fields generated by the sun's internal dynamo. An erupting prominence occurs when such a structure becomes unstable and bursts outward, releasing the plasma."

Study shows that monogamous men given the hormone oxytocin will put extra space between themselves and an attractive woman they've just met.

If retired Army Gen. David H. Petraeus had gotten an occasional dose of supplemental oxytocin, a brain chemical known to promote trust and bonding, he might still be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, new research suggests.

A study published Tuesday in the Journal of Neuroscience has uncovered a surprising new property of oxytocin, finding that when men in monogamous relationships got a sniff of the stuff, they subsequently put a little extra space between themselves and an attractive woman they'd just met.

Oxytocin didn't have the same effect on single heterosexual men, who comfortably parked themselves between 21 and 24 inches from the comely female stranger. The men who declared themselves in "stable, monogamous" relationships and got a dose of the hormone chose to stand, on average, about 6 1/2 inches farther away.

Tick bites have long been synonymous with bad news, responsible for transmitting diseases such as Lyme disease, Ehrlichiosis, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, but this must be a carnivore or BBQ lover's worst nightmare. A growing body of research suggests that bites from a particular tick are causing an unusual allergic reaction to meat. At an allergy meeting last week, for example, a diagnostics lab presented evidence that the highest prevalence of the allergy is in the southeastern United States, where the tick primarily thrives. Yet American BBQ lovers and carnivores elsewhere may not rest easy; the allergy mysteriously afflicts people living in parts of the United States, even Hawaii, where the tick does not live.

The meat allergy, known as alpha-gal for a sugar carbohydrate found in beef, lamb, and pork, produces a hivelike rash - and, in some people, a dangerous anaphylactic reaction - roughly 4 hours after consuming meat. But unlike other common food allergies, the alpha-gal allergy has been found only in people who have been bitten by ticks - specifically the lone star tick, previously best known for causing a condition called southern tick-associated rash illness, the symptoms of which include rash, fatigue, headache, fever, and muscle pains. "You have to have a tick bite to then trigger the immune reaction," Stanley Fineman, an allergist and president of American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI).

People who are bitten by the ticks develop antibodies against the alpha-gal sugar, and individuals with symptoms can be diagnosed by a blood test that looks for the presence of those antibodies. But Fineman says that too few people are aware of the allergy or don't make the connection between a case of hives and the meal they had much earlier in the day, and so they never get tested. "It takes 4 to 6 hours to see a reaction, so many people don't correlate that to their meat, or hamburger or something. It's easy to miss," Fineman says.

Allergy researcher Thomas Platts-Mills of the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville has been studying the alpha-gal reaction since 2002, when he began investigating an unusual sensitivity to the cancer drug cetuximab, which contains the same alpha-gal sugar as meat. Cancer patients who demonstrated an allergic reaction to the drug were nearly exclusive to the southeastern United States and were also found to have high levels of alpha-gal antibodies, Platts-Mills explains. Furthermore, some of them, along with other noncancer patients in the same region, also reported having severe allergic reactions after eating meat. Platts-Mills later published the relationship between alpha-gal antibodies and the cetuximab allergy in The New England Journal of Medicine.

You may know the term Circadian rhythm, or the cells' biological clocks that determine peak processes of bodily processes, like blood pressure, heart efficiency, and general alertness. That Circadian rhythm is why some people are night owls and some people cannot stay awake past 8:00 PM. Interestingly, researchers have found that a single gene can determine into which group you fall - and that gene can also help explain what time of day you are likely to die.

"The internal 'biological clock' regulates many aspects of human biology and behavior, such as preferred sleep times, times of peak cognitive performance, and the timing of many physiological processes. It also influences the timing of acute medical events like stroke and heart attack," said Andrew Lim, a study author and a postdoctoral fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at the time of this research.

Researchers had previously been aware of certain rare gene mutations that meant that entire families were on the same Circadian rhythm, in which they stayed awake until the wee hours of the morning and woke up in the early afternoon. However, this study was the first to find a gene that is expressed in every single member of the general population.

The study, published in the Annals of Neurology, began as an attempt to find out whether behaviors could predict the onset of the debilitating Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. The study had intended to examine 1,200 people who were 65 years old at the time of study. Researchers also gave the participants actigraphs, which analyze a person's sleep-wake behaviors and provides an assessment of their activity. All of the participants also agreed to donate their brains after their deaths.

Last week I went to a lecture by the inventor and futurist author Ray Kurzweil, who was visiting Dartmouth College for a couple of days. Kurzweil became famous for his music synthesizers and his text-to-speech software, which are of great help to those who can't read or are blind. Stevie Wonder was one of his first customers. His main take, that the exponential advance in information and computer technology will deeply transform society and the meaning of being human, resonates with many people and scares a bunch more.

Using his exponential curve for processing-power-per-dollar increase, Kurzweil estimates that by 2045 we will reach the "Singularity," a point of no return where people and machine will reach a deep level of integration. You can watch Kurzweil walk through his ideas at bigthink.com. Here's a sample posted to YouTube:


For those who can afford it - and that's a whole topic of discussion by itself: what will happen to those who can't? - life will be something very different. Lifespan will be enormously extended, death will become an affliction and not an inevitability. I guess only taxes will remain a certainty!

Are such scenarios sci-fi or the reality of the future?

An international team of researchers, led by the University of Edinburgh, has discovered a new gene that helps to solve one of life's greatest mysteries - what makes us human?

The gene - miR-941 - helps to explain how humans evolved from apes. It appears to have played a crucial role in the development of the human brain and may shed light on our use of tools and language.

This is the first time, according to the team, that a new gene carried only by humans and not by apes has been shown to have a specific function within the human body. They compared the human genome to 11 other species of mammals - including chimpanzees, gorillas, mice and rats - to find the differences between them.

The miR-941 gene is unique to humans, the study found. The results, published in Nature Communications, show that it emerged after humans evolved from apes, between six and one million years ago.

The team found that the gene is highly active in the two areas of the brain that control a human's ability to make decisions and our language abilities, suggesting that it could have a role in the advanced brain functions that make us human.

Does Mr. Whiskers really love you or is he just angling for treats?

Until recently, scientists would have said your cat was snuggling up to you only as a means to get tasty treats. But many animals have a moral compass, and feel emotions such as love, grief, outrage and empathy, a new book argues.

The book, Can Animals Be Moral? (Oxford University Press, October 2012), suggests social mammals such as rats, dogs and chimpanzees can choose to be good or bad.

And because they have morality, we have moral obligations to them, said author Mark Rowlands, a University of Miami philosopher.

"Animals are owed a certain kind of respect that they wouldn't be owed if they couldn't act morally," Rowlands told LiveScience.

But while some animals have complex emotions, they don't necessarily have true morality, other researchers argue.