Tardigrades, already made of indestructible win, have shown up again in the scientific weirdness Hall of Fame this week, thanks to a new study that sequenced the first tardigrade genome and found that 17.5% of it came from other species. Otherwise known as water bears, tardigrades are actually a large group of related species which have a key trait in common: They're impossible to kill. Tardigrades are the only species ever observed to survive outside Earth's sheltering atmosphere. Now scientists are speculating that horizontal gene transfer, the phenomenon identified by a team of researchers at UNC as the reason for the unprecedented proportion of foreign DNA discovered in the tardigrade genome, may also be responsible for some of the tardigrade's famous durability.

ANTARCTIC temperatures have cooled over the past six years, according to US space agency NASA

An intensive scientific study of both Earth's poles has found that from 2009 to 2016 overall temperature has dropped in the southern polar region.

NASA's Operation IceBridge is an airborne survey of polar ice and has finalised two overlapping research campaigns at both the poles. In the last few weeks NASA has revealed the overall amount of ice has increased at the Antarctic and the amount of sea ice has also extended. Coupled with the latest announcement of slight cooling in the area, it has fuelled claims from climate change deniers that human industrialisation is not having the huge impact on global tenperature as often is claimed.

Christopher Shuman, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County glaciologist working at Goddard, said: "Field data suggests that there's been a modest cooling in the area over the 2009 - 2015 time period, and images collected during that time by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on the Terra and Aqua satellites show more persistent fast ice (sea ice that is attached to the shore) in the Larsen A and Larsen B embayments"

However, Mr Shuman warned that in some areas of the Antarctic, glaciers continued to melt at significant levels, despite the slight temperature drop. At the south polio, the mission observed a big drop in the height of two glaciers situated in the Antarctic Peninsula. Mr Shuman added: "These IceBridge measurements show that once the ice shelves collapse, even some cooling and a good deal of persistent sea ice is not able to hold back these larger glaciers and they continue to lose mass overall."

Researchers in Peru have a new way to capture electricity from plants and bacteria to help rainforest communities.

Researchers at the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC) have developed a technique for capturing the electricity emitted from plants. Actually, to be fair, it's Geobacter— a genus of bacteria that live in the soil — that do the grunt work. Robby Berman at Slate explains the process:

"[N]utrients in plants encounter microorganisms called 'geobacters' in the dirt, and that process releases electrons that electrodes in the dirt can capture. A grid of these electrodes can transfer the electrons into a standard battery."

Wild birds are love birds. A recent study found great tits pairs were willing to forego reliable food sources in order to stay together.

Using a unique bird feeding experiment, researchers at the University of Oxford revealed the great tits' commitment to love. Scientists designed feeders to only allow access to birds tagged with the matching radio frequency transmitter.

Some great tit pairs were tagged so mates were unable to access from from the same feeder. One bird would have access to only certain feeders, while the other would have access to others -- no overlap.

Compared to pairs allowed to feed at the same feeder, separated pairs spend less time feeding. Presumably, they couldn't bear to be apart.

Of course, this isn't simply sentimentalism, but an evolved form of self-preservation and species perpetuation. Birds need each other to survive and reproduce.

As the race to adapt to climate change quickens, a South African scientist is leading global research into developing crops that mimic the extraordinary survival skills of "resurrection plants".

Jill Farrant, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Cape Town, hopes that unlocking the genetic codes of drought-tolerant plants could help farmers toiling in increasingly hot and dry conditions.

With more than 130 known varieties in the world, resurrection plants are a unique group of flora that can survive extreme water shortages for years.

During a drought, the plant acts like a seed, becoming so dry it appears dead.

But when the skies finally open and the rain pours down, the shrivelled plant bursts "back to life", turning green and robust in just a few hours.

Winston Churchill famously defined an appeaser as someone who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. In the debate about global warming, business, especially large corporations, is the largest sector of appeasers and some, like Volkswagen, are now, rightfully, paying the price.

Churchill was talking about Neville Chamberlain's appeasement with Adolf Hitler. In a classic example of the claim that fact is stranger than fiction, it was Adolf Hitler who sketched the design for the first Volkswagen (Figure1).

The ability for adult Europeans to drink milk was inherited from Russian herders just 4,000 years ago, a genetic study has shown.

The findings come from the largest ancient DNA study of its kind published in the journal Nature.

"Everyone assumed it came to Europe with the first farmers," co-author Dr Bastien Llamas, from the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, said.

"But you actually had a 4,500-year period when European farmers could not actually drink milk."

The study of DNA from 230 Eurasians who lived between 6500 BC and 300 BC showed that Russian herders from the Great Steppes brought the enzymes for lactose tolerance into Europe.

"Suddenly 4,000 years ago there's a revolution when the Steppe herders brought the enzymes they needed," Dr Llamas said.

Earlier this year, Dr Llamas and colleagues found Europeans descended from three groups: Stone-Age hunter-gatherers, farmers that migrated from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), and nomadic herders that migrated west from the Great Steppe in Russia.

For this study, the researchers analysed patterns in the genomes of these groups to look at how human traits had changed since the advent of agriculture in Europe around 8,500 years ago.

One of the most surprising findings related to the emergence of the genetic mutation that enables humans to drink raw milk.

This mutation enables the enzyme lactase, which digests lactose in milk, to remain active long after weaning occurs.

Most people had assumed the mutation, which is widespread in Europe today, would have been introduced by the Anatolian farmers, who had been keeping animals such as cows since around 6500 BC.

However, Dr Llamas and colleagues found the mutation did not enter the European population until 4,000 years later, when the Russian herders arrived.

Despite all the predictions from futurologists over the years on how robots would look and work, NASA's newest bot aimed at exploring distant worlds proves them all wrong. It's not a humanoid or a mechanical animal from science fiction, but resembles a geometric structure and was actually inspired by a baby toy.

NASA has unveiled the Super Ball robot, the space agency's newest tool for space exploration specifically designed for landing safely on distant planets with unstudied terrains and landscapes, always a challenge for spacecraft and exploration vehicles.

The creation, designed by engineers from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, resembles a baby toy made of wire and rods that is indestructible, and as such scientists believe it can handle strong impacts like those caused by landing on a planet's surface. The idea came to NASA's developers when they first saw the toy falling — it was absorbing impact of landing on the ground surprisingly well — and they decided that this physical principle, known as tensegrity, is perfect for space robotics.

Mars is destined to get a spectacular new planetary ring system to rival that of Saturn, but don't hold your breath because it will not be for another 30 million years or so, according to scientists.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, are based on a new study to determine the fate destined to befall the diminutive Martian moon Phobos.

"We found that Phobos is too weak to withstand tidal stresses from Mars and we expect it to break apart in a few tens of millions of years and form a ring around Mars," the study's lead author Dr Benjamin Black of the University of California said.

Only the giant planets of the outer solar system have rings at the moment.

Phobos — the larger of the two moons circling Mars — orbits just 6,000 kilometres above the surface of the red planet, closer than any other moon in the solar system.

"Over time Phobos is creeping inwards towards Mars at a couple of centimetres per year," Dr Black said.

"We wanted to figure out whether Phobos crashes into Mars or breaks apart to form a ring, so we needed to know how strong it was — is it going to be able to stand the increasing tidal stresses that are going to be pulling this little moon apart, or will it eventually succumb to these forces?"

Dr Black and co-author Tushar Mittal found that Phobos will be pulled apart by the red planet's gravitational tidal forces in about 20 to 40 million years' time.

"We concluded that Phobos would break apart between 2.4 and about 1.1 Mars radii, somewhere between 8,500 kilometres down to around 4,000 kilometres or so," Dr Black said.

Apparently, size doesn't always matter. An extensive study by an interdisciplinary research group suggests that the deformation properties of nanocrystals are not much different from those of the Earth's crust.

"When solid materials such as nanocrystals, bulk metallic glasses, rocks, or granular materials are slowly deformed by compression or shear, they slip intermittently with slip-avalanches similar to earthquakes," explained Karin Dahmen, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Typically these systems are studied separately. But we found that the scaling behavior of their slip statistics agree across a surprisingly wide range of different length scales and material structures."

"Identifying agreement in aspects of the slip statistics is important, because it enables us to transfer results from one scale to another, from one material to another, from one stress to another, or from one strain rate to another," stated Shivesh Pathak, a physics undergraduate at Illinois, and a co-author of the paper, "Universal Quake Statistics: From Compressed Nanocrystals to Earthquakes," appearing in Scientific Reports. "The study shows how to identify and explain commonalities in the deformation mechanisms of different materials on different scales.

"The results provide new tools and methods to use the slip statistics to predict future materials deformation," added Michael LeBlanc, a physics graduate student and co-author of the paper. "They also clarify which system parameters significantly affect the deformation behavior on long length scales. We expect the results to be useful for applications in materials testing, failure prediction, and hazard prevention."