A team from the University's Experimental Psychology and Anthropology Departments wanted to see whether our feelings of social closeness when dancing with others might be linked to endorphins - the body's 'feel good' chemicals.

Endorphins are neurotransmitters that form part of the brain's pain control system, but they are also implicated in social bonding. Dr Bronwyn Tarr explained: 'Dance is an important activity around the world, and it could be a way to connect with other people and feel socially bonded. We wanted to see the effect of high and low energy, and synchronised and unsynchronised dancing had on both pain threshold and the sense of bondedness to fellow group-members.'

In 10-20 million years, the moon will get so close to Mars that it'll be shredded into a ring

Mars' largest moon, Phobos, is slowly falling toward the planet, but rather than smash into the surface, it likely will be shredded and the pieces strewn about the planet in a ring like the rings encircling Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune.

Though inevitable, the demise of Phobos is not imminent. It will probably happen in 20 to 40 million years, leaving a ring that will persist for anywhere from one million to 100 million years, according to two young earth scientists at the University of California, Berkeley.

In a paper appearing online this week in Nature Geoscience, UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Benjamin Black and graduate student Tushar Mittal estimate the cohesiveness of Phobos and conclude that it is insufficient to resist the tidal forces that will pull it apart when it gets closer to Mars.

When birds and humans sing it sounds completely different, but now new research reported in the journal Nature Communications shows that the very same physical mechanisms are at play when a bird sings and a human speaks.

Birds and humans look different, sound different and evolved completely different organs for voice production. But now new research published in Nature Communications reveals that humans and birds use the exact same physical mechanism to make their vocal cords move and thus produce sound.

"Science has known for over 60 years that this mechanism - called the myoelastic-aerodynamic theory, or in short the MEAD mechanism- drives speech and singing in humans. We have now shown that birds use the exact same mechanism to make vocalizations. MEAD might even turn out to be a widespread mechanism in all land-dwelling vertebrates", says lead author of the paper, Associate Professor Dr. Coen Elemans, Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark. Co-authors of the paper are from Emory University, Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and Palacky University.

Over the last year Dr. Elemans and his colleagues studied six different species of bird from five avian groups. The smallest species, the zebra finch, weighs just 15 grams, and the largest one, the ostrich, weighs in at 200 kg. All studied birds were revealed to use the MEAD mechanism, just as humans do.

In the human voice box, or larynx, air from the lungs is pushed past the vocal cords, which then start moving back and forth sideways like a flag fluttering in the wind. With each oscillation the larynx closes and opens, making the airflow stop and start, which creates sound pulses. "Such vocal fold oscillations occur from about 100 times/sec in normal speech to one of the highest possible notes sung in opera at about 1400 times/sec, a F6 in Mozart's "Die Zauberflöte", adds voice expert and co-author Dr. Jan Švec of Palacky University in the Czech Republic.

From an evolutionary perspective, it happened almost overnight. In less than 800 years Yakutian horses adapted to the extremely cold temperatures found in the environments of eastern Siberia. The adaptive process involved changes in the expression of a plethora of genes, including some also selected in human Siberian groups and the extinct woolly mammoth.

In a new scientific study, the comparison of the complete genomes of nine living and two ancient Yakutian horses from Far-East Siberia with a large genome panel of 27 domesticated horses reveals that the current population of Yakutian horses was founded following the migration of the Yakut people into the region in the 13-15th century AD. Yakutian horses, thus, developed their striking adaptations to the extreme cold climate present in the region in less than 800 years. This is one of the fastest examples of adaptation within mammals.

Black holes are known for their voracious appetites. These bodies -- formed when a massive star collapses upon itself -- have occasionally been described as the "vacuum cleaners" of the universe and are notorious for their tendency to wreak havoc on the usual laws of physics that govern the rest of the cosmos.

Now, for the first time ever, scientists have witnessed a black hole swallowing a star and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light -- a rare event that occurs when a star stumbles across a black hole's gravitational well.

"It's the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months," Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins University, said, in a statement released Thursday. "Previous efforts to find evidence for these jets, including my own, were late to the game."

Developments in wireless networking over the past few years have seen Wi-Fi become faster and more reliable than ever. It's still far from perfect though, and now new tech known as 'Li-Fi' threatens to supersede it, boasting 100 times greater performance.

Li-Fi replaces the radio waves of Wi-Fi with light signals. Wi-Fi typically uses the 2.4GHz or 5GHz radio bands, both of which have a tendency to slow down as more devices are added.

Li-Fi solves this problem by boasting 100 times greater performance than the typical Wi-Fi connection today. Pocket-Lint reports lab tests have pushed peak transfer rates to an astounding 224 gigabits per second. In a real-world experiment conducted this week, researchers saw 1GB per second being pushed through the network.

Li-Fi is based around a protocol known as Visible Light Communication (VLC). It essentially involves toggling a light switch thousands of times every second to create a stream of "on" and "off" pulses that can be interpreted as binary bits. It works in a similar fashion to Morse code and currently uses the 400 and 800 THz (terahertz) bands.

New research from MIT shows that the Earth's geomagnetic field intensity is double the long-term historical average, indicating that the current field intensity has a long way to fall before reaching an unstable level that would lead to a reversal.

The intensity of Earth's geomagnetic field has been dropping for the past 200 years, at a rate that some scientists suspect may cause the field to bottom out in 2,000 years, temporarily leaving the planet unprotected against damaging charged particles from the sun. This drop in intensity is associated with periodic geomagnetic field reversals, in which the Earth's North and South magnetic poles flip polarity, and it could last for several thousand years before returning to a stable, shielding intensity.

With a weakened geomagnetic field, increased solar radiation might damage electronics — from individual pacemakers to entire power grids — and could induce genetic mutations. A reversal may also affect the navigation of animals that use Earth's magnetic field as an internal compass.

Astronomers at the Universities of Tübingen and Potsdam have identified the hottest white dwarf ever discovered in our Galaxy.

With a temperature of 250,000 degrees Celsius, this dying star at the outskirts of the Milky Way has already even entered its cooling phase. The researchers also were the first to observe an intergalactic gas cloud moving towards the Milky Way -- indicating that galaxies collect fresh material from deep space, which they can use to make new stars. These findings are published in the latest Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Relatively low-mass stars -- like our Sun -- get extremely hot towards the end of their lives. The Sun's surface temperature has been fairly constant at around 6000 degrees Celsius since its birth 4.6 million years ago. Immediately before its source of nuclear energy is exhausted in about five billion years, the Sun will reach thirty times that temperature, going to 180,000 degrees before cooling down as a white dwarf. Computer simulations suggest that stars can become even hotter than that. The highest temperature of an observed dying star was measured to be 200,000 degrees.

The researchers' evaluation of ultraviolet spectra taken by the Hubble Space Telescope points to a new record of 250,000 degrees -- a temperature which can only be reached by a star some five times more massive than our Sun. The white dwarf, RX J0439.8-6809, has already entered the cooling phase. It appears to have reached its maximum temperature of 400,000 degrees about a thousand years ago. Its chemical composition is not yet understood. Analyses show that carbon and oxygen are present on its surface -- the products of the nuclear fusion of helium, a process which normally takes place deep in the core of a star.

Astronomers have responded to the buzz about a mysterious dimming star by studying data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. They conclude the dimming was probably caused by a family of comets passing in front of the star.

Was it a catastrophic collision in the star's asteroid belt? A giant impact that disrupted a nearby planet? A dusty cloud of rock and debris? A family of comets breaking apart? Or was it alien megastructures built to harvest the star's energy?

Just what caused the mysterious dimming of star KIC 8462852?

Massimo Marengo, an Iowa State University associate professor of physics and astronomy, wondered when he saw all the buzz about the mysterious star found by citizen scientists on the Planet Hunters website.

Those citizen scientists were highlighting measurements of star brightness recorded by NASA's Kepler spacecraft. Tiny dips in a star's brightness can indicate a planet is passing in front of the star. That's how Kepler astronomers -- and citizen scientists using the internet to help analyze the light curves of stars -- are looking for planets.

A Moscow laboratory has conducted the first successful organ translation using a unique Russian 3D-printing technology. The breakthrough could potentially help millions suffering from thyroid disorders - and paves the way for printing other human organs.

The thyroid, a butterfly-shaped gland in the neck, can have a dramatic impact on a huge variety of human bodily functions. The groundbreaking operation, thus far only in rodents, was performed by a team from the 3D Bioprinting Solutions Laboratory in the Russian capital some three months ago.

"Then we were monitoring them over eight weeks and the level of the hormone continued growing," said Elena Bulanova, 3D Bioprinting Solutions Laboratory Head.

The thyroid glands in mice were first killed by a radioactive iodine injection, before the research team transplanted newly-printed organs into their subjects.Three weeks into the experiment, the team, headed by Vladimir Mironov, observed "higher" levels of the hormone T4, which is responsible for growth and the metabolism, and measured higher body temperatures, Bulanova said.After 11 weeks of monitoring the subjects' 3D printed thyroid glands, they were fully functional with completely restored thyroid function.

"All in all we consider experiment to be successfully conducted because we managed to raise the level of hormone T4," Bulanova said.