There are many cosmic catastrophes that could do us in, completely irrespective of anything that happens here on Earth. A star could pass into our Solar System and swallow up our planet whole, or eject us from our orbit and cause us to permanently freeze over. A supernova or gamma ray burst could go off too close to us, disintegrating all life on the Earth's surface. Or, as we know it did at least once before some 65 million years ago, a large, fast-moving object like a comet or asteroid could have a catastrophic collision with Earth. At least if we're prepared, we ought to see one coming and be able to take preparations. But what if there's no chance; what if an incoming comet is somehow unseeable? David Bertone heard about that possibility, and wants to know!

I recently came across a few articles regarding dark comets, and to say the least it freaked me out! [...] Is Napier right about the dark comets? Are they truly a threat to us [on] earth? We have lots of threats to life on Earth, and getting struck by a large, fast-moving, unexpected object is certainly among them! Bill Napier is a scientist who studies potentially hazardous objects from outer space. He rightly points out that, while most efforts to catalogue the potential dangers to Earth focus on near-Earth objects like the asteroids that leave the main belt and cross Earth's orbit, that might not be a good reflection of what's actually likely to get us. Nor is it necessarily an asteroid orbiting interior to Jupiter or a comet orbiting exterior to the orbit of Neptune, just waiting to get perturbed and flung into the inner Solar System. There are plenty of objects orbiting in between the orbits of the four gas giants, known as centaurs, that could be hurtled inwards without any warning, and most of them have not been catalogued. Napier postulates that many of these centaurs may be invisible to us, even after being flung inwards, until it's far too late.

A newly identified hybrid animal has been "hiding in plain sight," according to researchers who spotted its depiction in well-known cave art thousands of years old.

Researchers have identified a previously unknown hybrid species of bison and cattle, with the help of cave drawings dating to at least 12,000 years ago.

Nicknamed the Higgs Bison (a play on the physics term Higgs boson) because of its once mysterious, elusive past, DNA analysis has verified the existence of the hybrid.

A new study published in the journal Nature Communications describes how the animal originated more than 120,000 years ago through the hybridization of the extinct Aurochs, the ancestor of modern cattle, and the Ice Age Steppe bison, which ranged across the cold grasslands from Europe to Mexico.

Higgs Bison eventually became the ancestor of the modern European bison, also called the wisent.

Study co-author Alan Cooper, director of the University of Adelaide's Australian Center for Ancient DNA, said that the Auruchs and the Ice Age Steppe bison were "doing things they are not meant to be doing together and producing a completely new species that survived, which is bizarre because normally that's not meant to happen in mammals."

Two scientists say they've uncovered hidden chambers in the Great Pyramid of Giza. Discovered using an advanced X-ray technique the chambers are completely isolated from all other tombs and passages in the 4,500 year-old structure.

The discovery was made by Scan Pyramids, a research project involving universities and advanced scientific instruments. Using a combination of thermography, 3D simulation and radiography imaging, the team discovered anomalies in the structure indicating the presence of holes beneath the rock.

One was discovered at the north-eastern edge of the pyramid and another on the northern face, where a 2015 study indicated one may exist, according to the research's findings.

"The precise shape, size, and exact position of this void is now under further investigation," the team said. "It should be done with the help of 12 new muon emulsion plates that are installed in the descending corridor, and will be collected by the end of October 2016."

This op-ed from IBD points out what we have been saying for years, that even though there is no trend in hurricane frequency of intensity, alarmists like Mashable's Andrew Freedman are trying to get the definition of a hurricane redefined, so that the trend will become a positive one. Recall that hateful science blogger Greg Laden asked Should There be a Category 6 for Hurricanes? after super typhoon Haiyan hit in 2013, something that ABC news opined had "already happened" without one shred of evidence to back up that opinion for a Category 6 storm. They also note:

Only three Category 5s have come ashore in the United States in the past century — the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane, Camille in 1969 and Andrew in 1992.

But because of man-made global warming, most hurricane scientists say now we will probably be getting Category 4 and 5 hurricanes more frequently in the coming decades.

Driven by a declining population, a trend for developing robotic babies has emerged in Japan as a means of encouraging couples to become "parents". The approaches taken vary widely and are driven by different philosophical approaches that also beg a number of questions, not least whether these robo-tots will achieve the aim of their creators.

To understand all of this it is worth exploring the reasons behind the need to promote population growth in Japan. The issue stems from the disproportionate number of older people. Predictions from the UN suggest that by 2050 there will be about double the number of people living in Japan in the 70-plus age range compared to those aged 15-30. This is blamed on a number of factors including so-called "parasite singles", more unmarried women and a lack of immigration.

So, what are the different design approaches that are being taken to encourage more people to become parents? These have ranged from robots that mimic or represent the behaviour of a baby through to robots that look much more lifelike. Engineers at Toyota recently launched Kirobo Mini, for example, as a means of promoting an emotional response in humans. The robot does not look like a baby, but instead models "vulnerable" baby-like behaviours including recognising and responding to people in a high-pitched tone and being unstable in its movements.

For the first time, scientists have created viable mammalian eggs from scratch in the lab - and used them to produce healthy offspring.

Experts say the breakthrough could one day offer new hope to women who have lost their fertility - as a result of cancer treatment, for example.

However, it is likely to be many years before the technique - so far performed in mice - is reliable and safe enough for humans.

The scientists behind the discovery say the process could also shed light on the complexities of reproduction, and aiding the conservation of endangered species.

In the experiments, the Japanese team - led by Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi, from Kyushu University - used stem cells both obtained from embryos and generated from mature cells taken from the tips of mouse tails.

Astronomers have spotted a distant world that orbits far beyond Pluto, in the extreme reaches of the Solar System.

The object, known informally as L91, may be in the process of gradually shifting its way inward from the Oort cloud — a reservoir of comets and other icy bodies — into the equally icy Kuiper belt. No object has ever been seen doing this.

The discovery of L91 reveals more about the extreme worlds whose orbits lie beyond the gravitational influence of Neptune, the most distant giant planet in the Solar System. Researchers have yet to fully explain how these bodies end up in their current orbits."Every time we find another one of these objects it adds another piece to the puzzle," says Meg Schwamb, a planetary scientist at Gemini Observatory in Hilo, Hawaii.

Astronomers with the Outer Solar System Origins Survey discovered L91 in September 2013 using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii. The group has been conducting a detailed survey of a small portion of the sky, aiming to catalog and describe the Kuiper belt objects within.

For decades now, there's been an image of human regeneration being a few cells dividing in a petri dish, hopefully growing into a shiny new organ. But the truth is that scientists' work is a bit more macabre. To make a new organ, it helps to be working from a dead one.

That goes for hearts, too. A little more than a decade ago, Dr. Harald Ott, now a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School, developed a procedure that could rinse an organ of its cells, leaving behind an empty structure that can be repopulated with new ones. In the lab, Ott and his colleagues have taken ghostly hearts and resurrected them as new ones. Shocked with electrical pulses, those new hearts have even started beating again.

These regenerated organs are not yet strong enough to be subbed in for the originals in the human body. But that's the goal of this research: to be able to use a person's own cells to grow new body parts that can replace broken ones.

This year is closing on a lunar high note with the spectacular 'supermoon' phenomenon expected to occur an incredible three times before the end of 2016 - the first of which can be seen tonight.

The aim of science is to establish facts, as accurately as possible. It is therefore crucially important to determine whether an observed phenomenon is real, or whether it's the result of pure chance. If you declare that you've discovered something when in fact it's just random, that's called a false discovery or a false positive. And false positives are alarmingly common in some areas of medical science.

In 2005, the epidemiologist John Ioannidis at Stanford caused a storm when he wrote the paper 'Why Most Published Research Findings Are False',focusing on results in certain areas of biomedicine. He's been vindicated by subsequent investigations. For example, a recent article found that repeating 100 different results in experimental psychology confirmed the original conclusions in only 38 per cent of cases. It's probably at least as bad forbrain-imaging studies and cognitive neuroscience. How can this happen?

The problem of how to distinguish a genuine observation from random chance is a very old one. It's been debated for centuries by philosophers and, more fruitfully, by statisticians. It turns on the distinction between induction and deduction. Science is an exercise in inductive reasoning: we are making observations and trying to infer general rules from them. Induction can never be certain. In contrast, deductive reasoning is easier: you deduce what you would expect to observe if some general rule were true and then compare it with what you actually see. The problem is that, for a scientist, deductive arguments don't directly answer the question that you want to ask.

What matters to a scientific observer is how often you'll be wrong if you claim that an effect is real, rather than being merely random. That's a question of induction, so it's hard. In the early 20th century, it became the custom to avoid induction, by changing the question into one that used only deductive reasoning. In the 1920s, the statistician Ronald Fisher did this by advocating tests of statistical significance. These are wholly deductive and so sidestep the philosophical problems of induction.