Sir David Attenborough has seen some horrific sights over the course of his 60-year career.

None so terrible, however, than watching monkeys brutally murdered by chimpanzees.

The Octogenarian naturalist, who released his latest film Natural History Museum Alive on New Year's Eve, was answering questions from fans during an hour-long Q&A session on social media site Reddit yesterday.

Asked by one member what he felt his distressing moment was, he said:

"Seeing chimpanzees kill monkeys, they do this to eat them.

A new, "potentially hazardous" asteroid has been discovered by one of NASA's recently reactivated spacecraft - and it's headed in Earth's direction.

The new asteroid, called 2013 YP139, was spotted by NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), and marks the spacecraft's first discovery since being resurrected last year.

According to the Telegraph, the asteroid is still 27 million miles (43 million km) away from Earth, but with a diameter of nearly half a mile (0.4 miles, to be precise), an impact with our planet would cause significant damage. NASA estimates any asteroid with a diameter greater than 0.5 miles could create worldwide consequences upon impact.

The 2013 YP139 doesn't quite raise concern to that level, but its trajectory has attracted the attention of NASA.

Fortunately, the space agency added that the asteroid will miss the Earth this time around, though it will fly by our planet at a distance of 300,000 miles, or about as close as the moon. It's not expected to get any closer for the next century.

Cats have been man's other best friend for thousands of years, with the first felines coming into the lives of humans at least 9,500 years ago, based on a grave unearthed in 2004 in Cyprus that contained the remains of a cat with its possible human master.

Since then, cats have spread to Egypt and throughout the rest of the world and have quickly become the most popular domestic pet in the world today, outnumbering dogs as pets by three to one.

However, while cat lovers often view their cuddly fur balls as another dependent, rather than an actual cat, those fur balls tend to look at us in a somewhat different way.

According to Dr. John Bradshaw, a British anthrozoologist of the University of Bristol, our cat friends look at us as just a larger, more docile version of themselves and has detailed his findings in a new book titled "Cat Sense," which was recently reviewed by The New York Times.

In his book, Bradshaw maintains that despite how much our pet cats infiltrate our daily lives, as can be seen in thousands of YouTube videos shared from around the world, cats are still essentially wild animals. And while most seem domesticated enough, they still have at least some wild elements about them.

If you sit and watch your cat long enough, you will see their wild side come through. Cats are hunters, and even living the domesticated life, they still want to hunt and continue to hone their skills in the form of what most people consider play time with kitty. But to the cat, this is considered a training exercise.

Under a microscope, the tiny trap of a carnivorous plant becomes an impressive gaping maw. Rootless and adrift in its wetland habitat, the humped bladderwort (Utricularia gibba) preys on water fleas and other small invertebrates. Organisms that trip the plant's sensory hairs are sucked inside bladderlike traps to be digested.

Neurobiologist Igor Siwanowicz of the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Va., created this psychedelic image of a bladderwort's trap using fluorescent dye to tag the cellulose in plant cell walls. This trap was just 1.5 millimeters long, so he magnified the image 100 times to reveal minuscule details, including digestive glands that line the trap's inner wall (red crosses). The plant also sports some microscopic hitchhikers: single-celled green algae living inside the trap (red-and-blue disks, three species shown). Algae escape digestion by squatting in older, inactive traps.

In December, Siwanowicz's photo took first place in the 2013 Olympus BioScapes Competition, an international contest for life science images.

• Mice taught to fear smells pass this information to their offspring
• The fear apparently causes chemical changes in their sperm
• This then alters the brains of their children causing them to fear the smell
  

  © AlamyGenetic: Mice taught to fear a certain smell pass this information on to their children through their sperm

The smell of fear can be inherited genetically and can be passed on for two generations, scientists have proved.

For the first time researchers at Emory School of Medicine in Georgia have shown that if mice are taught to fear a certain smell this triggers chemical changes in their sperm.

These changes then alter the makeup of their children and grandchildren's brains, causing them to fear the same smell.

If the same is true of humans it could completely change the way we think about adult behaviour, and how we treat conditions such as post traumatic stress disorder.

Kerry Ressler, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said: 'Knowing how the experiences of parents influence their descendants helps us to understand psychiatric disorders that may have a trans-generational basis, and possibly to design therapeutic strategies.'

During the study mice were taught to associate the smell of cherry blossom with a mild electric shock. After a short time the mice reacted fearfully even if they were just exposed to the smell.

Scientists then checked the mice's offspring and found that they also associated the odor with fear, despite never having been given an electric shock.

Scientists at The University of Nottingham have discovered a key difference in the biological mechanisms by which the immune system responds to viral and bacterial pathogens.

The study, published in the journal Nature Immunology and led by Professor Uwe Vinkemeier in the University's School of Life Sciences, centred on STAT1, a protein that can bind DNA and hence plays a vital role in regulating genes in the body.

STAT-1 responds to interferon signals, hormone-like molecules which control communication between cells to trigger defensive action by the body's immune system when pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, or parasites are detected. These powerful defensive actions are also part of the body's ability to control the growth of malignant tumours that can ultimately achieve their complete elimination.

It was previously thought that all interferons used single STAT1-containing units rather than STAT1 chains to regulate the activity of genes. However, using mice bred specially to express a mutated form of STAT1 which is limited to forming single STAT1 units, the Nottingham team has demonstrated that this abolishes the function of some interferons while leaving others largely unaffected.

In this excerpt from his new book, Our Mathematical Universe, M.I.T. professor Max Tegmark explores the possibility that math does not just describe the universe, but makes the universe.

What's the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything? In Douglas Adams' science-fiction spoof "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", the answer was found to be 42; the hardest part turned out to be finding the real question. I find it very appropriate that Douglas Adams joked about 42, because mathematics has played a striking role in our growing understanding of our Universe.

The Higgs Boson was predicted with the same tool as the planet Neptune and the radio wave: with mathematics. Galileo famously stated that our Universe is a "grand book" written in the language of mathematics. So why does our universe seem so mathematical, and what does it mean? In my new book "Our Mathematical Universe", I argue that it means that our universe isn't just described by math, but that it is math in the sense that we're all parts of a giant mathematical object, which in turn is part of a multiverse so huge that it makes the other multiverses debated in recent years seem puny in comparison.

The Hubble space telescope has captured "a lidless purple eye, staring back at us through space" - a star 20,000 light-years away from us that is ready to explode at any time now, according to NASA:

scientists say that it is destined to go supernova. Twenty-six years ago, another star with striking similarities went supernova - SN 1987A. Early Hubble images of SN 1987A show eerie similarities to SBW1. Both stars had identical rings of the same size and age, which were travelling at similar speeds; both were located in similar HII regions; and they had the same brightness. In this way SBW1 is a snapshot of SN1987a's appearance before it exploded, and unsurprisingly, astronomers love studying them together.

Of course, "about to explode" in cosmic terms may mean in one hundred years. Like NASA says, "if we are very lucky it may happen in our own lifetimes."

Why did the last 8 glacial periods only end when the earth's orbit around the sun reached maximum eccentricity ? This is the real unsolved mystery of the Ice Ages as discussed in previous posts and recently on The Science of Doom.

1. Phenomenology of Ice Ages
2. What causes interglacials - part 1
3. Part 2: The real cause of interglacials - Resonant dust clouds

With the last of these posts I finally thought there could be a solution to this mystery based on resonant interplanetary dust, but alas I could find no evidence whatsoever in TSI data and dismissed the idea. However I now realise that perhaps there is another solution which may have been looking us in the face all the time. The Earth already has a large resonant interplanetary body - the moon. There is no need to invent some hypothetical resonant dust. The trigger for interglacials is not changes in insolation but instead changes in tidal forces acting on the oceans and cryosphere. Every 100,000 years super-tides must occur whenever the decreased perihelion distance of the earth from the sun and the moon coincide and are synchronised with maximum eccentricity. These tidal forces combined with already known increases in insolation could well be the trigger that initiates the rapid break up and melting of the northern glaciers.

The 100,000 and 400,000 year cycles in the ellipticity of the Earth's orbit are caused by regular gravitational effects of the other planets as they orbit the sun, particularly those of Jupiter and Saturn. Every 100,000 years the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn align themselves so that their net gravity perturbs the Earth's orbit causing it to elongate and become more elliptical. This cycle reaches a maximum every 400,000 years in regular fashion.

The moon also is effected by the same regular (Milankovitz) induced variation in its orbit around the sun. This also causes an increased elliptical orbit of the moon around the Earth. Tidal forces vary as 1/r^3 so small changes in distance can have large effects on tides.

The gravitational force of the sun on the moon is more than twice that of the Earth. For an observer in outer space the moon appears to orbit the sun just like any other planet. It's orbit is perturbed by the Earth's gravity making it slightly concave. It is only from Earth that it appears to us to be in an elliptical orbit around the Earth.

Scientists searched a corner of the Internet for evidence of time travel into the past. They found no evidence that this fantastical form of travel exists.

Time travel into the future is physically possible: Einstein's theory of special relativity predicts that the time between two events is slower for faster-moving objects. This has been experimentally proven by measuring clocks on commercial planes. But time travel into the past is trickier.

Although many scientists have proposed the possibility of time travel into the past using the equations and concepts of Einstein's subsequent theory of general relativity, few scientists have conducted experiments to test these theories.

This is because the theories include mysterious concepts like wormholes and cosmic strings. Scientists have yet to confirm these things exist at all, let alone prove that they enable time travel into the past. But this is not for lack of trying.

One of the few experimental studies that has searched for evidence of time travelers from the future includes a party hosted by the famous physicist Stephen Hawking.