A new airship that is part flying saucer and part blimp could soon carry entire buildings and offer airgoers a fresh way to travel and explore.

Called the SkyLifter and currently in development by an Australian company of the same name, the concept airship relies on a lighter-than-air chamber for its buoyancy, just like a blimp or a balloon. But rather than a standard spherical, cigar, or "bomb" profile for its air-filled envelope, or aerostat, the SkyLifter has a flat, disk shape.

This innovative, flying saucer-esque configuration does not catch the wind like a sail as much as some other airship designs, and in effect gives the craft greater directional control even in gusty conditions, its designers said.

Evidence of the oldest dinosaurs yet discovered suggests the reptiles may have been walking the earth far earlier than was previously thought.

A study of footprints found in Poland from the early Triassic age found they dated from just a few million years after what scientists describe as the greatest mass extinction of all time, the ''Permo-Triassic mass extinction''.

The footprints, thought to be about 250 million years old, are ''the indisputably oldest fossils of the dinosaur lineage'', according to the researchers who carried out the study.

The scientists, from Poland, Germany and the US, said the prints, along with those from two other slightly younger sites, provided important insight into the origin and early evolutionary history of dinosaurs.

As well as suggesting that the origin of the animals occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Permo-Triassic event, they indicate that the earliest dinosaur relatives were very small animals.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. I crack open an eye. Everyone else has theirs closed. I shut it again. Breathe in, breathe out. Around me people are sitting crossed-legged, meditating. For some it's spiritual, for others an oasis of calm. Me? I'm building a better brain.

A few months ago I would probably have bought a brain-training game, but alas, it turns out they are probably useless. Although your performance on the games improves, that effect doesn't seem to translate into the real world (see "The rise and fall of brain training" at end of article). With that in mind, I wondered if there was anything else I could do to give my grey matter a boost.

Our brains are constantly adapting to information from the world around us. However, some activities make a bigger impression than others. In recent years, researchers have been probing how outside influences, from music to meditation, might change and enhance our brains.

One of the most promising is music - and not via the famous but controversial "Mozart effect", whereby merely listening to classical music is supposed to improve brain performance. Learning to play an instrument brings about dramatic brain changes that not only improve musical skills but can also spill over into other cognitive abilities, including speech, language, memory, attention, IQ and even empathy. Should I dust off my trumpet and get practising?

This image of the moon's surface was snapped by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's Wide Angle Camera with the sun directly overhead. Under these conditions, surface features show no shadows, causing an increase in brightness in the image called an "opposition surge".

The camera uses different filters to observe different pieces of the ground at different times. Here, the 689, 643, and 604 nanometre filters are displayed in red, green, and blue, respectively.

Because the opposition surge is seen by different filters at different times, when the observations from separate filters are combined to a single colour image, the shifting bright spot is seen as a rainbow, inadvertently recreating Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon".

You can check a person's vital signs - pulse, respiration and blood pressure - manually or by attaching sensors to the body. But a student in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program is working on a system that could measure these health indicators just by putting a person in front of a low-cost camera such as a laptop's built-in webcam.

So far, graduate student Ming-Zher Poh has demonstrated that the system can indeed extract accurate pulse measurements from ordinary low-resolution webcam imagery. Now he's working on extending the capabilities so it can measure respiration and blood-oxygen levels. He hopes eventually to be able to monitor blood pressure as well. Initial results of his work, carried out with the help of Media Lab student Daniel McDuff and Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Rosalind Picard, were published earlier this year in the journal Optics Express.

Poh suggests that such noninvasive monitoring could prove useful for situations where attaching sensors to the body would be difficult or uncomfortable, such as for monitoring burn victims or newborns. It could also be used for initial telemedicine screening tests over the Internet using a patient's own webcam or even cell-phone camera.

Such a system could also be built into a bathroom mirror so that patients who need ongoing monitoring, or just people who want to keep track of their own health, could get pulse, respiration, oxygen saturation and blood-pressure readings routinely while they brush their teeth or wash up, displayed in a corner of the mirror.

In the foothills of the Himalayas, two field linguists have discovered an oddity as rare as any endangered species - a language completely new to science.

The researchers, who announced their find Tuesday in Washington, D.C., encountered it for the first time along the western ridges of Arunachal Pradesh, India's northeastern-most state, where more than 120 languages are spoken. There, isolated by craggy slopes and rushing rivers, the hunters and subsistence farmers who speak this rare tongue live in a dozen or so villages of bamboo houses built on stilts.

The researchers identified the language - called Koro - during a 2008 expedition conducted as part of National Geographic's Enduring Voices project.

"Their language is quite distinct on every level - the sound, the words, the sentence structure," said Gregory Anderson, director of the nonprofit Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, who directs the project's research. Details of the language will be documented in an upcoming issue of the journal Indian Linguistics.

Neanderthals have been unjustly maligned as heartless brutes, according to researchers who claim the primitive humans possessed a deep-seated sense of compassion.

Researchers found that groups living in Europe between 500,000 and 40,000 years ago took care of sick or wounded individuals over a period of many years.

The interdependence of early communities, who would hunt and eat together, let to an emerging commitment to the welfare of others.

The University of York study, published in the journal Time and Mind, examined archaeological remains to see how emotions emerged from our ancestors.

The researchers' evidence showed how a child with a congenital brain abnormality was not abandoned but lived until five or six years old.

Scientists are broadly rethinking the nature, skills and demise of the Neanderthals of Europe and Asia, steadily finding more ways that they were substantially like us and quite different from the limited, unchanging and ultimately doomed inferiors most commonly described in the past.

The latest revision involves Neanderthals who lived in southern Italy from about 42,000 to 35,000 years ago, a group that had to face fast-changing climate conditions that required them to adapt.

And that, says anthropologist Julien Riel-Salvatore, is precisely what they did: fashioning new hunting tools, targeting more-elusive prey and even wearing identifying ornaments and body painting.

Traditional Neanderthal theory has it that they changed their survival strategies only when they came into contact with more-modern early humans. But Riel-Salvatore, a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver writing in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, says that was not the case in southern Italy.

"What we know is that the more-modern humans lived in northern Italy, more-traditional Neanderthals lived in middle Italy, and this group that adapted to a changing world was in the south - out of touch with the northern group," he said.

"Because of this Neanderthal buffer, it seems very unlikely that the southern Italy Neanderthals learned from the more-modern humans," he said. "They needed to change, and did, apparently by themselves."

He says this finding - along with recent investigations that have determined that between 1 and 4 percent of the human genome in Europe and Asia has Neanderthal genes - means that these often disparaged humans are actually "more like our brothers and sisters than even our cousins."

It will either revolutionise your presentations or make "death by PowerPoint" worse. One thing is certain: by allowing you to touch and play with light, Microsoft's LightSpace technology will make presenting more fun.

The LightSpace prototype projects slides, documents, photographs or video onto any surface, from a table to a door. Presenters can then touch and literally pick up a virtual item from a display and carry it across the room as a spot of light in the palm of their hand.

To perform commands - "play video", for example - you move your hand along a projected light beam that acts as the central control. Holding your hand in the right position on the menu for a few seconds activates the function.

"The aim is to bring the kind of multi-touch interaction you get with LCD surface displays to every surface in a room," says Andrew Wilson of the Microsoft Research lab in Redmond, Washington.

Russian archaeologists have unearthed some ancient and virtually unknown settlements which they believe were built by the original Aryan race about 4000 years ago.

According to the team which has discovered 20 of the spiral-shaped settlements in remote part of Russia steppe in southern Siberia bordering Kazakhstan, the buildings date back to the beginning of Western civilisation in Europe.

The Bronze-age settlements, the experts said, could have been built shortly after the Great Pyramid some 4000 years ago by the original Aryan race whose swastika symbol was later adopted by the Nazis in the 1930s.

TV historian Bettany Hughes, who explored the desolate part of the Russian steppe for BBC programme 'Tracking The Aryans', said: "Potentially, this could rival ancient Greece in the age of the heroes."