Exposure to "dog dust," or the dried flakes of skin that fall from Fido, may protect against developing allergies and asthma in later life by altering intestinal bacteria, a new study in mice suggests.

The dust appears to contain bacteria that, when present in an animal's gut, affects the production of immune cells in the animal's airway.

"Perhaps early life dog exposure introduces microbes into the home that somehow influence the gut microbiome, and change the immune response in the airways," said study researcher Susan Lynch, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Past research has shown that exposure to pets, particularly dogs, during infancy may prevent people from developing allergies, and other work has found that bacteria in the gut can affect allergies and asthma. The new study adds to the research because it links these ideas - showing that the reason exposure to dog dust may prevent allergies is that the dust affects the population of gut microbes.

In the study, Lynch and her colleagues exposed mice to dust from a dog owner's home, and then tested the mice's immune response to cockroach allergens and ovalbumin (a component of egg whites), two substances that commonly trigger asthma attacks. They found that mice exposed to dog dust had fewer immune cells in the airway that respond to allergens, compared with mice not exposed to dog dust.

Researchers studying a 5,000-year-old archaeological site in China have discovered that wildcats first came to ancient villages to feed on rodents, which were stealing farmers' grains. The research shows, for the first time, how the process of cat domestication started.

Pathways of Domestication

Over the years, there have been a number of different thoughts as to how domestication of various animals came about. Some people proposed that early domestication involved a kind of master-subject relationship, where humans guided wild animals to domestication through selective breeding and other techniques. On the opposite end of the spectrum, one theory holds that some domesticates manipulated humans into relationships that benefited the animals, at, possibly, the expense of people.

"Now, we look at it as being much more of a mutualistic relationship between humans and animals," said Fiona Marshall, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. That is, both human and animal reap some kind of benefit through their increasingly co-dependent interactions. But not all relationships begin the same way - there are three different "pathways" to domestication.

Animals such as sheep, goat and cattle became domesticated through the prey pathway. They began as prey for hunters, but when their numbers dwindled, people implemented smarter, more selective hunting practices and likely protected the animals from other predators. Over time, these game management strategies transformed into herding and eventually controlled breeding. By comparison, the directed pathway is seen as a kind of intentional domestication, where people selected animals to domesticate for things such as milk, wool and transportation.

Russian scientists are calling for a 10-year moratorium on GMOs to thoroughly study their influence on human health, stressing that such examinations are vital.

"It is necessary to ban GMO, to impose moratorium [on it] for 10 years. While GMO will be prohibited, we can plan experiments, tests, or maybe even new methods of research could be developed," vice president of Russia's National Association for Genetic Safety, Irina Ermakova, told Interfax news agency.

According to her, there have not been enough sufficient studies on GMO influence on human health to allow for a wide introduction of genetically modified food on the market.

However, scientists say that most studies prove that such food comes along with dangerous side effects.

"It has been proved that not only in Russia, but also in many other countries in the world, GMO is dangerous. Methods of obtaining the GMO are not perfect, therefore, at this stage, all GMOs are dangerous," Ermakova said.

She went on to explain that one of the techniques uses tumor-causing soil bacteria.

"Consumption and use of GMOs obtained in such way can lead to tumors, cancers and obesity among animals," Ermakova said.

E. coli is one of millions of bacterial species that live in our gut. From when we are infants, E. coli dwells peacefully in the lower intestine, maintaining a give-and-take relationship with our body - it helps the gut digest food, and gets energy to live and reproduce in return.

However, the normally harmless bacterium can quickly evolve into a deadly form that can cause severe food poisoning, infection, and sometimes death. This can happen especially when it leaves the gut and enters our blood stream.

Scientists have long tried to figure out how this mild bacterium morphs into a killer. A new study published in PLOS Pathogens throws some light on this process of transformation.

The researchers in the study found that a key factor that triggers this transformation is contact with the body's immune cells called macrophages. Macrophages help kill dangerous bacteria or viruses by eating and digesting them.

The researchers grew two groups of E. coli in lab dishes, one with and one without macrophages. E. coli can grow and reproduce very quickly, producing generations within weeks. The researchers observed how E. coli shape, size and structure changed in successive generations.

A rebellious moon might have just popped out of Saturn's rings. Images from a NASA spacecraft show a disturbance along the rings' edge that is probably being caused by an unseen object stirring up the icy bands. The region has since quietened down, suggesting that we may have witnessed the birth of a small moon.

Models had previously shown that Saturn's rings might double as moon factories. Material on the outer edge of a ring could clump up and grow into an object large enough to hold together under its own gravity. The newly made moon could then migrate away to become an independent satellite. This process could be how Saturn made the family of small moons that orbit close to - and sometimes inside - its famous rings, but so far no one has seen the factory in action.

Carl Murray of Queen Mary University of London and colleagues were looking at pictures of the small moon Prometheus taken by NASA's Cassini orbiter. In an image from 15 April, they noticed an unexpected distortion in the A ring, the outermost of the planet's thick, bright rings.

"I'd never seen anything quite like this at the edge of the A ring," Murray said today during a talk at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

China on Saturday successfully carried out the world's first soft landing of a space probe on the moon in nearly four decades, state media said, the next stage in an ambitious space program that aims to eventually put a Chinese astronaut on the moon.

The unmanned Chang'e 3 lander, named after a mythical Chinese goddess of the moon, touched down on Earth's nearest neighbor following a 12-minute landing process.

The probe carried a six-wheeled moon rover called "Yutu," or "Jade Rabbit," the goddess' pet. After landing Saturday evening on a fairly flat, Earth-facing part of the moon, the rover was slated to separate from the Chang'e eight hours later and embark on a three-month scientific exploration.

China's space program is an enormous source of pride for the country, the third to carry out a lunar soft landing - which does not damage the craft and the equipment it carries - after the United States and the former Soviet Union. The last one was by the Soviet Union in 1976.

The universe may grow like a giant brain, according to a new computer simulation.

The results, published Nov.16 in the journal Nature's Scientific Reports, suggest that some undiscovered, fundamental laws may govern the growth of systems large and small, from the electrical firing between brain cells and growth of social networks to the expansion of galaxies.

"Natural growth dynamics are the same for different real networks, like the Internet or the brain or social networks," said study co-author Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist at the University of California San Diego.

The new study suggests a single fundamental law of nature may govern these networks, said physicist Kevin Bassler of the University of Houston, who was not involved in the study.

"At first blush they seem to be quite different systems, the question is, is there some kind of controlling laws can describe them?" he told LiveScience.

By raising this question, "their work really makes a pretty important contribution," he said.

A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection.

In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.

Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing - and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa. But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.

The universe could be about to collapse and everything in it - including us - will be compressed into a small, hard ball. The process may already have started somewhere in our cosmos and is eating away at the rest of the universe, according to theoretical physicists.

The mind-bending concept has been around for a while, but now researchers in Denmark claim they have proven it is possible with mathematical equations. The basis of the theory is that sooner or later a radical shift in the forces of the universe will cause every particle in it to become extremely heavy.

Everything - every grain of sand, every planet and every galaxy - will become billions of times heavier than it is now.

The theory suggests that the new weight will squeeze all material into a small, super-hot and heavy ball, and the universe as we know it will cease to exist. This violent process is called a 'phase transition' and is similar to what happens when, for example, water turns to steam or a magnet heats up and loses its power.

A cave on the Indonesian island of Sumatra is providing a "stunning" record of Indian Ocean tsunamis over thousands of years.

Paleo-oceanographers say layers of tsunami-borne sediments found in the cave in northwest Sumatra suggest the biggest destructive waves do not occur at set intervals -- meaning communities in the area should be prepared at all times for a tsunami.

"It's something that communities need to know," research team leader Charles Rubin told AFP, adding that the team wanted to "promote safety of coastal communities".

Professor Rubin and other researchers from a Singapore institute were working with scientists from an Indonesian university when they discovered the cave, south of Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province.

A quake-triggered tsunami devastated Aceh and areas across the Indian Ocean in 2004, leaving some 170,000 people dead in the province alone.

Inside the cave the researchers found layers of sandy sediment, which had been washed in by tsunamis thousands of years previously, Rubin said.

The layers, which contained small fossils from the seabed, were well-preserved and separated by droppings deposited by bats in the cave, he added.

"This is a beautiful, stunning record of tsunamis that you just don't have very often," Rubin said.