With this in mind, the Americans have just launched their very latest rocket, the Ares 1. Fully developed, Ares will be able to carry four people to the moon.

It doesn't sound like much but it's a start, and quite a few other nations ? including the Chinese and the Indians ? are planning missions of this kind. For a generation weaned on the adventures of Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek, the idea of moving out into outer space doesn't sound quite as preposterous as it used to do. The big question ( Read more... )
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Scientists operating the giant £6 billion machine at Cern, the nuclear research body near Geneva, said yesterday that they had finally succeeded in making low energy proton collisions, which could eventually provide clues about the first Big Bang and the origins of the universe.

Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Cern's director, described the outcome as a "great achievement". He said that as the machine had only been switched back on last Friday, the results were very impressive. "The experiment has come ( Read more... )
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Some 5,000 miles away in southern India, scientists last month issued a plea for villagers and even student palaeontologists to halt the mass looting of hundreds of dinosaur eggs whose petrified embryos could shed new light on the extinction of a species.

Fascination with the ferocious beasts has never been greater, with scientists announcing almost weekly the discovery of new prehistoric species from giant crocodiles to feathered lizards that bear testimony to an evolutionary link with ( Read more... )
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The true test of the Large Hadron Collider will come in the first two months of 2010, when scientists plan to start deliberately crashing protons into each other to see what they can discover about the makeup of the universe and its tiniest particles.

The collisions ? seen by massive detectors ? were a side effect of the quick advances being made by the LHC during its startup phase, which began on Friday night, said Rolf Heuer, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, ( Read more... )
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Scientists have produced a map showing that Martian valley networks are more than twice as extensive as had previously been thought, indicating that they were carved by rivers.

They are concentrated in a belt circling the planet's equator and mid-southern latitudes. Experts believe they mark the paths of rivers that once flowed from the planet's southern highlands into a huge ocean.

The evidence suggests that billions of years ago much of Mars had an "arid continental climate" similar ( Read more... )
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Marine biologists have been astonished by the range of animals they have found during an underwater expedition that that took them down 5,000m (three miles), where they have now identified 17,650 deep-sea species.

One of the most surprising animals was a rare specimen of a primitive creature called a cirrate, or finned octopod, commonly called a "Dumbo" because they swim by flapping a pair of ear-like fins, rather like the Disney cartoon character. But the particular species the biologists ( Read more... )
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But I wasn't particularly drawn to the bloody or grotesque, either, so it's odd to think that I've now devoted 20 years of my life to investigating violent death as a forensic pathologist in New York City and Florida.

On my first day at St Thomas's Medical School in London, we kicked off with dissection; I remember my excitement at the prospect of cutting a real human body. Ultimately, though, it was a bit anticlimactic. They prepare bodies for dissection by embalming ( Read more... )
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Dr Mark Cregan, medical director at the Swiss healthcare and baby equipment company Medela, believes the existence of stem cells means breast milk could help a child "fulfil its genetic destiny", with a mother's mammary glands taking over from her placenta to guide infant development once her child is born.

"Breast milk is the only adult tissue where more than one type of stem cell has been discovered. That is very unique and implies a lot about the impressive bioactivity of breast milk ( Read more... )
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Some of the UK's top scientists will gather this week to share news of groundbreaking developments that will radically improve the chances of patients suffering from failing joints, damaged eyes, broken bones or scarred skin. The breakthroughs they have made will eventually ease the pressure to recruit, for example, blood donors of a particular type. Within a decade, blood cells made in the laboratory could be available for transfusions.

Professor Sue Hill, the Government's Chief Scientific ( Read more... )
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The gloomy message from Professor Steve Jones is: this is as good as it gets.

Professor Jones, from the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London, believes the mechanisms of evolution are winding down in the human race.

At least in the developed world, humans are now as close to utopia as they are ever likely to be, he argues.

Speaking at a UCL Lunch Hour Lecture in London, Professor Jones said there were three components to evolution - ( Read more... )
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It took a year of repairs before beams of protons circulated late yesterday in the Large Hadron Collider for the first time since it was heavily damaged by a simple electrical fault. Circulation of the beams was a significant leap forward.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research has taken the restart of the collider step by step to avoid further setbacks as it moves toward new scientific experiments - probably starting in January - regarding the ( Read more... )
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Palaeontologists have unearthed five new crocodile species that lived with the dinosaurs about 100 million years ago until they too became extinct about 64 million years ago.

Professor Paul Sereno of Chicago University and his colleagues discovered the dinosaurs while excavating remote sites in the Sahara desert, which was once part of the ancient southern continent of Gondwana and enjoyed a warm, moist climate similar to present-day Florida.

The finds show that these large reptiles ( Read more... )
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Scientists working for an American biotechnology company yesterday applied for a licence to carry out a clinical trial on patients in the US suffering from a type of macular degeneration, which causes gradual loss of vision. They expect the transplant operations to begin early in the new year.

The development is highly controversial because many "pro-life" groups are opposed to using human embryos in any kind of medical research but scientists believe that the benefits could revolutionise ( Read more... )
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Hobbie-J has been dubbed the smartest rat in the world after its NR2B gene, which controls memory, was boosted as an embryo. The rodent can remember objects three times as long as its smartest peers and can better solve complicated puzzles like mazes.

The success of Hobbie-J, which is named after a Chinese cartoon character, brings new hope for future dementia patients, as it is thought the gene enhancement could one day be incorporated into a drug treatment for human ( Read more... )
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She became known as "the hobbit", standing just over 3ft tall with a brain the size of a grapefruit, about a third of the average brain volume of modern humans. It seemed that the last of her species, Homo floresiensis, died out not long after she lived around 18,000 years ago.

But within weeks of her discovery being announced in the pages of the journal Nature, other scientists began to voice doubts over whether she did indeed belong to a new species. The sole female "hobbit", they said, ( Read more... )
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Taking notice of the good things around you and learning something new ? even how to fix a bike ? are part of the five-a-day deeds that together can help to avert cognitive decline in later life, the scientists believe.

Based on the idea of eating at least five portions of fresh fruit and vegetables each day to avoid heart disease and cancer, the researchers identified a handful of simple daily actions that anyone can do to maintain their mental wellbeing in later life.

The suggestions, ( Read more... )
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In exhaustive research involving nearly 10,000 people and taking eight years to complete, Professor Paul Frijters claims to have established that happiness is really quite cheap. And the monetary value of events such as marriage, moving house and bereavement is dramatically different depending on whether you are a man or a woman.

Men, his research finds, are both far more exalted and more depressed by changes in their lives. To an Australian man marriage is worth about ( Read more... )
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The human eye and brain have a tendency to see a bouncing tennis ball landing outside the court rather than inside the line, which is why referees are more likely to make mistakes when deciding whether a ball is out, scientists said. The findings can be exploited tactically by tennis players, who can only challenge a decision a limited number of times. Researchers say players should dispute controversial "out" calls and ignore "in" calls, even if the player thinks the "in" call is wrong.

The ( Read more... )
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The Soyuz TMA-12 capsule landed at 9:37 a.m. local time (0337GMT), about 55 miles north of Arkalyk in north-central Kazakhstan, Russian Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin told The Associated Press.

Search and recovery crews buzzed in on Mi-8 helicopters and extracted Richard Garriott, Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko from the capsule, which landed on its side on the brushy surface under a clear sky.

"What a great ride that was," said Garriott, an American computer ( Read more... )
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Some of the deadliest cancers, such as those affecting the lung and pancreas, get the least amount of public money, while five cancers with some of the best survival rates, including breast and leukaemia, receive nearly two-thirds of the money.

Lung cancer experts described the findings as "soul destroying" and made a plea to scientists to stop sidelining the disease. About 80 per cent of lung cancer victims die within the first year, mainly because people are diagnosed too late.

According ( Read more... )
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