Archaeologists found some of the richest and most unusual Aztec offerings ever in excavations under a mammoth slab depicting an earth goddess and said Wednesday they hope to uncover an emperor's tomb nearby.

The seven offerings of strange and unparalleled oddities found under the stone slab depicting the goddess Tlaltecuhtli include the skeleton of a dog or wolf dressed in turquoise ear plugs, jadeite necklaces and golden bells on its feet.

It is a very simple equation: Energy = Civilisation. Without any form of energy we regress to circa 5000 BC. Energy powers every aspect of our modern lifestyle: clean water, fresh food, lighting, comfortable shelter, mobility, communication, safety and security. Our very own giant hot star, the sun, is earth's primary source of energy.

On June 12th, at 00:55 Universal Time, an M2-class solar flare sparked a bright flash of extreme ultraviolet radiation, propelling a shock wave through the sun's atmosphere, and hurling a billion-ton Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) into space. According to scientists at NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), "The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity... at the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms." One needs to go back over 8,000 years in order to find a time when the sun was, on average, as active as it is at present!

The sun supports almost all life on earth via photosynthesis and drives earth's climate and weather. Solar flares have been connected with weather extremes, and there have been some powerful lightning storms in recent days:

1. BP temporarily suspended siphoning operations on its Gulf of Mexico oil gusher after a drill ship collecting the oil was hit by lightning;

2. A 62 feet -- six storey -- tall statue of Jesus Christ in Ohio came to a blazing end when it was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm and burned to the ground; and

3. A bolt of lightning struck a local gasoline storage tank in North Carolina, erupting into a wall of flames that leapt as high as 100 feet and belched a plume of smoke in the shape of an arch across eight lanes of US interstate highway.

The one critical factor that did not operate according to plan in many of the recent severe lightning-strikes was the electrical grounding system, which was supposed to draw lightning away from the structures. The sun has begun to awaken and possibly exhale a massive solar storm on planet earth's electromagnetic field. Are several interlocking factors in play that could bring life as we know it to a stand-still via a catastrophic disruption?

Six hundred recent observations of the Mars landscape from an orbiting telescopic camera include scenes of sinuous gullies, geometrical ridges and steep cliffs.

Each of the 600 newly released observations from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter covers an area of several square miles on Mars and reveals details as small as desks.

The HiRISE images taken from April 5 to May 6, 2010, are now available on NASA's Planetary Data System and the camera team's website.

This image shows the west-facing side of an impact crater in the mid-latitudes of Mars' northern hemisphere. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took the image on April 13, 2010. It is one of 600 recent HiRISE observations newly released to NASA's Planetary Data System.

Scientists have created a genetically modified 'monster' salmon which could soon be on dinner tables around the world.

A U.S. company claims it has been given initial approval by American safety authorities to produce the GM fish which grow two to three times faster than normal varieties.

The net result is that the fish convert their feed to muscle much more quickly and can be killed for the table at a younger age, assuring producers bigger profits.

Paris - In a technical feat, astronomers measured the size of a small rock six billion kilometers (3.75 billion miles) away to an accuracy of a few kilometers and found its surface to be a mysterious ice-like white.

Years of planning combined with a network of telescopes to grab the first pictures of the Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) through a method of celestial alignment, they reported on Wednesday in the British science journal Nature.

KBOs are a population of rocks that orbit the Sun at a distance of between 4.95-8.25 billion kms (3.09-5.15 billion miles), and are believed to be rubble left over from the building of the planets.

Their lonely journey takes them out beyond Neptune, the farthest acknowledged planet, and into a vast region that touches on the deeply chilled fringes of the Solar System.

The rock, KBO 55636, had been tracked by an astronomer in the United States, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor James Elliot, for five years.

Elliot suddenly realised that on October 9, 2009 that his coveted 55636 would pass between a bright star and Earth, an event known as occultation.

When a rock or planet passes between a star and the observer, it causes changes in starlight that can reveal its size and temperature and indicate whether it has an atmosphere, and if so, what kind.

But the October 9 occultation faced a problem.

Detailed observations made by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found an answer to the flash of light seen June 3 on Jupiter. It came from a giant meteor burning up high above Jupiter's cloud tops. The space visitor did not plunge deep enough into the atmosphere to explode and leave behind any telltale cloud of debris, as seen in previous Jupiter collisions.

Astronomers around the world knew that something must have hit the giant planet to unleash a flash of energy bright enough to be seen 400 million miles away. But they didn't know how deeply it penetrated into the atmosphere. There have been ongoing searches for the "black-eye" pattern of a deep direct hit.

The sharp vision and ultraviolet sensitivity of Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 were brought to bear on seeking out any trace evidence of the aftermath of the cosmic collision. Images taken on June 7 - just over three days after the flash was sighted - show no sign of debris above Jupiter's cloud tops. This means that the object didn't descend beneath the clouds and explode as a fireball. "If it did, dark sooty blast debris would have been ejected and would have rained down onto the cloud tops, and the impact site would have appeared dark in the ultraviolet and visible images due to debris from an explosion," says team member Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "We see no feature that has those distinguishing characteristics in the known vicinity of the impact, suggesting there was no major explosion and fireball."

Dark smudges marred Jupiter's atmosphere when a series of comet fragments hit Jupiter in July 1994. A similar phenomenon occurred in July 2009 when a suspected asteroid slammed into Jupiter. The latest intruder is estimated to be only a fraction the size of these previous impactors.

In a computerized game of 'spot the difference,' people are more likely to notice additions, removals than color changes.

Scientists have just come several steps closer to understanding change blindness - the well studied failure of humans to detect seemingly obvious changes to scenes around them - with new research that used a computer-based model to predict what types of changes people are more likely to notice.

NASA is assessing the risk to spacecraft posed by the upcoming 2011 Draconid meteor shower, a seven-hour storm of tiny space rocks that has the potential to ding major Earth-orbiting spacecraft like the crewed International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope.

The meteor shower risk assessment is actually more art than science, and there has been some variation in the projected intensity levels of the 2011 Draconids by meteoroid forecasters. But spacecraft operators are already being notified to weigh defensive steps.

Current meteor forecast models project a strong Draconid outburst, possibly a full-blown storm, on Oct. 8, 2011, according to William Cooke of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The Draconids do present some risk to spacecraft, Cooke confirmed. They could potentially become the next significant event in low-Earth orbit as far as meteoroids are concerned, he added.

Cooke and Danielle Moser of Stanley, Inc., also of Huntsville, presented their Draconid data at Meteoroids 2010 - an international conference on minor bodies in the solar system held May 24-28 in Breckenridge, Colo. The conference was sponsored in part by NorthWest Research Associates/CoRADivision, NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research.

The mystery fireball that smacked into Jupiter on June 3 has been identified as a giant meteor that plunged into the planet's atmosphere and burned up high above its cloud tops, according to new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The cosmic intruder did not dive deep enough into Jupiter's atmosphere to explode, which explains the lack of any telltale cloud of debris, as was seen in previous Jupiter collisions, said Hubble astronomers, who described the meteor's size as "giant" in a Wednesday announcement.

"We suspected for this 2010 impact there might be no big explosion driving a giant plume, and hence no resulting debris field to be imaged," said Heidi Hammel, a veteran Jupiter observer at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., in a statement. "There was just the meteor, and Hubble confirmed this."

The meteor was huge, but not as large as the object that struck Jupiter in July 2009, or the shattered comet fragments that hit the gas giant planet in 1994, researchers said. [Gallery: Jupiter's 2009 crash.]

The new Hubble observations also allowed scientists to get a close-up look at changes in Jupiter's atmosphere, following the disappearance of the dark Southern Equatorial Belt (SEB) several months ago.

In the latest Hubble view, a slightly higher altitude layer of white ammonia ice crystal clouds appears to obscure the deeper, darker belt clouds.

"Weather forecast for Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt: cloudy with a chance of ammonia," Hammel said.

The researchers predict that these ammonia clouds will likely clear out in a few months, as it has typically done in the past.

A perfectly preserved shoe, 1,000 years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt and 400 years older than Stonehenge in the UK, has been found in a cave in Armenia.

The 5,500 year old shoe, the oldest leather shoe in the world, was discovered by a team of international archaeologists and their findings will publish on June 9th in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE.

The cow-hide shoe dates back to ~ 3,500 BC (the Chalcolithic period) and is in perfect condition. It was made of a single piece of leather and was shaped to fit the wearer's foot. It contained grass, although the archaeologists were uncertain as to whether this was to keep the foot warm or to maintain the shape of the shoe, a precursor to the modern shoe-tree perhaps?

"It is not known whether the shoe belonged to a man or woman," said lead author of the research, Dr Ron Pinhasi, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland "as while small (European size 37; US size 7 women), the shoe could well have fitted a man from that era." The cave is situated in the Vayotz Dzor province of Armenia, on the Armenian, Iranian, Nackhichevanian and Turkish borders, and was known to regional archaeologists due to its visibility from the highway below.