Strangely shaped dust clouds, resembling spilled liquids, are silhouetted against a colourful background of glowing gas in this newly released Hubble image. The star-forming region NGC 2467 is a vast cloud of gas - mostly hydrogen - that serves as an incubator for new stars.

Some of these youthful stars have emerged from the dense clouds where they were born and now shine brightly, hot and blue in this picture, but many others remain hidden.

The full beauty of this object and hints of the astrophysical processes at work within it are revealed in this super-sharp image from Hubble. Hot young stars that recently formed from the cloud are emitting fierce ultraviolet radiation that is causing the whole scene to glow while also sculpting the environment and gradually eroding the gas clouds.

Studies have shown that most of the radiation comes from the single hot and brilliant massive star just above the centre of the image. Its fierce radiation has cleared the surrounding region and some of the next generation of stars are forming in the denser regions around the edge.

One of the most familiar star-forming regions is the Orion Nebula, which can be seen with the naked eye. NGC 2467 is a similar but more distant example.

Such stellar nurseries can be seen out to considerable distances in the Universe, and their study is important in determining the distance and chemical composition of other galaxies. Some galaxies contain huge star-forming regions, which may contain tens of thousands of stars. Another dramatic example is the 30 Doradus region in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Workers excavating at the World Trade Center site have unearthed the 32ft long hull of a ship that is believed to have been buried in the 18th century.

The vessel probably was used along with other debris to fill in land to extend lower Manhattan into the Hudson River, archeologists said.

Molly McDonald and A. Michael Pappalardo, archeologists, were at the site of the 9/11 terror attacks when workers uncovered the artifacts.

"We noticed curved timbers that a backhoe brought up," Ms McDonald said. "We quickly found the rib of a vessel and continued to clear it away and expose the hull over the last two days."

The two archeologists work for AKRF, a firm hired to document artifacts discovered at the site. They called the find significant but said more study was needed to determine the age of the ship.

Egyptian archaeologists on Thursday unveiled a newly unearthed double tomb with vivid wall paintings in the ancient necropolis of Saqqara near Cairo, saying it could be the start for uncovering a vast cemetery in the area.

The tomb includes two false doors with colorful paintings depicting the two people buried there, a father and a son who served as heads of the royal scribes, said Abdel-Hakim Karar, a top archaeologist at Saqqara.

"The colors of the false door are fresh as if it was painted yesterday," Karar told reporters.

Humidity had destroyed the sarcophagus of the father, Shendwas, while the tomb of the son, Khonsu, was robbed in antiquity, he said.

Skulls found in a Queensland cave have allowed scientists to map for the first time the entire life cycle of an extinct prehistoric species.

A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales was exploring the world heritage Riversleigh fossil field, in northwestern Queensland, when they chanced upon the 15 million-year-old cave.

Among the hundreds of beautifully preserved fossils found beneath the limestone cave floor were 26 skulls from the Nimbadon, a wombat-like marsupial and major herbivore group before kangaroos.

By comparing the intact skulls from varying stages of the marsupial's life - including as babies in the pouch - scientists were able to map the Nimbadon's life cycle from birth to death in a world-first study.

"We've got skulls representing pouch young all the way through to elderly adults, and that's a first," said Karen Black from UNSW's School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Studies.

"There is no other fossil deposit (in the world) that has that."

Is dark matter lurking at the centre of our bright sun? Yes, say two research groups who believe the elusive stuff is cooling the solar core.

The insight doesn't significantly affect the sun's overall temperature. Rather, a core chilled by dark matter would help explain the way heat is distributed and transported within the sun, a process that is poorly understood.

Dark matter doesn't interact with light and so is invisible. The only evidence for its existence is its gravitational effects on other objects, including galaxies. These effects suggest dark matter makes up about 80 per cent of the total mass of the universe.

The idea that it might lurk at the heart of the sun goes back to the 1980s, when astronomers found that the number of ghostly subatomic neutrinos leaving the sun was only about a third of what computer simulations suggested it should be. Dark matter could have explained the low yield because it would absorb energy, reducing the rate of the fusion reactions that produce neutrinos.

However, the problem was solved another way when it was found that neutrinos oscillate between three kinds, only one of which was being detected on Earth. As a result, the idea of solar dark matter was dropped.

London: It's the age-old question that has puzzled the finest minds for thousands of years - which came first: The chicken or the egg?

Now, scientists claim to have finally discovered the answer to the conundrum - it's the chicken which came first. A team from University of Sheffield and University of Warwick has found that a protein called ovocleidin (OC-17) is crucial in the formation of eggshells.

It is produced in the pregnant hen's ovaries so the correct reply to the egg riddle must be that the chicken came first, the experts say. However, the research does not come up with how the protein-producing chicken existed in the first place, the Daily Express reported on Wednesday.

Boeing has unveiled its unmanned hydrogen-powered spy plane which can fly non-stop for up to four days.

The high-altitude plane, called Phantom Eye, will remain aloft at 20,000m (65,000ft), according to the company.The demonstrator will be shipped to Nasa's Dryden Flight Research Center in California later this summer to prepare for its first flight in early 2011.
Boeing says the aircraft could eventually carry out "persistent intelligence and surveillance".

It is a product of the company's secretive Phantom Works research and development arm.
Boeing says the aircraft is capable of long endurance flights because of its "lighter" and "more powerful" hydrogen fuel system.

Red planet gigapixel HD probesat cam imagery distilled

NASA and Microsoft have teamed up to present huge amounts of 3-D Mars mapping data, gleaned by space probes in orbit about the red planet, in a form usable by anyone with a net connection.

"These incredibly detailed maps will enable the public to better experience and explore Mars," says NASA's Michael Broxton, a boffin in the Intelligent Robotics Group at the space agency's Ames centre in Silicon Valley.

"The collaborative relationship between NASA and Microsoft Research was instrumental for creating the software that brings these new Mars images into people's hands, classrooms and living rooms."

Why have so few heard of one of the great heroes of modern physics?

In 1935, Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen outlined an extraordinary paradox associated with the then emerging science of quantum mechanics.

They pointed out that quantum mechanics allows two objects to be described by the same single wave function. In effect, these separate objects somehow share the same existence so that a measurement on one immediately influences the other, regardless of the distance between them.

To Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen this clearly violated special relativity which prevents the transmission of signals at superluminal speed. Something had to give.

Despite the seriousness of this situation, the EPR paradox, as it became known, was more or less ignored by physicists until relatively recently.

Today, we call the relationship between objects that share the same existence entanglement. And it is the focus of intense interest from physicists studying everything from computing and lithography to black holes and photography.

It's fair to say that while the nature of entanglement still eludes us, few physicists doubt that a better understanding will lead to hugely important insights into the nature of reality.

Bozeman -- Research by a Montana State University doctoral student and one of the nation's top paleontologists is upending more than 100 years of thought regarding the dinosaurs known as Triceratops and Torosaurus.

Since the late 1800s, scientists have believed that Triceratops and Torosaurus were two different types of dinosaurs. Triceratops had a three-horned skull with a rather short frill, whereas Torosaurus had a much bigger frill with two large holes through it.

MSU paleontologists John Scannella and Jack Horner said in the July 14 issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, however, that Triceratops and Torosaurus are actually the same dinosaur at different stages of growth. They added that the discovery contributes to an unfolding theory that dinosaur diversity was extremely depleted at the end of the dinosaur age.

The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology is the official journal of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Scannella is a doctoral student in earth sciences, and Horner is Regents Professor of Paleontology at MSU's Museum of the Rockies.

The confusion over Triceratops and Torosaurus was easy to understand, Scannella said, because juvenile dinosaurs weren't just miniature versions of adults. They looked very different, and their skulls changed radically as they matured. Recent studies have revealed extreme changes in the skulls of pachycephalosaurs, tyrannosaurs and other dinosaurs that died out about 65 million years ago in North America.

"Paleontologists are at a disadvantage because we can't go out into the field and observe a living Triceratops grow up from a baby to an adult," Scannella said. "We have to put together the story based on fossils. In order to get the complete story, you need to have a large sample of fossils from many individuals representing different growth stages."

The Triceratops study suggests that it is critical that paleontologists consider ontogeny (growth from a juvenile to an adult) as a source of major morphological variations before naming new species of dinosaurs to account for variation between specimens, Scannella added.