Woolly rhinos, some of the hairiest beasts to roam Ice Age landscapes, may have had a surprising ancestral home. The discovery of a number of fossils indicates that these iconic beasts may have evolved in the frigid environment of the Tibetan Plateau more than 1 million years before global cooling allowed the creatures' descendants to spread throughout much of northern Eurasia. The findings upend the notion that many if not all of the cold-adapted creatures roaming Ice Age landscapes evolved in the high Arctic.

Ice ages have struck North America and northern Eurasia every 100,000 years or so since about 2.8 million years ago. Many of the large creatures roaming the landscape during these cycles, including woolly mammoths, mastodons, and saber-toothed cats, mysteriously went extinct about 10,000 years ago, as the latest episode of global cooling waned. But when and where many of those megafauna originally evolved has been an even larger mystery, says Xiaoming Wang, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in California.

In the new study, Wang and colleagues uncovered a variety of fossils - including a skull, a jawbone, and a couple of neck vertebrae in the Himalayan foothills along the southwest Tibetan Plateau. The plateau is often called "the roof of the world" because its 2.5-million-square-kilometer area - the largest and tallest in the world - has an average elevation that exceeds 4500 meters (14,800 feet). Based on the age of the sediments surrounding the fossils, which was estimated using the magnetic characteristics of the rock as well as the other fossils entombed therein, the researchers say the fossils belong to a new species of woolly rhino that roamed the region about 3.7 million years ago. The team has dubbed the rhino, which was about the size of its modern kin but covered with shaggy fur to help preserve its body heat, Coelodonta thibetana, or "the pit-toothed creature from Tibet."

Astronomers have discovered Earth's closest infant star: a baby red dwarf, just 27 light-years away.

Astronomers have discovered the closest known infant star to our planet, and it wasn't born until 25 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The star, called AP Columbae, is closer to Earth than previously thought and is around 40 million years old - a stellar newborn when compared to our own Sun which was created 4.6 billion years ago.

"The star has been known about and studied for the past 15 years, but it wasn't realised it was so young and so close, until now," says co-author Simon Murphy, a PhD student from the Australian National University in Canberra. He says that highly accurate measurements from telescopes in Coonabarabran, NSW, and Chile, Hawaii and California, allowed the international team to build a much better picture of the star.

A subterranean river said to be flowing beneath the Amazon region of Brazil is not a river in the conventional sense, even if its existence is confirmed.

The "river" has been widely reported, after a study on it was presented to a Brazilian science meeting last week.

But the researchers involved told BBC News that water was moving through porous rock at speeds measured in cm, or inches, per year - not flowing.

Another Brazilian expert said the groundwater was known to be very salty.

Valiya Hamza and Elizabeth Tavares Pimentel, from the Brazilian National Observatory, deduced the existence of the "river" by using temperature data from boreholes across the Amazon region.

A primordial star at the outer edges of our Milky Way galaxy may upset current theories of star formation in the universe. The star simply shouldn't exist since it lacks the materials astronomers have long thought necessary for low-mass stars to form, scientists say.

The star, with the somewhat cumbersome name of SDS J102915+172927, hails from the beginning of the universe. At 13 billion years old, it formed from the death of the first generation of stars. (The universe itself is estimated to be about 13.7 billion years old.)

An analysis of the star's makeup reveals that it formed relatively quickly after the supernova-explosion deaths of a few of the short-lived original stars.

Mount Hood, the tallest mountain in Oregon, has a secret, scientists revealed. Covered by trees and plants is an earthquake fault that stretches for miles from the iconic mountain.

The fault appears to have been recently active, and could be an earthquake threat today, reported the Portland Oregonian. Scientists said the last time the fault ruptured, possibly as a magnitude 6 or 7 earthquake, the ground ripped six feet (1.8 meters) apart.

The fault was discovered by scientists flying over Mt. Hood using lasers to scan the terrain. The fault is about 20 miles (32.2 kilometers) long and stretches from the northern flank of Mount Hood to the Columbia River.

On March 28, 2011, NASA's Swift detected intense X-ray flares thought to be caused by a black hole devouring a star. In one model, illustrated here, a sun-like star on an eccentric orbit plunges too close to its galaxy's central black hole. About half of the star's mass feeds an accretion disk around the black hole, which in turn powers a particle jet that beams radiation toward Earth.


Video credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

Two studies appearing in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Nature provide new insights into a cosmic accident that has been streaming X-rays toward Earth since late March. NASA's Swift satellite first alerted astronomers to intense and unusual high-energy flares from the new source in the constellation Draco.

"Incredibly, this source is still producing X-rays and may remain bright enough for Swift to observe into next year," said David Burrows, professor of astronomy at Penn State University and lead scientist for the mission's X-Ray Telescope instrument. "It behaves unlike anything we've seen before."

On its way to the biggest planet in the solar system -- Jupiter, NASA's Juno spacecraft took time to capture its home planet and its natural satellite -- the moon.

"This is a remarkable sight people get to see all too rarely," said Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "This view of our planet shows how Earth looks from the outside, illustrating a special perspective of our role and place in the universe. We see a humbling yet beautiful view of ourselves."

The image was taken by the spacecraft's camera, JunoCam, on Aug. 26 when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (9.66 million kilometers) away. The image was taken as part of the mission team's checkout of the Juno spacecraft. The team is conducting its initial detailed checks on the spacecraft's instruments and subsystems after its launch on Aug. 5.

Juno covered the distance from Earth to the moon (about 250,000 miles or 402,000 kilometers) in less than one day's time. It will take the spacecraft another five years and 1,740 million miles (2,800 million kilometers) to complete the journey to Jupiter. The spacecraft will orbit the planet's poles 33 times and use its eight science instruments to probe beneath the gas giant's obscuring cloud cover to learn more about its origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere, and look for a potential solid planetary core.

Did counterfeit SSL cert target Iranians?

Security researchers have discovered a counterfeit web certificate for Google.com circulating on the internet that gives attackers the encryption keys needed to impersonate Gmail and virtually every other digitally signed Google property.

[...]"While we investigate, we plan to block any sites whose certificates were signed by DigiNotar," a statement issued by Google announced.

Google credited a security feature recently added to its Chromium browser engine with protecting alibo and bringing the bogus credential to public attention.

Mozilla, meanwhile, said it planned to issue updates for Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey shortly "that will revoke trust in the DigiNotar root and protect users from this attack." It invited users who don't want to wait to manually purge the DigiNotar root from their browsers following these instructions.

Even after many decades of studying ozone and its loss from our atmosphere miles above the Earth, plenty of mysteries and surprises remain, including an unexpected loss of ozone over the Arctic this past winter, an authority on the topic told attendees of the 242nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) on Monday. She also discussed chemistry and climate change, including some proposed ideas to "geoengineer" the Earth's climate to slow down or reverse global warming.

In a Kavli Foundation Innovations in Chemistry Lecture, Susan Solomon, Ph.D., of the University of Colorado, Boulder, said that the combined efforts of scientists, the public, industry and policy makers to stop ozone depletion is one of science's greatest success stories, but unanswered questions remain. And ozone is still disappearing.

"We're no longer producing the primary chemicals - chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) - that caused the problem, but CFCs have very long lifetimes in our atmosphere, and so we'll have ozone depletion for several more decades," said Solomon. "There are still some remarkable mysteries regarding exactly how these chlorine compounds behave in Antarctica - and it's amazing that we still have much to learn, even after studying ozone for so long."

The ozone layer is crucial to life on Earth, forming a protective shield high in the atmosphere that blocks potentially harmful ultraviolet rays in sunlight. Scientists have known since 1930 that ozone forms and decomposes through chemical processes. The first hints that human activity threatened the ozone layer emerged in the 1970s, and included one warning from Paul Crutzen, Ph.D., that agricultural fertilizers might reduce ozone levels. Another hint was from F. Sherwood Rowland, Ph.D., and Mario Molina, Ph.D., who described how CFCs in aerosol spray cans and other products could destroy the ozone layer. The three shared a 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that research. In 1985, British scientists discovered a "hole," a completely unexpected area of intense ozone depletion over Antarctica. Solomon's 1986 expedition to Antarctica provided some of the clinching evidence that underpinned a global ban on CFCs and certain other ozone-depleting gases.

The International Space Station may have to start operating without a crew in November if Russian engineers don't figure out soon what caused a recent rocket failure, NASA officials announced Monday.

The unmanned Russian cargo ship Progress 44 crashed just after its Aug. 24 launch to deliver 2.9 tons of supplies to the orbiting lab. The failure was caused by a problem with the Progress' Soyuz rocket, which is similar to the one Russia uses to launch its crew-carrying vehicle, which is also called Soyuz, to the station.

Currently, six astronauts reside on the space station. But three of them are due to return to Earth next month, and the rest are scheduled to come back in mid-November. If the rocket anomaly isn't identified and fixed soon, a fresh crew won't be able to get to the station before the last three astronauts depart.