It has long been a question as to what exactly foxes say, but according to a new study the question we should have been asking is how do they hunt? A scientific paper recently published details on the discovery of a protein, previously only seen in some birds and bats, that has been found in foxes and other mammals.

This protein, "chryptochrome", known scientifically as Cry1a, sits in the retina of many primates and allows them to detect the earth's magnetic field. The discovery comes after examining the hunting behavior of several mammals, but more specifically the red fox in snowy conditions.

As can be seen in the image below, the fox uses a sort of 'bunny hop' to catch pray lurking in the snowy layer. It was found that when the fox aligned himself with the earth's magnetic field, respective to hemisphere, his success rate in catching the prey improved drastically.

For what may be the first time, scientists have eavesdropped on the deepest part of the world's oceans and instead of finding a sea of silence, they discovered a cacophony of sounds both natural and caused by humans.

For three weeks, a titanium-encased hydrophone recorded ambient noise from the ocean floor at a depth of more than 36,000 feet in a trough known as Challenger Deep in the fabled Mariana Trench near Micronesia. The team of researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Oregon State University and the U.S. Coast Guard expected to hear little. They were surprised.

"You would think that the deepest part of the ocean would be one of the quietest places on Earth," said Robert Dziak, a NOAA research oceanographer and chief scientist on the project. "Yet there really is almost constant noise from both natural and man-made sources. The ambient sound field at Challenger Deep is dominated by the sound of earthquakes, both near and far was well as the distinct moans of baleen whales and the overwhelming clamor of a category 4 typhoon that just happened to pass overhead.

"There was also a lot of noise from ship traffic, identifiable by the clear sound pattern the ship propellers make when they pass by," added Dziak, who has a courtesy appointment in Oregon State's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. "Guam is very close to Challenger Deep and is a regional hub for container shipping with China and The Philippines."

The project, which was funded by the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, was designed to establish a baseline for ambient noise in the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. Anthropogenic, or human-caused noise has increased steadily over the past several decades and getting these first recordings will allow scientists in the future to determine if the noise levels are growing.

Robots may be the future, but scientists are looking to sea-dwelling octopuses and squid in order to learn how to design them. A newly created artificial "octopus skin" can actually stretch and change colors much like the intelligent cephalopods can.

What's more, the development could be a boon to a variety of different types of robots and products in numerous fields, including health care, consumer electronics, and even rescue teams, according to the Cornell University team behind the invention.

The effort was inspired by creatures like the octopus, which can stretch and even change the texture of their skin to fit into hard-to-reach places. The new electroluminescent "skin" can stretch more than six times its original size, bend, and display changing colors at the same time.

Astronomers have taken a "major step back in time" by spotting the oldest ‒ and the farthest ‒ galaxy they have ever seen. Located 13.4 billion years in the past, it brings new insights into the first generation of galaxies that formed after the Big Bang.

Even though GN-z11 ‒ or, as scientists dubbed it, the "infant galaxy" ‒ is extremely faint, it is unusually bright for its remoteness from Earth.

Never before has the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope managed to reach as far as 400 million years after the Big Bang and precisely measure the distance to GN-z11. NASA says it has now broken "the cosmic distance record."

According to a new study, scientists' claims that coral reefs are doomed by ocean acidification are overplayed. An "inherent bias" in scientific journals, says the editor of ICES Journal of Marine Science, has excluded research showing marine creatures are not being damaged.

Instead, he says, many studies have used flawed methods by subjecting such creatures to sudden increases in carbon dioxide that would never happen in real life. No surprises there. The claim that CO2 emissions are acidifying the oceans is a favourite of climate-change alarmists.

Man-made global warming theory has been propped up by studies that many scientists have dismissed as methodologically flawed, ideologically bent or even fraudulent. The problem of scientific integrity, however, goes far wider. Psychology, neuroscience, physics and other scientific areas have been convulsed by revelations of dodgy research.

Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, has written bleakly: "The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue."

One reason is that cash-strapped universities, competing for money and talent, exert huge pressure on academics to publish more and more to meet the box-ticking criteria set by grant-funding bodies. Corners are being cut and mistakes being made.

But whatever happened to peer-review, the supposed kitemark of scientific integrity produced by the collective judgment of other researchers? Well, that seems to have gone south too. In 1998 Fiona Godlee, editor of the British Medical Journal, sent an article containing eight deliberate mistakes to more than 200 of the BMJ's regular reviewers. Not one picked out all the mistakes. On average, they reported fewer than two; some did not spot any.

Repeating bursts of mysterious radio waves from a galaxy far, far away have been detected by scientists who believe they come from an "extremely powerful object".

Researchers at New York's Cornell University, who published the paper in Nature on Wednesday, believe the origin of these fast radio bursts (FRBs), which last only milliseconds, cannot be an explosion in space as they are repeating.

"Whatever produces the FRB can't be destroyed by the burst, because otherwise, what would produce the next pulse?" said Shami Chatterjee, a senior researcher at Cornell, who has also described their findings as having "broken this enigmatic phenomenon wide open".

A giant underwater dome covering an area of 25 square kilometres and having a height of about 15 meters was discovered halfway between the volcano Mount Vesuvius and the active caldera of Campi Flegrei, at depths ranging from 100 to 170 meters just 5 km apart from the port of Naples, Italy.Scientists are actually concerned by the gas released by this new underwater structure and concluded that seabed doming, faulting, and gas discharge are manifestations of non-volcanic unrests potentially preluding submarine eruptions and/or hydrothermal explosions.

Scientists have discovered a dome releasing gases in the Bay of Naples, between the volcano Mount Vesuvius and the active Campi Flegrei caldera during the oceanographic campaigns.

The dome covers an area of 25 square km and has a height of about 15 meters. The new structure sits at depths ranging from 100 to 170 meters.


The findings made on the oceanic research vessel Urania show 35 gas emission spots and 650 small craters linked to the gas emission on the dome, which date back to 12,000 years.

According to the scientists, gas emissions in the Bay of Naples are secondary volcanic phenomena, but are not currently associated with a direct ascent of magma. So we can not talk about magma rising at the surface, but there is evidence in other cases that such gas emissions preceded by hydrothermal explosions and the formation of underwater volcanoes.

Here the abstract of the Nature article:

A total eclipse of the Sun on March 9, 2016. Alaska and Hawaii will be the only two states that will be able to view it (as a partial). As you can see, this eclipse crosses the Pacific beginning in the eastern portion of the Indian Ocean. There are many tour ships and planes ready to view this event from many of the Indonesian islands.

Greatest eclipse will occur at 01:57:12 over the Pacific with the greatest duration lasting four minutes and ten seconds. Greatest duration will occur at 01:56:52. The frame rate is 3 frames per minutes which comes to 1080 frames for this video.

As we march steadily toward a cashless society, Google is naturally at the forefront of seeing it come to fruition as quickly as possible.

Despite the fact that several years ago Google had a major security scare with its first incarnation of the digital wallet smartphone app, which required a temporary shutdown, they are announcing a new system being tested which does not even require the smartphone at all.

A growing number of people apparently find that having to remove their smartphone is just such a hassle that they are prepared to embrace payment via biometrics - in this case, facial recognition.

A nuclear power propulsion system could propel a spacecraft to Mars in just over a month, a huge step forward from the current 18 months required. Russia might test a nuclear engine as early as 2018, the head of the Rosatom nuclear corporation revealed. Another advantage of a nuclear engine is that it enables a spacecraft to maneuver throughout the flight, whereas existing technology only makes a defined trajectory flight possible.

"A nuclear power unit makes it possible to reach Mars in a matter of one to one and a half months, providing capability for maneuvering and acceleration," the head of Rosatom Sergey Kirienko said. "Today's engines can only reach Mars in a year and a half, without the possibility of return," Kirienko said.

The nuclear engine project was launched in 2010 and by 2012 an engineering design had been created. The project's budget is estimated at 20 billion rubles (about $US274 million). It has been reported that a prototype nuclear drive could start testing by 2018. Traditional rocket engines are believed to have reached the limit of their potential and can't be used for deep space exploration.