New research suggests we may be able to sniff out psychopaths by their poor scores on a smell test.

In the study, psychologists at Macquarie University in Australia tested the noses of more than 70 college-age participants, all without criminal records. The researchers had the subjects try to identify common odors (like orange, coffee and leather) and distinguish between different scents.

The participants then were given personality tests to check for their level of empathy and psychopathic tendencies. For example, the subjects were asked to rate on a 5-point scale how much they agreed with statements such as: "I purposely flatter people to get them on my side;" "People sometimes say that I'm cold-hearted;" and "I have broken into a building or vehicle in order to steal something or vandalize."

Psycopathy is a personality disorder marked by superficial charm, a lack of empathy and impulsive tendencies.

Humans may be very close to extracting all of the Earth's available plant resources, says a University of Montana researcher.

In fact, said Steven Running, a professor in the university's College of Forestry and Conservation, humanity may realistically have only 10 percent or so of our planet's annual plant resources in reserve, with little ability to boost yearly growth. The calculations don't suggest that humanity is on the verge of starvation, Running said, but they do indicate there are limits to our species' growth.

"Economic logic just seems to be about endless growth with no limits," Running told LiveScience. "And this is my attempt to say that on the planet we at least have some biophysical limits, and here's one."

Boundaries to growth

The concept of resource-imposed limits to growth, or "planetary boundaries" first came up in the 1970s with the book Limits to Growth (Club of Rome, 1972). The authors of that book modeled the planet's productivity and predicted that population and economic growth would run up against basic resource scarcity sometime around 2030. The calculations were somewhat primitive, Running said. The methodology and findings of the modeling were criticized, though researchers have recently revisited the predictions and found them to be relatively accurate. One 2011 analysis, published in book form by SpringerBriefs in Energy found that "reality seems to be closely following the curves that the [Limits to Growth] scenarios had generated."

Climate change and other environmental concerns have prompted scientists to revisit the idea of planetary boundaries, Running said. Likewise, he said, environmental policy-makers have become more interested in whether those boundaries can be defined. Researchers have suggested that important boundaries might include climate change, ocean acidification, land-use change and loss of species.

No question about it... they're very good at what they do. But they don't take well to orders, especially those to carry out inspection work in oily or dangerous environments, or in any kind of harsh environment, for that matter. Still, they're one of the fastest and most maneuverable creatures on the planet, having extraordinary abilities at both high and low speeds due to their streamlined bodies and a finely tuned muscular/sensory/control system. This impressive creature is the humble tuna fish.

The Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is funding the development of an unmanned underwater vehicle designed to resemble a tuna, called the BIOSwimmer™. Why the tuna? Because the tuna has a natural body framework ideal for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), solving some of the propulsion and maneuverability problems that plague conventional UUVs.

On 15 to 16 September, a team of researchers, doctors and specialists at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, carried out the world's first mother-to-daughter womb transplant, where two Swedish women received new wombs donated by their mothers.

One of the women to receive a new womb in the pioneering procedure had to have her uterus removed many years ago because of cervical cancer. The other woman was born without a womb.

Over the past few centuries, science can be said to have gradually chipped away at the traditional grounds for believing in God. Much of what once seemed mysterious - the existence of humanity, the life-bearing perfection of Earth, the workings of the universe - can now be explained by biology, astronomy, physics and other domains of science.

Although cosmic mysteries remain, Sean Carroll, a theoretical cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, says there's good reason to think science will ultimately arrive at a complete understanding of the universe that leaves no grounds for God whatsoever.

Carroll argues that God's sphere of influence has shrunk drastically in modern times, as physics and cosmology have expanded in their ability to explain the origin and evolution of the universe. "As we learn more about the universe, there's less and less need to look outside it for help," he told Life's Little Mysteries.

He thinks the sphere of supernatural influence will eventually shrink to nil. But could science really eventually explain everything?

Either as a culprit or a witness, we've all been there. Your niece's piano recital, your sister's wedding, your best friend's funeral. Wherever it's been, it never fails to happen: someone forgets to turn off their phone and, at the most inopportune time, a ringer detonates with as much tact as an air horn in a cathedral.

Thankfully, Victor Johansson has come up with a solution that could put an end to all that red-faced scrambling in pockets and purses. The UK-based designer has designed what he calls the Escape Jacket, a jacket that features a Faraday cage in its inside pocket. Simply slip your phone inside the pocket and all radio waves are blocked.

With the combined power of NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes as well as a cosmic magnification effect, a team of astronomers led by Wei Zheng of The Johns Hopkins University has spotted what could be the most distant galaxy ever detected.

Light from the young galaxy captured by the orbiting observatories shone forth when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was just 500 million years old.

The far-off galaxy existed within an important era when the universe began to transit from the so-called "Dark Ages." During this period, the universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. The discovery of the faint, small galaxy accordingly opens up a window into the deepest, remotest epochs of cosmic history.

"This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence," said Zheng, a principal research scientist in The Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins' Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and lead author of a paper appearing in Nature on Sept. 20. "Future work involving this galaxy -- as well as others like it that we hope to find -- will allow us to study the universe's earliest objects and how the Dark Ages ended."

Sydney -- A huge meteor striking Earth 2.5 million years could have generated a massive tsunami and plunged the world into the Ice Ages, Australian researchers suggest.

Scientists at the University of New South Wales say that because the meteor -- more than a mile across - crashed into deep water in the southern Pacific Ocean, most researchers have discounted its potential for catastrophic impacts on coastlines around the Pacific rim or its capacity to destabilize the entire planet's climate system.

"This is the only known deep-ocean impact event on the planet and it's largely been forgotten because there's no obvious giant crater to investigate, as there would have been if it had hit a land mass," lead study author James Goff said in a university release Wednesday.

Goff is co-director of UNSW's Australia-Pacific Tsunami Research Centre and Natural Hazards Research Laboratory.

A 37-year project to compile a dictionary of an ancient Egyptian script used for daily communication has been completed, offering an unprecedented look at the words of ordinary ancient Egyptians.

The Chicago Demotic Dictionary, so named because it was created by University of Chicago researchers, translates Demotic Egyptian, the tongue of common Egyptians from about 500 B.C. to A.D. 500.

Demotic was used in everyday Egyptian documents and letters, said Janet Johnson, a University of Chicago Egyptologist. The researchers compiled the words in the dictionary from Demotic on stone carvings, papyrus and broken fragments of pottery.

"Personal documents (letters, tax receipts, accounts, legal texts, etc.), administrative documents, and literary, scientific and religious texts were all written in Demotic and provide a wealth of information about the Egyptian-speaking population in Egypt," Johnson told LiveScience in an email.

The language was a prominent one during Greek and Roman occupation of Egypt in this period. Along with hieroglyphs and Greek, Demotic is one of the three languages on the famous Rosetta Stone, which helped early Egyptologists first decipher the formal hieroglyphic script.

Call it the Soviet Union's most valuable cold war secret. This past weekend, Russia declassified the existence of what could very well be the richest diamond field in existence, located in the depths of a 62-mile diameter asteroid crater known as Popigai Astroblem in Siberia.

The diamonds found in the Popigai Astroblem are known as "impact diamonds." They're created when a meteor strikes a graphite deposit, as happened there an estimated 35 million years ago. Impact diamonds are significantly harder than normal diamonds, and are best suited for industrial or scientific use.

Given that diamonds can sell for $2,000 per karat with unusually large diamonds going for as much as $20 million, a discovery of "trillions of karats" could value this hole in the quadrillions of dollars. Of course, a diamond discovery of this magnitude is almost sure to have a serious downward impact in the per-karat price should full-scale mining operations ever begin.