People who are hard-wired to show empathy and kindness do so even in the face of a threatening or untrustworthy world.

What makes people behave kindly? Is it the result of having been nurtured in an environment of love and kindness that makes you more likely to treat others the same way? Or perhaps personal experiences of threat and deprivation make you more attuned to the suffering of others? Or maybe it's just a matter of genes?

As with so many human tendencies, displays of kindness are likely to be influenced by both environment and genes. People who have genes that predispose them to empathy and kindness, for example, are steadfast in their charitable behavior, regardless of their current environment, a new study finds. But people with genes that are linked to a weaker inclination toward altruism tend to reduce their charitable behavior and commitment to civic responsibilities, such as political action or jury duty, when they have heightened feelings of fear or being threatened.

As crazy as it sounds, free-floating rogue planets have been predicted to exist for quite some time and just last year, in May 2011, several orphan worlds were finally detected. And earlier this year, astronomers estimated that there could be 100,000 times more rogue planets in the Milky Way than stars. Now, the latest research suggests that sometimes, these rogue, nomadic worlds can find a new home, and go into orbit around other stars. Scientists say this finding could explain the existence of some planets that orbit surprisingly far from their stars, and even the existence of a double-planet system.

"Stars trade planets just like baseball teams trade players," said Hagai Perets of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Astronomers now understand that rogue planets are a natural consequence of both star and planetary formation. Newborn star systems often contain multiple planets, and if two planets interact, one can be ejected in a form of planetary billiards, kicked out of the star system to become an interstellar traveler.

But, later if a rogue planet encounters a different star moving in the same direction at the same speed, be captured in to orbit around that star, say Perets and Thijs Kouwenhoven of Peking University, China, the authors of a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

A premature baby - who was declared dead shortly after birth - was later discovered to be alive after spending 10 hours in a morgue refrigerator. How did this happen?

Doctors at the Perrando Hospital in northeast Argentina can't explain how several doctors pronounced the child dead or how the premature infant born three months early survived for so many hours inside a chilly coffin. The baby, Luz Milagros Veron, was reported Friday in "very serious" condition after doctors detected an infection.

New research from the American Museum of Natural History shows that America's Great Plains region may have once been home to some typically sea-bound creatures.

Ammonites - a type of shelled mollusk, now extinct and closely related to the nautiluses and squids of today - may have lived in methane seeps when a seaway once covered America's midwest. The findings have been published online in the journal Geology, and shed some new light on how and where these ancient animals lived.

During the Late Cretaceous period, around 80 to 65 million years ago, scientists believe America was split into two land masses by the Western Interior Seaway. Sediments were deposited in this seaway, creating geologic formations in some parts of Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. As popular destinations for paleontologists, the researchers have narrowed their focus on a giant mound of fossilized material where methane-rich fluids are believed to have migrated through sediments onto the seafloor.

Here, the researchers have the shelled mollusks.

"We've found that these methane seeps are little oases on the sea floor, little self-perpetuating ecosystems," said Neil Landman, lead author of the paper published in Geology and a curator in the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, according to a statement.

"Thousands of these seeps have been found in the Western Interior Seaway, most containing a very rich fauna of bivalves, sponges, corals, fish, crinoids, and, as we've recently documented, ammonites."

Craters made by asteroid impacts may be the best place to look for signs of life on other planets, a study suggests. Tiny organisms have been discovered thriving deep underneath a site in the US where an asteroid crashed some 35 million years ago.

Scientists believe that the organisms are evidence that such craters provide refuge for microbes, sheltering them from the effects of the changing seasons and events such as global warming or ice ages.

Life forms

The study suggests that crater sites on Mars may also be hiding life, and that drilling beneath them could lead to evidence of similar life forms.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh drilled almost 2 km below one of the largest asteroid impact craters on Earth, in Chesapeake Bay, US.

Samples from below ground showed that microbes are unevenly spread throughout the rock, suggesting that the environment is continuing to settle 35 million years after impact.

According to NASA, there is a bit of testing where hardware, software and certain procedures are concerned

NASA announced that all is well with SpaceX's Dragon capsule, and that an April 30 flight to the International Space Station (ISS) is possible.

SpaceX, which is expected to be the first private company to send a spacecraft to the ISS, has been preparing its Dragon capsule for the flight. However, it delayed the Dragon's first launch to the ISS, which was set for February 7. The company wanted to conduct more tests before the cargo capsule took off for space.

"Everything looks good as we head toward the April 30 launch date," said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations. "There is a good chance to make the 30th."

The Dragon capsule will be expected to carry 1,148 pounds of cargo to the ISS, which will consist of supplies needed for the space lab, and will return 1,455 pounds of cargo back to Earth.

On the 100^th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, The Japan Times yesterday ran an editorial titled "The Titanic and the Nuclear Fiasco" which stated: "Presenting technology as completely safe, trustworthy or miraculous may seem to be a thing of the past, but the parallels between the Titanic and Japan's nuclear power industry could not be clearer."

"Japan's nuclear power plants were, like the Titanic, advertised as marvels of modern science that were completely safe. Certain technologies, whether they promise to float a luxury liner or provide clean energy, can never be made entirely safe," it said.

It quoted from a piece by Joseph Conrad written after the Titanic sank in which he noted the "chastening influence it should have on the self-confidence of mankind." The Japan Times urged: "That lesson should be applied to all 'unsinkable' undertakings that might profit a few by imperiling the majority of others."

Yes, the same kind of baloney behind the claim that the Titanic was unsinkable is behind the puffery that nuclear power plants are safe. The nuclear power promoters are still saying that despite the sinking of atomic Titanics: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants.

In fact, underneath the PR offensive are government documents admitting that nuclear power plants are deadly dangerous.

A smile and a frown mean the same thing everywhere - or so say many anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists, who for more than a century have argued that all humans express basic emotions the same way. But a new study of people's perceptions of computer-generated faces suggests that facial expressions may not be universal and that our culture strongly shapes the way we read and express emotions.

The hypothesis that facial expressions convey the same meaning the world over goes all the way back to Charles Darwin. In his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, the famed naturalist identified six basic emotional states: happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sadness. If facial expressions are just cultural traits, passed down through the generations by imitation, their meanings would have diverged by now, he argued. A smile would signal happiness for some and disgust for others. But that's not what he found, based on his correspondence with researchers around the world using photos of various facial expressions. So Darwin concluded that the common ancestors of all living humans had the same set of basic emotions, with corresponding facial expressions as part of our genetic inheritance. Smiles and frowns are biological, not cultural.

Or are they? Rachael Jack, a psychologist at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, says that there is a fundamental flaw in the facial expression studies carried out since Darwin's time: Researchers have been using Darwin's six basic expressions as their starting point, and yet they were first identified by Western European scientists studying Western European subjects. The fact that non-Western subjects can recognize the emotions from photographs of those facial expressions has been taken as support for the universality hypothesis. But what if non-Western cultures have different basic emotions that underlie their expressions? Those expressions may be similar to those of Westerners, but with subtle differences that have gone undetected because no one has looked.

To test the true universality of Darwin's six emotional categories, Jack and colleagues used a computer program to create virtual faces with 4800 expressions. The program generated the faces by contracting virtual facial muscles, pulling the corners of the mouth up or down, widening or narrowing the eyes, and so forth. Half of the expressions were shown on a Western Caucasian face and half on an East Asian face.

Magnetic fields on the sun's northeastern limb erupted around 17:45 UT on April 16th, producing one of the most visually-spectacular explosions in years. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the blast at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths:
The explosion, which registered M1.7 on the Richter Scale of solar flares, was not Earth-directed. A CME produced by the blast is likely to hit NASA's STEREO-B spacecraft, but probably no planets.

This event confirms suspicions that an active region of significance is rotating onto the Earth-facing side of the sun. Stay tuned for updates.

Update: Using data from SDO, Steele Hill of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has assembled a must-see movie of the event. The movie shows the explosion unfolding at 304 Angstroms, a wavelength which traces plasma with a temperature around 80,000 K.

The first prostate cancer vaccine could be a step away after ministers gave their approval for a human trial of a new genetically modified therapy.
The treatment, which uses viruses carrying human DNA to direct the body's natural defences against cancer cells, is the first prostate cancer vaccine ever to reach late stage "phase three" trials in Europe.