Among all the extraterrestrial species featured in the late Douglas Adams' excellent Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels there is one called a Hoovooloo, described as "a super intelligent shade of the colour blue".

Oddly enough, this utterly abstract sort of alien might yet turn out to be the author's most perspicacious invention.

A leading Australian physicist has co-authored a new paper proposing a radical new theory of life.If a new paper co-written by prominent Australian physicist Professor Paul Davies is on the money, every other fictitious ET, from Star Trek's Vulcans to Star Wars' Yoda, are the products of depressingly limited imaginations.

Pretty much all cinematic aliens - think Dr Who's Sontarans, the bubble-headed things from Mars Attacks!, the giant worms from Dune - have something recognisably "life-like" about them: they have a chemical structure broadly similar to those found in earth species, and (it is implied) some kind of DNA-ish apparatus that facilitates reproduction.

They are reasonable enough assumptions to make, but what if they are plain wrong?

Davies and co-author Dr Sara Imari Walker, both from the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at the Arizona State University, suggest that fleshiness and double-helixes might be things confined only to life on Earth. Life in the rest of the universe, they venture, could be based on something much more unlikely: information.

An FBI pilot program to record prisoners' eyes is under way in California, Texas and Missouri.

FBI officials have scanned the irises of nearly 460,000 people in a pilot program that may soon replace fingerprints. While iris-scanning technology has been around for more than 25 years, it's just now getting to where it's fast, easy and relatively bug-free.

"It's a powerful biometric," said Patrick Grother, a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., who has been developing algorithms and software for iris scanning. "It's fast to process, it has discriminative power -- my iris doesn't look like your iris, and it has reasonable permanence."

Iris scanning has replaced retinal scans, a method that has been pretty much abandoned since it turned out to be uncomfortable for people to endure, Grother explained. Iris scan technology was featured recently in the AMC mini-series The Night Manager, based on a John LeCarre spy novel. The lead character used an iris scan camera on his smartphone to access his Swiss bank account (just before a big truck blew up).

Grother says that kind of quick reading ability isn't far away, and several banks are looking at using it. Windows' Lumia Nokia and Fujitsu both have iris scanners to unlock their phones, (similar to the iPhone fingerprint pad) but it's not ready to authenticate other sorts of apps or accounts.

An international research team led by Mainz palaeogeneticists demonstrates that populations in the ancient Fertile Crescent are the ancestors of modern day South Asians but not of Europeans.

Sedentism, farming, and agriculture was invented some 10,000 years ago in a region between southeastern Anatolia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, an area traditionally labeled as the Fertile Crescent. Most of the technology and culture associated with farming including domestic sheep, goat, cattle, and pig originated here.

The transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture and sedentism was considered such a radical change in human ecology that the term Neolithic revolution was coined for it. Some 2,000 years later, the new Neolithic lifestyle appeared in southeastern Europe and shortly afterwards in Central and Mediterranean Europe.

This week, an international research team led by palaeogeneticists of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) published a study in the journal Science showing that the earliest farmers from the Zagros mountains in Iran, i.e., the eastern part of the Fertile Crescent, are neither the main ancestors of Europe's first farmers nor of modern-day Europeans.

"This came as a surprise," said Farnaz Broushaki, first author of the study and a member of the JGU Palaeogenetics Group. "Our team had only recently shown that early farmers from across Europe have an almost unbroken trail of ancestry leading back to northwest Anatolia. But now it seems that the chain of migration into Europe breaks somewhere in eastern Anatolia."

According to the team's previous study, Neolithic settlers from northern Greece and the Marmara Sea region of western Turkey reached central Europe via a Balkan route and the Iberian Peninsula via a Mediterranean route. These colonists brought sedentary life, agriculture, and domestic animals and plants to Europe. New research shows that some of the world's earliest farmers from Iran were a genetically distinct group and only very distantly related to the first farmers of western Anatolia and Europe.

Proponents of clean energy will soon have a new source to add to their existing array of solar, wind, and hydropower: osmotic power. Or more specifically, energy generated by a natural phenomenon occurring when fresh water comes into contact with seawater through a membrane.

Researchers at EPFL's Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology have developed an osmotic power generation system that delivers never-before-seen yields. Their innovation lies in a three atoms thick membrane used to separate the two fluids. The results of their research have been published in Nature.

The concept is fairly simple. A semipermeable membrane separates two fluids with different salt concentrations. Salt ions travel through the membrane until the salt concentrations in the two fluids reach equilibrium. That phenomenon is precisely osmosis.

If the system is used with seawater and fresh water, salt ions in the seawater pass through the membrane into the fresh water until both fluids have the same salt concentration. And since an ion is simply an atom with an electrical charge, the movement of the salt ions can be harnessed to generate electricity.

Known as a 'coronal hole', the black mass creeping across the sun's surface has the potential to cause chaos on Earth.

A coronal hole appears on the sun's corona, or atmosphere, when the sun's magnetic field opens and allows heat from the corona to be expelled.

The lower temperature of these areas causes them to appear darker than the rest of the sun's surface. They also have lower energy and gas levels, adding to its dark appearance.

While this sounds pretty terrifying, given the Earth's dependence on the sun to survive, scientists say this discovery is not a sign of impending doom for either our star or our planet.

Coronal holes appear regularly on the sun's surface, but this one is much larger than usual. The holes can last for months and can grow to cover up to a quarter of the sun's surface, according to NASA.

A recent report from the National Academy of Science of The United States, titled "Gene Drives on the Horizon: Advancing Science, Navigating Uncertainty, and Aligning Research with Public Values," warns:

"One possible goal of release of a gene-drive modified organism is to cause the extinction of the target species or a drastic reduction in its abundance."

Gene Drives have been called "mutagenic chain reactions," and are to the biological world what chain reactions are to the nuclear world. The Guardian describes Gene Drives as the "gene bomb."

Scientists have been taken by surprise to discover that a galaxy they thought was tiny and conventional is, in fact, enormous and bizarre - and quite unlike anything they have seen before.

At about 718,000 light-years across, UGC 1382 is more than seven times wider than the Milky Way - 10 times larger than was previously thought. But that isn't the strange part.

Whereas most galaxies have the oldest stars closer to the centre, this one is the reverse.

"The centre of UGC 1382 is actually younger than the spiral disc surrounding it," says Mark Seibert of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, in California.

"It's old on the outside and young on the inside. This is like finding a tree whose inner growth rings are younger than the outer rings."

Seibert and Lea Hagen of Pennsylvania State University found the galaxy by accident while they were looking for stars forming in run-of-the-mill elliptical galaxies - of which they thought UGC 1382 was one.

But when they started looking more closely at images in ultraviolet light through data from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), they were amazed to see a vast expanse of stars that shouldn't have been there.

A senior economic adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama has issued a warning to lower-wage earners: You risk losing your job to a machine.

"Technological advances in recent decades have brought tremendous benefits but have also contributed to increasing inequality and falling [workforce] participation," said Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, in a speech in New York last week.

A 2013 study from the University of Oxford found that 47 per cent of existing U.S. employment is at risk of automation. Furman's council took that data and analyzed it to see how it would impact people at different points on the income ladder.

A new age of warfare is near — and it's a situation of mind over matter.

Panagiotis Artemiadis, the director of the Human-Oriented Robotics and Control Lab at Arizona State University, is developing technology that allows a person to control multiple drones using wavelengths generated by his brain.

"I have been working on brain control interfaces and human robot interactions for many years now," Artemiadis, who's also an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, told The Post.

His previous research focused on the mind control of a single machine, such as a robotic prosthetic hand or arm.

"About two years ago I thought of doing the next step: many robots," he said.

A PhD student wearing a skin-tight cap hooked up to 128 electrodes demonstrated the technology in a video uploaded by ASU.

"We're using advanced algorithms to decipher what the person is thinking," the student says. Those signals are then communicated to the robots.

In 2014, the lab was awarded $860,000 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects and Agency and the US Air Force in order to build the mind-bending technology.

The furniture retailer is looking at using biodegradable mycelium "fungi packaging" as part of its efforts to reduce waste and increase recycling.

It's no secret polystyrene is devastating to the environment. But, do you know how exactly that is so? According to a fact-sheet provided by Harvard, polystyrene - which is made from petroleum, a non-sustainable, non-renewable, heavily polluting and fast-disappearing commodity - is not biodegradable, as it takes thousands of years to break down. In addition, it is detrimental to wildlife that ingests it.

Despite this well-known data, humans continue to toss more than 14 million tons of the stuff into landfills every year, according to the French ministry of ecology.

Sadly, until every individual decided to "be the change" and live consciously, styrofoam pollution will continue to be a problem.