The future Russian spacecraft, set to replace tried and trusted Soyuz, has been tested in a hypersonic wind tunnel. The capsule will not be protected by a fairing during launch and requires refining of its shape and composition.

The spacecraft, called PTK Federation, has been meticulously developed during the past decade. It is being designed to eventually replace the Soyuz in manned missions and also to serve as a space freighter to supply orbital stations like the ISS.

In late April three scale models of Federation were delivered to the facilities of TsAGI, or Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute, a leading Russian aviation and space laboratory. The lab has since been testing how the future spacecraft fares under enormous stress during launch and reentry phases. According to an industry source cited by the news agency TASS, the most serious tests in the TsAGI hypersonic wind tunnel have been successfully completed while those involving supersonic flows would continue until the end of the year.

Frankenstein is the timeless story of reanimating a dead body through the use of technology.

And now a team of researchers in the US seem to be walking in the footsteps of Mary Shelley's creation with a new experiment.

Teams at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are experimenting with lumps of tissue taken from fossil bones of our early ancestors

They've reportedly managed to grow tiny brains, about the size of a pea, in petri dishes inside labs.

They say the next step is to link these cavemen brains to robots using neural implants to try and create a kind of Neanderthal cyborg.

This, in turn, will allow them to find out what caused Neanderthals to go extinct - leaving homo sapiens to colonise the Earth.

In our eternal quest to seek out new life, humanity has tried to make contact with extraterrestrials in some pretty weird ways. We've sent quite a few objects into space, some of which may truly confuse any aliens who find them.

Gazing at the night sky we often ask ourselves if there's anyone out there on planets orbiting faraway stars in the deep vastness of the universe.

In an attempt to communicate with the unknown, we've launched orbital missions and shot space probes past the edges of our Solar System. But it might have taken a few bizarre turns along the way though, as humanity has launched some unusual objects into space to tell the aliens something about who we are.

Heroin and other opioids increase the amount of hypocretin-producing nerve cells

Using opioids gives some brain cells a call to action.

Opioid addicts' brains, examined after death, contain about 50 percent more nerve cells that release a molecule called hypocretin, compared with people who didn't use the drugs, a new study finds. Giving the opiate morphine to mice also induced similar changes in their brains. But the increase didn't come from new nerve cells, or neurons, being born. Instead, once-dormant neurons appear to rev up their hypocretin machinery in response to the addictive drugs, researchers report June 27 in Science Translational Medicine.

The findings fit with a growing body of research that suggests that hypocretin, a brain chemical that regulates wakefulness and arousal, may also be involved in addiction.

From Tokyo Rose's radio broadcasts to American soldiers blasting Van Halen to force out Panamanian dictators, breaking the will of an enemy has always been one of the most important goals of warfare, primarily because it's much easier to win battles if the enemy gives themselves up without a fight. For years, many armies have relied on dropping leaflets on the enemy from the air, but a new prototype created by the U.S. Special Operations Forces Command (USSOCOM) takes the concept of propaganda leaflets to the next level by essentially being a piece of paper that can talk to enemy combatants who pick it up.

The USSOCOM prototype is incredibly thin-only the thickness of four sheets of paper-and has the ability to repeat a 30-second message. Now that they have a prototype to show people what they're looking for, they're asking private companies to propose improvements on it, including potential features like "printable electronics incorporating 'flexible micro-circuitry', [a] flexible speaker, and super thin photovoltaic batteries."

Astronomers have spotted a mysteriously gargantuan explosion a hundred times more massive than an exploding star and they have no idea what it is.

More than a dozen telescopes from all over the world have recorded the inexplicable event, which was first seen on June 16 in the skies above Hawaii.

Early speculations point to a giant cloud of high-speed particles moving at a rate of 12,000 miles per second and registering a temperature of 16,000 degrees Fahrenheit. However, everything is a wild guess at this point.

Schrödinger's kittens have never been very cute, and the latest litter is no exception. Images of nebulous clouds of ultracold atoms or microscopic strips of silicon are unlikely to go viral on the internet. All the same, these exotic objects are worth heeding, because they show with unprecedented clarity that quantum mechanics is not just the physics of the extremely small.

"Schrödinger's kittens," loosely speaking, are objects pitched midway in size between the atomic scale, which quantum mechanics was originally developed to describe, and the cat that Erwin Schrödinger famously invoked to highlight the apparent absurdity of what that theory appeared to imply. These systems are "mesoscopic" - perhaps around the size of viruses or bacteria, composed of many thousands or even billions of atoms, and thus much larger than the typical scales at which counterintuitive quantum-mechanical properties usually appear. They are designed to probe the question: How big can you get while still preserving those quantum properties?

To judge by the latest results, the answer is: pretty darn big. Two distinct types of experiments - both of them carried out by several groups independently - have shown that vast numbers of atoms can be placed in collective quantum states, where we can't definitely say that the system has one set of properties or another. In one set of experiments, this meant "entangling" two regions of a cloud of cold atoms to make their properties interdependent and correlated in a way that seems heedless of their spatial separation. In the other, microscopic vibrating objects were maneuvered into so-called superpositions of vibrational states. Both results are loosely analogous to the way Schrödinger's infamous cat, while hidden away in its box, was said to be in a superposition of live and dead states.

A new app lets school administrators send an emergency lockdown notification to their entire staff and communicate with teachers to see if they're safe.

The details

TABS-which stands for "Tracking Appropriate Behaviors"-rolled out on Tuesday. It's a web-based app meant for use on laptops and smartphones that combines tools for keeping an eye on students with ways for schools to automatically enact lockdown procedures. It's designed as a way to keep staff members in touch with each other during emergencies such as school shootings.

It's not alone

As if the need for one app weren't horrifying enough, TABS is just the latest to include this kind of lockdown capability. App makers apparently expect that schools will want to have them handy at a time when on-campus shootings regularly dominate headlines.

Research uncovers the first insect known to use the same navigation method as night-flying migratory birds.

Monarch butterflies and bogong moths are the only insects known to undertake migratory journeys to specific sites year after year.

An Australian species, bogong moths (Agrotis infusa) flee the harsh conditions of the arid plains by migrating long distances to spend summer in cool caves of the continent's alpine region. The butterflies (Danaus plexippus) use an internal sun compass for their journey, but the bogongs moths can't do that because they fly at night.

How millions of the adult moths find their way across 1000 kilometres or more of country in darkness, then back again at the end of summer, was unknown - until now. New research published in the journal Current Biology reveals that, like migratory birds, they use the Earth's magnetic field and visual landmarks to navigate this journey.

Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, much attention has been focused on the role of bots in promoting political news on Twitter. But bots can play a role in spreading many other types of news and information as well.

Indeed, a new Pew Research Center analysis finds that suspected bots are far more active in sharing links to news sites focusing on nonpolitical content than to sites with a political focus. And when they do share political news on Twitter, suspected bots are more likely to link to sites with ideologically centrist audiences than to ones with staunchly liberal or conservative followings.

To conduct the analysis, researchers examined 108,552 tweeted links to 50 popular news websites sent during a six-week period in the summer of 2017. The sites all produce original content and include those associated with legacy news organizations (outlets that originated in print or broadcast) as well as digital-native sites (outlets that were "born on the web"). Researchers identified potential bot accounts by using a multistep process that is explained here.

Here are some key findings from the analysis:

1 Suspected bots share a smaller proportion of links to popular news sites compared with other kinds of websites. Suspected bots shared 59% of tweeted links to the 50 news sites in the analysis. While that figure may sound high, it is lower than the average from a previous Pew Research Center analysis, which found that suspected bots shared 66% of tweeted links to a broader set of more than 2,000 popular websites, including sites focused on commercial products, sports and other subjects.

The 50 sites in the news analysis include the digital versions of print newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as sites for television and radio broadcasting organizations such as CNN, Fox News and NPR.