Studies at Florida State University could also lead to smaller storage devices with Exabyte capacity

Researchers at Florida State University have discovered crystals that could lead to super security chips as well as contribute to the discovery of materials that expand the capacity of electronic storage devices by 1,000 to 1 million times.

The security chips could store encrypted data written two different ways -- electrically and magnetically -- making extraction of the data more complex and so more difficult for attackers to decrypt.

If they have success developing a new storage medium, devices the size of a current 1GB storage components could hold an Exabyte -- a million million Bytes -- of data.

The government of the Ulianovsk Region in the Volga area has approved a five-year program to produce so-called "flying saucers" - a bizarre hybrid of a helicopter and an aerostat.

The first such aircraft, officially named "aerostatic thermoballasted vehicle" or simply "Locomoskayner" after its manufacturer LocomoSky, was presented MAKS-2009 air show. The prototype flying saucer was seven meters (23 feet) in diameter and was able to transport 20 kg (44.4 lbs) of cargo.

The company, however, plans to produce aircraft with a cargo-carrying capacity of up to 600 metric tons or a passenger capacity of up to 11,000 people.

It will be able to hover, perform a vertical landing, move in a straight line with speeds close to 100 kmph, turn around and will need no special ground-based facilities to land.

Could these lines etched into 60,000-year-old ostrich eggshells (see photo) be the earliest signs of humans using graphic art to communicate?

Until recently, the first consistent evidence of symbolic communication came from the geometric shapes that appear alongside rock art all over the world, which date to 40,000 years ago. Older finds, like the 75,000-year-old engraved ochre chunks from the Blombos cave in South Africa, have mostly been one-offs and difficult to tell apart from meaningless doodles.

The engraved ostrich eggshells may change that. Since 1999, Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux, France, and his colleagues have uncovered 270 fragments of shell at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape, South Africa.

They show the same symbols are used over and over again, and the team say there are signs that the symbols evolved over 5000 years. This long-term repetition is a hallmark of symbolic communication and a sign of modern human thinking, say the team (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0913047107).

Astronomers have discovered a relic from the early universe - a star that may have been among the second generation of stars to form after the Big Bang. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 290,000 light-years away, the star has a remarkably similar chemical make-up to the Milky Way's oldest stars. Its presence supports the theory that our galaxy underwent a "cannibal" phase, growing to its current size by swallowing dwarf galaxies and other galactic building blocks.

"This star likely is almost as old as the universe itself," said astronomer Anna Frebel of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the Nature paper reporting the finding.

A low-cost water purification technique published in Current Protocols in Microbiology could help drastically reduce the incidence of waterborne disease in the developing world. The procedure, which uses seeds from the Moringa oleifera tree, can produce a 90.00% to 99.99% bacterial reduction in previously untreated water, and has been made free to download as part of access programs under John Wiley & Sons' Corporate Citizenship Initiative.

Ann Arbor, Michigan---The most common digital security technique used to protect both media copyright and Internet communications has a major weakness, University of Michigan computer scientists have discovered.

RSA authentication is a popular encryption method used in media players, laptop computers, smartphones, servers and other devices. Retailers and banks also depend on it to ensure the safety of their customers' information online.

The scientists found they could foil the security system by varying the voltage supply to the holder of the "private key," which would be the consumer's device in the case of copy protection and the retailer or bank in the case of Internet communication. It is highly unlikely that a hacker could use this approach on a large institution, the researchers say. These findings would be more likely to concern media companies and mobile device manufacturers, as well as those who use them.

Archaeologists in Egypt have unearthed what they say is the 4,000-year-old sarcophagus of a mysterious ancient Egyptian queen.

A French team discovered the stone coffin in a burial ground, or necropolis, at Saqqara, south of the capital Cairo.

Egyptian experts say the burial chamber included ancient texts, or hieroglyphics, identifying the coffin as belonging to Queen Behenu. The inscriptions also included prayers meant to ease her passage to the afterlife.

The French team leader, Philippe Collombert, says it is not clear if Queen Behenu was the wife of 6th Dynasty rulers Pepi I or Pepi II. During that period, Egypt's Old Kingdom collapsed, bringing an end to the king's centralized power.

Spanish police have revealed that they have arrested three men responsible for one of the world's biggest networks of virus-infected computers.

All are Spanish citizens with no criminal records and limited hacking skills.

It is estimated that the so-called Mariposa botnet was made up of nearly 13 million computers in 190 countries. It included PCs inside more than half of Fortune 1000 companies and more than 40 major banks, investigators said.

The criminals have so far only been identified by their internet names, netkairo, aged 31, johnyloleante, aged 30 and ostiator, 25. Other arrests may follow, the investigators believe.

When cosmologist George Ellis turned 70 last year, his friends held a party to celebrate. There were speeches and drinks and canapés aplenty to honour the theorist from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who is regarded as one of the world's leading experts on general relativity. But there the similarity to most parties ends.

For a start, Ellis's celebration at the University of Oxford lasted for three days and the guest list was made up entirely of physicists, astronomers and philosophers of science. They had gathered to debate what Ellis considers the most dangerous idea in science: the suggestion that our universe is but a tiny part of an unimaginably large and diverse multiverse.

To the dismay of Ellis and many of his colleagues, the multiverse has developed rapidly from a being merely a speculative idea to a theory verging on respectability. There are good reasons why. Several strands of theoretical physics - quantum mechanics, string theory and cosmic inflation - seem to converge on the idea that our universe is only one among an infinite and ever-growing assemblage of disconnected bubble universes.

What's more, the multiverse offers a plausible answer to what has become an infuriatingly slippery question: why does the quantity of dark energy in the universe have the extraordinarily unlikely value that it does? No theory of our universe has been able to explain it. But if there are countless universes out there beyond our cosmic horizon, each with its own value for the quantity of dark energy it contains, the value we observe becomes not just probable but inevitable.

Despite the many virtues of the multiverse, Ellis is far from alone in finding it a dangerous idea. The main cause for alarm is the fact that it postulates the existence of a multitude of unobservable universes, making the whole idea untestable. If something as fundamental as this is untestable, says Ellis, the foundations of science itself are undermined.

The extraterrestrial body that slammed into Earth 65 million years ago is best known for killing off the dinosaurs. But it also snuffed out more than 90% of the tiny plankton species that made up the base of the food web in the oceans. By sifting through geological records of ancient sediments from around the globe, palaeoceanographers have culled clues about how the impact caused so much havoc.

The researchers report in Nature Geoscience¹ today that the most severe extinctions of nannoplankton happened in the northern oceans and that the ecosystems there took 300,000 years to recover, much longer than in the south. Given that pattern, the researchers speculate that the direction of the impact caused long-lasting darkness in the Northern Hemisphere and metal-poisoning in the northern oceans.

Nannoplankton with calcium-based shells were the primary photosynthetic producers in the oceans until 65 million years ago, at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Palaeogene periods. But 93% of those species went extinct - along with ammonites, large marine reptiles such as the plesiosaurs, and all the dinosaurs. The extinctions have been linked to the Chicxulub impact crater, which is buried beneath the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico.