Science

Shark Photobomb in Australia? A group of mothers surfing at Coffs Harbour on the New South Wales north coast had the shock of their lives on the weekend when a large shark leapt from the water about 30m from shore, right next to where they were competing.

Mastodons were once believed to have roamed the snowy Arctic region alongside the first human colonists some 13,000 to 14,000 years ago, but new evidence suggests they disappeared tens of thousands of years earlier and were not hunted to extinction.

Photos of the historic landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko seen by the public are all in grayscale. The European Space Agency has, however, just released a color photo taken by the Rosetta probe that shows the comet’s true colors, which is a shade of reddish brown.

Engineers have revealed a robot that runs on batteries at speeds of more than 10mph, jump 16 inches and gallop for at least 15 minutes while using less power than a microwave. The robot is called the cheetah, named after the creature that inspired its creation by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA.

The European Space Agency successfully landed a space craft on a comet last month – but it’s not stopping there. In fact there are 16 mission launches planned for ESA over the next 10 years — and that doesn’t include sending Britain’s first (official) astronaut to the ISS in 2015.

It has been reported that NASA’s Orion spacecraft is all set to be launched for its first test flight as per schedule on December 4. The Orion spacecraft has been specifically designed to carry astronauts to deep space destinations including Mars.

Engineers in the U.S. have shown that graphene — a remarkable material that’s only 10 to 100 nanometers thick — could make for excellent body armor, absorbing 10 times the amount of energy than steel before failing.

Two researchers have conducted a new study trying to better understand the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek mechanism that modeled the known universe 2,000 years ago. The study, published in the Archive for History of Exact Science, has helped the researchers reveal new clues about the antique Greek astronomical puzzle that has fascinated archaeologists for decades.

Two scientists writing in the Nov. 27 issue of Science are cautioning that social scientists using data from social media like Twitter and Facebook are frequently getting biased results.

How did life first evolve? Creepy, crawly centipedes may hold the answer. researchers have examined this arthropod’s DNA and have been given new insight into how life first developed on our planet.

A new study has revealed that domesticated dogs can not only distinguish emotions from human speech but the content of words too. Just like humans, dogs were found to use different parts of the brain to determine the characteristics of a speaker’s voice (the familiarity, the gender, emotion etc) and the verbal content of their words.