Apple has said children should not use the new iPhone's facial recognition technology, saying faces of under-13s could be too similar to each other to protect phones from intruders.

The iPhone X, which is set to go on sale next month, uses a facial recognition system called Face ID to unlock phones, verify payments and gain access to apps. It has an array of sensors at the top of the phone that scan the users' face and compare it to the model stored on the phone.

Apple says the chances of an imposter being able to trick the system are one in a million, making facial recognition more secure than the one in 50,000 chance that somebody else could fool a phone's fingerprint scanner.

However, in a security paper on Wednesday it said that since under-13s' faces are still developing, there is a greater chance that the feature may not work as intended and other children - especially brothers or sisters - will be able to unlock the phone.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has photographed the farthest active inbound comet ever seen, at a whopping distance of 1.5 billion miles from the Sun (beyond Saturn's orbit). Slightly warmed by the remote Sun, it has already begun to develop an 80,000-mile-wide fuzzy cloud of dust, called a coma, enveloping a tiny, solid nucleus of frozen gas and dust. These observations represent the earliest signs of activity ever seen from a comet entering the solar system's planetary zone for the first time.

The comet, called C/2017 K2 (PANSTARRS) or "K2", has been travelling for millions of years from its home in the frigid outer reaches of the solar system, where the temperature is about minus 440 degrees Fahrenheit. The comet's orbit indicates that it came from the Oort Cloud, a spherical region almost a light-year in diameter and thought to contain hundreds of billions of comets. Comets are the icy leftovers from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago and therefore pristine in icy composition.

"K2 is so far from the Sun and so cold, we know for sure that the activity-all the fuzzy stuff making it look like a comet-is not produced, as in other comets, by the evaporation of water ice," said lead researcher David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles. "Instead, we think the activity is due to the sublimation [a solid changing directly into a gas] of super-volatiles as K2 makes its maiden entry into the solar system's planetary zone. That's why it's special. This comet is so far away and so incredibly cold that water ice there is frozen like a rock."


Based on the Hubble observations of K2's coma, Jewitt suggests that sunlight is heating frozen volatile gases - such as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide - that coat the comet's frigid surface. These icy volatiles lift off from the comet and release dust, forming the coma. Past studies of the composition of comets near the Sun have revealed the same mixture of volatile ices.

Physicists have come up with what they claim is a mathematical model of a theoretical "time machine" - a box that can move backwards and forwards through time and space.

The trick, they say, is to use the curvature of space-time in the Universe to bend time into a circle for hypothetical passengers sitting in the box, and that circle allows them to skip into the future and the past. "People think of time travel as something as fiction. And we tend to think it's not possible because we don't actually do it," says theoretical physicist and mathematician, Ben Tippett, from the University of British Columbia in Canada.

"But, mathematically, it is possible."

Together with David Tsang, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, Tippett has used Einstein's theory of general relativity to come up with a mathematical model of what they're calling a Traversable Acausal Retrograde Domain in Space-time (yep, the acronym is literally TARDIS).

Antibiotics are the most common medication used to treat microbial infections. Many antibiotics target intracellular bacterial ribosomes - cellular factories that synthesize proteins - which are essential for bacterial survival and proliferation. When bacteria have an excess of protein synthesis activity they stall the ribosomes in an inactive dimeric complex (i.e. two copies of ribosomes interact with each other). This so-called hibernating ribosome complex is more resistant to antibiotics.

In a collaborative effort, research groups from the Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute of the University of Groningen led by Egbert Boekema, Bert Poolman and Albert Guskov revealed a novel mechanism of ribosome dimerization in the bacterium Lactococcus lactis using cryo-electron microscopy. The peculiarity of the mechanism they describe is that it involves a single protein, named HPFlong, which is capable to dimerize on its own and then pull two copies of ribosomes together. The dimeric state of the ribosome is no longer capable of synthesizing new proteins.

An incredibly 'life-like' android appears to show how the line between woman and machine is starting to disappear.

Footage captured at this year's Tokyo Game Show has already amassed three million views on one video-sharing platform alone, but not everyone believes their eyes.

A fierce debate has broken out among people who have seen the reputed robot with many believing it must be a person, while others think she is the genuine article.

The alleged automaton, which some social media users have even admitted to 'falling in love' with the 'pretty' machine, was at the Japanese games convention to promote a PlayStation 4 game.

A number of Japanese-made and international games are on display at the convention, which has been held annually for the last 21 years.

The beautiful female 'android' stood out to many of the more than a quarter of a million gamers who attended, despite the fact she is only a PR prop.

She along with several others of her kind were stood at the booth of Detroit: Become Human, a new video game developed by French firm Quantic Dream and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Visitors could be forgiven for thinking the apparently man-made machine was in fact a real-life human, as the video shows stunning build detail on her face and in the movements of her limbs.

In the short clip, the 'android' smiles and waves, leaving expo-goers and social media users stunned.

According to the game's storyline, the humanoid robots promoting the game are state-of-the-art AP700 models, called 'the most reliable android'.

A landmark Australian research trial has found that blood, like good red wine, improves with age - at least when it's stored for transfusion.

In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Research Centre at Monash University in Melbourne led teams in five countries to investigate the effect of the age of transfused red blood cells on critically ill patients.

The trials involved 5000 intensive care patients in Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Ireland and Saudi Arabia. Analysis concluded the transfusion of older stored red blood cells is safe and, surprisingly, associated with fewer side effects.

We already know that climate change has a hold on the earth's surface processes, such as erosion and fluctuations in sea levels... but do surface processes in turn have an influence on volcanic activity? This was the question raised by geologists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE, Switzerland) working in partnership with the University of Orléans, University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris and the ICTJA-CSIC Institute in Barcelona. The researchers analysed volcanic data from the Messinian salinity crisis in the Mediterranean Sea, when the Strait of Gibraltar was blocked and the Mediterranean temporarily isolated from the Atlantic. After observing a sharp rise in volcanic activity during this period, and testing various scenarios, the geologists concluded that the increase in magmatic activity could only be explained by the almost total drying out of the Mediterranean. These results, which you can read all about in the journal Nature Geoscience, reveal the influence of surface processes - largely controlled by climate - on volcanic activity.

It is known that the Strait of Gibraltar was shut on a temporary basis during the Messinian Era (more precisely, from 5.96 to 5.33 million years ago) and that the Mediterranean Sea was isolated from the Atlantic. In fact, as far back as the 1970s scientists found layers of salt several hundred metres thick on the seabed. The only explanation for their formation is that there was no or very limited connection between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The scientists also discovered huge underwater canyons dating back to the same period, hollowed out by rivers running over land that is now submerged, suggesting that the sea level was much lower at the time. This also points to the massive drying up of the Mediterranean with enormous geographical and climatic disruption across the entire basin. This hypothesis, however, continues to be a source of debate.

Nevertheless, a team of UNIGE-led geologists has provided new evidence of the Mediterranean's drying up and the forcing of surface processes on magmatic activity.

Russian astronomer Marat Gilfanov managed to shed light on the origin of the world-famous supernova that flared up in the sky in 1572 and drastically changed scientists' perspective of astronomy at the time.

"The explosion of the [Tycho Brahe] supernova in the constellation of Cassiopeia in 1572 showed the whole world that the sky is not perennial as Aristotle wrote, and that the universe is constantly evolving," Russian astronomer Marat Gilfanov and his foreign colleagues said in a study published by the journal Nature Astronomy.

To understand the essence of the study, a small introduction to the nature of supernova might be needed.

In the Arctic, the Inuits have adapted to severe cold and a predominantly seafood diet. After the first population genomic analysis of the Greenland Inuits (Fumagalli, Moltke et al. 2015, Science doi:10.1126/science.aab2319), a region in the genome containing two genes has now been scrutinized by scientists: TBX15 and WARS2. This region is thought to be central to cold adaptation by generating heat from a specific type of body fat, and was earlier found to be a candidate for adaptation in the Inuits.

Now, a team of scientists led by Fernando Racimo, Rasmus Nielsen et al. have followed up on the first natural selection study in Inuits to trace back the origins of these adaptations.

To perform the study, they used the genomic data from nearly 200 Greenlandic Inuits and compared this to the 1000 Genomes Project and ancient hominid DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans. The results, published in the advanced online edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution, provide convincing evidence that the Inuit variant of the TBX15/WARS2 region first came into modern humans from an archaic hominid population, likely related to the Denisovans.

Legendary weapons manufacturer Kalashnikov has unveiled a flying motorbike which could be unleashed by Vladimir Putin if Russia goes into battle.

In a clip of the device being tested, shot in a hangar, a helmeted pilot is seen climbing aboard the small aircraft, which resembles a car roof rack surrounded by eight propellers.

The pilot for the Kalashnikov Concern group, which is based in the city of Izhevsk in central Russia's Udmurt Republic region, is seen sitting surrounded by the propellers and with a battery to power them mounted behind him.