Who says NASA has lost interest in the moon? Along with rumours of a hovering lunar base, there are reports that the agency is considering a proposal to capture an asteroid and drag it into the moon's orbit.

Researchers with the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California have confirmed that NASA is mulling over their plan to build a robotic spacecraft to grab a small asteroid and place it in high lunar orbit. The mission would cost about $2.6 billion - slightly more than NASA's Curiosity Mars rover - and could be completed by the 2020s.

For now, NASA's only official plans for human spaceflight involve sending a crewed capsule, called Orion, around the moon. The Obama administration has said it also wants to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid. One proposed target, chosen because of its scientific value and favourable launch windows for a rendezvous, is a space rock called 1999 AO10. The mission would take about half a year, exposing astronauts to long-term radiation beyond Earth's protective magnetic field and taking them beyond the reach of any possible rescue.

Robotically bringing an asteroid to the moon instead would be a more attractive first step, the Keck researchers conclude, because an object orbiting the moon would be in easier reach of robotic probes and maybe even humans.

Help is on the way for parents who lie awake in bed worrying about their newborn babies sleeping in the nursery. New "smart" baby clothing could automatically track infants' breathing and alert parents in case of trouble.

Parents won't have to directly attach sensors to their infants to achieve peace of mind. Researchers fitted a baby romper suit with a printed circuit board - made of stretchable polyurethane - and commercially available sensors to monitor the breathing in a baby's chest and stomach areas. Such work marks yet another step toward the future of "smart" or "intelligent" clothing that could monitor soldiers and babies alike.

"The circuit board we have developed can be manufactured using routine industrial processes, meaning a high throughput and, consequently, good cost-efficiency," said Manuel Seckel, a scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM in Berlin, Germany.

Baby suits with the added technological twist could possibly help unravel the mystery of the 4,500 infants in the United States who die suddenly from no obvious cause each year. Health researchers have already set up a database to track cases of sudden unexpected infant death (SUID) to better figure out how to prevent such tragedy. (SUID refers to sudden, unexpected deaths of an infant in which the manner and cause of death are not immediately obvious before an investigation.)

In a sun-scorched region of Western Australia known as Pilbara, a team of American and Australian paleobiologists believe they have located the oldest known evidence of life on Earth. The ancient bacterial fossils have been dated as 3.49 billion years old, only about a billion years after scientists estimate the Earth was formed.

"It's not just finding this stuff that's interesting," said Alan Decho, a geobiologist at the University of South Carolina. "It's showing that the life had some organization to it."

According to the findings presented by the joint team at the most recent meeting of the Geological Society of America, the tiny ridges that lattice the rocks like a fishing net seem to indicate that primitive bacteria integrated themselves into expansive networks. This collective behavior, which mirrors that of modern bacteria, involved thousands of different bacteria species, each performing a unique task that contributed to the larger community.

One of those communal functions was responsible for leaving behind traces of the bacteria for billions of years. Like some species of modern bacteria, thick mats of the microbes ensnare and fasten together sand particles. This adhesive layer of particles prevents erosion, resulting in rock fossils that outlast the living organisms that once lived there.

The team's excitement over finding record-breaking ancient fossils, however, is tempered by the fact that scientists have been fooled by similar rock formations in the past. In 1980, comparable rippling layers were found in Australia's Strelley Pool, over 180 miles to the north. However, Oxford University scientists later showed that water flowing along a seafloor can create similar structures under the right conditions.

Growing up in the 1960s, I collected monster cards: The 60-foot-man and the 50-foot woman, duplicate bodies gestating in giant seed pods, unseen Martians that sucked children into sand pits and returned them devoid of emotion, with telltale marks on the back of the neck. One card featured a very young Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf.

Forgive my lapse in political correctness, but I recalled those cards when I saw the word "hypertrichosis" in a recent paper in PLOS Genetics, because, unfortunately, the condition is also known historically as "werewolf syndrome."

In the paper, geneticist Angela Christiano, PhD, and colleagues at Columbia University analyzed the genomes of a father and son with Ambras syndrome, a form of hypertrichosis - and found something intriguing about the causative mutation that has repercussions for genetic testing in general.

A WEREWOLF PRIMER

Before a genetic explanation for overactive hair follicles existed, werewolfism, aka lycanthropy, was thought to arise in eclectic ways: rubbing a magic salve into the skin, sleeping outdoors under a summer full moon, drinking from the pawprint of a wolf, or a devil's curse. Werewolves were once considered to be giant extinct lemurs from Madagascar.

Armenian folklore describes a werewolf as a female criminal being punished by coming out at night and eating her children, and then her relatives' children, in order of relatedness.

In 1963 a physician in London, where Warren Zevon tells us werewolves are prevalent, ascribed lycanthropy to the very rare blood disease congenital erythropoietic porphyria. With its attendant hairiness, reddish teeth, pink urine, and aversion to bright light, porphyria would later explain vampires too, although that idea has been discredited.

Some physicians suggested that hypertrichosis causes lycanthropy, but others argued that the genetic condition was too rare to account for the many werewolves loose on the streets of Europe.

Astronomers using CSIRO's 210-feet Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia have found monstrous outflows of charged particles coming from the center of our galaxy.

The researchers said that the outflows contain an extraordinary amount of energy, reaching about a million times the energy of an exploding star.

Although the outflows are shooting out at over 600 miles per second, but they pose no danger to Earth or the solar system.

"They are not coming in our direction, but go up and down from the galactic plane," said CSIRO's Dr. Ettore Carretti. "We are 30,000 light-years away from the galactic center, in the plane. They are no danger to us."

The outflows extend 50,000 light-years from top to bottom out of the galactic plane, which equals half the diameter of the Milky Way.

Astronomers said the outflows stretch about two-thirds across the sky from horizon to horizon, and correspond to a "haze" of microwave emission previously spotted by the WMAP and Planck space telescopes.

Cbet nr. 3367, issued on 2013, January 01, announces the discovery of a new comet (discovery magnitude 15.2) by the E12 Siding Spring Survey on images obtained with the 0.5-m Uppsala Schmidt + CCD on December 30.6. The new comet has been designated C/2012 Y3 (MCNAUGHT).

We performed some follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 19 unfiltered exposures, 30-sec each,obtained remotely,from Q26 (iTelescope Observatory, Siding Spring) on 2013, Jan. 01.46, through a 0.32-m f/9.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD shows that this object is a comet: coma about 10" in diameter with a fan-shaped tail elongated in PA 85.

Our confirmation image:
M.P.E.C. 2013-A03 assigns the following preliminary parabolic orbital elements to cometC/2012 Y3: T 2012 Aug. 26.59; e= 1.0; Peri. = 236.15; q = 1.78 AU; Incl.= 73.90.

The morning skies are this week set to be filled with hundreds of shooting stars in the year's first meteor shower, the Quadrantids, according to Nasa scientists.

Amateur British stargazers will be able to view nature's own "beautiful" firework display from space throughout much of the country depending on clear weather conditions.

Astronomers said Quadrantids, a little-known, but spectacular meteor shower, is due to start in the early hours of the morning tomorrow before peaking just before dawn on Friday.

Scientists say that during the annual shower, named after an extinct constellation, up to 200 shooting stars could be visible to the eye every hour.

Like finding a silver needle in the haystack of space, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced a beautiful image of the spiral galaxy IC 2233, one of the flattest galaxies known.

Typical spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are usually made up of three principal visible components: the disk where the spiral arms and most of the gas and dust is concentrated; the halo, a rough and sparse sphere around the disk that contains little gas, dust or star formation; and the central bulge at the heart of the disk, which is formed by a large concentration of ancient stars surrounding the Galactic Center.

However, IC 2233 is far from being typical. This object is a prime example of a super-thin galaxy, where the galaxy's diameter is at least ten times larger than the thickness. These galaxies consist of a simple disk of stars when seen edge on. This orientation makes them fascinating to study, giving another perspective on spiral galaxies. An important characteristic of this type of objects is that they have a low brightness and almost all of them have no bulge at all.

Many researchers believe that one of the pivotal events in becoming human was the development of terrestrial bipedalism, or the ability to walk on two legs. Much has been made of our ancestors "coming down out of the trees." After all, the majority of our living primate relatives - for example, the great apes - still spend a great deal of their time in trees. In the primate family, humans are the only branch devoted to the ground, living terrestrial rather than arboreal lives. However, that wasn't always the case.

It is clear from the fossil records that our ancestors were tree dwellers until Lucy and her relatives arrived on the scene. Australopithecus afarensis appeared in Africa about 3.5 million years ago, and Lucy is the first specimen of this new species ever discovered. Anthropologists agree that A. afarensis was bipedal, but the question remains whether Lucy and her kin had totally forsaken the trees. Controversy over this question still rages today, prompting the new study by Dartmouth College. The findings of this study were recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"Australopithecus afarensis possessed a rigid ankle and an arched, nongrasping foot," writes Nathaniel Dominy, associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College, and his colleagues. "These traits are widely interpreted as being functionally incompatible with climbing and thus definitive markers of terrestriality,"

However, the new study indicates that this might not be the case after all. Based on data gathered during field studies in the Philippines and Africa, Dominy and his colleagues have brought new evidence to light by looking at modern humans who, like Lucy, have feet well adapted to terrestrial bipedalism. The results reveal that these people can still function as effective tree climbers.

On a sparkling New England afternoon, as hawks coasted overhead and yellow leaves drifted to the ground, Anne Pringle stood before a large granite obelisk that marked the graves of a family called French.

In this bucolic cemetery, steps from the headquarters of Harvard's research forest, she was pondering mortality. But she wasn't thinking about the Frenches. She was thinking about lichens.

Pale green and vaguely ruffled, like calcified doilies, lichens grow all over the tombstones and the old stone walls that fringe properties in this part of the world. Most people barely notice them. But Dr. Pringle, a mycologist at Harvard, believes they may help answer one of science's greatest questions: Is immortality biologically possible?

For eight years, Dr. Pringle, 42, has been returning to this cemetery each fall, to measure, sketch and scrutinize the lichens, which belong to the genus Xanthoparmelia. She wants to know whether they deteriorate with the passage of time, leaving them more susceptible to death.

Biologists call it senescence: the grim reality of decline with age. Are the lichens more likely to break apart as the years pass? Does their chemistry or bacterial composition change, leaving them more vulnerable to pathogens?