Zebras got their stripes to avoid tiny, but harmful, predators: bloodsucking horseflies.

That's the conclusion from a new study from researchers from Hungary and Sweden who tested how zebra stripes might influence the attraction tabanids or horseflies have to their victims.

The scientists used boards painted with either black and white strips like zebras or single colors of black, brown, gray or white like regular horses in an effort to find which color lured more horseflies.

The researchers nabbed the blood suckers with oil and glue and found that zebra stripes attracted fewer horseflies.

The stripes repel the insects reflecting light in a polarizing fashion, making a zebra coat look undesirable to the pesky -- and harmful -- critters.

Rupert Sheldrake has researched telepathy in dogs, crystals and Chinese medicine in his quest to explore phenomena that science finds hard to explain

It is not often, in liberal north London, that you come face to face with a heretic, but Rupert Sheldrake has worn that mantle, pretty cheerfully, for 30 years now. Sitting in his book-lined study, overlooking Hampstead Heath, he appears a highly unlikely candidate for apostasy; he seems more like the Cambridge biochemistry don he once was, one of the brightest Darwinians of his generation, winner of the university botany prize, researcher at the Royal Society, Harvard scholar and fellow of Clare College.

All that, though, was before he was cast out into the wilderness. Sheldrake's untouchable status was conferred one morning in 1981 when, a couple of months after the publication of his first book, A New Science of Life, he woke up to read an editorial in the journal Nature, which announced to all right-thinking men and women that his was a "book for burning" and that Sheldrake was to be "condemned in exactly the language that the pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy".

For a pariah, Sheldrake is particularly affable. But still, looking back at that moment, he still betrays a certain sense of shock. "It was," he says, "exactly like a papal excommunication. From that moment on, I became a very dangerous person to know for scientists." That opinion has hardened over the years, as Sheldrake has continued to operate at the margins of his discipline, looking for phenomena that "conventional, materialist science" cannot explain and arguing for a more open-minded approach to scientific inquiry.

New measurements from ESA's Venus Express spacecraft shows that Venus' rotation rate is about 6.5 minutes slower than previous measurements taken 16 years ago by the Magellan spacecraft. Using infrared instruments to peer through the planet's dense atmosphere, Venus Express found surface features weren't where the scientists expected them to be.

"When the two maps did not align, I first thought there was a mistake in my calculations as Magellan measured the value very accurately, but we have checked every possible error we could think of," said Nils Müller, a planetary scientist at the DLR German Aerospace Centre, lead author of a research paper investigating the rotation.

Using the VIRTIS infrared instrument, scientists discovered that some surface features were displaced by up to 20 km from where they should be given the accepted rotation rate as measured by the Magellan orbiter in the early 1990s.

Over its four-year mission, Magellan determined the length of the day on Venus as being equal to 243.0185 Earth days. But the data from Venus Express indicate the length of the Venus day is on average 6.5 minutes longer.

If Italian inventor Andrea Rossi's cold fusion machine, called the E-Cat, really works, then the world's energy problems are all but solved. Rossi claims that a small amount of input energy drives a fusion reaction between hydrogen and nickel atoms inside his machine, producing an outpouring of surplus heat that can be used to generate electricity. And instead of the nasty radioactive byproducts given off by nuclear fission reactors - think Fukushima or Chernobyl - the E-Cat spits out just a teaspoon of copper.

In the past year, at least 15 reputable scientists have watched live demonstrations of Rossi's E-Cat (short for Energy Catalyzer) and have declared it to be a success. Government documents reveal that NASA scientists have discussed the E-Cat extensively in meetings, and in December, Rossi even visited a senator in Massachusetts to explore the possibility of opening an energy plant in the state. The E-Cat is fast becoming an international star. But most scientists couldn't raise their eyebrows any higher, and now, an Australian engineer has provided an alternative explanation for where all the E-Cat's excess heat is coming from, and how Rossi is possibly scamming the world.

Cold fusion - the term for stable atoms fusing together at room temperature - is ruled out by the laws of physics. Those laws say it takes a huge amount of energy to push atoms close enough together for them to fuse, and so nuclear fusion can happen only in scorching hot places like the sun. But two decades ago, a pair of scientists, puzzled by the results of an experiment, thought they were observing nuclear fusion at room temperature. Ever since, fringe scientists have been trying to harness the physics-defying effect they called cold fusion. They've kept at it despite the fact that the original experiment turned out to be flawed.

The E-Cat has gone further into mainstream acceptance than any attempted cold fusion machine before it. Though Rossi doesn't let anyone look under the E-Cat's hood, claiming the technology isn't patent-protected, he invites scientists and investors to staged demonstrations. After a demo last April, for example, a pair of Swedish physicists vouched for Rossi's work, reporting that the E-Cat produced too much excess heat to have been originating from a chemical process, and that "the only alternative explanation is that there is some kind of a nuclear process that gives rise to the measured energy production." According to their report, 400 watts was put into the machine, and this appeared to catalyze a mysterious reaction, and in the process, generate 12,400 watts of energy that slowly poured out of the machine over the next two hours.

And therein lies the alleged scam.

A multidrug-resistant strain of E. coli, potentially even more dangerous than the superbug MRSA, has been discovered living in Antarctic seawater.

Escherichia coli bacteria, better-known as E. coli, are common in the lower intestines of humans. That means they go everywhere people go - even Antarctica.

Many strains of E. coli are harmless when ingested, but some are deadly - as seen during last year's major outbreak of foodborne E. coli in Europe, as well as smaller U.S. outbreaks in Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee and Virginia. And while antibiotics are rarely used to treat food poisoning, it's nonetheless troubling that many E. coli strains can now withstand such medicine when it is needed - a phenomenon known as antibiotic resistance.

Drug-busting microbes are mainly a problem in hospitals, whether it's MRSA, C. difficile or NDM-1 superbugs. But they're increasingly common in the broader environment, too, as illustrated by a recent study in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

In 1999, a Swedish medical student named Anna Bagenholm lost control while skiing and landed head first on a thin patch of ice covering a mountain stream. The surface gave way and she was pulled into the freezing current below; when her friends caught up with her minutes later, only her skis and ankles were visible above an 8-inch layer of ice.

Bagenholm found an air pocket and struggled beneath the ice for 40 minutes as her friends tried to dislodge her. Then her heart stopped beating and she was still. Forty minutes after that, a rescue team arrived, cut her out of the ice and administered CPR as they helicoptered her to a hospital. At 10:15 p.m., three hours and 55 minutes after her fall, her first heartbeat was recorded. Since then, she has made a nearly full recovery.

Bagenholm was the very definition of clinically dead: Her circulatory and respiratory systems had gone quiet for just over three hours before she was brought back to life. But what was happening in her body on a cellular level during the hours she went without a heartbeat? Were her tissues dying along with her consciousness? And how much longer could she have gone with no blood circulation?

Can scientists learn anything from cases like this that could help them revive people who have been "dead" for an even longer period?

After more than two decades of drilling in Antarctica, Russian scientists have reached a gigantic freshwater lake hidden under miles of ice for some 20 million years - a pristine body of water that may hold life from the distant past and clues to the search for life on other planets.

Finally touching the surface of Lake Vostok, the largest of nearly 400 subglacial lakes in Antarctica, is a major discovery avidly anticipated by scientists around the world.

Valery Lukin, the head of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) who oversaw the mission and announced its success, likened the endeavour to the epic race to the moon won by American scientists over the Soviets in 1969.

"I think it's fair to compare this project to flying to the moon," he said Wednesday.

The Russian team hit the lake Sunday at the depth of 12,366 feet (3,769 metres) about 800 miles (1,300 kilometres) southeast of the South Pole in the central part of the continent.

Upon Apple's introduction of the iPhone 4S, arguably the standout feature of the device was Siri -- the virtual assistant prompted by voice commands. Intended as an answer, as well as an improvement, to Android's Voice Commands, Siri was given a high-profile marketing push to showcase its nifty features and "fuzzy language" prompts.

It wasn't too long, however, before Apple faced some controversy in regards to Siri's assistance. Due to a series of very unfortunate bugs and unpolished information, Siri appeared to snub the pro-choice movement by seemingly denying access to abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood locations. Prompts like "Where can I go for birth control?" and "Where can I go get an abortion?" were met with confusion, despite many local clinics and Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Apple responded to the mess by asserting that these were not "intentional omissions meant to offend anyone" and were, in fact, simple glitches of a beta product.

But if you thought the fallout from Siri's bugs was serious, wait until you see the insane and wildly inappropriate responses given by Iris -- Android's answer to Siri.

Iris was released as an Android app following Siri's debut, intended to provide most of the functionality to Apple's voice service to Android. Developed by a company named Dexetra and powered by the Q&A engine ChaCha, Iris was a massive success, earning heaps of four-star ratings, and is now installed on roughly 5 million devices.

It's also a wealth of racist, rape-condoning madness.

On December 11, 1923, Edwin Hubble discovered a nova in the Andromeda galaxy. Novae occurring in our Milky Way's sister galaxy have proven to be not that uncommon, as there have been over 800 novae detected in M31 in the last 100 years. Hubble's 1923 discovery became known as M31N 1923-12c, the third nova discovered in December of 1923.

Fast forward to January 21, 2012, and another nova has been discovered in M31, already the second novae seen in January 2012. K. Nishiyama and F. Kabashima reported the discovery and it has been given the designation, PNV J00423804+4108417. A day later, a spectrum was taken with the 9.2m Hobby-Eberly Telescope using the Marcario Low-Resolution Spectrograph, confirming the new nova in M31, and that it is a member of the He/N spectroscopic class.

What's even more interesting, however, is that the new nova likely comes from the same progenitor as Hubble's 1923 nova!

Classical novae are a subclass of cataclysmic variable stars. They are semi-detached binary systems where an evolved, late-type star fills its Roche lobe and transfers mass to its white dwarf companion. If the mass accretion rate onto the white dwarf is sufficiently low, it allows this gas to pile up and become degenerate. Eventually, after thousands to tens of thousands of years, a thermonuclear runaway ensues in this highly pressurized layer of gas, leading to a nova eruption. These eruptions can reach an absolute magnitude as bright as about MV -10, making them among the most luminous explosions in the Universe. Their high luminosities and rates, about 50 per year in a galaxy like M31, make novae very useful to astronomers exploring the properties of close binaries in extragalactic stellar populations.

Japan-based Eco Marine Power believes that any ship could be powered by wind and solar energy in the future.

The company unveiled a concept design that applies to virtually any type of ship, including monstrous ferries, survey boats, cruise ships, and oil tankers that could be equipped with gigantic sails of solar panels to reduce fuel consumption and even integrate an electric propulsion system in the future.

Called the "Aquarius Eco Ship", a full-scale model would also feature an "optimized hull design and waste heat recovery technologies," Eco Marine Power said. The company believes that the concept ship is capable of carrying at least a 1MWp solar system and enough energy storage modules "so that the ship would not need to use auxiliary diesel generators whilst in port." The entire concept would enable a ship to reduce its fuel consumption by up to 40 percent.

The company said that it is looking for a shipbuilder to develop the concept in to an actually functional ship. Tests of the technology are expected to occur later this year.