In the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram famously conducted experiments in a Yale University basement showing that people will apparently inflict pain on another person simply because someone in a position of authority told them to. Now, researchers have taken those classic experiments one step further, providing new evidence that might help to explain why people are so easily coerced.

According to the new work by researchers at University College London and Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, when someone gives us an order, we actually feel less responsible for our actions and their painful consequences.

"Maybe some basic feeling of responsibility really is reduced when we are coerced into doing something," says Patrick Haggard of University College London. "People often claim reduced responsibility because they were 'only obeying orders.' But are they just saying that to avoid punishment, or do orders really change the basic experience of responsibility?"

Nicknamed the "Superman memory crystal," a new storage device made of nanostructured glass can archive 360 terabytes worth of information for billions of years. Created by scientists at the University of Southampton using femtosecond laser writing, the sliver of fused quartz coin can withstand temperatures up to 157 degrees Celsius (350 degrees Fahrenheit). It is an example of 5D optical data storage.

The research team from the University's Optoelectronics Research Center first experimentally tested the technology in 2013. The final iteration encodes files in five dimensions (size, orientation + 3 dimensional position of nanostructures), writing with ultrafast, intense pulses of light.

Giant canyons on Charon, one of Pluto's five known moons, suggest there was once a warm ocean underneath, NASA says. Scientists believe the ocean might be still there, frozen under the moon's surface.

Recent images from the New Horizon spacecraft suggest that Charon's peculiar tectonic landscape could have been formed by expansion from the inside.

Having frozen, the ocean might have pushed outward, causing the moon's surface to stretch and fracture on a massive scale.

This has raised the question about how such an ocean would form in the first place. Scientists believe that as the outer layer of Charon is primarily water-ice, in the moon's youth it could have been heated by internal processes and radioactive elements. Some of the melting water apparently went underneath, into the moon's deeper layers to form a massive pool of water.

Clues as to how the solar system came into existence could be hidden in a layer of meteorites just beneath the surface of Antarctica, a team of British scientists claim.

A recent study by researchers at the University of Manchester posits the theory that a "hidden reserve" of meteorites lies between 10 and 50cm beneath the icy surface.

If discoverable, these rocks - which were originally part of large planets which subsequently broke apart - could help scientists in their understanding of the formation of the solar system.

An international group of scientists have discovered a previously unknown layer in Earth's mantle, and they estimate that it contains about eight to ten times more oxygen than Earth's atmosphere.

"This discovery came as a big surprise to us and so far we don't know what is happening to these 'rivers of oxygen' in the depths of our planet," said Elena Bykova, a member of the group of scientists who made the discovery.

The human brain may be able to hold as much information in its memory as is contained on the entire Internet, new research suggests.

Researchers discovered that, unlike a classical computer that codes information as 0s and 1s, a brain cell uses 26 different ways to code its "bits." They calculated that the brain could store 1 petabyte (or a quadrillion bytes) of information.

"This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience," Terry Sejnowski, a biologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, said in a statement. "Our new measurements of the brain's memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10."

Amazing computer

What's more, the human brain can store this mind-boggling amount of information while sipping just enough power to run a dim light bulb.

By contrast, a computer with the same memory and processing power would require 1 gigawatt of power, or "basically a whole nuclear power station to run one computer that does what our 'computer' does with 20 watts," said study co-author Tom Bartol, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute.

In particular, the team wanted to take a closer look at the hippocampus, a brain region that plays a key role in learning and short-term memory.

To untangle the mysteries of the mind, the research team took a teensy slice of a rat's hippocampus, placed it in embalming fluid, then sliced it thinly with an extremely sharp diamond knife, a process akin to "slicing an orange," Bartol said. (Though a rat's brain is not identical to a human brain, the basic anatomical features and function of synapses are very similar across all mammals.) The team then embedded the thin tissue into plastic, looked at it under a microscope and created digital images.

Next, researchers spent one year tracing, with pen and paper, every type of cell they saw. After all that effort, the team had traced all the cells in the sample, a staggeringly tiny volume of tissue.

"You could fit 20 of these samples across the width of a single human hair," Bartol told Live Science.

Scientific discoveries that involve humans interfacing with machines can evoke reactions of fear and wonder. Quite often, these feelings are epitomized through works of science fiction. Think Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein," for starters; or its modern day equivalent, one of many films playing on our mixed feelings toward AI, "Ex Machina."

One British sci-fi TV series that captures the anxious mix of fear and wonder that accompanies machine-human interfaces is Black Mirror. One episode in this series, titled "The Entire History of You" features a piece of technology called "Grain".

When implanted behind a human's right ear, grain records a person's first-hand visual and auditory experience and converts it into a chronological collection of watchable videos.

Surgeons have made history in France, removing a cancerous brain tumor from a conscious patient wearing 3D virtual reality glasses. Placing the patient in an "artificial world" allowed the doctors to easily test parts of the brain during the operation.

"In creating a completely artificial world for the patient, we could map certain zones and connections of his brain related to functions that we could not, up to now, easily test on the operating table," Philippe Menei, a neurosurgeon at Angers hospital in western France, told AFP.

Alien hunters are hopeful that a photo snapped by the Mars Rover could show a stone coffin amid an ancient extraterrestrial burial ground on the red planet. Others attempts to read the picture resulted in observers "finding" a fallen statue amid the piles of stones.

The photo, taken by the Mars Rover back in May 2015, shows what first appears to be ordinary rocks and rubble. However, this week it captured the attention of several alien websites and UFO channels, which believe it could be (gasp) something more.

The Mister Enigma YouTube channel - which claims to be a source for the "best UFO, alien, and ghost news" - posted a video of the image and said it appears to show "some kind of sarcophagus laying on the edge of a cliff."

The video went on to state that in another photo taken a few moments later, there appears to be two faces carved into a cliff looking towards the object, prompting Mister Enigma to ask: "Could this be an ancient alien burial ground?"

If you're trying to keep flying pests away from your veranda lights on summer evenings, your choice of light bulb matters. A poster presented here today at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes Science) describes a new study comparing insect traps outfitted with the six major types of commercially available lights, including traditional incandescent bulbs, LED bulbs that emit cold and warm colored light, and the yellow tinted "bug lights" marketed as being less attractive to insects.

Over the course of a summer, researchers collected and catalogued 8887 insects and spiders from a neighborhood in Appomattox, Virginia. Although the factors that influence a light's attractiveness remain mysterious, the study revealed some clear winner and losers. Incandescent bulbs brought in the largest insect haul, averaging about eight per hour.

The "bug lights" and warm-colored LEDs were roughly tied for least attractive, at about 4.5. But the bug lights had a downside: They were more enticing than the warm LED to two insect orders that many people consider pesky: Hemiptera, which includes so-called "stink bugs," and pincer-clad Dermaptera, better known by the heebie-jeebies - inducing name "earwigs." Caveat emptor.