A Russian Progress cargo spacecraft on a Soyuz booster carrying supplies for the International Space Station crew has successfully completed its record-breaking two-orbit trip in less than four hours.

The Progress MS-09 blasted off atop a Soyuz-2.1a rocket at 21:51 GMT Monday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Some 1.5 hours and several thruster firings after liftoff, the spacecraft's onboard computers initiated the automated rendezvous sequence. The craft completed its radar-guided docking with the station's Pirs module at 01:31 GMT Tuesday.

It was the third attempt to execute the short two-orbit flight scheme for the Progress MS freighter, which required a coordinated effort to realign the orbit of the ISS.Two previous attempts were hindered by delays in the final moments of the countdown that exceeded narrow launch opportunities for the fast-track flight.

Russian cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Sergey Prokopyev were on board the station and ready to take over manual control of the craft should any problems occur, but the docking proceeded in a fully automatic mode. The craft has brought over 2.5 tons of water, fuel, food and other supplies, extending the entire crucial provision supply to at least mid-January 2019.

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has issued a stark warning to humanity: advances in artificial intelligence could lead to a world which humans will no longer be able to understand - and we should start preparing now.

What if machines learn to communicate with each other? What if they begin to establish their own objectives? What if they become so intelligent that they are making decisions beyond the capacity of the human mind?

Those are some of the questions the 95-year-old Kissinger poses in a piece published by the Atlantic under the apocalyptic headline: 'How The Enlightenment Ends.'

Kissinger's interest in artificial intelligence began when he learned about a computer program that had become an expert at Go - a game more complicated than chess. The machine learned to master the game by training itself through practice; it learned from its mistakes, redefined its algorithms as it went along - and became the literal definition of 'practice makes perfect.'

Research into the remarkable regenerative powers of worms and the insights they can give into battling diseases could help humans live longer and healthier lives.

Humans have long dreamed of finding the secret to eternal youth, but despite the benefits of better living conditions and modern medicine, time still takes its unrelenting toll on our bodies.

While people today live longer than ever before, age-related diseases such as dementia and other neurodegenerative conditions rob people of the chance of living healthy lives into old age.

But researchers have a secret weapon in the battle with the ageing process - the humble worm. Flatworms have the ability to regrow large parts of their bodies after losing them. Roundworms, meanwhile, may hold the secret to counteracting neurodegenerative scourges like Alzheimer's disease and conditions such as muscular dystrophy.

Scientists see these creatures as a rich source of potential clues about the ageing process and how we too might regenerate tissues.

In a project called MacModel, researchers are using the flatworm Macrostomum lignano, which is normally found living in the tidal sands of the Adriatic Sea, to investigate ageing mechanisms. Previous research observed that the animals had a remarkable ability to regenerate, and that the worms tended to live for longer after repeated amputation, suggesting that something about the regeneration process also rejuvenated them.

Professor Eugene Berezikov, principal investigator for MacModel and a stem cell researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and his team, tried to investigate further by severing the worms' heads to induce regeneration.

Their findings, however, appeared to contradict the earlier research - after multiple amputations, flatworms had decreased survival compared to intact worms. But there was another major difference with the earlier findings - both worms that underwent amputations and those that did not tended to live longer than the median 200-day lifespan seen in the previous research.

Many of Prof. Berezikov's worms were still alive after a whopping 740 days, including about 70% of the intact worms. This defies the tendency for small organisms to be shorter-lived, explains Prof. Berezikov.

'Macrostomum is very small, about 1 millimetre, so for it to live for more than two years makes it a huge outlier,' he said. Often, a creature of this size would be expected to live just a few weeks.

Tucked away beneath the rest of the brain and only a tenth of its size, the cerebellum is typically seen as a trusty neural sidekick. Like Watson trailing behind Sherlock Holmes, it was useful enough, but not nearly as interesting. The cortex was where the good stuff happened, the stuff that makes us human.

Recently, though, it has become clear that the cerebellum is far from a bit player in the story of humankind. Neuroscientists are starting to suspect that this little cauliflower-shaped orb at the back of our head, which is packed with more neurons than all the other brain regions put together and home to a superfast wiring system, is doing the kinds of complex calculations that allow for our most Sherlock-worthy feats. In fact, it could be the crowning achievement of our brain's evolution.

This upgrade in status has been a long time coming. In the 19th century, phrenologists, who looked at the shape of the skull to determine a person's character, declared the cerebellum, with its wrinkly lobes that hang from the bottom of the brain, the root of sexual desire. The larger the cerebellum, the greater the likelihood of sexual deviance.

The evidence soon began to suggest otherwise, however. During the first world war, the British neurologist Gordon Holmes noticed that the main problems for men whose cerebellums had been damaged by gunshot wounds had nothing to do with their sex lives and everything to do with the fine control of their movements, ranging from a lack of balance to difficulties with walking, speech and eye movements. From then on, the cerebellum became known as the mastermind of our smooth and effortless motions, with no role in thinking.

Researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark have uncovered a new form of gene regulation that appears to be a form of encryption of genetic information. That idea was not lost on them as they pursued the analogy. From "Encrypted messages in biological processes":

RNA modifications can encrypt the RNA code and are responsible for a very sophisticated control of RNA function. A Danish-German research team has shown that modified RNA bases have a great impact on the dynamics of gene expression from DNA to functional RNA. The study yields important new insight into how the basis of RNA modifications can affect the function of mature RNA molecules. [Emphasis added.]

Programmers know all about cryptology, a form of intelligent design. Encryption is necessary when you want to conceal information from people who shouldn't have access to it.

A bizarre mummy from ancient Egypt combining the heads of a girl and a crocodile was photographed for the first time. Before its picture was published in the media, the mummy was hidden from the public eye for more than a century.

The first ever photo of the unusual mummy was unveiled by the Turkish daily Hurriyet. Experts told the paper that the mummy was composed of the head of an unidentified ancient Egyptian princess and the head and body of a Nile crocodile.

With those hot weather records in Los Angeles being set, it's important to remember where measurements are taken. I've done an investigation and found that every "all time high" reported by the LA Times is from a station compromised by heat sources and heat sinks. In my opinion, the data from these stations is worthless.

It's been going on for some time, for example, back in 2010, because there's been a questionable high reading reading at USC of 113°F. This 2010 LA Times article tells why:

L.A.'s hottest day ever

How hot was it? The National Weather Service's thermometer downtown reached 113 degrees for the first time since records began being kept in 1877 - and then stopped working. The record highs follow a summer of record lows.

September 27, 2010 | By Bob Pool and Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times

It was so hot Monday that it broke the all-time record - and the weatherman's thermometer.

The National Weather Service's thermometer for downtown Los Angeles headed into uncharted territory at 12:15 p.m. Monday, reaching 113 degrees for the first time since records began being kept in 1877.

Shortly after that banner moment, the temperature dipped back to 111, and then climbed back to 112. Then at 1 p.m., the thermometer stopped working.The weather service office in Oxnard rushed an electronics technician 60 miles southeast to the USC campus to repair the thermometer, which is actually a highly sensitive wire connected to electronic equipment. Because of the snafu, officials said it's possible Monday's temperature actually was hotter than 113 - but they might never know.

Far from just being the product of our parents, University of Adelaide scientists have shown that widespread transfer of genes between species has radically changed the genomes of today's mammals, and been an important driver of evolution.

In the world's largest study of so-called "jumping genes", the researchers have traced two particular jumping genes across 759 species of plants, animals and fungi. These jumping genes are actually small pieces of DNA that can copy themselves throughout a genome and are known as transposable elements.

They have found that cross-species transfers, even between plants and animals, have occurred frequently throughout evolution.

Both of the transposable elements they traced-L1 and BovB-entered mammals as foreign DNA. This is the first time anyone has shown that the L1 element, important in humans, has jumped between species.

For years, Earth has been bombarded by cosmic rays emanating from a mysterious source astronomers couldn't identify. Now, new research conducted with the help of NASA's NuSTAR space telescope has finally tracked down the source of these rays: Eta Carinae, a binary star system just 10,000 light-years away. In an event called the Great Eruption of 1838, the system created a stunning hourglass nebula in a tremendous burst of energy that temporarily made it the second-brightest object in the night sky.

According to Fiona Harrison, the principal investigator of NuSTAR: "We've known for some time that the region around Eta Carinae is the source of energetic emission in high-energy X-rays and gamma rays. But until NuSTAR was able to pinpoint the radiation, show it comes from the binary and study its properties in detail, the origin was mysterious."

The powerful cosmic radiation is caused, in part, by two currents of stellar wind colliding as they swirl around the twin stars. These winds then create shockwaves that boost the strength of the X-rays and gamma rays also being emitted. According to Kenji Hamaguchi, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center: "We know the blast waves of exploded stars can accelerate cosmic ray particles to speeds comparable to that of light, an incredible energy boost. Similar processes must occur in other extreme environments. Our analysis indicates Eta Carinae is one of them."

Around 13,000 years ago, Earth was emerging from its last great ice age. The vast frozen sheets that had covered much of North America, Europe and Asia for thousands of years were retreating. Giant mammals - steppe bison, woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats - grazed or hunted across tundra and grasslands. A Paleo-Indian group of hunter-gatherers who eventually gave rise to the Clovis people had crossed a land bridge from Asia hundreds of years earlier and were now spread across North America, hunting mammoth with distinctive spears.

Then, at about 12,800 years ago, something strange happened. Earth was abruptly plunged back into a deep chill. Temperatures in parts of the Northern Hemisphere plunged to as much as 8 degrees Celsius colder than today. The cold snap lasted only about 1,200 years - a mere blip, in geologic time. Then, just as abruptly, Earth began to warm again. But many of the giant mammals were dying out. And the Clovis people had apparently vanished.

Geologists call this blip of frigid conditions the Younger Dryas, and its cause is a mystery. Most researchers suspect that a large pulse of freshwater from a melting ice sheet and glacial lakes flooded into the ocean, briefly interfering with Earth's heat-transporting ocean currents. However, geologists have not yet found firm evidence of how and where this happened, such as traces of the path that this ancient flood traveled to reach the sea (SN: 12/29/12, p. 11).