A growing body of evidence suggests that the molecular machinery of life emits and absorb photons. Now one biologist has evidence that this light is a new form of cellular communication.

One of the more curious backwaters of biology is the study of biophotons: optical or ultraviolet photons emitted by living cells in a way that is distinct from conventional bioluminescence.

Nobody is quite sure how cells produce biophotons but the latest thinking is that various molecular processes can emit photons and that these are transported to the cell surface by energy carying excitons. A similar process carries the energy from photons across giant protein matrices during photosynthesis.

Whatever the mechanism, a growing number of biologists are convinced that when you switch off the lights, cells are bathed in the pale fireworks of a biophoton display.

A new collaboration between Oxford University and the Lausanne Museum of Zoology will use the latest genetic techniques to investigate organic remains that some have claimed belong to the 'Yeti' and other 'lost' hominid species.

The Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project invites institutions and individuals with collections of cryptozoological material (cryptozoology: the search for animals whose existence is not proven) to submit details of the samples they hold, and then on request submit the samples themselves, particularly hair shafts, for rigorous genetic analysis. The results will then be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Ever since Eric Shipton's 1951 Everest expedition returned with photographs of giant footprints in the snow there has been speculation that the Himalayas may be home to large creatures 'unknown to science'. Since then, there have been many eye-witness reports of such creatures from several remote regions of the world. They are variously known as the 'yeti' or 'migoi' in the Himalaya, 'bigfoot' or 'sasquatch' in America, 'almasty' in the Caucasus mountains and 'orang pendek' in Sumatra, as well as others.

Cape Canaveral, Florida - Astronauts aboard the International Space Station opened the hatch and floated inside a Space Exploration Technologies' Dragon capsule on Saturday, the first privately owned spaceship to reach the orbital outpost, NASA said.

Running ahead of schedule, station commander Oleg Kononenko and flight engineer Don Pettit opened the hatch to Dragon just before 6 a.m. EDT (1000 GMT), NASA mission commentator Josh Byerly reported from Mission Control in Houston.

The bell-shaped capsule, which was making its second test flight, arrived at the space station on Friday.

The crew wore protective masks and goggles, but the interior of Dragon, which is 350 cubic feet (10 cubic meters), about the size of a large walk-in closet, proved clean.

"There was no sign of any kind of (debris) floating around," Pettit radioed to Mission Control, adding that Dragon "smells like a brand new car."

"It looks like it carries about as much cargo as I could put in my pickup truck," Pettit later told reporters during an in-flight press conference.

"There's not enough room in here to hold a barn dance, but for transportation of crew up and down through Earth's atmosphere and into space, which is a rather short period of time, there's plenty of room in here for the envisioned crew," Pettit said.

US: Nashville, Tennessee - For years, varied and sometimes wild claims have been made about the origins of a group of dark-skinned Appalachian residents once known derisively as the Melungeons. Some speculated they were descended from Portuguese explorers, or perhaps from Turkish slaves or Gypsies.

Now a new DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy attempts to separate truth from oral tradition and wishful thinking. The study found the truth to be somewhat less exotic: Genetic evidence shows that the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin.

And that report, which was published in April in the peer-reviewed journal, doesn't sit comfortably with some people who claim Melungeon ancestry.

"There were a whole lot of people upset by this study," lead researcher Roberta Estes said. "They just knew they were Portuguese, or Native American."

Beginning in the early 1800s, or possibly before, the term Melungeon (meh-LUN'-jun) was applied as a slur to a group of about 40 families along the Tennessee-Virginia border. But it has since become a catch-all phrase for a number of groups of mysterious mixed-race ancestry.

In recent decades, interest in the origin of the Melungeons has risen dramatically with advances both in DNA research and in the advent of Internet resources that allow individuals to trace their ancestry without digging through dusty archives.

G. Reginald Daniel, a sociologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara who's spent more than 30 years examining multiracial people in the U.S. and wasn't part of this research, said the study is more evidence that race-mixing in the U.S. isn't a new phenomenon.

"All of us are multiracial," he said. "It is recapturing a more authentic U.S. history."

Rome - Italian doctors have saved the life of a 16-month-old boy by implanting the world's smallest artificial heart to keep the infant alive until a donor was found for a transplant.

The doctors at Rome's Bambino Gesu hospital said the operation was carried out last month and made public this week. The baby, whose identity has not been disclosed, was kept alive for 13 days before the transplant and is now doing well.

The baby was suffering from dilated myocardiopathy, a heart muscle disease which normally causes stretched or enlarged fibers of the heart. The disease gradually makes the heart weaker, stopping its ability to pump blood effectively.

"This is a milestone," surgeon Antonio Amodeo told Reuters television, adding that while the device was now used as bridge leading to a transplant, in the future it could be permanent.

Before the implant, the child also had a serious infection around a mechanical pump that had been fitted earlier to support the function of his natural heart.

Northside Independent School District plans to track students next year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their student identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112 of its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students.

District officials said the Radio Frequency Identification System (RFID) tags would improve safety by allowing them to locate students - and count them more accurately at the beginning of the school day to help offset cuts in state funding, which is partly based on attendance.

Northside, the largest school district in Bexar County, plans to modify the ID cards next year for all students attending John Jay High School, Anson Jones Middle School and all special education students who ride district buses. That will add up to about 6,290 students.

The school board unanimously approved the program late Tuesday but, in a rarity for Northside trustees, they hotly debated it first, with some questioning it on privacy grounds.

Cbet Circular No. 3123, issued on 2012, May 25, announces the recovery of comet P/2005 N3 (LARSON) = 2012 K4 (Larson) by our team; this comet was discovered on 2005, July 5.38 by S. Larson on CCD images taken in the course of the Mt. Lemmon Survey and it was last observed on 2005, December 02.

On 2012, May 22.6 we started an observing session to recover the periodic comet P/2005 N3. We found an object of magnitude ~20.4 located ~4 arcmin north-east of the nominal position. On May 25.6 we have been able to obtain a second night of observations.

Stacking of, respectively, seven and thirteen R-filtered exposures, 60-seconds each obtained remotely from the Haleakala-Faulkes Telescope North on 2012, May 22.6 and 25.6, through a 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD, shows that comet P/2005 N3 (LARSON) has a ill-defined central condensation of R magnitude about 20.3, surrounded by a weak coma 5" in diameter, and a faint and broad tail, nearly 8" long toward the south-west.

On Monday, June 4th, the Moon will pass through the shadow of Earth, producing a partial lunar eclipse visible across the Pacific from China to the United States.

Researchers have trapped a rainbow - slowing light to a near-stop - in an array of 25,000 "invisibility cloaks", each smaller than a hair's breadth.

A report in the New Journal of Physics shows how the quest for an invisibility cloak is leading to cleverer ways to use and manipulate light.

The trick could aid the analysis of complex samples or even communications.

In recent years, a number of research efforts has demonstrated a wide range of cloaking techniques.

Light can either be guided around or cancelled by a material that makes an object invisible to an observer.

For the most part, such cloaks have been tiny or limited in the range of colours or angles of light they work with.

Nevertheless, this kind of engineering of light and the paths it takes has in principle a great many applications besides invisibility.

Travelers could find themselves facing life-size virtual avatars at New York City's airports as soon as this summer. Today's avatars exist as projected video images rather than as interactive holograms, but the next generation is expected to have the "brains" to directly answer people's questions.

Three of the virtual assistants will appear at New York City's John F. Kennedy International and LaGuardia Airports, as well as New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport. Such "computerized, hologramlike avatars" will act as fancier versions of automated video greetings that direct passengers to ticket counters and instruct people on moving through airport security screening.

The technology exists to make more interactive avatars that respond to airport traveler questions in multiple languages, said Patrick Bienvenu, CEO at AirportOne.com and creator of the "AVA" airport avatar. He envisions AVA's next generation answering questions such as the location of departure gates and departure times for certain flights.