According to the Boston Globe, the United Nations has issued a new climate "tipping point" by which the world must act to avoid dangerous global warming.

The Boston Globe noted on April 16, 2014: "The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

Once again, the world is being warned of an ecological or climate "tipping point" by the UN.

As early as 1982, the UN was issuing a two decade tipping point. UN official Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, the "world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now." According to Tolba in 1982, lack of action would bring "by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust."

A genetic disease has been cured in living, adult animals for the first time using a revolutionary genome-editing technique that can make the smallest changes to the vast database of the DNA molecule with pinpoint accuracy.

Scientists have used the genome-editing technology to cure adult laboratory mice of an inherited liver disease by correcting a single "letter" of the genetic alphabet which had been mutated in a vital gene involved in liver metabolism.

A similar mutation in the same gene causes the equivalent inherited liver disease in humans - and the successful repair of the genetic defect in laboratory mice raises hopes that the first clinical trials on patients could begin within a few years, scientists said.

The success is the latest achievement in the field of genome editing. This has been transformed by the discovery of Crispr, a technology that allows scientists to make almost any DNA changes at precisely defined points on the chromosomes of animals or plants. Crispr - pronounced "crisper" - was initially discovered in 1987 as an immune defence used by bacteria against invading viruses. Its powerful genome-editing potential in higher animals, including humans, was only fully realised in 2012 and 2013 when scientists showed that it can be combined with a DNA-sniping enzyme called Cas9 and used to edit the human genome.

Since then there has been an explosion of interest in the technology because it is such a simple method of changing the individual letters of the human genome - the 3 billion "base pairs" of the DNA molecule - with an accuracy equivalent to correcting a single misspelt word in a 23-volume encyclopaedia.

A study of ancient fossil shells has revealed that the Antarctic was once as warm as the California coast.

Yale University scientists came to their conclusion after trying a different model to gauge historic temperatures.

Their findings underscore the potential for seesawing temperatures at the Earth's poles and the associated risk of melting polar ice and rising sea levels.

Will anyone see next week's solar eclipse? On April 29^th, an annular solar eclipse occurs over a small D-shaped 500 kilometre wide region of Antarctica.

This will be the second eclipse for 2014 - the first was the April 15^th total lunar eclipse - and the first solar eclipse of the year, marking the end of the first eclipse season. 2014 has the minimum number of eclipses possible in one year, with four: two partial solars and two total lunars.

This month's solar eclipse is also a rarity in that it's a non-central eclipse with one limit. That is, the center of the Moon's shadow - known as the antumbra during an annular eclipse - will juuuust miss the Earth and instead pass scant kilometres above the Antarctic continent.

Neanderthals were remarkably less genetically diverse than modern humans, with Neanderthal populations typically smaller and more isolated, researchers say.

Although Neanderthals underwent more genetic changes involving their skeletons, they had fewer such changes in behavior and pigmentation, scientists added.

Modern humans are the only humans alive today, but Earth was once home to a variety of other human lineages. The Neanderthals were once the closest relatives of modern humans, with the common ancestors of modern humans and Neanderthals diverging between 550,000 and 765,000 years ago. Neanderthals and modern humans later interbred - nowadays, about 1.5 to 2.1 percent of DNA of people outside Africa is Neanderthal in origin.

• A new image shows a mysterious aircraft flying over Kansas
• The jet appears to be the same one that was spotted over Texas last month
• Photographer Jeff Templin says it may have been as high as passenger jets
• A retired Marine previously said the mysterious plane is the SR-72
• The SR-72 is designed to cross entire continents in less than an hour
• Developers at Lockheed Martin say the plane could be operational by 2030

A new photo of a mysterious flying object over Kansas has been revealed.

It appears to be the same aircraft as one that was snapped soaring over Texas last month.

The exact identify of the aircraft remains a mystery, but rumours abound that it could be a secret jet.

Researchers from the scientific organization PSE (Physicians Scientists & Engineers for Healthy Energy), the University of California, Berkeley and Weill Cornell Medical College conducted the first systematic literature review of public health effects and routes of exposure of contaminants associated with shale and tight gas development (i.e., fracking).

The research shows that many of the studies reviewed identified associations between the development of shale and tight gas and elevated levels of toxic compounds in the environment. The researchers note that while the scientific literature on this modern type of natural gas development has grown recently, more epidemiological studies are needed to investigate public health impacts.

The review, "Environmental Public Health Dimensions of Shale and Tight Gas Development" was published online in the peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Health Perspectives on April 16 at 12:01 a.m. Eastern.

Cerro Armazones is a crumbling dome of rock that dominates the parched peaks of the Chilean Coast Range north of Santiago. A couple of old concrete platforms and some rusty pipes, parts of the mountain's old weather station, are the only hints that humans have ever taken an interest in this forbidding, arid place. Even the views look alien, with the surrounding boulder-strewn desert bearing a remarkable resemblance to the landscape of Mars.

Dramatic change is coming to Cerro Armazones, however - for in a few weeks, the 10,000ft mountain is going to have its top knocked off. "We are going to blast it with dynamite and then carry off the rubble," says engineer Gird Hudepohl. "We will take about 80ft off the top of the mountain to create a plateau - and when we have done that, we will build the world's biggest telescope there."

A press release from some former NASA astronauts on the current asteroid impact threat to earth, based on data on in-atmosphere detonations since 2001, gleaned from a nuclear weapon detonation detection system has yielded some startling numbers.

The threat is 3 to 10 times higher than previously predicted. The data will be presented at the Seattle Flight Museum, Tuesday April 22, at 6:00pm PDT.

Just last night, another fireball was seen over Russia, caught on a dashcamera. See video.

Harvard neuroscientists have made a discovery that turns 160 years of neuroanatomy on its head.

Myelin, the electrical insulating material in the body long known to be essential for the fast transmission of impulses along the axons of nerve cells, is not as ubiquitous as thought, according to new work led by Professor Paola Arlotta of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) and the University's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, in collaboration with Professor Jeff Lichtman of Harvard's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

"Myelin is a relatively recent invention during evolution," says Arlotta. "It's thought that myelin allowed the brain to communicate really fast to the far reaches of the body, and that it has endowed the brain with the capacity to compute higher-level functions."

In fact, loss of myelin is a feature in a number of devastating diseases, including multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia.

But the new research shows that despite myelin's essential roles in the brain, "some of the most evolved, most complex neurons of the nervous system have less myelin than older, more ancestral ones," said Arlotta, co-director of the HSCI neuroscience program.