In the sandy desert grasslands of Namibia in southern Africa, mysterious bare spots known as "fairy circles" will form and then disappear years later for no reason anyone can determine. A new look at these strange patterns doesn't solve the wistful mystery but at least reveals that the largest of the circles can linger for a lifetime.

Small fairy circles stick around an average of 24 years, while larger ones can exist as long as 75 years, according to research detailed today (June 27) in the journal PLoS ONE. Still, the study sheds little light on why the circles form, persist and then vanish into the landscape after decades.

"The why question is very difficult," said study researcher Walter Tschinkel, a biologist at Florida State University. "There are a number of hypotheses on the table, and the evidence for none of them is convincing." [See Photos of Fairy Circles]

Circles of life (and death)

Tschinkel grew interested in fairy circles during a 2005 safari to NamibRand Nature Reserve in southwest Namibia, in the Namib Desert. It was his first experience with the round clearings, tens of thousands of which expose the red sandy soil in the area. A short time after the circles form, a tall ring of grass grows around the border, highlighting the bare area.

Few researchers have studied fairy circles, in part because of their remoteness, 111 miles (180 km) from the nearest village. It's an arid landscape where springbok, ostriches, leopards and other large animals roam, Tschinkel told LIveScience.

"It's like dying and going to heaven if you like remote, beautiful desert places," he said.

At first glance, Tschinkel assumed the circles marked underground nests of harvester termites. But digs have shown no evidence of termite nests under fairy circles. Other explanations, such as differences in soil nutrients or the death of seedlings by toxic vapors from the ground, have likewise failed to hold up to study.

The finger-counting technique you learned as a child may influence how good your grey matter is at crunching numbers

Put down your coffee for a moment. Now, without thinking about it too much, use your hands to count to 10.

How did you do it? Did you start with the left hand, or the right? Did you begin counting on a thumb, or with a pinkie? Maybe you started on an index finger? And did you begin with a closed fist, or an open hand?

If you're European, there's a good chance you started with closed fists, and began counting on the thumb of the left hand. If you're from the Middle East, you probably also started with a closed fist, but began counting with the little finger of the right hand.

Most Chinese people, and many North Americans, also use the closed-fist system, but begin counting on an index finger, rather than the thumb. The Japanese typically start from an open-hand position, counting by closing first the little finger, and then the remaining digits.

In India, it's common to make use of finger segments to get as many as 20 counts from each hand. It's even been reported that the Amazonian Pirah people don't use their fingers to count at all.

Finger counting feels as natural as breathing - but it's not innate, or even, apparently, universal. There are actually many different techniques, and they are culturally transmitted.

Google sought to leapfrog rivals like Apple and Microsoft on Wednesday as it unveiled an ambitious prototype of a pair of "smart" glasses designed to replace many of the things currently done on a smartphone, such as sharing pictures and accessing information.

The move came as the search company also joined the hardware wars that are currently rocking the consumer technology industry, showing off the first tablet to carry its brand and a living room entertainment device designed and built by the internet company from the ground up.

Google said that an early version of its new glasses would be shipped to a limited number of software developers early next year, adding weight to the company's attempts to reposition itself as an audacious innovator at a time when its size and bureaucracy is under attack from smaller, more nimble companies including Facebook.

Google Glass, which has been in development for two and a half years, boasts a tiny display, worn like regular spectacles but sitting just above the right eye, to show information gathered from the internet and the local environment. A bundle of sensors, microphones, speakers, cameras and wireless connections allows the wearer to both send and receive sound and images as they go about their daily lives.

Following the posting on the Central Bureau's Transient Object Confirmation Page about a possible Nova in Sgr (TOCP Designation: J17522579-2126215) we performed some follow-up of this object remotely through the 0.10-m f/5 reflector + CCD of ITelescope network (MPC Code - H06).

On our images taken on June 27.3, 2012 we can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with R-filtered CCD magnitude 8.9 at coordinates:

R.A. = 17 52 25.79, Decl.= -21 26 21.6

(equinox 2000.0; CMC-14 catalogue reference stars).

Our annotated confirmation image.

An animation showing a comparison between our confirmation image and the archive POSS2/UKSTU plate (R Filter - 1996) be viewed here.

Ice samples that profile Greenland glaciers have long been used to give climate scientists historical temperature data, but those samples could be misleading, according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers found that the data gathered from the ice cores around Greenland varies greatly from other records of Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the Younger Dryas. Also referred to as the "Big Freeze" - the Younger Dryas was a period of abrupt cooling that began nearly 13,000 years ago.

"In terms of temperature during the Younger Dryas, the only thing that looks like Greenland ice cores are Greenland ice cores," said Anders Carlson, a UW-Madison geosciences professor.

"They are supposed to be iconic for the Northern Hemisphere, but we have four other records that do not agree with the Greenland ice cores for that time. That abrupt cooling is there, just not to the same degree."

While collaborating with UW - Madison climatologist Zhengyu Liu and scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Carlson could reliably recreate temperatures in the Oldest Dryas, a cooling period about 18,000 years ago. But when using the same model to reconstruct Younger Dryas data, the program breaks down around data culled from Greenland ice cores.

Dinosaurs may not have been the slow, sunbathing reptiles researchers used to think. In fact, they may have been warm-blooded, new research suggests.

The researchers studied the "growth lines" on animal bones, which are similar to the growth rings in tree trunks. During slow-growing times like during the winter, they are darker and narrower, while in fast-growing times the bones have lighter, wider bands.

Figuring out if dinosaurs were warm-blooded endotherms (made their own body heat) or were "cold-blooded" ectotherms that relied on outside sources of warmth could illuminate a lot about how they lived, grew and evolved. How warm an animal is has an impact on their metabolism, and therefore how quickly they can grow and have babies.

Of bones and blood

Previously, scientists had thought that growth lines showed up only on the bones of cold-blooded animals, since these animals grow in fits and starts. Warm-blooded animals, like mammals and birds, are assumed to grow continuously, because they keep their temperatures up and have high metabolic rates, continually making energy to grow.

As such, researchers took the growth lines on dinosaur bones as evidence of their cold-bloodedness. Until now.

In this study, the researchers compared the bone lines from the leg bones of more than 100 wild ruminants (warm-blooded mammals like sheep and cows that have multiple stomachs) with seasonal rainfall and temperature cycles and with the animal's core body temperature and resting metabolic rate. The researchers showed that these warm-blooded animals also have bone growth lines indicating fast, yet interrupted yearly growth that depended on how long the "unfavorable" season lasted.

The immediate ancestor of the human lineage may have lived off a woodland diet of leaves, fruits and bark instead of a menu based on the open savanna as other extinct relatives of humanity did, researchers say.

Food was a major environmental force that shaped the human lineage - perhaps influencing key moments such as when humans' ancestors started walking upright - and these new findings help reveal the complex evolutionary paths these ancestors took in response to the world around them, the scientists add.

The findings are based on fossils of the extinct hominin Australopithecus sediba that were accidentally discovered in 2008 by the 9-year-old son of a scientist in the remains of a cave in South Africa. The fossils were 2 million years old.

A hominin is the lineage that includes humans and their relatives after they split from those of chimpanzees. Australopithecus means "southern ape" and is a group that includes the iconic fossil Lucy, while sediba means "wellspring" in the South African language Sotho.

This hominin's mix of human and primitive traits has made a strong case for it being the immediate ancestor of the human lineage.

Chimpanzees, humans' closest living relatives, prefer fruits and leaves even when grasses are abundant. By contrast, extinct species of humans and australopiths apparently preferred diets richer in grasses or grass-eating animals.

At 54.6 million km away at its closest, the fastest travel to Mars from Earth using current technology (and no small bit of math) takes around 214 days - that's about 30 weeks, or 7 months. A robotic explorer like Curiosity may not have any issues with that, but it'd be a tough journey for a human crew.

Developing a quicker, more efficient method of propulsion for interplanetary voyages is essential for future human exploration missions... and right now a research team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville is doing just that.

This summer, UAHuntsville researchers, partnered with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and Boeing, are laying the groundwork for a propulsion system that uses powerful pulses of nuclear fusion created within hollow 2-inch-wide "pucks" of lithium deuteride.

And like hockey pucks, the plan is to "slapshot" them with plasma energy, fusing the lithium and hydrogen atoms inside and releasing enough force to ultimately propel a spacecraft - an effect known as "Z-pinch".

"If this works," said Dr. Jason Cassibry, an associate professor of engineering at UAH, "we could reach Mars in six to eight weeks instead of six to eight months."

The key component to the UAH research is the Decade Module 2 - a massive device used by the Department of Defense for weapons testing in the 90s. Delivered last month to UAH (some assembly required) the DM2 will allow the team to test Z-pinch creation and confinement methods, and then utilize the data to hopefully get to the next step: fusion of lithium-deuterium pellets to create propulsion controlled via an electromagnetic field "nozzle"

Mexican veterinary authorities are intensifying avian influenza control efforts in a region that houses several large commercial farms after further tests determined that the strain responsible for more than 200,000 bird deaths at three farms is the highly pathogenic H7N3 subtype.

The events represent the first highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreaks in Mexican flocks since the country battled H5N2 in the mid 1990s.

In a follow-up report submitted today to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), Mexican animal health officials said intravenous pathogenicity tests revealed the highly pathogenic H7N3 subtype. The initial report on Jun 21 said preliminary tests suggested a low-pathogenic H7 subtype.

The outbreaks began at three large commercial farms in Jalisco state on Jun 13, causing clinical signs in the layer flocks that included gasping, lethargy, fever, and death. The disease sickened 587,160 of more than 1 million susceptible birds, killing 211,424 of them. About 60,000 have been culled so far to curb the spread of the virus.

Today's update said that, based on the latest test results, authorities are sampling birds at about 60 poultry farms near the outbreak area, and quarantine measures are under way in the region, which has about 500 production units. Full gene sequencing and an epidemiologic investigation to determine the source of the virus are also in progress.

Jalisco state, in western Mexico, is the country's top egg producer.

NASA's Voyager 1, launched in 1977, appears to be on the verge of becoming the first spacecraft to leave the solar system and begin a new journey in outer space, experts say.

Scientists are intrigued by the recent increase in cosmic rays hitting the spacecraft, which for decades has snapped images of the Earth and other planets in the solar system as it makes its long journey into outer space.

"The latest data from Voyager 1 indicate that we are clearly in a new region where things are changing quickly," said a statement from Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"This is very exciting. We are approaching the solar system's final frontier."

These cosmic rays, which are high energy particles that are accelerated to near-light speed by distant supernovas and black holes, have been bombarding the spacecraft with greater frequency, NASA said.