Scientists have discovered what they believe is one of the biggest impact craters in the world near the Falklands Islands. They say the crater appears to date to between 270 and 250 million years ago, which, if confirmed, would link it to the world's biggest mass extinction event, where 96 percent of life on Earth was wiped out.

The presence of a massive crater in the Falklands was first proposed by Michael Rampino, a professor in New York University, in 1992 after he noticed similarities with the Chicxulub crater in Mexico—the asteroid that created this crater is thought to have played a major role in the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

But after a brief report at the Falklands site, very little research was carried out. Now, a team of scientists—including Rampino—have returned to the area to perform an "exhaustive search for additional new geophysical information" that would indicate the presence of an impact crater.

Their findings, published in the journal Terra Nova, suggest the huge circular depression just northwest of the islands is indeed the result of the massive impact of an asteroid or meteorite. The basin, which is now buried under sediments, measures over 150 miles in diameter.

Imagine a scenario, perhaps a few years from now, in which Canada decides to release thousands of mosquitoes genetically modified to fight the spread of a devastating mosquito-borne illness. While Canada has deemed these lab-made mosquitoes ethical, legal and safe for both humans and the environment, the US has not. Months later, by accident and circumstance, the engineered skeeters show up across the border. The laws of one land, suddenly, have become the rule of another.

If modern science can can defy the boundaries of borders, who exactly should be charged with deciding what science to unleash upon the world?

A version of this hypothetical scenario is already unfolding in the UK. Last year, the British government gave scientists the green light to genetically engineer human embryos. But in the US and most other nations, this possibility is still both illegal and morally fraught. Opponents to the practice argue that it risks opening up a Pandora's Box of designer babies and genetically engineered super-humans. Even many more neutral voices argue that the technology demands further scrutiny.

And yet, the UK, at the vanguard of genetic engineering human beings, has already opened that box. In 2015, the British government approved the use of a controversial gene-editing technology to stop devastating mitochondrial diseases from being passed on from mothers to their future children. And last February, the UK granted the first license in the world to edit healthy human embryos for research. Recently, a Newsweek headline asked whether the scientists of this small island nation are in fact deciding the fate of all of humanity. It is a pretty good question.

Much is known about flu viruses, but little is understood about how they reproduce inside human host cells, spreading infection. Now, a research team headed by investigators from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is the first to identify a mechanism by which influenza A, a family of pathogens that includes the most deadly strains of flu worldwide, hijacks cellular machinery to replicate.

The study findings, published online today in Cell, also identifies a link between congenital defects in that machinery—the RNA exosome—and the neurodegeneration that results in people who have that rare mutation.

It was by studying the cells of patients with an RNA exosome mutation, which were contributed by six collaborating medical centers, that the investigators were able to understand how influenza A hijacks the RNA exosome inside a cell's nucleus for its own purposes.

"This study shows how we can discover genes linked to disease—in this case, neurodegeneration—by looking at the natural symbiosis between a host and a pathogen," says the study's senior investigator, Ivan Marazzi, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

An "emotional chatting machine" has been developed by scientists, signalling the approach of an era in which human-robot interactions are seamless and go beyond the purely functional.

The chatbot, developed by a Chinese team, is seen as a significant step towards the goal of developing emotionally sophisticated robots.

The ECM, as it is known for short, was able to produce factually coherent answers whilst also imbuing its conversation with emotions such as happiness, sadness or disgust.

Microsoft believes smartphones are "already dead" and is moving forward to the next big thing, one of the company's senior technical fellows has said. Microsoft intends to progress beyond mobile to a mixed reality future where smartphones are redundant.
The comments, made by Microsoft's Alex Kipman, were published in a recent Bloomberg report looking in detail at the company's hardware division. Kipman, the mixed reality visionary behind Microsoft HoloLens, (see video below) gave the most obvious indication yet that the company is ready to abandon its current mobile efforts. It is now looking beyond the curve in a bid to beat the competition to technology's next frontier.

What's your brain doing when you process information? Could it be producing a "controlled online hallucination"?

Welcome to one of the more provocative-sounding explanations of how the brain works, outlined in a set of 26 original papers, the second part of a unique online compendium updating us on current thinking in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind.

In 2015, the MIND group founded by philosopher Thomas Metzinger of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, set up the Open MIND project to publish papers by leading researchers. Unusually, the papers were published in open access electronic formats, as an experiment in creating a cutting edge online resource - and it was free. The first volume, spanning everything from the nature of consciousness to lucid dreaming, was a qualified success.

The second volume, Philosophy and Predictive Processing, focuses entirely on the influential theory in its title, which argues that our brains are constantly making predictions about what's out there (a flower, a tiger, a person) and these predictions are what we perceive.

The Chinese COMAC C919 airplane, which seeks to challenge the market dominance of the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320, has made its maiden flight.

The new narrow-body twin-engine passenger jet took to the skies of Shanghai on Friday. The maiden flight had been delayed at least twice since 2014 due to production issues, according to Reuters.

The state-owned producer of the plane, Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), says there is a $2 trillion market for the new plane, which was first revealed last November.

A total of 23 foreign and domestic customers have placed orders for 570 planes, the company says.

Scientists have created bricks from simulated moon dust using the sun's rays in a potential breakthrough for the development of future settlements on the moon - and beyond.

Researchers at the DLR German Aerospace Center facility in Cologne baked the bricks in a solar furnace which harnesses sunlight and exposes them to a high-temperature beam, melting soil grains together. The material - volcanic minerals processed to mimic the look and feel of lunar rock - is then 3D-printed as bricks.

"We took simulated lunar material and cooked it in a solar furnace," said Advenit Makaya, a materials engineer overseeing the project for the European Space Agency (ESA).

"This was done on a 3-D printer table, to bake successive 0.1mm layers of moondust at 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 Fahrenheit). We can complete a 20 x 10 x 3 cm brick for building in around five hours."

The US Navy launched its second America class amphibious assault ship, the USS Tripoli, from its shipyard in Mississippi this week, months ahead of schedule.

Timelapse video from the shipbuilding facility shows the vessel being transported to the dry dock at Huntington Ingalls Industries' (HII) shipyard before launch.

Designed to carry the F-35B fighter jet, the warship was launched some 13 weeks ahead of the original construction schedule, according to the military shipbuilding company.

The USS Tripoli - officially designated Landing Helicopter Assault (LHA) 7 - was transferred from land to the company's floating dry dock in Pascagoula, Mississippi on April 8.

Ever wondered how Mars looks through the eyes of the Curiosity rover? NASA has released a new 360-degree video from the robot's point of view so you can virtually explore the Red Planet's rippled surface without leaving Earth.

The car-sized robot is slowly making its way around Gale crater, examining sand dunes as it attempts to figure out if Mars could ever have supported life.

Between February and April, the rover examined four sites near a linear dune for comparison with crescent-shaped dunes it investigated over a year ago. This is the first close-up study of active dunes on any planet other than Earth.