Michaelangelo's 'David' statue is in danger of collapsing due to its weak ankles and the structure's great weight, scientists have confirmed following new tests. The famous sculpture of the boy warrior is housed in Florence's Galleria dell'Accademia.

The statue of David, the biblical hero who killed Goliath with just one stone, dates back to the 1500s and is the one of the world's most famous works of art. It has come to represent the Renaissance ideal of the male physique. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni spent three years making it.

A small asteroid about the size of a city bus zipped by Earth at a range closer than the moon early Saturday (May 3), but posed no threat to our planet.

The newly discovered asteroid 2014 HL129 came within 186,000 miles (299,338 kilometers) of Earth when it made its closest approach on Saturday morning, which is close enough to pass between the planet and the orbit of the moon. The average distance between the Earth and moon is about 238,855 miles (384,400 km).

You can watch a video animation of asteroid 2014 HL129's orbit around the sun on Space.com. The asteroid is about 25 feet (7.6 meters) wide, according to NASA's Asteroid Watch project based at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. It made its closest approach to Earth at 4:13 a.m. EDT (0813 GMT).

Saturday's close shave by asteroid 2014 HL129 came just days after its discovery on Wednesday, April 28, by astronomers with the Mt. Lemmon Survey team, according to an alert by the Minor Planet Center, an arm of the International Astronomical Union that chronicles asteroid discoveries. The Mt. Lemmon Survey team scans the night sky with a telescope at the Steward Observatory atop Mt. Lemmon in Arizona's Catalina Mountains.

NASA scientists and researchers around the world constantly monitor the sky for potentially dangerous asteroids that could pose a risk of impacting the Earth.

Scientists searching for what they thought to be a shipwreck found something entirely unexpected in the Gulf of Mexico instead.

"It looked like a shipwreck," Thomas Heathman, a Texas A&M-Galveston marine biology student, told KHOU-TV of the image that was first seen on an acoustic survey. "And then once we get down there, we see this structure that we've never seen before. Never seen anything like it in the northern Gulf of Mexico."

A robotic vehicle tethered to the Okeanos Explorer, a vessel owned by the National and Atmospheric Administration, was on its 12th dive last week as part of the expedition in the Gulf. At a depth of more than 1,900 meters, the robot picked up images of bacterial mats, bamboo corals, shrimp and other sea life.

Approaching the area of the suspected shipwreck though, the researchers saw not a man-made object but a natural phenomenon, according to NOAA's dive report.

In his talk, Piers Corbyn described the failure of standard meteorology (SM) in outlook, theory, and practice. He included: signals in real meteorology data unexplained by SM; real role of jet stream, stratosphere, electro-jets, magnetosphere, solar wind, solar corona, and the Moon; the total inability of SM to explain: sudden stratospheric warmings and its consequences, tropical storm intensifications, angular momentum concentration in tornadoes; and the need for something else such as electromagnetic plasma explanations; the theoretical basis of non-standard long range weather forecasting on a real planet; a summary on his WeatherAction forecasting skill and examples; and the future of forecasting and meteorology, climate 'science' and science in general.

Piers Corbyn began recording weather and climate patterns at the age of five, constructing his own observation equipment. He obtained a first-class honors degree in physics at Imperial College London. In 1969, he became the first president of the Imperial College Students' Union to be directly elected by the student body. He later studied astrophysics in 1979 at Queen Mary College, London, and then began examining the relationship between Earth's weather and climate and solar activity. Following many years of weather prediction as an occupation, Piers formed WeatherAction in 1995, where he sells web-accessible long-range monthly forecasts for Britain and Ireland, Europe, and the USA plus special forecasts of 'Red Weather periods' and related increases in thunder/tornado and earthquake risk.

Scientists may be awesome, but they're still human beings - and they fall prey to the same cognitive biases as everyone else. Now, a group of researchers say they've discovered that the bias known as anthropocentrism is holding back genetic research and severely limiting our discoveries.
Anthropocentrism is the idea that humanity is the most important form of life in the universe.

It becomes a cognitive bias when we project human motivations or values onto other life forms - or even onto the universe itself. We fall prey to the anthropocentric bias quite a bit when describing animals, because it's tempting to go all Richard Attenborough and treat their lives as scarier, cuter, or more rascally versions of our own.

But this bias can also show up in more subtle ways, such as shaping which life forms we think are worthy of study.

A group of genetic researchers at the University of British Columbia undertook a massive study to investigate what life forms scientists have chosen for DNA sequencing.

Published in Cell last month, their work reveals that the vast majority are animals similar to humans. More broadly, scientists tend to favor studying eukaryotes, or life forms that have nuclei in their cells.

This includes animals and plants, but not bacteria - despite the fact that bacteria have been proven time and again to be crucial in medicine and genetic discovery.

High-powered law firms have for decades won massive settlements from accused online pirates based on legal claims that are now in doubt. Initiating so many battles has created a lot of enemies, though, as one firm recently found out.

Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver was one of the legal agencies that teamed up with Hollywood film studios and the United States Copyright Group (USCG) to file suit against tens of thousands of suspected BitTorrent users who acquired music, movies, or other media content illegally.

Since online piracy became common in the early 2000s, lawsuits trying to stop downloaders have traditionally identified the alleged pirate by their IP address, a computer's individual specification number that could be likened to its fingerprint. Hundreds of suits were successful in reaping millions of dollars for the plaintiffs, until a recent string of rulings in which state and federal judges announced that an IP address alone was insufficient evidence of a defendant's guilt.

Defense attorneys representing accused pirates have claimed that, because of the legal grey area, prosecutors sometimes take any measure they can to convince the defendant to settle, rather than leaving the decision up to a judge.

Astronomers say they have discovered a star cluster that has been thrown in the direction of Earth at a speed of more than two million miles per hour.

The cluster, named HVGC-1, originated in the M87 galaxy and is expected to endlessly drift through space, rocketing through the voids between other galaxies.

"Astronomers have found runaway stars before, but this is the first time we've found a runaway star cluster," said Nelson Caldwell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who is the lead author on a study which is set to be published in the The Astrophysical Journal.

HVGC stands for hypervelocity globular cluster. These clusters are groupings of thousands of stars contained inside a ball a few dozen light-years across.

Kate Ravilious makes this nutty claim at The Guardian:

But in fact the catastrophe may have been set in motion by a warm, wet year over Greenland in 1908, resulting in greater snow accumulation. Writing in the journal Weather, Grant Bigg and David Wilton of Sheffield University explain how the snow soaked through cracks in the ice sheet, encouraging excess iceberg calving over the following few years. Soberingly, global warming has increased iceberg hazard greatly in recent decades, making years like 1912 more the norm than the exception.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/apr/27/weatherwatch-icebergs-greenland-titanic

Yeah, but have a look at what this research actually says and you'll understand why The Guardian is nothing more than agitprop.

A woman's body is found in London. DNA turns up a hit, yet the suspect apparently died weeks before the alleged victim. Here, forensic scientist Dr Mike Silverman tells the story of one of the strangest cases of his career.
It was a real-life mystery that could have come straight from the pages of a modern-day detective novel.

A woman had been brutally murdered in London and biological material had been found under her fingernails, possibly indicating that she might have scratched her attacker just before she died.

A sample of the material was analysed and results compared with the National DNA database and quickly came back with a positive match.

The problem was, the "hit" identified a woman who had herself been murdered - a full three weeks before the death of her alleged "victim".

The killings had taken place in different areas of the capital and were being investigated by separate teams of detectives.

A woman's diet at the time of conception might cause lasting changes in the DNA of her children, potentially influencing their development, researchers say.

In a new study, researchers analyzed the diets of women in rural parts of The Gambia, in western Africa, who experience major changes in their diets over the course of each year as the area goes through rainy seasons and dry seasons.

"The rainy season is often referred to as 'the hungry season,' and the dry season 'the harvest season,'" said study author Robert Waterland, a nutritional epigeneticist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

"During the rainy season, villagers have a lot more farming labor to do, and they gradually run out of food collected from the previous harvest."

Yearlong staples of the women's diet include rice, a grain called millet, peanuts and cassava. But during the rainy season, they eat more leafy green vegetables similar to spinach, which are very high in folate, a nutrient that is especially important during pregnancy.

The scientists investigated the concentration of nutrients in the blood of 84 pregnant women who conceived at the peak of the rainy season and 83 women who conceived at the peak of the dry season. In addition, they analyzed the DNA of six specific genes in the women's infants when they were 2 to 8 months old.

The researchers found that in all six genes, the infants who were conceived during the rainy season had consistently higher rates of "methylation" in their DNA. A methylation is a change made to DNA - it's the addition of methyl groups to the DNA strand, a so-called epigenetic modification to DNA - and is a process that can silence the expression of a gene.