Science Glance
The US space agency's Dawn probe has gone into orbit around Ceres, the largest object in the Solar System between Mars and Jupiter.
A signal from the satellite confirming its status was received by ground stations at 13:36 GMT. Ceres is the first of the dwarf planets to be visited by a spacecraft. Scientists hope to glean information from the object that can tell them about the Solar System's beginnings, four and a half billion years ago.
Nasa's Dawn probe achieves orbit around Ceres
Jaw bone discovered in Ethiopia is oldest known human lineage remains
A lower jaw bone and five teeth discovered on a hillside in Ethiopia are the oldest remains ever found that belong to the genus Homo, the lineage that ultimately led to modern humans.
Fossil hunters spotted the jaw poking out of a rocky slope in the dry and dusty Afar region of the country about 250 miles from Addis Ababa.
The US-led research team believes the individual lived about 2.8m years ago, when the now parched landscape was open grassland and shrubs nourished by tree-lined rivers and wetlands.
UK scientists work out weight of Sophie the Stegosaurus
Scientists at a British museum have worked out the living weight of Sophie, one of the world's most complete Stegosaurus skeletons.
London's Natural History Museum said Tuesday that Sophie, a young adult when it died around 150 million years ago, weighed around 1.6 tons (1,600 kilograms) and its body mass was about the same size as a small rhinoceros.
The scientists worked out the dinosaur's body mass after creating a 3-D digital version of its skeleton, calculating the volume of flesh around the bones, and comparing the data with information from similar-sized modern animals.
Scientists photograph light as particle and wave
Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior.
Quantum mechanics tells us that light can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave. However, there has never been an experiment able to capture both natures of light at the same time; the closest we have come is seeing either wave or particle, but always at different times. Taking a radically different experimental approach, EPFL scientists have now been able to take the first ever snapshot of light behaving both as a wave and as a particle. The breakthrough work is published in Nature Communications.
'Most powerful' X-ray machine opens new frontier
Researchers in Palo Alto in the US state of California have developed the most powerful X-ray laser in the world.
The Linac Coherent Light Source is being used to see how atoms and molecules move in living systems. The machine is a billion times more intense than the previous generation of lasers.
Each X-ray pulse has as much power as the national grid of a large country, and a hundred are produced every second.
Spy agencies fund climate research in hunt for weather weapon, scientist fears
A senior US scientist has expressed concern that the intelligence services are funding climate change research to learn if new technologies could be used as potential weapons.
Alan Robock, a climate scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has called on secretive government agencies to be open about their interest in radical work that explores how to alter the world’s climate.
UK Scientists: Aliens May Have Sent Space Seeds To Create Life On Earth
Scientists in the U.K. have examined a tiny metal circular object, and are suggesting it might be a micro-organism deliberately sent by extraterrestrials to create life on Earth.
Don't be fooled by the size of the object in the microscopic image above. It may appear to look like a planet-sized globe, but in fact, it's no bigger than the width of a human hair.
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