It is a freezing landscape of ice and snow.

But venture a few metres under the surface, as diver and photographer Alexander Semenov did, and you enter the dream-like world of translucent 'lion's mane' jellyfish.

The marine biologist Alexander Semenov has spent more than two years in the hostile environment of the ultra-remote White Sea Biological Station, on the western coast of Russia.

Whenever he gets down-time, he floats his way beneath the surface, to capture images of the beautiful, if occasionally painful, creatures of the deep.

The underwater photographer breaks through arctic sea ice dropping into a cold -2C water - although still warmer than the -30C world up above.

It's been compared to a fluffy dog, a Pokemon character and a Power Rangers villain - but whatever it is, the Venezuelan poodle moth has captured the Internet like Mothra in a bad Japanese movie. Now it's up to the experts to figure out exactly where this moth belongs on the tree of life.

The first thing to emphasize is that the poodle moth is no phony [alleged] concoction like the jackalope, dogerpillar or chupacabra. Its cute, furry, scary look is totally in line with what's expected for a neotropical ornamental moth. In fact, cryptozoologist Karl Shuker found a similar picture of a white, fuzzy critter known as Diaphora mendica, or muslin moth, a member of the lepidopteran family Arctiidae.

The Venezuelan poodle moth is even more bizarre-looking than your run-of-the-mill muslin moth. That's largely due to the details that zoologist Arthur Anker of Brazil's Federal University of Ceara captured in the photograph he took in the Gran Sabana region of Venezuela's Canaima National Park several years ago.

Are you a morning lark or a night owl? Scientists use that simplified categorization to explain that different people have different internal body clocks, commonly called circadian clocks. Sleep-wake cycles, digestive activities, and many other physiological processes are controlled by these clocks.

In recent years, researchers have found that internal body clocks can also affect how patients react to drugs. For example, timing a course of chemotherapy to the internal body time of cancer patients can improve treatment efficacy and reduce side effects.

But physicians have not been able to exploit these findings because determining internal body time is, well, time consuming. It's also cumbersome. The most established and reliable method requires taking blood samples from a patient hourly and tracking levels of the hormone melatonin, which previous research has tied closely to internal body time.

Now a Japanese group has come up with an alternative method of determining internal body time by constructing what it calls a molecular timetable based on levels in blood samples of more than 50 metabolites - hormones and amino acids - that result from biological activity. The researchers established a molecular timetable based on samples from three subjects and validated it using the conventional melatonin measurement. They then used that timetable to determine the internal body times of other subjects by checking the levels of the metabolites in just two blood samples from each subject per day.

When you hear someone say "Once in a Blue Moon" you know what they mean. They're usually talking about something rare, silly, and even absurd. After all, when was the last time you saw the Moon turn blue? Well, rare or not, we're having one this week, and according to astronomer David Reneke writer and publicist for Australasian Science magazine, a Blue Moon is slated for the last day of this month, Friday, August 31.

It's not at all clear where the term 'Blue Moon' comes from. According to modern folklore it dates back at least 400 years. A Blue Moon is the second Full Moon in a calendar month. "Usually months have only one Full Moon, but occasionally a second one sneaks in, David said. "Ancient cultures around the world considered the second Full Moon to be spiritually significant."

Full Moons are separated by 29 days, while most months are 30 or 31 days long, so it is possible to fit two Full Moons in a single month. This happens every two and a half years, on average. By the way, February is the only month that can never have a Blue Moon by this definition. We had one Full Moon on August 2 this year and the second will be Friday night.

Although they have been used as the "standard candles" of cosmic distance measurement for decades, Type Ia supernovae can result from different kinds of star systems, according to recent observations conducted by the Palomar Transient Factory team at California's Berkeley Lab.

Judging distances across intergalactic space from here on Earth isn't easy. Within the Milky Way - and even nearby galaxies - the light emitted by regularly pulsating stars (called Cepheid variables) can be used to determine how far away a region in space is. Outside of our own local group of galaxies, however, individual stars can't be resolved, and so in order to figure out how far away distant galaxies are astronomers have learned to use the light from much brighter objects: Type Ia supernovae, which can flare up with a brilliance equivalent to 5 billion Suns.

Type Ia supernovae are created from a special pairing of two stars orbiting each other: one super-dense white dwarf drawing material in from a companion until a critical mass - about 40% more massive than the Sun - is reached. The overpacked white dwarf suddenly undergoes a rapid series of thermonuclear reactions, exploding in an incredibly bright outburst of material and energy... a beacon visible across the Universe.

Because the energy and luminance of Type Ia supernovae have been found to be so consistently alike, distance can be gauged by their apparent brightness as seen from Earth. The dimmer one is when observed, the farther away its galaxy is. Based on this seemingly universal similarity it's been thought that these supernovae must be created under very similar situations... especially since none have been directly observed - until now.

A new look at a fossil mammal with powerful front legs for digging is clearing up questions about the origin of a group of strange and scaly modern-day creatures called pangolins.

First excavated in Mongolia in the 1970s, the fossil sat in storage for decades until researchers for the Russian Academy of Sciences rediscovered and analyzed it, reporting their results today (Aug. 27) in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

What they found was a dog-size, strong-shouldered digger called Ernanodon. This mammal lived about 57 million years ago, after dinosaurs had died out and our furry ancestors had taken over.

Ernanodon was known from one other fossil found in China, but that specimen is warped, and some archaeologists even thought it might be a fake.

The new discovery puts those accusations to rest, said study researcher Peter Kondrashov, an anatomist at Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine in Missouri.

"It's the real deal," Kondrashov told LiveScience.

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard's Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data - around 700 terabytes - in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).

To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it - just as if you were sequencing the human genome - and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) - so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.

A controversial paper questioning the 'Out of Africa' theory of human origins was recently published in the journal Advances in Anthropology. There are quite a lot of references to the origins of humanity in the Cs transcripts, so that's what I want to discuss in this installment of the Hit List series. I'll get to the paper in question a bit further on, but before I do, there's a bunch of background material to cover. The references from the Cs are given in a certain context and concern ideas and possibilities that probably won't make much sense without covering certain ground first. That said, there's way too much material to cover in one article, so I suggest checking out the books I'll be referencing and reading them in full if anything here strikes the reader's interest.

Pop culture has conveniently provided a starting point from which to take off on these topics. In June, Ridley Scott released the much-anticipated prequel of sorts to his blockbuster film, Alien, titled Prometheus. Leaving aside any discussion of the artistic merits of the film, it does cover some themes relevant to the subject at hand. The plot revolves around the idea that life on planet earth, and presumably other planets in the galaxy, was not a chance happening. In the film, a race of pale-skinned, muscular and hairless humanoids 'seeds' life on planets through acts of sacrifice. An 'engineer', as they're called in the film, gives his body to be broken down into its constituent parts, providing the source DNA from which life will take root. The human characters in the film fund a space mission to 'meet their makers' at a location indicated in ancient artwork found all over the world.

The film leaves the question of the ultimate origins of life open, allowing conventional evolutionary theories (i.e., neo-Darwinism) and so-called 'intelligent design' (or biogenetic engineering) to coexist as compatible options. In other words, the engineers 'intelligently' seeded life on earth, after which evolution took its natural course (with a possible 'tweak' here and there over the course of history), resulting in the wealth of DNA-based life forms that characterize our planet. The origin of the engineers is left untouched - a further mystery to be pondered.

Back in the real world, the fact of the matter is that no one knows how life actually started on planet earth. Let me repeat that: no one knows. All we have are various theories, none of which has been scientifically demonstrated to have actually occurred. At best, most scientists will say it must have occurred a certain way, simply because they have excluded other options as not worth considering. In fact, we may have a pretty good idea of some of the evolutionary mechanisms that have been in effect since the hypothetical first single-celled organism, but how that organism got there in the first place is a mystery, and open to speculation. Historically, there have been five or so categories under which various theories have been proposed. First, of course, there's creationism: the idea that 'God' created all the forms of life in one way or another. Then there are the various theories of 'spontaneous abiogenesis'. This is the idea that somehow ordinary chemistry spontaneously resulted in the formation of primitive biological materials, which somehow acquired the ability to self-replicate and evolve all on their own, whether on crystals, or by some other mathematically improbable and as-yet-unobserved natural process. Panspermia, popularized by scientists Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, is another option whereby organic materials are said to exist throughout the universe and are carried by cosmic wanderers like asteroids and meteoroids, to then be deposited on some lucky planet, et voila! The fourth option, directed panspermia, promoted by Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the DNA molecule), posits that life was deliberately seeded by an already existing intelligent race somewhere in the galaxy. As in Prometheus, that leaves open the question as to their own origin.

The next time you leave your DNA behind be forewarned that you are now not only leaving your biological fingerprint behind for prying eyes, but also leaving evidence of what color your hair and eyes are. Until the mid-1980s, DNA at a crime scene went largely unchecked due to lack of technology to search it out. And for the last two decades, in order for a crime scene detective to match DNA to a suspect, samples had to be taken from possible matches.

But now, according to a team of researchers, led by professor Manfred Kayser of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, a new forensic test can predict both the hair and eye color of a possible suspect using DNA at a crime scene. The team said it could provide valuable leads in cases where suspects cannot be identified through DNA profiling.

The test, called the Hirisplex system, could allow crime scene investigators to narrow down a large group of possible suspects, making it easier to pinpoint the perpetrator. Details of the research appear in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics.

Predicting phenotypes is quickly becoming an emerging field in forensics. The current approach, genetic profiling, involves comparing crime scene DNA to possible suspects or to a database of stored profiles. Genetic profiling relies on the person either being among a pool of suspects identified by police or having their profile previously stored.

The Hirisplex approach could be very useful in cases where a perpetrator is completely unknown to the authorities, said Kayser.