The latest details from the investigations into the crash of Asiana flight 214 in San Francisco indicate that the jet was flying dangerously slow before it hit the ground. While the NTSB sorts out whether this was pilot error or not, DNews wondered, Would an autonomous piece of computer hardware and software have done better?

The short answer is probably, but that doesn't mean we should hand over control to computers altogether.

Although the technology giving jets the ability to land themselves has been around for decades, it's been limited to the military.

"When I was flying the F/A-18 Hornet, the level of automation made me step back and reevaluate my life," Missy Cummings, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems director of the Humans and Automation Laboratory at MIT told DNews.

"The plane landed itself better on the carrier than I ever could."

She was convinced that the days of human pilots were numbered.

It hasn't happened because the technology has not moved into commercial airliners. Contrary to popular assumption, the autopilot systems on passenger jets do not handle take off, fly the plane completely and control the landing. In fact, these systems are designed to carry out orders, such as "maintain this heading" or "stay on this glide path."

A new device that trains the brain to convert sounds into images could someday be used as a non-invasive treatment for blind and partially sighted people, according to researchers at the University of Bath.

Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) aim to compensate for the loss of a sensory modality, typically vision, by converting information from the lost modality into stimuli in a remaining modality.

The device in the current study, dubbed "The vOICe," is a visual-to-auditory SSD that encodes images taken by a camera worn by the user into "soundscapes," allowing experienced users to extract information about their surroundings to construct an image in their mind.

The researchers, led by Dr. Michael Proulx from the University's Department of Psychology, examined how blindfolded sighted participants responded to an eye test using the device. The participants were asked to perform a standard eye chart test known as the Snellen Tumbling E test, which asked participants to view the letter E turned in four different directions and in various sizes.

Normal, best-corrected visual acuity is considered 20/20, calculated in terms of the distance (in feet) and the size of the E on the eye chart.

A meteor hitting the Earth 12,800 years ago released toxic gases into the air and blocked out the sun causing temperatures to plummet and plants to die

Some species managed to adapt but the woolly mammoth died out

A giant meteor was probably responsible for wiping out the woolly mammoth, scientists believe.

It has long been thought that hunting was the cause of the creatures' extinction, but researchers have now revised their opinion.

They believe a huge meteor smashing through the Earth's atmosphere broke up into ten million tonnes of fiery fragments, scattering over four continents.

These fragments are thought to have released toxic gas which poisoned the air and blacked out the sun, causing temperatures to plummet, plants to die and landscapes to alter forever.

Female woolly mammoth was found frozen in a Siberian ice tomb in May

The creature will be on display in Tokyo until September

Scientists think she got stuck in a swamp and died over 39,000 years ago

Blood sample found at the scene could be used to clone the beast

A female woolly mammoth, which was found frozen in Russia in May, has gone on display in an exhibition hall in Tokyo.

The 39,000-year-old mammoth will be on display at the hall in Yokohama in the south of the Japanese city from 13 July until September 16.

Visitors and tourists will be able to come and view the extinct creature that was discovered in an ice tomb in the New Siberian Islands, or Novosibirsk Islands, earlier this year.

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It almost seems like a mystical correlation. Babies conceived at certain times of the year appear healthier than those conceived during other times. Now, scientists have shown that the bizarre phenomenon is actually true - and they think they may know why it happens.

The work is "a really long-overdue analysis," says economist Douglas Almond of Columbia University, who was not involved in the study. "This is maybe not quite a smoking gun," he says, "but it's much stronger than the previous evidence."

As early as the 1930s, researchers noticed that children born in winter were more prone to health problems later in life: slower growth, mental illness, and even early death. Among the proposed explanations were diseases, harsh temperatures, and higher pollution levels associated with winter, when those expectant mothers and near-term fetuses might be most vulnerable.

But recently, as economists looked at demographics, the picture got more complicated. Mothers who are nonwhite, unmarried, or lack a college education are more likely to have children with health and developmental problems. They are also more likely to conceive in the first half of the year. That made it hard to tease out the socioeconomic effects from the seasonal ones.

Economists Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt of Princeton University took a new approach to resolving this long-standing question, using data from the vital statistics offices in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania about births between 1994 and 2006. To control for socioeconomic status, their study looked only at siblings born to the same mother. And lo and behold, seasonal patterns persist, they report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Next generation sequencing (NGS) techniques have allowed scientists to sequence DNA at faster rates than ever before, and in the process they have begun to revolutionize fields as disparate as anthropology and botany.

The technology is also now being used to screen embryos for in vitro fertilization (IVF), and the first child to ever pass though that screening process was recently born in the United States.

Developed in the UK at the University of Oxford, the embryo screening process is designed to scan the embryo for genetic abnormalities that could lead to a miscarriage, defective genes or mitochondrial DNA mutations.

"Next generation sequencing provides an unprecedented insight into the biology of embryos," said Dr. Dagan Wells at Oxford's Biomedical Research Centre, who helped to develop the screening process and reported on the child birth at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

Hearing voices in one's head may precede a trip to a neurologist. But not necessarily, if you're riding a train equipped with Sky Go. German ad agency BBDO Deutschland has teamed up with Sky Go to produce a new kind of advertising that beams messages to a person's head as they ride on a train.

Huh?

It works using a small box-like device called a Sky Go module, which delivers audio advertisements in the form of vibrations across the train's windows. When a commuter leans her head against the window, the vibrations get transmitted to her skull and through the bones in her ear in a way that allows her to hear the message.

Scuba divers have discovered a primeval underwater forest off the coast of Alabama.

The Bald Cypress forest was buried under ocean sediments, protected in an oxygen-free environment for more than 50,000 years, but was likely uncovered by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said Ben Raines, one of the first divers to explore the underwater forest and the executive director of the nonprofit Weeks Bay Foundation, which researches estuaries.

The forest contains trees so well-preserved that when they are cut, they still smell like fresh Cypress sap, Raines said.

The stumps of the Cypress trees span an area of at least 0.5 square miles (0.8 kilometers), several miles from the coast of Mobile, Alabama, and sit about 60 feet (18 meters) below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite its discovery only recently, the underwater landscape has just a few years to be explored, before wood-burrowing marine animals destroy the ancient forest.

Scientists are a step closer to solving part of a 165-million-year-old giant jigsaw puzzle: the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana.

Finding the past position of Earth's continents is a finicky task. But pinning down their wanderings plays a key role in everything from understanding ancient climate to how Earth's mountains and oceans evolved. Through "plate reconstruction" models, geoscientists illustrate how Earth's continents crunch together and split apart.

Before it cracked into several landmasses, Gondwana included what are today Africa, South America, Australia, India and Antarctica. The big continents - Africa and South America - split off about 180 million to 170 million years ago. In recent years, researchers have debated what happened next, as the remaining continents rocketed apart. For example, different Gondwana reconstruction models had a 250-mile (400 kilometers) disagreement in the fit between Australia and Antarctica, an error that has a cascading effect in plate reconstructions, said Lloyd White, a geologist at Royal Holloway University in Surrey, England.

"If Australia's in the wrong position by that amount, then when we try to build these models of what the Earth used to look like, it can have a flow-on effect around the globe," White told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

Crime scene investigation got a boost into the 21st century this past week, as a team of researchers at the University of Leicester, in the UK, announced the development of a new technique for gathering fingerprints that can even find hidden prints.

Due to TV and movies, the techniques used up until now are pretty familiar to everyone - an investigator brushes a special powder onto the surfaces at a crime scene, and the powder sticks to the sweat and oils left behind when anyone at the scene touched something. The contrast between the colour of the powder and whatever the fingerprint is on lets the investigators see the print and get a record of it. Since the chance of two people having the same fingerprints is extremely slim (something like 1 in 64 billion), it gives them a good chance to identify who was there and narrow down who the criminal was.

Criminals know about this though, and they've exploited one of the weaknesses of the technique, by literally wiping away the evidence. Even the most thorough criminal can miss something, though, and it's these missed or 'hidden' fingerprints that investigators have to rely upon. Quite often, though, the quality of the print isn't good enough for it to be used in court.

However, now steps in the research team from the University of Leicester, with a new, and incredibly accurate way of lifting and reading these prints.

This new method uses the fact that the residue of sweat and oils our skin leaves behind is insulating - that is, it doesn't conduct electricity. If the surface underneath the print is conductive, like a metal knife or bullet casing, a special coloured 'electro-active' film is applied that transfers the colour only to the conductive surface, and even the thinnest amount of residue will prevent the colour from being transferred. This reveals the fingerprint in negative, with extremely fine detail.