The U.S. Navy has used steam to launch aircraft from the deck of aircraft carriers for over 50 years and the technology behind the steam catapults is well proven and reliable. The problem with the current steam system is that the system is reaching the limits of its operational capability with how fast it can shoot aircraft off the deck of a carrier.

With new carrier-based aircraft on the horizon that are heavier and faster than current aircraft, the steam catapult system used today will not be able to launch all future aircraft. The U.S. Navy has announced that it has made history with the first aircraft launched using an electro-magnetic aircraft launch system or EMALS. The new EMALS launch system is planned to be installed into the new Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers as they launch.

"This is a tremendous achievement not just for the ALRE team, but for the entire Navy," said Capt. James Donnelly, ALRE program manager. "Saturday's EMALS launch demonstrates an evolution in carrier flight deck operations using advanced computer control, system monitoring and automation for tomorrow's carrier air wings."

Professor Chris Stringer: "It's nothing short of sensational - we didn't know how ancient people in China related to these other humans"

Scientists say an entirely separate type of human identified from bones in Siberia co-existed and interbred with our own species.

The ancient humans have been dubbed "Denisovans" after the caves in Siberia where their remains were found.

There is also evidence that this population was widespread in Eurasia.

A study in Nature journal shows that Denisovans co-existed with Neanderthals and interbred with our species - perhaps around 50,000 years ago.

An international group of researchers sequenced a complete genome from one of the ancient hominids (human-like creatures), based on nuclear DNA extracted from a finger bone.

Human rights groups and campaigners are being hit hard by huge web attacks launched by those opposed to their views, finds research.

Many web-based campaigning groups are being knocked offline for weeks by the attacks, it found.

The researchers expect the tempo of attacks to increase as the tools and techniques become more widespread.

It urged human rights groups and independent media groups to beef up their defences to avoid falling victim.

Flash flood

The research by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University tried to get a sense of how often human rights groups and independent media organisations are hit by what is known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

DDoS attacks try to knock a site offline by overwhelming it with data.

In the 12 months between August 2009 and September 2010 the research found evidence of 140 attacks against more than 280 different sites. The report acknowledged that these were likely to be the most high profile attacks and that many more had probably gone unreported.

It would be hard to confuse Africa's forest elephants and savanna elephants. Forest elephants, found in dense West African forests, have longer, straighter tusks and round, not pointed, ears. They're also 1 meter shorter and weigh half as much as the savanna elephants, which range from South to East Africa. Yet for years, scientists have classified the two as the same species, arguing that they were slightly different populations that mingled on the edges of the forest. A new genetic analysis, however, finds that forest and savanna elephants are as different from each other as modern Asian elephants are from ancient mammoths. The findings, which split the elephants into two species, could improve the conservation of African elephants overall, say researchers.

The study is not the first to analyze the elephants' DNA. In 2001, researchers compared the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of forest and savanna elephants and reached much the same conclusion. (mtDNA is inherited only from the mother and is found in mitochondria, the cell's energy factories.) And a subsequent study of the forest and savanna elephants' nuclear DNA showed that the two had diverged more than 3 million years ago. Both studies concluded that forest and savanna elephants are separate species, but they did not sway all taxonomists, who felt that certain data suggested that some forest and savanna elephants shared a recent maternal ancestor.

Many studies use mtDNA to determine whether a species designation is valid. But mtDNA has its limitations. It represents only a small fraction of an animal's genome (the rest is nuclear DNA), and because it is transmitted only from the mother, it reveals just the genetic history of females.

Under certain conditions, a population of reproducing cells can spontaneously divide into two groups with distinctly different functions. Researchers have long been looking for the reasons behind such a spectacular process but the mechanisms found so far were complicated and did not explain all observed cases. Theoretical calculations and computer simulations carried out by scientists from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IPC PAS) in Warsaw have provided the simplest explanation.

"We discovered a statistical law that is responsible for cell differentiation," says Dr. Anna Ochab-Marcinek from the IPC PAS. The new statistical mechanism will possibly allow [us] to rationalize one of the sources of bacteria's resistance to antibiotics and help understand why monozygotic twins and cloned organisms are not their identical copies. A paper describing the discovery appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a scientific journal published by the US National Academy of Sciences.

In the middle of the past century, it had been noticed in laboratory studies that an Escherichia coli population could divide into two groups, with one of them showing expression of a specific gene, e.g., the gene responsible for production of an enzyme to digest a specific type of sugar, whereas in the other group the same gene remained inactive. The effect is known in science as population bimodality. The observation was intriguing, as all the cells had the same DNA and were kept under the same conditions.

Moreover, despite the lack of changes in the gene set, subsequent cell generations were able to inherit new functions. The researchers from the IPC PAS set themselves the task of discovering the simplest possible mechanism that is responsible for such an unexpected behavior of cells. For that purpose, they carried out theoretical calculations followed by verification with a series of Monte Carlo simulations. The theoretical and computational work involved the most important chemical reactions that take place in a living cell.

Earthlings will surely thrill at finding their planetary double: our calculation suggests the discovery could happen next year

In 2010, one new exoplanet appeared every four days or so; by the end of the year, the total topped 500. But in September, a truly exceptional find punctuated this steady drumbeat of discovery: the first alien planet that could host life on its surface.

Gliese 581 g, spotted by a team led by Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, inhabits a "Goldilocks" zone around its host star, a band just warm enough to boast liquid water. At 3.1 to 4.3 times the mass of Earth, it is also small enough that it should be made mostly of rock. Although a second team of astronomers failed to find signs of Gliese 581 g in their data, if its existence is confirmed, it will be the most habitable exoplanet yet found.

Skywatchers around the world are gearing up to observe a rare total lunar eclipse.

The best viewing conditions for the eclipse are from North and Central America, parts of northern Europe and East Asia.

Astronomers say the Moon could turn a pink or blood red hue during the eclipse, which begins early on Tuesday morning GMT.

It will be the first total lunar eclipse in three years.

Giovanni Battista Riccioli is a name that perhaps still holds some resonance with astronomy history buffs. Otherwise, the 17th Century Jesuit priest is relatively unknown. Still, he should be the one getting credit for discovering the Coriolis effect.

The concept refers to the motion of objects in a rotating system, and is now taken into account by meteorologists when analyzing atmospheric front formation, and by artillery gunners when they plot new trajectories into their guns.

What the effect describes is the apparent deflection of moving objects when they are observed from a rotating reference frame. The Earth is the best and most widely used example of this.

Alongside the centripetal and centrifugal forces, the Coriolis effect is among the most important factors to consider when analyzing a rotating system.

Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis is the French mathematician credited with first proposing this phenomenon in a paper published in 1835. But Riccioli based theories on it back in 1651.

The Italian Jesuit priest/astronomer first made reference to what would later be named the Coriolis effect in an astronomy tome called Almagestum Novum, which listed 77 reason for why Copernicus' heliocentric model of the solar system was wrong.

One of the most important critics of the then-new idea was what Riccioli referred to as an impossibility - namely that the Earth spins around a central axis that drives through its pole.

By looking far out into space and observing what's going on there, scientists have been led to theorize that it all started with a Big Bang, immediately followed by a brief period of super-accelerated expansion called inflation. Perhaps this was the beginning of everything, but lately a few scientists have been wondering if something could have come before that, setting up the initial conditions for the birth of our universe.

In the most recent study on pre-Big Bang science posted at arXiv.org, a team of researchers from the UK, Canada, and the US, Stephen M. Feeney, et al, have revealed that they have discovered four statistically unlikely circular patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The researchers think that these marks could be "bruises" that our universe has incurred from being bumped four times by other universes. If they turn out to be correct, it would be the first evidence that universes other than ours do exist.

A 44-year-old woman who doesn't experience fear has led to the discovery of where that fright factor lives in the human brain.

Researchers put out their best foot to try to scare the patient, who they refer to as "SM" in their write-up in the most recent issue of the journal Current Biology. Haunted houses, where monsters tried to evoke an avoidance reaction, instead evoked curiosity; spiders and snakes didn't do the trick; and a battery of scary film clips entertained SM.

The patient has a rare condition called Urbach - Wiethe disease that has destroyed her amygdala, the almond-shaped structure located deep in the brain. Over the past 50 years studies have shown the amygdala plays a central role in generating fear responses in various animals from rats to monkeys.