A supervolcano on the ocean floor might have spewed massive amounts of lava in a rapid amount of time, new findings that could help reveal the mysterious origin of some of these ancient goliaths, which may have triggered mass extinctions through Earth's history.

Roughly a dozen supervolcanoes currently exist. Some are on land, while others lie at the bottom of the ocean. Each has produced several million cubic miles of lava - about three hundred times the volume of all the Great Lakes combined - dwarfing the amount of lava produced by the Hawaiian volcanoes or the Icelandic volcano that erupted recently.

These eruptions have dramatically shaped life on Earth, pumping huge amounts of ash, dust and gas into the atmosphere that have killed off species and altered global climate. Despite their global impact, the cause of the massive eruptions from supervolcanoes at times remains unknown.

One of the puzzles that geologists occasionally ponder is the nature of eskers and drumlins.

Eskers are winding ridges a few tens of metres high that look remarkably like railway embankments. Indeed they are often used as readymade roads and run up and down hills over distances that sometimes stretch to hundreds kilometres.

Drumlins, on the other hand, are tear drop-shaped hills a few tens of metres high and a hundreds of metres long. They often appear in large numbers with the same orientation in drumlin fields .

Geologists have long assumed that eskers and drumlins are formed by glaciers and left behind after these ice giants retreated.

There are essentially two problems. The first is the internal structure of these formations. Eskers and drumlins have have an outer layer of water-borne clay and silt with attendant fossil debris. This covers an inner core made of unsorted boulders and rocks which are entirely free of fossils. These inner cores do not appear to have been affected by the action of water. How does this structure arise?

The second is that if glaciers are responsible for eskers and drumlins, they ought to be forming now. And yet nobody can find anywhere on Earth where these structures are currently forming.

Today, Milton Zysman and Frank Wallace publish on the arXiv their explanation for the formation of these objects and it makes for fascinating, if not entirely convincing, reading.

The discovery of a 'missing link' between man and apes could revolutionise our understanding of how we evolved, scientists say.

They believe the two-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a child, found in South Africa, is that of an entirely new species and an intermediate stage between our ape-like ancestors and modern man.

And they claim it could help us crack one of the great mysteries of our evolutionary tree - exactly when humans began to walk on two feet.

Secrecy undermines the practice of good science, charges Michael Schrage in an opinion piece published in the Financial Times, and governments need to step in and provide more incentives for open sharing of data.

"On issues of the greatest importance for public policy, science researchers are less transparent than they should be," Schrage writes. "That behavior undermines science, policy and public trust."

Schrage cites the recent scandal over emails stolen from the computers of climate researchers at the University of East Anglia as an example of the distortions caused by a modern climate of secrecy and competition in science. Although there is no evidence that researchers falsified data as some climate skeptics have alleged, the Associated Press concluded that "One of the most disturbing elements suggests an effort to avoid sharing scientific data with critics skeptical of global warming. ... It raises a science ethics question because free access to data is important so others can repeat experiments as part of the scientific method."

Schrage also notes that only recently have many U.S. universities begun to require that drug researchers expose financial ties to the companies that make the products they are testing.

Hubble has snapped a spectacular view of the largest "player" in the Leo Triplet, a galaxy with an unusual anatomy: it displays asymmetric spiral arms and an apparently displaced core. The peculiar anatomy is most likely caused by the gravitational pull of the other two members of the trio.

The unusual spiral galaxy, Messier 66, is located at a distance of about 35 million light-years in the constellation of Leo. Together with Messier 65 and NGC 3628, Messier 66 is one third of the Leo Triplet, a trio of interacting spiral galaxies, part of the larger Messier 66 group. Messier 66 wins out in size over its fellow triplets - it is about 100 000 light-years across.

A cache of cuneiform tablets unearthed by a team led by a University of Toronto archaeologist has been found to contain a largely intact Assyrian treaty from the early 7th century BCE.

"The tablet is quite spectacular. It records a treaty -- or covenant -- between Esarhaddon, King of the Assyrian Empire and a secondary ruler who acknowledged Assyrian power. The treaty was confirmed in 672 BCE at elaborate ceremonies held in the Assyrian royal city of Nimrud (ancient Kalhu). In the text, the ruler vows to recognize the authority of Esarhaddon's successor, his son Ashurbanipal," said Timothy Harrison, professor of near eastern archaeology in the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations and director of U of T's Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP).

Big planet or companion brown dwarf? Using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have discovered an unusual object orbiting a brown dwarf, and its discovery could fuel additional debate about what exactly constitutes a planet. The object circles a nearby brown dwarf in the Taurus star-forming region with an orbit approximately 3.6 billion kilometers (2.25 billion miles) out, about the same as Saturn from our sun. The astronomers say it is the right size for a planet, but they believe the object formed in less than 1 million years - the approximate age of the brown dwarf - and much faster than the predicted time it takes to build planets according to conventional theories.

Kamen Todorov of Penn State University and his team conducted a survey of 32 young brown dwarfs in the Taurus region.

The object orbits the brown dwarf 2M J044144 and is about 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter. Brown dwarfs are objects that typically are tens of times the mass of Jupiter and are too small to sustain nuclear fusion to shine as stars do.

Cyborgs - human beings merged with machines -- are a staple of science fiction. Star Wars's Darth Vader, Star Trek's Borg, and the Cybermen of Dr. Who are variations on this theme - and it's no coincidence they're all "bad guys." Cyborgs symbolize one of our greatest fears: that over time, we will become so enmeshed in our technology that we lose our humanity.

The real-life application of cyborg science is far from horrifying. Medical technology has developed implantable heart pacemakers, insulin pumps, hearing aids, and even computer chips for the brain to treat depression and Parkinson's disease. In that sense, we are already on the path to becoming cyborgs.

Transhumanists believe that the development of such technology will lead one day to "Human version 2.0" - an upgrade of the human body that not only eliminates many of the problems that plague us, but improves upon the basic human design. For instance, some transhumanists envision a day when the human brain will be re-wired with computer chips, allowing us to think, learn and communicate with unprecedented speed and accuracy.

There's an ethical leap between using technology to help people overcome disabilities, and using it to "improve" healthy humans. The 1972 science fiction novel, Cyborg by Martin Caidin, which was turned into the popular TV show The Six-Million-Dollar Man, bridges the gap by creating a cyborg superman as a life-saving measure. The title character was a NASA test pilot who suffered traumatic injuries when his plane crashed. His legs, left arm, and an eye were replaced with bionic parts, giving him superior speed, strength and vision.

Martin Caidin's novel may have been inspired by discussions taking place within the space community around that time. NASA had considered the possibility of engineering humans, not to create super heroes, but to help us travel to the other planets and the stars beyond.

A giant rock is walking among the "dirty iceballs" in the outer solar system, a new study suggests. Researchers say it may have journeyed there from the asteroid belt near Mars, or it may have been the victim of a cosmic crash that blasted away its once-icy exterior.

Quaoar was discovered in 2002 in the Kuiper belt, a ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune. At about 900 kilometres across, or 40 per cent as wide as Pluto, it is not the biggest denizen of the belt, but researchers now say it may be the densest.

Wesley Fraser and Michael Brown of Caltech confirmed its size by studying archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope. They also used Hubble images to study the motion of its moon, Weywot, which allowed them to calculate Quaoar's mass.

Combining the size and mass revealed Quaoar's density to be between 2.9 and 5.5 grams per cubic centimetre. That is much higher than that of other Kuiper belt residents like Pluto, which has a density of about 2.0 grams per cubic centimetre.

Quaoar's high density suggests it is made almost entirely of rock, unlike its neighbours, which are a mixture of ice and rock, the researchers conclude. They say the rocky world may be a refugee from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, thrown outwards early in the solar system's history, when the orbits of the giant planets are thought to have shifted.

A newly discovered asteroid will zip close by Earth Thursday, but poses no threat of crashing into our planet even though it is passing within the orbit of the moon.

The asteroid, called 2010 GA6, is a relatively small space rock about 71 feet (22 meters) wide and was discovered by astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, Az. The space rock will fly within the orbit of the moon when it passes Earth Thursday at 7:06 p.m. EDT (2306 GMT), but NASA astronomers said not to worry...the planet is safe.

"Fly bys of near-Earth objects within the moon's orbit occur every few weeks," said Don Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in a statement.

At the time of its closest pass, asteroid 2010 GA6 will be about 223,000 miles (359,000 km) from the Earth. That's about nine-tenths the distance between Earth and the moon [more asteroid photos].

The space rock is not the first asteroid to swing close by Earth this year.