A Cambridge professor has tackled the issue of spontaneous combustion - using belly pork.

Prof Brian J Ford is a research biologist and author of more than 30 books, most about cell biology and microscopy but he has turned his attention to the mechanisms behind why people 'explode'.

He said in an article in New Scientist: "One minute they may be relaxing in a chair, the next they erupt into a fireball.

"Jets of blue fire shoot from their bodies like flames from a blowtorch, and within half an hour they are reduced to a pile of ash.

"Typically, the legs remain unscathed sticking out grotesquely from the smoking cinders. Nearby objects - a pile of newspapers on the armrest, for example - are untouched."

The first record of spontaneous combustion dates back to 1641 when Danish doctor and mathematician Thomas Bartholin described the death of Polonus Vorstius - who drank wine at home in Milan, Italy, one evening in 1470 before bursting into flames.

Since then more reports of spontaneous combustion have been filed and linked to alcoholism - though the link was later disproved.

The older a father is, the more likely he will pass new mutations to his children, upping the chances of disease, researchers say.

"A 36-year-old father gives twice more new mutations to his child than a 20-year-old father does, and a 50-year-old father gives about four times the number of mutations," said researcher Kari Stefansson, chairman and CEO of deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland.

"This is not a subtle effect - this is a very, very large effect. And it increases the probability that a mutation may strike a gene that is very important, which can lead to a disease."

Past studies have linked a father's age at conception to the risk of schizophrenia, autism and other mental disorders. The new research links new mutations to these same diseases - mutations seen in patients but not in their parents.

Genetic errors crop up in the body over time, and scientists had conjectured that older parents accumulate more mutations in their sperm and egg cells than younger ones. To better understand the rate at which novel mutations emerge over time, researchers sequenced the entire genomes of 78 Icelandic trios of parents and offspring.

The scientists found that the age of the father at conception was by far the dominant factor in determining the number of novel mutations in children.

Photographed using a specialized microscope whose viewing stage is chilled to -170C, scientists in Maryland are showing a whole new side to what's caught on the tip of our tongues.

Using a low-temperature scanning electron microscope, researchers at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center have captured an astonishing new view on naturally-occurring snowflakes.

Shipping in the samples collected from snow banks or during fresh snow fall from around the country, the researchers study their composition for their effects on our ecosystem.

Scientists have discovered that a tiny particle within a protein allowed humans to become the most intelligent creatures on the planet.

Researchers from the University of Colorado found that the protein domain issue known as DUF1220 holds the key to understanding why our brains are so much bigger and more complex than any other animal, the Daily Mail reported.

DUF1220 is a protein domain of unknown function that shows a striking human-specific increase in copy number is considered important to human brain evolution.

Humans have more than 270 copies of DUF1220 encoded in their DNA, far more than other species.

"This research indicates that what drove the evolutionary expansion of the human brain may well be a specific unit within a protein - called a protein domain - that is far more numerous in humans than other species," Professor James Sikela from the University said.

More than two weeks after landing in Mars' Gale Crater, NASA's Curiosity rover has wiggled its wheels to warm up for its first honest-to-goodness drive, just hours from now.

Mission manager Mike Watkins said that the wiggle tests, which involved twisting the rover's four turnable wheels to the left and to the right in place, were done successfully overnight.

"We wanted to test the steering, because otherwise we would be driving in whatever direction we landed in," Watkins explained today during a teleconference that originated from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Everything's in fine shape, and that means we are 'go' for our first test drive tomorrow."

Watkins said the commands will be sent up tonight for a drive of just a few yards (meters), incorporating a turn to the right and a backing-up maneuver. That initial movement should occur "in the middle of the night our time" and last about a half-hour, he said.

Earthquakes in Europe have influenced everything from its legends to its languages.

According to Greek mythology, the Oracle at Delphi spoke through women who inhaled delirium-causing vapors; now, modern geologists say these vapors were hydrocarbon gases released along earthquake faults and fractures crisscrossing the site of the Delphi temple.

In Italy, a magnitude-6.7 quake in 1638 permanently tweaked the Calabria region's dialects, according to a study published in the journal Annali di Geofisica in 1995. For example, the town of Savelli, founded after the quake, was linguistically isolated from its neighbors because it was settled by refugees from villages far to the west.

About 45,000 earthquakes large enough to feel have rocked the continent in the past 1,000 years, according to a newly updated catalog of earthquakes in Europe and the Mediterranean. Combining this historic information with modern-day geologic investigations is the first step in forecasting Europe's future risk of earthquakes, researchers say.

"One has to bring together the information from very old times, and from very modern times," said Gottfried Grünthal, of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany.

Estimating earthquake risk requires "good knowledge about the seismological past. That means we have to extend our knowledge of the seismicity of an area as long into the past as possible," Grünthal said.

Maars are not your typical volcanoes.

These explosive geological oddities don't form neat, cone-shaped mountains. Rather, they can crop up just about anywhere within certain volcanically active areas.

Maars are created when a rising plume of magma interacts with underground water, creating a mixture that bursts out of the ground without much warning.

To get a better idea of where and when these eruptions might strike, Greg Valentine, a researcher at SUNY Buffalo, is trying to recreate his own miniature maars.

A better understanding of this phenomenon could lead to better warnings before explosions, and could also help geologists locate hidden sources of diamonds, which can form in maars, Valentine said.

The problem is, there are very little data on maar eruptions, which happen worldwide about once every 20 years, he said. They are also short-lived; after forming, they are active for a few weeks to a few years before disappearing.

Microsoft is suffering a slow death by committee as bureaucracy stifles the company's core creativity

Here's a question you don't often hear asked: whatever happened to Microsoft? To many people, it will seem a silly question. Microsoft, they point out, is still around - with a vengeance. It's a huge company worth $250bn (£160bn) that employs 94,000 people worldwide and earns vast profits. (OK, it made a loss last quarter for the first time in its history, but that's because it had to write off $6bn it blew in 2007 on a company called aQuantive which turned out to be a turkey.) Microsoft dominates the market for PC operating systems and Office software, products that are still licences to print money: its Xbox game console sweeps all before it; its server software is a big seller in the corporate world. In 2012, the company's net revenues totalled $74bn.

Sure, there are some flies in the ointment. Microsoft's search engine, Bing, has failed to break Google's stranglehold on search. The company's repeated attempts to break into the smartphone market have been failures, and its new partnership with Nokia hasn't changed that. Its effort to get into the music business with the Zune player (remember that?) turned out to be an embarrassing farce.

The great apes known as bonobos can make stone tools far more varied in purpose than previously known, reaching a level of technological competence formerly assigned only to the human lineage, according to researchers.

These findings may shed light on the mental capabilities of the last common ancestor of humans and these apes, scientists added.

Bonobos are, with chimpanzees, humanity's closest living relatives. Together bonobos and chimps are part of the group Pan, just as modern humans and extinct species of humans make up the group Homo.

Chimpanzees are well-known tool-users, capable of fashioning spear-like weapons from branches for hunting and using stones as hammers and anvils in the wild. Although bonobos in the wild are not known for tool use, in captivity they have shown remarkable capabilities with stone tools. For instance, in the 1990s, researchers taught the male bonobo Kanzi and the female Pan-Banisha how to knap flint -- that is, strike the rocks together to create tools -- and use the resulting stone flakes to cut rope to open a box and to cut leather to open a drum for food.

Now scientists reveal that in the intervening years, by practicing on their own, Kanzi and Pan-Banisha have developed a broader stone tool kit for more complex tasks, making them at least a match with chimpanzees in tool use.

The researchers challenged Kanzi and Pan-Banisha to break wooden logs and to dig underground, tests similar to tasks the apes might have to carry out to get food in the wild. To break the logs -- an act similar at cracking open bones to get at marrow -- the scientists not only saw these apes use rocks as hammers or projectiles to smash their targets, but also observed them either rotating stone flakes to serve as drills or use the flakes as scrapers, axes or wedges to attack slits, the weakest areas of the log. To root into hard soil, these bonobos used both unmodified rocks and a variety of handmade stone tools as shovels.

A resurrected hover vehicle won't fly through dense forests as effortlessly as the Star Wars speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi, but its intuitive controls could someday allow anyone to fly it without pilot training.

The aerial vehicle resembles a science fiction flying bike with two ducted rotors instead of wheels, but originates from a design abandoned in the 1960s because of stability and rollover problems. Aerofex, a California-based firm, fixed the stability issue by creating a mechanical system - controlled by two control bars at knee-level - that allows the vehicle to respond to a human pilot's leaning movements and natural sense of balance.

"Think of it as lowering the threshold of flight, down to the domain of ATV's (all-terrain vehicles)," said Mark De Roche, an aerospace engineer and founder of Aerofex.