For 4,500 years, the Great Pyramid at Giza has enthralled, fascinated and ultimately frustrated everyone who has attempted to penetrate its secrets.

Now a roboticsteam from Leeds University, working with Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, is preparing a machine which they hope will solve one of its enduring mysteries.

Watch out, humans, the U.S. military has released an all-seeing, unmanned helicopter into the wild, according to Aviation Week.

The Boeing A160T Hummingbird was photographed in Belize, where it was test flying a tree-penetrating Darpa radar called FORESTER. Locals were given a heads-up thanks to a press release from the U.S. Embassy. There's no sign of the document on the website, but local reports say that the the Belize government invited the U.S. to test the Hummingbird in a mountain range 25 miles from the Guatemalan border. A few dozen military personnel - both Belizean and American - are involved in the testing, which will last until September.

A revolutionary advancement in artificial limbs will provide the first hard-wired brain-control of bionic body parts. The John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have joined forces to develop the brain-interface Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL).

The limb will be controlled by computer cursors implanted in the brain and will restore the sense of touch by sending electrical impulses from the limb back to the sensory cortex.

APL was awarded a $34.5 million contract with the government agency to begin testing the prototype on human subjects over the next two years, according to a Hopkins Applied Physics Lab press release and Singularity Hub.

What makes something funny? Philosophers have been tossing that question around since Plato. Now two psychological scientists think they've come up with the formula: humor comes from a violation or threat to the way the world ought to be that is, at the same time, benign.

Most older theories of humor all come up short in one way or another, says A. Peter McGraw, of the University of Colorado-Boulder, who coauthored the study with Caleb Warren. Freud thought humor came from a release of tension; another theory holds that humor comes from a sense of superiority, and still another from incongruity. The researchers, however, point out that all of these could happen if you accidentally killed your spouse - but that wouldn't be funny. They thought that instead, a situation might be funny only if it also seems benign.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers presented various situations to volunteers they rewarded with candy bars. In one experiment, the volunteers read pairs of situations - for example, one where Jimmy Dean hired a rabbi as spokesman for their new line of pork products, and one where Jimmy Dean hired a farmer as spokesman for their new line of pork products. The situation with a moral violation - having a rabbi promote pork - was both more likely to be seen as wrong and more likely to make the reader laugh.

The world's first robot to be able to display and detect emotions has been unveiled by European scientists.

The humanoid machine, called Nao, hunches its shoulders when it feels sad and raises its arms for a hug when it feels happy.

It has been designed to mimic the emotional skills of a one-year-old child and is capable of forming bonds with people who treat it with kindness.

On a winding road near Santa Fe, New Mexico, exposed mountain walls form an intricate mosaic of brown, yellow, pink and grey rocks that stretch up toward the deep blue sky. To the untrained eye, these rocks are just a random jumble of different shapes and colors. To a geologist, however, such rock outcrops can tell a compelling story about the distant past.

One particular outcrop on this Santa Fe mountain pass whispers a thrilling tale of ancient cataclysmic violence.

Evidence suggests that a large meteorite smashed into this area long ago. The force of the impact shattered the ground and tossed broken and pulverized rocks far and wide. [Earth's Meteor Craters]

Scientists are currently studying the Santa Fe impact structure to determine when this event took place. Right now they can only say the meteorite struck sometime between 1.2 billion and 330 million years ago. Certainly it happened far enough in the past for the impact crater to be completely altered or eroded.

Complicating the question is the "Great Unconformity", an event that wiped about a billion years of history out of the geologic record of this region. The disappearance of these tons of rocks was due to erosion -- seas receded, and the newly exposed rocks wore away through wind, rain and other weathering processes. Then the seas flooded in again and sediments began forming new layers.

The result is that a 330-million-year-old rock layer now lies directly on top of rocks that vary between 1.2 to 1.6 billion years old, depending on the location.

Whenever the impact occurred, scientists estimate the crater it carved out of the Earth was once between 6 to 13 kilometers in diameter. This makes it much larger than a more famous impact crater in this region: the 1.2 kilometer-wide Meteor Crater in Arizona.

A new breakthrough demonstrates how quantum computers could network with each other in the same way that traditional computers connect across the Internet. Quantum computers are machines that exploit different physical properties of atoms than modern PCs for much faster computing speeds.

For the most part, connectivity has taken a back seat in quantum computing research to experiments that focus on creating reliable components for quantum processors or memory. Considering the connectivity is the main driver of traditional computing technology, this omission highlights how far quantum computers have to go before they can be as robust functionality of regular desktops.

Computer Vision Syndrome is the official name for eye strain and other vision problems caused by hours in front of a computer, and until recently was rarely seen in anyone under 40. But now because of more frequent sessions on the computer, it is a common complaint experienced by people of all ages. Thankfully, there are some simple measures you can take to make your hours in front of the computer more comfortable.

Just outside Bhubaneswar, around 2,000 years ago, stood one of old India's biggest cities. When they chanced upon Sisupalgarh, excavators could only gape in astonishment at its modern ways.

Sisupalgarh sounds like a happening settlement by historic standards: a sprawling urban settlement that housed 20,000-25,000 people, street-linking gateways, pillared meeting halls, water storage systems and disposable vessels for daily use. In one of the richest hauls for archaeologists in the country in recent times, a 12-member Indo-American expert team discovered the remains of a city from the early historic period in the outskirts of Bhubaneswar two years ago.

Iceman, the Neolithic mummy found accidentally in the Eastern Alps by German hikers in 1991, has offered researchers all sorts of clues to life 5,200 years ago, from his goat-hide coat to the meat and unleavened bread in his stomach to the arrow wound in his shoulder.

Now, scientists stand poised to find out a whole lot more about Iceman, who also goes by Ötzi, Frozen Fritz and Similaun Man.