Lab-grown meat would generate a tiny fraction of emissions associated with conventional livestock production

Meat grown artificially in labs could be a greener alternative for consumers who cannot bear to go vegetarian but want to cut the environmental impact of their food, according to new research.

The study found that growing meat in the lab rather than slaughtering animals would generate only a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with conventional livestock production.

The researchers believe their work suggests artificial meat could help feed the growing world population while reducing the impact on the environment.

According to the analysis by scientists from Oxford University and Amsterdam University, lab-grown tissue would reduce greenhouse gases by up to 96% in comparison to raising animals. The process would require between 7% and 45% less energy than the same volume of conventionally produced meat such as pork, beef, or lamb, and could be engineered to use only 1% of the land and 4% of the water associated with conventional meat.

Galaxies often exhibit alignment with one another across vast distances.

According to Electric Universe theory, galactic evolution occurs as large-scale plasma discharges form spinning wheels of coherent filaments that display electrodynamic behavior and not merely that which gravity alone can contribute. Stars in galaxies can also form long arcs that thread through them like silver beads on a string. No nebular contraction theory can adequately explain star formation. Beyond that, the great spirals that collect in clusters, that then also group themselves in superclusters, are beyond any conventional definition.

When plasma moves through a cloud of dust and gas, the cloud becomes ionized, initiating an electric field and the flow of electric current. Electricity moving through any substance forms magnetic fields that tend to align and constrict the current flow. Those fields create what are sometimes called "plasma ropes," otherwise known as Birkeland currents.

The coconut (the fruit of the palm Cocos nucifera) is the Swiss Army knife of the plant kingdom; in one neat package it provides a high-calorie food, potable water, fiber that can be spun into rope, and a hard shell that can be turned into charcoal. What's more, until it is needed for some other purpose it serves as a handy flotation device.

No wonder people from ancient Austronesians to Captain Bligh pitched a few coconuts aboard before setting sail. (The mutiny of the Bounty is supposed to have been triggered by Bligh's harsh punishment of the theft of coconuts from the ship's store.)

So extensively is the history of the coconut interwoven with the history of people traveling that Kenneth Olsen, a plant evolutionary biologist, didn't expect to find much geographical structure to coconut genetics when he and his colleagues set out to examine the DNA of more than 1300 coconuts from all over the world.

"I thought it would be mostly a mish-mash," he says, thoroughly homogenized by humans schlepping coconuts with them on their travels.

Israeli scholars say they have confirmed the authenticity of a 2,000-year-old burial box bearing the name of a relative of the high priest Caiaphas of the New Testament.

The ossuary bears an inscription with the name "Miriam daughter of Yeshua son of Caiaphas, priest of Maaziah from Beth Imri."

To confirm the authenticity of the ossuary, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), who discovered the ancient burial box turned to Dr. Boaz Zissu of the Department of the Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology of Bar Ilan University and Professor Yuval Goren of the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations of the Tel Aviv University.

"The prime importance of the inscription lies in the reference to the ancestry of the deceased - Miriam daughter of Yeshua - to the Caiaphas family, indicating the connection to the family of the Ma'aziahcourse of priests of Beth 'Imri," wrote Zissu and Goren in the conclusion of their study.

An ossuary is a stone chest used to store bones.

The moon will block part of the sun on Friday (July 1) in a partial solar eclipse, but everyone on the planet will likely miss the event unless you're a penguin, or possibly aboard an icebreaker sailing between Antarctica and Africa.

The partial solar eclipse will be relatively minor, as eclipses go, so it's no big deal for skywatchers to skip. However, this particular eclipse is noteworthy because it falls into two unusual categories.

First, it turns out that this event, puny as it is, will be the third eclipse to take place within a single month's time. It comes after a partial solar eclipse on June 1 over Earth's northern polar regions. That event was followed on June 15 by a stunning total lunar eclipse over Europe and Asia.

Now on Friday, there will be yet another partial eclipse of the sun.

The common crow knows when you're out to get him - and he's likely to teach his friends and family to watch out for you, a new study finds.

In results that can only be described as Hitchcockian, researchers in Seattle who trapped and banded crows for five years found that those birds don't forget a face. Even after going for a year without seeing the threatening human, the crows would scold the person on sight, cackling, swooping and dive-bombing in mobs of 30 or more.

"Most of the birds that are scolding us are not the ones we captured," said study researcher John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington and an occasional victim of crow attacks. "It's likely that they're learning from their parents and their peers that this dangerous person is still out there."

The hacktivist group Anonymous may be setting its sights on the city of Orlando, Florida next, if an anonymous press release which has landed in our inbox is to be believed (see below). The group is threatening to take down a different city-related website every day, starting with Orlando Florida Guide, which doesn't even appear to be owned by the city of Orlando (it is registered to an organization called Utopia, administered by a man named Steven Ridenour). So any random website extolling the virtues of Orlando could be targeted.

The DDOS attacks are justified in the press release as retaliation for the repeated arrests of members of a non-profit group called Food Not Bombs, which feeds homeless people in a park without a permit. The leader of the group, Keith McHenry, was also recently arrested.

Using a vast array of radio telescopes, astronomers in North America are the first to make a direct measurement of the distance to Cygnus X-1, allowing them to conclude that the mass of its dark star is so great it can only be a black hole. They have also discovered that the black hole spins faster than most of its peers.

"There's no doubt about its distance now, and there's not much uncertainty anymore about its mass," says Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It's definitely a black hole."

A black hole is a star that has run out of fuel and died, collapsing into a small body with such enormous gravity that nothing escapes its grip. First identified as harbouring a possible black hole in 1971, Cygnus X-1 was one of the first sources of X-rays discovered by astronomers. It is found in the constellation Cygnus the Swan, also known as the Northern Cross, and is one of the most studied objects in the sky. It even inspired a 10-minute song by the Canadian rock band Rush about how the stars of the Northern Cross were "in mourning for their sister's loss".

It may not be marked on your holiday calendar but today, June 28, is noted for being "Tau Day", at least among strident detractors of pi, the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference, BBC News is reporting.

Proponents of Tau Day suggest a constant called tau should replace pi, which comes close to twice the value of pi, or about 6.28 - hence the 28 June celebration. Fans say that for many problems in math, tau makes more sense and makes calculations easier.

Not all math geeks agree, however, and pi has a long, rich history which means it will be a difficult number to unseat. "I like to describe myself as the world's leading anti-pi propagandist," said Michael Hartl, an educator and former theoretical physicist, to BBC.

"When I say pi is wrong, it doesn't have any flaws in its definition - it is what you think it is, a ratio of circumference to diameter. But circles are not about diameters, they're about radii; circles are the set of all the points a given distance - a radius - from the center" Dr. Hartl explained.

Leeds University experts are backing the campaign for pi to be replaced by tau by making certain mathematical problems easier.

The circular patterns within the cosmic microwave background suggest that space and time did not come into being at the Big Bang, but that our universe in fact continually cycles through a series of "aeons," according to University of Oxford theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, who says that data collected by NASA's WMAP satellite supports his idea of "conformal cyclic cosmology".

Penrose's finding runs directly counter to the widely accepted inflationary model of cosmology which states that the universe started from a point of infinite density known as the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, expanded extremely rapidly for a fraction of a second and has continued to expand much more slowly ever since, during which time stars, planets and ultimately humans have emerged. That expansion is now believed to be accelerating due to a scientific X factor called dark energy and is expected to result in a cold, uniform, featureless universe.

Penrose, however, said Physics World, takes issue with the inflationary picture "and in particular believes it cannot account for the very low entropy state in which the universe was believed to have been born - an extremely high degree of order that made complex matter possible. He does not believe that space and time came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang but that the Big Bang was in fact just one in a series of many, with each big bang marking the start of a new "aeon" in the history of the universe."

The core concept in Penrose's theory is the idea that in the very distant future the universe will in one sense become very similar to how it was at the Big Bang. Penrose says that "at these points the shape, or geometry, of the universe was and will be very smooth, in contrast to its current very jagged form. This continuity of shape, he maintains, will allow a transition from the end of the current aeon, when the universe will have expanded to become infinitely large, to the start of the next, when it once again becomes infinitesimally small and explodes outwards from the next big bang. Crucially, he says, the entropy at this transition stage will be extremely low, because black holes, which destroy all information that they suck in, evaporate as the universe expands and in so doing remove entropy from the universe."