Researchers from the Gene and Stem Cell Therapy Program at Sydney's Centenary Institute have confirmed that, far from being "junk", the 97 per cent of human DNA that does not encode instructions for making proteins can play a significant role in controlling cell development.

And in doing so, the researchers have unravelled a previously unknown mechanism for regulating the activity of genes, increasing our understanding of the way cells develop and opening the way to new possibilities for therapy.

Using the latest gene sequencing techniques and sophisticated computer analysis, a research group led by Professor John Rasko AO and including Centenary's Head of Bioinformatics, Dr William Ritchie, has shown how particular white blood cells use non-coding DNA to regulate the activity of a group of genes that determines their shape and function. The work is published today in the scientific journal Cell.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected a new kind of stellar blast called a kilonova, which happens when a pair of compact objects such as neutron stars crash together. Hubble observed the fading fireball from a kilonova last month, following a short gamma ray burst (GRB) in a galaxy almost 4 billion light-years from Earth.

"This observation finally solves the mystery of short gamma ray bursts," says Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, who led a team of researchers conducting this research.
Gamma ray bursts are flashes of intense high-energy radiation that appear from random directions in space. They come in two flavors--long and short. "Many astronomers, including our group, have already provided a great deal of evidence that long-duration gamma ray bursts (those lasting more than two seconds) are produced by the collapse of extremely massive stars," explains Tanvir.

The short bursts, however, were more mysterious.

A cosmic impact 12,900 years ago could have led to the demise of the 'Clovis' people of North America, researchers claim.

A layer of platinum from an ice core taken in Greenland has been dated back to the time of a known abrupt climate transition, known as the 'Big Freeze'.

The freeze has been previously been linked to the demise of the Clovis people, the prehistoric hunter gatherers who were the first to occupy North America.

According to researchers at Harvard University, this provides evidence that a comet tipped the world into its colder phase, making dozens of species extinct.

Researcher Michail Petaev and Harvard colleagues, writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found a 100-fold increase in platinum concentration in ice that is around 12,890 years old.

This is the same period for which oxygen isotope measurements show rapid cooling of the climate- a period known as the 'Younger Dryas'.

Colombian scientists have discovered what may be a graveyard of comets in a very strange spot -- and now, some of the interred are coming back to life.

These so-called "Lazarus" comets, described in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, may represent a long-lost population of the icy space travelers and may alter scientists' understanding of their origins.

These chunks of ice and rock, typically a few kilometers across, have long held human imaginations as "falling stars." As a comet travels around the sun, the heat and light vaporize some of the water ice trapped inside, causing the signature tail of glowing gas and dust to form behind it.

They're thought to have started out near the fringes of the planetary system, with stretched, elliptical orbits that are so extreme that some of comets circle the sun only once in several thousand years. Others have quicker round-trips of a couple centuries or so; these so-called short-period comets are the source of such famous sightings as Halley's Comet.

The house-sized rock that exploded spectacularly in the skies near Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February may have been a member of a gang of asteroids that still poses a threat to Earth, a new study says. The evidence is circumstantial, but future observations could help to settle the question.

On 15 February, an 11,000-tonne space rock slammed into the atmosphere above Russia, producing the most powerful impact since the Tunguska explosion in 1908 - which may also have been caused by an asteroid - and generating a shock wave that damaged buildings and injured more than 1,000 people. The 18-metre-wide object could not be seen as it approached the planet because it was obscured by the Sun's glare, but observations made while it was in the atmosphere have enabled several groups of researchers to estimate its orbit².

However, the estimates varied so much that there was no clear orbit that researchers could use to hunt for sibling asteroids on a similar path, say Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, orbital dynamicist brothers at the Complutense University of Madrid.

They decided to tackle the problem with brute computational force, running simulations of billions of possible orbits to find the ones most likely to have led to a collision. They then used the average of the ten best orbits to search a NASA asteroid catalogue for known objects on similar paths. They found about 20, ranging in size from 5 to 200 metres across, they report in an article to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters¹.

Today's high-end televisions are almost all equipped with "smart" PC-like features, including Internet connectivity, apps, microphones and cameras. But a recently discovered security hole in some Samsung Smart TVs shows that many of those bells and whistles aren't ready for prime time.

The flaws in Samsung Smart TVs, which have now been patched, enabled hackers to remotely turn on the TVs' built-in cameras without leaving any trace of it on the screen. While you're watching TV, a hacker anywhere around the world could have been watching you. Hackers also could have easily rerouted an unsuspecting user to a malicious website to steal bank account information.

Samsung quickly fixed the problem after security researchers at iSEC Partners informed the company about the bugs. Samsung sent a software update to all affected TVs.

But the glitches speak to a larger problem of gadgets that connect to the Internet but have virtually no security to speak of.

Security cameras, lights, heating control systems and even door locks and windows are now increasingly coming with features that allow users to control them remotely. Without proper security controls, there's little to stop hackers from invading users' privacy, stealing personal information or spying on people.

Google has announced its prototype real-time speech translation systems are performing with "close to 100% accuracy" in laboratory conditions.

However the web giant has given no indication as to when a finished product will become a reality.

Google Translate, the web and mobile tool for converting text from one language to another, is already indispensable for most business travelers, expats and holidaymakers.

The company is developing a real-time translation tool that can do for voice what its current systems can do for text.

In an interview with The Times, Android product management vice president Hugo Barra revealed that the current prototypes are achieving "close to 100% accuracy," and that with some language pairings, the results are "near perfect," meaning that in laboratory conditions at least (ie. without background noises and over a perfect internet connection), two people speaking two completely different languages can communicate via the system.

Earlier this month, Microsoft Asia researchers demonstrated a system that uses the Kinect sensor that can translate sign language in real time and also turn text into visual sign language via an avatar.

There's a potential "cometary graveyard" of inactive comets in our solar system wandering between Mars and Jupiter, a new Colombian research paper says. This contradicts a long-standing view that comets originate on the fringes of the solar system, in the Oort Cloud.

Mysteriously, however, 12 active comets have been seen in and around the asteroid belt. The astronomers theorize there must be a number of inactive comets in this region that flare up when a stray gravitational force from Jupiter nudges the comets so that they receive more energy from the Sun.

The researchers examined comets originating from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a spot where it is believed there are only asteroids (small bodies made up mostly of rock). Comets, by contrast, are a mixture of rocks and ice. The ice melts when the comet gets close to the sun, and can form spectacular tails visible from Earth. (Here's more detail on the difference between a comet and an asteroid.)

A team of astronomers from the University of Anitoquia, Medellin, Colombia, have discovered a graveyard of comets.

The researchers, led by Anitoquia astronomer Prof. Ignacio Ferrin, describe how some of these objects, inactive for millions of years, have returned to life leading them to name the group the 'Lazarus comets'.

The team publish their results in the Oxford University Press journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Comets are amongst the smallest objects in the Solar System, typically a few km across and composed of a mixture of rock and ices. If they come close to the Sun, then some of the ices turn to gas, before being swept back by the light of the Sun and the solar wind to form a characteristic tail of gas and dust.

Our internal clocks are drifting out of sync, and indoor lighting may be to blame. A new study suggests that just a few days in the great outdoors puts us back in tune with the solar cycle, and reconnecting with the sun could make us less drowsy.

Electricity has given us the freedom to choose our bedtimes; staying up after dark is as easy as flipping a light switch. But we pay a price for this luxury, says integrative physiologist Kenneth Wright of the University of Colorado, Boulder, who led the new study. People with later bedtimes and wake times are exposed to more artificial light and less sunlight, he says, which means their bodies aren't getting the natural cues humans once relied on.

To understand how falling out of sync with the sun changes our body's internal clock - or circadian rhythm - sleep researchers look to the timekeeping mechanisms in the brain, particularly how we regulate the hormone melatonin. Released about 2 hours before sleep, melatonin makes us feel drowsy as we wind down for rest, Wright says. It then decreases as we become alert in the morning. The mechanisms driving our clock are complex and hard to measure, but the daily spike and drop in melatonin are like its chimes. "Melatonin tells us what time it is in the body," Wright says.

And when we keep strange schedules, our melatonin goes haywire. Turning lights on at night can delay melatonin release and shift the timing of our internal clock, says sleep physiologist Derk-Jan Dijk of the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the work. But it wasn't clear just what would happen in modern, electricity-adapted humans if all artificial light were suddenly taken away. "This is the first time that somebody has done the obvious but important experiment," he says.