Until very recently, one of the biggest myths in science was that all dinosaurs have been extinct for the past 65 million years. But thanks to new fossil discoveries that filled in our knowledge about avian dinosaurs, we now know that only some dinosaurs went extinct following an asteroid collision with Earth - others survived and gave rise to the birds we live with today.

To figure out how this evolution occurred, researchers in Chile have manipulated the genes of regular chickens so they develop tubular, dinosaur-like fibulas on their lower legs - one of the two long, spine-like bones you'll find in a drumstick.

In avian dinosaurs such as the Archaeopteryx, the fibula was a tube-shaped bone that reached all the way down to the ankle. Another bone, the tibia, grew to a similar length alongside it.

As evolution progressed through to a group of avian dinosaurs known as the Pygostylians, the fibula became shorter than the tibia, and sharper and more splinter-like towards the end, and it no longer reached the ankle.

While modern bird embryos still show signs of developing long, dinosaur-like fibulae, as they grow, these bones become shorter, thinner, and also take on the splinter-like ends of the Pygostylian bones, and never make it far enough down to the leg to connect with the ankle.

Researchers led by Joâo Botelho from the University of Chile decided to investigate how this transition from a long, tubular fibula in dinosaurs to a short, splinter-like fibula in birds actually came to be.

They achieved this by inhibiting the expression of a gene called IHH or Indian Hedgehog (seriously), which saw their chickens continue to grow the long, dinosaur-like fibulae that originated in their embryonic form.

In doing so, the team discovered something bizarre. Regular bone development sees cell division and therefore growth halt in the shaft long before the ends stop growing, but in modern chickens, the growth of the fibula halts first at the ends. This means the fibulae of modern chickens are actively blocked from reaching the lengths of their ancient relatives' bones.

Fires caused by lightning strikes on hydrocarbon storage plants are a century-old, yet to be addressed, problem, according to research published in the International Journal of Forensic Engineering. In the era of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, this is becoming an even more poignant issue for the fossil fuel industry.

Sterling Rooke of X8 Inc in Crofton, Maryland, and Miroslaw Skibniewski of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, at the University of Maryland, USA, explain that uncontrolled fires and explosions at storage facilities can cost US $10 million per incidence. Moreover, given that some facilities are in areas of high-frequency lightning storms, the threat is significant. They point out that a third of all modern hydrocarbon tank accidents are associated with lightning. Ironically, the burning of fossil fuels that has led to anthropogenic climate change during this last century, might also increase the frequency of lightning storms.

We don't want to alarm you, but researchers appear to have come a step closer to helping robots one day take over the world.

Inspired by insects and lizards, researchers at Stanford University, California have designed a tiny robot capable of shifting weights many times its size, either working solo in in groups.

The "microTug" robots use a special adhesive inspired by gecko toes to move objects over 2,000 times their weight. If this level of power was ever used against mankind, we might be in deep trouble.

Money can buy you immortality, according to the Russian internet multi-millionaire who is ploughing a fortune into a project to create a human that never dies.

Web entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov is behind the "2045 Initiative", an ambitious experiment to bring about immortality within the next 30 years by creating a robot capable of storing human personalities.

The group of neuroscientists, robot builders and consciousness researchers say they can create an android that is capable of uploading someone's personality.

Mr Itskov, who has made a reported £1bn from his Moscow-based news publishing company, is the project's financial backer.

A rocket has blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying a pair of spacecraft which hope to find if there really is life on Mars. The probes will travel almost 500 million km, meaning scientists will have to wait a while to get their first readings. Mission control at the space center in Kazakhstan gave the ExoMars operation the all clear, saying, "The rocket has started successfully," after lift-off at 09:31 GMT, Roscosmos stated. The first three separation stages all went according to plan, before the Breeze-M booster stage took over to give extra thrust. This was also successfully completed, according to information on the European Space Agency (ESA) website and Igor Komarov from Roscosmos.

Russia's space agency and the ESA are embarking on the mission to Mars to try and get a better understanding of the Red Planet and, of course, searching for signs of life. However, it is going to take the spacecraft seven months to get there. There are not one, but two probes, which will be looking to find things of interest on the fourth planet from the sun: the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and a small module called Schiaparelli. When the Proton rocket eventually reaches Mars in October, the TGO will orbit the planet using its sensors to pick up information that could show scientists that life once existed. Meanwhile the Schiaparelli module will actually land on the planet itself and take readings.

The real-life "Death Star" that astronomers recently caught in the act of destroying a planet is continuing to disintegrate nearby orbiting objects, researchers say.

This finding could shed light on how dead stars rip apart their planetary systems — a phenomenon that could happen in Earth's solar system billions of years from now, scientists added.

Recently, astronomers detected a dead star tearing apart a planetesimal — a small planetary body, such as a dwarf planet, large asteroid or moon. The dead star is a white dwarfknown as WD 1145+017, which lies about 570 light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo.

Scientists at the University of Berkeley have found that the amount of energy used per operation by computer components can be reduced to as little as one-millionth what it is now, if the transistors in modern computers are replaced with new magnetic chips.

"We wanted to know how small we could shrink the amount of energy needed for computing," explained Jeffrey Bokor, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of Berkeley and senior author of a paper about the breakthrough published in the journal Science Advances on Friday. "The biggest challenge in designing computers and, in fact, all our electronics today is reducing their energy consumption."

The massive galaxy wall discovered by a Canary Islands-based research team is a billion light years big. It is estimated to contain at least 10,000 times the mass of our Milky Way, so it should be no surprise it's part of a project called 'BOSS.'

Galaxies form clusters - groups of relatively neighboring galaxies - much the same way as our planets form the solar system and star systems form galaxies. If a group of clusters is big enough, astronomers christen it a 'supercluster.' What comes next, you might ask? Well, the answer is Great Walls, such as the BOSS Great Wall (BGW) discovered by Heidi Lietzen and her team at the Canary Islands' Institute of Astrophysics.

"We found two walls of galaxies ... that are larger in volume and diameter than any previously known superclusters. Together they form the system of the BOSS Great Wall, which is more extended than any other known structure," their research in Astronomy and Astrophysics reads.

Invisibility is one of those science fiction superpowers, along with flight or super speed, that most everyone has at least dreamt of having. In our current age, with the emerging science of metamaterials, invisibility seems closer than ever to becoming a reality. But there is still one problem: if a person achieved true, perfect invisibility, they would probably be blind.

When it comes to invisibility and cloaking, it's all about light, and metamaterials look like our best way to mess with it. Metamaterials are specially designed materials that have been created to produce a specific effect that wouldn't naturally occur. More specifically, Dr. Stephane Larouche, an Assistant Research Professor at Duke University's Meta Group explained, "Metamaterials are structured materials to which it's possible to assign effective properties." To create these futuristic materials, researchers are taking small pieces of metal or plastic and shaping them at almost unimaginably small scales, in order to create a specific response.

When Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) swung past the Red Planet in October 2014, it was an unprecedented opportunity for an armada of Mars robots to have a ringside seat of the interplanetary spectacle. But as dazzling as the flyby was, the real drama wasn't seen by the cameras of Mars orbiters or rovers; it was detected by a magnetometer. And that magnetometer, located 100 miles above the Martian surface, detected chaos.

"Comet Siding Spring plunged the magnetic field around Mars into chaos," said Jared Espley, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. and science team member of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, in a NASA press release. "We think the encounter blew away part of Mars' upper atmosphere, much like a strong solar storm would."

Although Mars' magnetic field is weak and patchy (unlike Earth's strong, global magnetosphere), MAVEN's sensitive magnetometer detected a huge upheaval in orbit as Siding Spring's own magnetism rattled the planet's magnetic field.

The comet's nucleus may only be a third of a mile wide, but the atmosphere surrounding the nucleus (known as the coma) was as wide as 600,000 miles when it encountered Mars. (The coma is formed through solar heating — the ices contained within a comet's nucleus sublimate into space, pumping the coma with gas.) Through interactions with the solar wind, comets also generate their own magnetic fields that loop their way through the coma. So when Siding Spring buzzed Mars, coming as close as 87,000 miles, the cometary magnetism punched Mars' weak magnetic field, sending it into violent turmoil for several hours.