TV News LIES

The world crept closer to doomsday on Thursday.

That's according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which each year updates the hands on a clock meant to symbolize how close we are to the annihilation of the human race, or midnight. For the last three years, the world was five minutes from the end. Today, we're three minutes away.

The two-minute move is symbolic, but it gives a sense of how grim the outlook some of the best scientific minds have for humanity. The decision to move the hands forward, said Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists executive director Kennette Benedict, came about largely due to the threats posed by anthropogenic climate change and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Scientists at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, say they've invented the world's first teleporter. Naturally, it's named "Scotty" after Star Trek's enterprising engineer Mr. Scott.

"We present a simple self-contained appliance that allows relocating inanimate physical objects across distance," the researchers wrote in the paper submitted to the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction conference, held this week at Stanford University. "Users place an object into the sender unit, enter the address of a receiver unit, and press the relocate button."

Are we living inside a giant wormhole? Maybe, if researchers at the International School for Advanced Studies are to believed.

Scientists at Italy's Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, or SISSA, suggest the Milky Way is simply one big space-time transport system -- a cosmic tunnel across the universe.

The new paper involves researchers from the United States, Italy and India, and incorporates the latest theories and scientific evidence concerning dark matter and the beginning of the universe. Researchers say they're not positing the Milky Way is a wormhole, only that it could be.

Scientists have succeeded in reading parts of an ancient scroll that was buried in a volcanic eruption almost 2,000 years ago, holding out the promise that the world's oldest surviving library may one day reveal all of its secrets.

The scroll is among hundreds retrieved from the remains of a lavish villa at Herculaneum, which along with Pompeii was one of several Roman towns that were destroyed when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79.

Scientists at Princeton have built a tiny microwave laser (a "maser") the size of a rice grain. The laser is made of artificial atoms called quantum dots -- miniature bits of semiconductor material.

"It is basically as small as you can go with these single-electron devices," lead study author Jason Petta, an associate professor of physics at Princeton, said in a recent press release.

Crew members were evacuated from a US segment of the International Space Station after an ammonia leak was suspected.

But Nasa officials now says a sensor problem probably created the false impression of leaking coolant.

The Russian space agency emphasised that the crew members had not been in any danger.