Ice cores are essential for climate research, because they represent the only archive which allows direct measurements of atmospheric composition and greenhouse gas concentrations in the past. Using novel isotopic studies, scientists from the European Project for Ice Coring In Antarctica (EPICA) were now able to identify the most important processes responsible for changes in natural methane concentrations over the transition from the last ice age into our warm period.

©Gerald Traufetter

Dr. Hubertus Fischer cutting an ice core at Kohnen Station, Antarctica.

Scientists from MIT and the Paris Observatory claim that rogue asteroids are more common than previously thought.

Previously, scientists believed that asteroids were static and remained near the sun. However, observations in the last decade have revealed that asteroids show up in unexpected places in space.


"That [theory] has been completely turned on its head," Francesca DeMeo, who did much of the mapping as a postdoc in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, said in a statement. "Today we think the absolute opposite: Everything's been moved around a lot and the solar system has been very dynamic."

Researchers developed a map that charts the size, composition and location of more than 100,000 asteroids throughout the solar system. The new maps suggests the early solar system could have undergone dramatic changes before the planets laid claim to their current alignment.

Gene types that influence disease in people today were picked up through interbreeding with Neanderthals, a major study in Nature journal suggests.

They passed on variants involved in type 2 diabetes, Crohn's disease and - curiously - smoking addiction.

Genome studies reveal that our species (Homo sapiens) mated with Neanderthals after leaving Africa.

But it was previously unclear what this Neanderthal DNA did and whether there were any implications for human health.

By screening the genomes of 1,004 modern humans, Sriram Sankararaman and his colleagues identified regions bearing the Neanderthal versions of different genes.

That a gene variant associated with a difficulty in stopping smoking should be found to have a Neanderthal origin is a surprise.

It goes without saying that there is no suggestion our evolutionary cousins were puffing away in their caves.

Instead, the researchers argue, this mutation may have more than one function, so the modern effect of this marker on smoking behaviour may be one impact it has among several.

Astronomers have discovered what could be a never-before-seen river of hydrogen flowing through space. This very faint, very tenuous filament of gas is streaming into the nearby galaxy NGC 6946 and may help explain how certain spiral galaxies keep up their steady pace of star formation.

Using the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), astronomer D.J. Pisano from West Virginia University has discovered what could be a never-before-seen river of hydrogen flowing through space. This very faint, very tenuous filament of gas is streaming into the nearby galaxy NGC 6946 and may help explain how certain spiral galaxies keep up their steady pace of star formation.
"We knew that the fuel for star formation had to come from somewhere. So far, however, we've detected only about 10 percent of what would be necessary to explain what we observe in many galaxies," said Pisano. "A leading theory is that rivers of hydrogen -- known as cold flows -- may be ferrying hydrogen through intergalactic space, clandestinely fueling star formation. But this tenuous hydrogen has been simply too diffuse to detect, until now."

Spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, typically maintain a rather tranquil but steady pace of star formation. Others, like NGC 6946, which is located approximately 22 million light-years from Earth on the border of the constellations Cepheus and Cygnus, are much more active, though less-so than more extreme starburst galaxies. This raises the question of what is fueling the sustained star formation in this and similar spiral galaxies

A trio of researchers at Tohoku University in Japan, led by Masahiro Hotta, has proposed a new way to teleport energy that allows for doing so over long distances. In their paper published in Physical Review A, the team describes a theory they've developed that takes advantage of the properties of squeezed light or vacuum states to allow for "teleporting" information about an energy state, allowing for making use of that energy - in essence, teleporting energy over long distances.

On television shows such as Star Trek, people are moved from one location to another via teleportation, where the people (or objects) are not literally sent - instead their essence is reestablished in another local, giving the illusion of movement. In real life, nothing like that exists, though scientists have begun using the term teleportation to describe the results of entanglement experiments - where two entangled particles are joined somehow despite no apparent connection between them. Changes to one particle happen automatically to the other. Scientists have broadened their experiments to include light and matter, and more recently, energy.

At least one-fifth of the Neanderthal genome may lurk within modern humans, influencing the skin, hair and diseases people have today, researchers say.

Although modern humans are the only surviving human lineage, other groups of early humans used to live on Earth. The closest extinct relatives of modern humans were the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia until they went extinct about 40,000 years ago. The ancestors of modern humans diverged from those of Neanderthals between 550,000 and 765,000 years ago.

Recent findings revealed that Neanderthals interbred with ancestors of modern humans when modern humans began spreading out of Africa perhaps about 40,000 to 80,000 years ago, although some research suggests the migration began earlier. About 1.5 to 2.1 percent of the DNA of anyone outside Africa is Neanderthal in origin.

However, scientists reasoned that the Neanderthal DNA found in one person might not be the same Neanderthal DNA of someone else.

"If you are 2 percent Neanderthal and I'm 2 percent Neanderthal, we might not have the same Neanderthal DNA between us," said study lead author Benjamin Vernot, a population geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle. "We might have inherited different portions of the Neanderthal genome.

This logic suggested a significant portion of the Neanderthal genome might survive within the genomes of present-day humans. Past calculations suggested that anywhere from 35 to 70 percent of the Neanderthal genome could exist in modern people.

Researchers are closing in on the final steps of a new system to analyze human DNA in 90 minutes instead of the two to three weeks it now takes, according to interviews with Pentagon and industry officials.

Such a dramatic cut in the amount of time to get a DNA sample has huge ramifications for law enforcement, war crimes investigations and immigration, said Chris Asplen, the executive director of the Global Alliance for Rapid DNA Testing.

"When it comes to solving crime (not proving it in court but actually using DNA to find the killer, rapist, burglar, etc.) the value of DNA as an investigative tool is directly proportional to the speed at which it can be leveraged in any given investigation," Asplen said.

Pentagon researchers expect to finish evaluating prototypes of the Accelerated Nuclear DNA Equipment (ANDE) system by June, said Jenn Elzea, a Pentagon spokeswoman. The Departments of Homeland Security and Justice are also investigating prototypes, she said.

Over the last month or so, a few keen-eyed Android users may have been startled by some peculiar permission requests when they tried to update their Facebook app. One request asks to "read your text messages (SMS or MMS)."

That's not exactly the kind of language users are likely to find reassuring, especially after recent allegations that Facebook has been scanning private messages within the social network. So, Facebook is currently on a PR offensive to calm user fears. "We realize that some of these permissions sound scary," writes Facebook. "So we'd like to provide more info about how we use them ... If you add a phone number to your account, this allows us to confirm your phone number automatically by finding the confirmation code that we send via text message."

Bizarre magnetic behavior that was predicted by a famous physicist more than 80 years ago has finally been demonstrated in the lab, according to a new study.

The behavior of an electron in response to a magnetic monopole, or a solitary magnet with just a north pole, has been demonstrated in an ultra-cold material that mimics a natural magnetic system. And the monopole and electron system behaves just as English physicist Paul Dirac predicted it would in 1931.

Though the new experiment, described today (Jan. 29) in the journal Nature, doesn't prove that such monopoles exist outside the lab in other magnetic systems, it could help physicists know what to look for in nature, said study co-author David Hall, a physicist at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

In our January Volcano Watch articles - Hawaii Island's fifth annual Volcano Awareness Month - we are exploring important questions about how Hawaiian volcanoes work. Last week, we discussed how Hawaiian islands grow; this week, we talk about how they fall apart.

In 1964, irregular submarine topography north of Oahu and Molokai was identified in newly available maps of the sea floor made by the U.S. Navy. James Moore, then Scientist-in-Charge at the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, suggested that this odd bathymetry might reflect massive landslides originating from those islands.

Moore's interpretation was disputed for more than 20 years until comprehensive mapping of the sea floor around the entire state of Hawaii was completed in the late 1980s. It turned out that Moore was right. Large - even catastrophic - submarine landslide structures litter the sea floor around the Hawaiian Islands. In fact, 17 major landslides have been identified off the shores of the main Hawaiian Islands. Fortunately, these slides are exceedingly rare - occurring, on average, only once every 350,000 years.

The largest landslides constitute significant portions of the islands from which they originated. Imagine if 10 percent of one of the islands suddenly collapsed into the ocean. Such an event would displace a huge amount of water and cause a large tsunami. Deposits of coral and sand have been found approximately 1,000 feet above sea level on several of the Hawaiian Islands. Catastrophic landslides are believed to have generated gigantic tsunami waves that washed ashore and left these deposits behind.