Claims of the possibility of "gravity reduction" or "anti-gravity" induced by magnetic fields have been investigated by NASA before (New Scientist, 12 January 2002, p 24). But this one, Droscher insists, is different. "Our theory is not about anti-gravity. It's about completely new fields with new properties," he says. And he and Hauser have suggested an experiment to prove it.

This will require a huge rotating ring placed above a superconducting coil to create an intense magnetic field. With a large enough current in the coil, and a large enough magnetic field, Droscher claims the electromagnetic force can reduce the gravitational pull on the ring to the point where it floats free. Droscher and Hauser say that to completely counter Earth's pull on a 150-tonne spacecraft a magnetic field of around 25 tesla would be needed. While that's 500,000 times the strength of Earth's magnetic field, pulsed magnets briefly reach field strengths up to 80 tesla. And Droscher and Hauser go further. With a faster-spinning ring and an even stronger magnetic field, gravitophotons would interact with conventional gravity to produce a repulsive anti-gravity force, they suggest.

Dröscher is hazy about the details, but he suggests that a spacecraft fitted with a coil and ring could be propelled into a multidimensional hyperspace. Here the constants of nature could be different, and even the speed of light could be several times faster than we experience. If this happens, it would be possible to reach Mars in less than 3 hours and a star 11 light years away in only 80 days, Droscher and Hauser say.

The US military is considering testing the principle behind a type of space drive which holds the promise of reaching Mars in just three hours. The problem is, as New Scientist explains, it's entirely theoretical and many physicists admit they don't understand the science behind it.

Two ice surges, known to Alaska Natives as ivus, stunned residents who had never seen such large blocks of ice rammed ashore.

"It just looked like a big old mountain of ice,'' said L.A. Leavitt, 19, who left his nightshift job at the city to check out the ridges.

Ivus are like frozen tsunamis and crash ashore violently. They have killed hunters and are among the Arctic's most feared natural phenomena.

The ivus crashed ashore Tuesday after strong winds from Russia and eastward currents began pushing pack ice toward Barrow last weekend, said North Slope Borough disaster coordinator Rob Elkins.

By late Monday, thick, old sea ice known as multiyear ice had shoved younger, thinner ice onto shore.

The planet, which has been given the unglamorous name OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, is considered an unlikely candidate for life, as it has a surface temperature of -220C (-364F) that precludes the presence of the liquid water thought necessary to sustain organisms.

Nevertheless, the discovery is an important breakthrough in the search for extra-terrestrial life, as it suggests that small, rocky planets like the Earth are relatively common around other stars.

If similar worlds are found to exist orbiting in the "habitable zones" of solar systems with suitably moderate temperatures, they would be prime candidates for supporting extra-terrestrial life.

Most of the exoplanets discovered to date are gas giants, similar in size or larger than Jupiter.

If the acceleration continues at the current rate, the scientists warn that sea levels could rise during this century by between 28 and 34cm.

Dr John Church, a scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation based in Tasmania and an author of the study, said that higher sea levels could have grave effects on some areas.

"It means there will be increased flooding of low-lying areas when there are storm surges," he told the Associated Press.

"It means increased coastal erosion on sandy beaches; we're going to see increased flooding on island nations."

Youlsau Bells of Palau, a chain of 200 islands in Micronesia in the Pacific with a population of 17,000, said causeways connecting the seven inhabited islands had always been dry even at high tide, but now they were covered half the time. Three islands are just above sea level and their 7,000-strong population may have to be evacuated.

All five of the hottest years since modern record-keeping began in the 1890s occurred within the last decade, according to analysis by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

In descending order, the years with the highest global average annual temperatures were 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004, NASA said in a statement.

"It's fair to say that it probably is the warmest since we have modern meteorological records," said Drew Shindell of the NASA institute in New York City.

"Using indirect measurements that go back farther, I think it's even fair to say that it's the warmest in the last several thousand years."

Officials at Grandfather Mountain said the upper limit on their anemometer is 200 mph, but the needle on the gauge went beyond its limit, leading weather observers to speculate that the wind speeds exceeded 200 mph. The highest wind speed ever recorded in the Eastern U.S. was 231 mph at Mount Washington, N.H. on April 12, 1934.

Grandfather Mountain's summit visitors center suffered extensive damage when the wind blew out three double-strength, steel-wire-reinforced windows, ripped up floor tiles, blew open a locked door; tore a wooden mantel off a wall and upended a 300-pound boulder that was cemented into the parking area.

The Science Learning Centre in London asked 11,000 pupils for their views on science and scientists.

Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as "normal young and attractive men and women".

They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did "very important work" and 70% thought they worked "creatively and imaginatively". Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did "boring and repetitive work".

Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were "really brainy people".

The research is being undertaken as part of Einstein Year.

Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: "Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family", and "because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female".

The researchers also found that water evaporation rates across the country have decreased in the same period, by about 1.5 inches per decade. The dip in solar radiation, combined with other factors such as increased temperatures and wind speeds, are likely behind this trend, said lead researcher Yun Qian from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory(PNNL) in Washington.

Adding further support to this hypothesis is that cloud cover, the other likely explanation, has actually decreased in China over the past half century, by 0.78 percent each decade.

Eliminating clouds from the dimming equation leaves little doubt that fossil fuel emissions, which have increased by nine-fold in the past half-century, is blanketing China in a foggy haze that absorbs and deflects sunlight, the researchers say.

The finds were made during a three-year study of 30 caves in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. Many of the creatures live only in caves and some only in one particular cave of Sequoia and Kings Canyon, according to the study, conducted by park staff and biologists from Austin, Texas-based Zara Environmental .

"We thought we might find a handful of new species," said Joel Despain, cave specialist for the parks. "It was amazing to find 27."

"I'm very confident we will have samples in there that are the first returned from beyond the Moon," former Stardust project manager, Ken Atkins, told the BBC News website.

"It is magnificent to see something that we saw leave the planet on 7 February 1999 return to the planet here on 15 January 2006."

The highlight of Stardust's seven-year mission was its close encounter with Comet Wild 2 in January 2004.

A hurricane's winds are mostly horizontal, not vertical. So the vertical churning that leads to lightning doesn't normally happen.

Lightning has been seen in hurricanes before. During a field campaign in 1998 called CAMEX-3, scientists detected lightning in the eye of hurricane Georges as it plowed over the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The lightning probably was due to air forced upward—called "orographic forcing"—when the hurricane hit the mountains.

"Hurricanes are most likely to produce lightning when they're making landfall," says Blakeslee. But there were no mountains beneath the "electric hurricanes" of 2005—only flat water.

It's tempting to think that, because Emily, Rita and Katrina were all exceptionally powerful, their sheer violence somehow explains their lightning. But Blakeslee says that this explanation is too simple. "Other storms have been equally intense and did not produce much lightning," he says. "There must be something else at work."

When Libbrecht started making snowflakes in the laboratory, he took microscopic photographs in order to be able to study the basic physics of each flake. In 2001, he started capturing images of natural snowflakes.

Location is important.

"Fairbanks sometimes offers some unusual crystal types, because it's so cold," Libbrecht said. "Warmer climates, for example, in New York state and the vicinity, tend to produce less spectacular crystals."

"I visit the frozen North and wait for snow to fall," Libbrecht said in a recent e-mail interview. "I'm in northern Ontario right now."

"The answer is basically yes, because there is such an incredibly large number of possible ways to make a complex snowflake," Libbrecht said. "In many cases, there are very clear differences between snow crystals, but of course there are many similar crystals as well. In the lab we often produce very simple, hexagonal crystals, and these all look very similar."

"What will go into the cave is a copy of all the material that is currently in collections [spread] all around the world," Geoff Hawtin of the Trust told the BBC's Today programme.

Mr Hawtin said there were currently about 1,400 seed banks around the world, but a large number of these were located in countries that were either politically unstable or that faced threats from the natural environment.

"What we're trying to do is build a back-up to these, so that a sample of all the material in these gene banks can be kept in the gene bank in Spitsbergen," Mr Hawtin added.

The Norwegian government is due to start work on the seed vault next year, when it will drill into a sandstone mountain on Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard archipelago, about 966km (600 miles) from the North Pole.

The discovery suggests that small human ancestors known as hominids had to survive being hunted not only by large predators on the ground but by fearsome raptors that swooped from the sky, said Lee Berger, a senior paleoanthropologist at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand.

But they also identified features previously never described: puncture marks and ragged incisions in the base of the eye sockets, made when eagles rip out the eyes of dead monkeys with their talons and beaks to get at the brains. Large predators can't reach inside the tiny sockets and instead crack open the skulls, Berger said.

The study prompted Berger to re-examine the Taung skull.

"I picked up this little face, and I almost dropped it," he said Thursday. There was a tiny hole and jagged tears at the base of the eye sockets that he and over two dozen other researchers had never noticed.

rown University's library boasts an anatomy book that combines form and function in macabre fashion. Its cover--tanned and polished to a smooth golden brown, like fine leather--is made of human skin.

In fact, a number of the nation's finest libraries, including Harvard's, have such books in their collections. The practice of binding books in human skin was not uncommon in centuries past, even if it was not always discussed in polite society.

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Brown's John Hay Library has three books bound in human skin--the 1568 anatomy text by the Belgian surgeon Andreas Vesalius, and two 19th-century editions of "The Dance of Death," a medieval morality tale.

One copy of "The Dance of Death" was rebound in 1893 by Joseph Zaehnsdorf, a master binder in London. A note to his client reports that he did not have enough skin and had to split it. The front cover, bound in the outer layer of skin, has a slightly bumpy texture, like soft sandpaper. The spine and back cover, made from the inner layer, feel like suede.

Bird flu appears more likely to wing its away around the globe by plane than by migrating birds. Scientists have been unable to link the spread of the virus to migratory patterns, suggesting that the thousands of wild birds that have died, primarily waterfowl and shore birds, are not primary transmitters of bird flu.

If that holds true, it would suggest that shipments of domestic chickens, ducks and other poultry represents a far greater threat than does the movement of wild birds on the wing.

It also would underscore the need to pursue the virus in poultry farms and markets rather than in wild populations of birds if a possible pandemic is to be checked, U.S. and European experts said.

The H5N1 strain has infected millions of poultry throughout Asia and parts of Europe since 2003. The virus also has killed at least 71 people, many of whom had close contact with poultry.

"There is more and more evidence building up that wild migratory birds do play some role in spreading the virus, but personally I believe -- and others agree -- that it's not a major role," said Ward Hagemeijer, a wild bird ecologist with Wetlands International, a conservation group in Wageningen, Netherlands. "If we would assume based on this evidence that wild birds would be a major carrier of the disease we would expect a more dramatic outbreak of the disease all over the world."

So if we believe that the size of the human "footprint" is a serious problem (and there is much evidence for this) then a rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed.

Let us assume (reasonably) that an optimum human population level exists, which would provide the physical and intellectual capacity to ensure a rich and fulfilling life for all, but would represent a call upon the services of the planet which would be benign and hence sustainable over the long term.

A scientific analysis can tell us what that optimum number is (perhaps 2-3 billion?).

With that number and a timescale as targets, a path to reach "Utopia" from where we are now is, in principle, a straightforward matter of identifying options, choosing the approach and then planning and navigating the route from source to destination.

World population is expected to increase by 2.6 billion over the next 45 years, from 6.5 billion today to 9.1 billion in 2050. Almost all growth will take place in the less developed regions, where today's 5.3 billion population is expected to swell to 7.8 billion in 2050. By contrast, the population of the more developed regions will remain mostly unchanged, at 1.2 billion.

Writing emerged in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India as far back as 3,000 B.C. Yet the first full-blown text -- a series of signs that are clearly telling a story— does not show up in the New World until about 400 to 300 B.C. They were left by the Zapotecs in the Oaxaca Valley south of central Mexico. Most of the early Maya writing comes from between A.D. 150 and 250.

Because Zapotec writing emerged so much earlier, researchers have long believed that the Maya were influenced by it.

The earliest single Mayan glyph — which could have stood for a person's name or might have been a sign on a calendar — dates to about 600 B.C. But it isn't considered writing. These new glyphs are much more complex, project leader William Saturno of the University of New Hampshire said.

"This is a full-blown and fully developed script," Saturno told LiveScience. "Which is not to say that the Maya invented writing and not the Zapotec, but it does lead us to question the origins and the complexities of these origins."

The Exhibition will utilize approximately 20,000-square-foot of exhibit space, showcasing the eye-opening effects of obesity on the human body through authentic human bodies of those who damaged their organs due to over- eating and lack of exercise. The exhibition also features a healthy lung and a black lung ravaged by smoking side by side in a vivid comparison that is undeniably more powerful than any textbook image. In addition to providing an up-close look inside our skeletal, muscular, respiratory and circulatory systems, the exhibition encourages healthy lifestyle choices by serving as a wake-up call demonstrating how our own choices directly affect our health. The exhibition will change the way people see themselves. It is designed to enlighten, empower, fascinate and inspire.

The human body specimens in the exhibition are preserved through a revolutionary technique called polymer preservation. In this process, human tissue is permanently preserved using liquid silicone rubber that is treated and hardened. The end result is a rubberized specimen, preserved to the cellular level, showcasing the complexity of the body's many bones, muscles, nerves, blood vessels and organs. The full-body specimens can take more than a year to prepare. After undergoing the polymer preservation process, they become impervious to decomposition.

Suggs and Cooke next consulted star charts and lunar imaging software and determined the meteoroid was likely a Taurid, part of an annual meteor shower active at the time of the strike. Based on the amount of light produced the object was roughly five inches in diameter, traveling more than 60,000 mph, and may have gouged a crater nearly 10 feet in diameter out of the moon's surface.

The Taurids, which approach Earth from the direction of the Taurus constellation, are believed to be ancient remnants of comet Encke, which orbits the Sun every 3.3 years.

NASA scientists previously studied lunar meteor strikes during the Apollo moon program, but lacked the sophisticated video cameras and high-powered image processors to capture the tiny, telling flashes. Now, however, as NASA readies its next-generation spaceship to carry explorers back to the moon for potential long-term stays, Suggs and Cooke say lunar impact research is more vital than ever.