• Scanner uses 'terahertz' spectrum - between infrared and microwaves
• Can see through walls, wood and plastics
• Doctors could use small, cheap devices to see tumours inside body

Comic-book superpowers could become reality as scientists have designed a phone that works as 'X-Ray spex'.

A hi-tech chip allows a phone to 'see through' walls, wood and plastics - and (although the researchers are coy about this) through fabrics such as clothing.

Doctors could also use the imagers to look inside the body for cancer tumours without damaging X-Rays or large, expensive MRI scanners.

Any physics student knows that light travels in a straight line. But now researchers have shown that light can also travel in a curve, without any external influence. The effect is actually an optical illusion, although the researchers say it could have practical uses such as moving objects with light from afar.

It's well known that light bends. When light rays pass from air into water, for instance, they take a sharp turn; that's why a stick dipped in a pond appears to tilt toward the surface. Out in space, light rays passing near very massive objects such as stars are seen to travel in curves. In each instance, light-bending has an external cause: For water, it is a change in an optical property called the refractive index, and for stars, it is the warping nature of gravity.

For light to bend by itself, however, is unheard of - almost. In the late 1970s, physicists Michael Berry at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and Nandor Balazs of the State University of New York, Stony Brook, discovered that a so-called Airy waveform, a wave describing how quantum particles move, can sometimes bend by a small amount.

That work was largely ignored until 2007, when Demetri Christodoulides and other physicists at the University of Central Florida in Orlando generated optical versions of Airy waves by manipulating laser light, and found that the resultant beam curved slightly as it crossed a detector.

How did this self-bending work? Light is a jumble of waves, and their peaks and troughs can interfere with one another. For example, a peak passing a trough cancels each other out to create darkness; a peak passing another peak "interferes constructively" to create a bright spot. Now, imagine light emitted from a wide strip - perhaps a fluorescent tube or, better, a laser whose output has been expanded. By carefully controlling the initial position of the wave peaks - the phase of the waves - at every step along the strip, it is possible to make the light traveling outward interfere constructively at only points on a curve and cancel out everywhere else. The Airy function, which contains rapid but diminishing oscillations, proved an easy way to define those initial phases - except that the resultant light would bend only up to about 8°.

Electric Universe proponent David Talbott presents the first of two video segments on the electric comet. Here he discusses NASA's surprising findings on the composition of comets, none supporting the traditional "dirty snowball" hypothesis.

Japanese researchers have successfully grown hair on hairless mice by implanting follicles created from stem cells, they announced Wednesday, sparking new hopes of a cure for baldness.

Led by professor Takashi Tsuji from Tokyo University of Science, the team bioengineered hair follicles and transplanted them into the skin of hairless mice.

The creatures eventually grew hair, which continued regenerating in normal growth cycles after old hairs fell out.

The world's first transgenic sheep produced via a simplified cloning technique, known as handmade cloning (seriously), is here. Peng Peng, named for the two principal scientists doing the cloning (who happen to have the same name), was successfully delivered back on March 26 and is developing so well that researchers have deemed him ready for the spotlight.

Peng Peng was more than two years in the making. Chinese researchers BGI Ark Biotechnology working with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shihezi University were working in some adverse conditions in China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, where climate and laboratory conditions were not ideal for conventional cloning.

So they opted for a simplified method of cloning, known as handmade cloning (or HMC), that requires fewer sophisticated lab implements and simplified procedures.

The donor cells were collected from Chinese Merino sheep back in 2009, and a transgenic cell line was established. It took several tries, but in October of last year a successful procedure for HMC sheep cloning was developed. From that point, Peng Peng was the next step.

HMC was first introduced in 2001, so the procedure itself is nothing new. Success with the procedure, however, is both new and proliferating. Successful clones have been previously made with cows, goats, pigs, and water buffalo, and with Peng Peng the world has its first HMC sheep. Which means two things. For one, scientists are getting better at this technique of animal cloning. And secondly: We're likely going to see more of this going forward.

Zurich: The fact that land-bound dinosaurs laid eggs is what sealed their fate of mass extinction millions of years ago while live birthing mammals went on to thrive, scientists said Wednesday.

In a new explanation for mammals' evolutionary victory over dinosaurs, researchers said a mathematical model has shown that infant size was the clincher.

Given physical limitations to egg size, dinosaurs had comparatively small young. Some came out of the egg weighing as little as two to 10 kilogrammes (4.4 to 22 pounds), yet had to bulk up to a hefty 30 or 50 tonnes.

Growing up, the youngsters had to compete in several size categories with adults of other animal groups for food, University of Zurich scientist Marcus Clauss told AFP.

This meant that all the small and medium animal size categories supported by the natural environment were "occupied", leaving no room for smaller dinosaur species in which to thrive, according to the findings published in Biology Letters, a journal of Britain's Royal Society.

"There is a lot of room in the ecosystem for small species, but (in such a scenario) that room is taken up by the young ones of the large species," Clauss explained.

"That was not a problem for 150 million years but as soon as something happens that takes away all the large species so that only small species remain, if there are no small species to remain you are gone as a whole group."

The catastrophic event that wiped out all larger life forms some 65 million years ago meant the end for terrestrial dinosaurs.

A young Missouri man has turned to the Internet in search of investors for his expedition into the remote jungles of Africa seeking to document undiscovered flora and fauna. That is not so unusual, but one of the creatures he hopes to find is: a living dinosaur.

The region Stephen McCullah, the organizer of the expedition, has chosen to explore is the reputed home of the Mokèlé-mbèmbé, a dinosaur-like creature said to be up to 35 feet long (11 meters), with brownish-gray skin and a long, flexible neck. Many locals believe that it lives in the caves it digs in riverbanks, and that the beast feeds on elephants, hippos and crocodiles.

McCullah posted his pitch on Kickstarter.com asking for $27,000 in donations so that he and his friends can launch the Newmac Expedition, "one of the first expeditions in this century with the goal of categorizing plant and animal species in the vastly unexplored Republic of the Congo." The preliminary four-man venture is slated to launch June 26.

Though the team members largely lack formal education in biology or zoology, they "anticipate discovering hundreds of new insect, plant and fish species during the course of our research. There is also the legitimate hope of discovering many reptile and mammalian species. We have received reports...in the region of eyewitnesses seeing canine-sized tarantulas, large river dwelling sauropods [dinosaurs], and a species of man-eating fish," McCullah wrote on the website.

Never mind dinosaurs, which have been extinct for millions of years, for a moment. Finding a spider the size of a dog would be remarkable enough, as the largest-known tarantula, the Goliath birdeater, lives in South America and has a leg span of "only" a foot.

Humans' meat-eating habits help separate them from other great apes, new research suggests. A meat-heavy diet lets people wean younger babies and have more offspring, which may have contributed to the population explosion, the researchers say.

Because human females wean their young so quickly, they "can potentially contribute a larger number of individuals to the human population during their reproductive years," study researcher Elia Psouni, an associate professor at Lund University in Sweden, told LiveScience. "We are suggesting that this has had a very big impact on the survival and spreading of the species and the way it happened."

Studies of "reproductively natural" populations (that is, societies that don't use birth control) showed that mothers stop giving breast milk to their baby when the baby reaches about 2 years and 4 months of age.

That surprised the researchers, since other great apes take about four times as long to wean their offspring (proportionate to their maximum lifespans).

These other apes have diets dominated by fruits, vegetables and other plant materials. Chimpanzees, humans' closest living ancestors, get only about 5 percent of their calories from meat, compared with about 20 percent for humans.

The mystery of the origin of the strongest cosmic rays has deepened as new clues into key suspects, the most powerful explosions in the universe, suggest they are likely not potential culprits, researchers say.

Cosmic rays are charged subatomic particles that streak to Earth from deep in outer space. A few rare cosmic rays are extraordinarily powerful, with energies up to 100 million times greater than any attained by human-made particle colliders, such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The sources of these cosmic rays are a mystery.

"Nature is capable of accelerating elementary particles to macroscopic energies," said study co-author Francis Halzen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, principal investigator at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a massive telescope designed to find the tiny subatomic particles.

"There are basically only two ideas on how she does this - in gravitationally driven particle flows near the supermassive black holes at the centers of active galaxies, and in the collapse of stars to a black hole, seen by astronomers as gamma-ray bursts."

A survey of the galactic region around our solar system by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has turned up a surprising lack of dark matter, making its alleged existence even more of a mystery.

Dark matter is an invisible substance that is suspected to exist in large quantity around galaxies, lending mass but emitting no radiation. The only evidence for it comes from its gravitational effect on the material around it... up to now, dark matter itself has not been directly detected. Regardless, it has been estimated to make up 80% of all the mass in the Universe.

A team of astronomers at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile has mapped the region around over 400 stars near the Sun, some of which were over 13,000 light-years distant. What they found was a quantity of material that coincided with what was observable: stars, gas, and dust... but no dark matter.