It may snow on Venus - although it will be snow composed of carbon dioxide, or 'dry ice'. The European Space Agency's Venus Express satellite has spied a surprisingly cold region high in the planet's atmosphere that may be frigid enough for carbon dioxide to freeze out as ice or snow. The planet Venus is well known for its thick, carbon dioxide atmosphere and oven-hot surface, and as a result is often portrayed as Earth's inhospitable evil twin.

But in a new analysis based on five years of observations using ESA's Venus Express, scientists have uncovered a very chilly layer at temperatures of around -175C in the atmosphere 125 km above the planet's surface. The curious cold layer is far frostier than any part of Earth's atmosphere, for example, despite Venus being much closer to the sun.

Washington (AP) - Fraud in scientific research, while still rare, is growing at a troubling pace, a new study finds.

A review of retractions in medical and biological peer-reviewed journals finds the percentage of studies withdrawn because of fraud or suspected fraud has jumped substantially since the mid-1970s. In 1976, there were fewer than 10 fraud retractions for every 1 million studies published, compared with 96 retractions per million in 2007.

The study authors aren't quite sure why this is happening. But they and outside experts point to pressure to hit it big in science, both for funding and attention, and to what seems to be a subtle increase in deception in overall society that science may simply be mirroring.

Fraud in life sciences research is still minuscule and committed by only a few dozen scientific scofflaws.


However, it causes big problems, said Arturo Casadevall, a professor of microbiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Casadevall is the lead author of the study which looked at the reasons for 2,047 retractions among many millions of studies published in journals and kept in a government database for medically focused research.

Fraud was the No. 1 cause of retractions, accounting for 43 percent of them. When fraud was combined with other areas of misconduct, such as plagiarism, it explained about 2 out of 3 retractions, the study found.

Neanderthals apparently last interbred with the ancestors of today's Europeans after modern humans with advanced stone tools expanded out of Africa, researchers say.

The last sex between Neanderthals and modern humans likely occurred as recently as 47,000 years ago, the researchers added.

Modern humans once shared the globe with now-departed human lineages, including the Neanderthals, our closest known extinct relatives. Neanderthals had been around for about 30,000 years when modern humans appeared in the fossil record about 200,000 years ago. Neanderthals disappeared about 30,000 year ago.

In 2010, scientists completed the first sequence of the Neanderthal genome using DNA extracted from fossils, and an examination of the genetic material suggested that modern humans' ancestors occasionally successfully interbred with Neanderthals. Recent estimates reveal that Neanderthal DNA makes up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes, perhaps endowing some people with the robust immune systems they enjoy today.

The Neanderthal genome revealed that people outside Africa share more genetic variants with Neanderthals than Africans do. One possible explanation is that modern humans mixed with Neanderthals after the modern lineage began appearing outside Africa at least 100,000 years ago. Another, more complex scenario is that an African group ancestral to both Neanderthals and certain modern human populations genetically diverged from other Africans beginning about 230,000 years ago. This group then stayed genetically distinct until it eventually left Africa.

According to reports issued by a number of observers to several astro-forums, comet 168P/Hergenrother is currently experiencing a bright phase: over the course of several nights, it increased in brightness by several magnitudes, reaching a total visual magnitude of approximately 8. We performed some follow-up on it remotely, on 2012 Sept. 26 and Oct. 3, through the 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD + Bessel R filter of the Faulkes Telescope South, at Siding Spring.
Inspecting our stacked images obtained on Sept. 26, the comet shows an obvious central condensation, measuring nearly 3" across; the total coma was traced to a diameter of about 1.7'. On Oct. 3, the central condensation grew to 8" and the total coma diameter was nearly 3'. It's interesting to notice how, apart the growing of the central condensation size, also its appearance changed, appearing pretty sharp on Sept. 26, and a bit "fluffy" on Oct. 3.

Montana State University ecologists who are about to return to Antarctica for another season had to adapt to dramatic changes in the sea ice last year.

Now they have published a paper that says the Weddell seals they monitor had to deal with some dramatic changes in ice in recent years, too. In fact, the seals handled the adverse conditions well and suffered less than the Emperor penguins in that region.

The paper was published Sept. 26 in the international journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Lead author was Thierry Chambert, a doctoral student supervised by co-authors Bob Garrott and Jay Rotella in the MSU ecology department. Rotella and Garrott have just received a National Science Foundation grant for $867,272 that will extend their long-term study by five more years.

Last year, the researchers encountered unusually thin ice that was three feet thick instead of the usual 12 to 16 feet, Garrott said. Large cracks and active breaks threatened snowmobile travel. As a result, the faculty members and students moved their base camp to a safer spot and set up emergency camps around their study area. When they couldn't cross the ice on snowmobiles, they flew by helicopter.

The discovery by NASA rover Curiosity of evidence that water once flowed on Mars - the most Earth-like planet in the solar system - should intensify interest in what the future could hold for mankind.

The only thing stopping Earth having a lifeless environment like Mars is the magnetic field that shields us from deadly solar radiation and helps some animals migrate, and it may be a lot more fragile and febrile than one might think.

Scientists say earth's magnetic field is weakening and could all but disappear in as little as 500 years as a precursor to flipping upside down.

It has happened before - the geological record suggests the magnetic field has reversed every 250,000 years, meaning that, with the last event 800,000 years ago, another would seem to be overdue.

"Magnetic north has migrated more than 1,500 kilometres over the past century," said Conall Mac Niocaill, an earth scientist at Oxford University. "In the past 150 years, the strength of the magnetic field has lessened by 10 percent, which could indicate a reversal is on the cards."

While the effects are hard to predict, the consequences may be enormous. The loss of the magnetic field on Mars billions of years ago put paid to life on the planet if there ever was any, scientists say.

Mac Niocaill said Mars probably lost its magnetic field 3.5-4.0 billion years ago, based on observations that rocks in the planet's southern hemisphere have magnetisation.

The northern half of Mars looks younger because it has fewer impact craters, and has no magnetic structure to speak of, so the field must have shut down before the rocks there were formed, which would have been about 3.8 billion years ago.

"With the field dying away, the solar wind was then able to strip the atmosphere away, and you would also have an increase in the cosmic radiation making it to the surface," he said.

"Both of these things would be bad news for any life that might have formed on the surface - either wiping it out, or forcing it to migrate into the interior of the planet."

A 37-year-old man from Czech Republic recently became the first man to live without a heart for six months.

Jakub Halik, a former firefighter lived without a pulse for six months after undergoing pioneering surgery in April when doctors removed his heart and replaced it with mechanical pumps, according to The Sun.

On April 3^rd, Halik became the second man to undergo the revolutionary procedure after the first patient, Craig Lewis, died a few weeks after surgery in Texas in 2011. The father-of-one had been in peak physical condition until he collapsed and doctors found an aggressive tumor growing inside his heart.

Doctors had told Halik that he wouldn't survive a heart transplant because he wouldn't be able to take the necessary drugs prescribed afterwards because of his cancer.

Halik, who is from Neratovice in the Czech Republic, was left with no other choice but to undergo a risky operation to remove his heart completely and replaced with a fake one until he could recover from the cancer.

"It was hard for me but I didn't have any other chance at all. It was acknowledged that with the tumor I can survive for about one year and I decided to fight and do it this way," Halik told reporters at a press conference 148 days after his operation, according to Reuters.

Fragments of a 1.5-million-year-old skull from a child recently found in Tanzania suggest early hominids weren't just occasional carnivores but regular meat eaters, researchers say.

The finding helps build the case that meat-eating helped the human lineage evolve large brains, scientists added.

"I know this will sound awful to vegetarians, but meat made us human," said researcher Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, an archaeologist at Complutense University in Madrid.

Past research suggested prehuman hominids such as australopithecines may have eaten some meat. However, it is the regular consumption of meat that often is thought to have triggered major changes in the human lineage, the genus Homo, with this high-energy food supporting large human brains.

Given its importance to human evolution, scientists want to learn when eating flesh became a regular activity. Stone tools dating back about 2.6 million years to Gona in Ethiopia are often considered the earliest signs of the human lineage butchering meat, and contentious evidence suggests butchery may have existed at least 3.4 million years ago. "Despite this ample evidence, some archaeologists still argue that meat was eaten sporadically and played a minor role in the diet of those hominins," Domínguez-Rodrigo said. (Hominins include humans and their relatives after they split from the chimpanzee lineage.)

Humans have reached the moon and are planning to return samples from Mars, but when it comes to exploring the land deep beneath our feet, we have only scratched the surface of our planet. This may be about to change with a $1 billion mission to drill 6 km (3.7 miles) beneath the seafloor to reach the Earth's mantle -- a 3000 km-thick layer of slowly deforming rock between the crust and the core which makes up the majority of our planet -- and bring back the first ever fresh samples.

It could help answer some of our biggest questions about the origins and evolution of Earth itself, with almost all of the sea floor and continents that make up the Earth´s surface originating from the mantle. Geologists involved in the project are already comparing it to the Apollo Moon missions in terms of the value of the samples it could yield.

However, in order to reach those samples, the team of international scientists must first find a way to grind their way through ultra-hard rocks with 10 km-long (6.2 miles) drill pipes -- a technical challenge that one of the project co-leaders Damon Teagle, from the UK's University of Southampton calls, "the most challenging endeavor in the history of Earth science."

In the wilds of Africa, when it's time for a family of elephants gathered at a watering hole to leave, the matriarch of the group gives the "let's-go rumble" - as it's referred to in scientific literature - kicking off a coordinated and well-timed conversation, of sorts, between the leaders of the clan.

First, the head honcho moves away from the group, turns her back and gives a long, slightly modulated and - to human ears - soft rumble while steadily flapping her ears. This spurs a series of back and forth vocalizations, or rumbles, within the group before the entire family finally departs.

This curious behavior, measured and documented in a study published in the October issue of Bioacoustics, shows how this cognitively advanced species uses well-coordinated "conversations" to initiate cooperation within the group, said lead author Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, PhD, a field biologist and instructor in otolaryngology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The use of "rumbles" to initiate departure helps explain the group's ability to work together to achieve more complicated tasks, such as rescue operations to save a calf from drowning.

"These vocalizations facilitate the bonds between the elephants to be able to work together," said O'Connell-Rodwell, who has been studying African elephants in the wilds for 20 years. "It's the measure of an organized society. It demonstrates how another social animal grouping organizes itself through vocalizations."