The solar-powered Zephyr aircraft developed by the UK defence and technology firm QinetiQ has completed the longest-lasting unmanned flight.
The Zephyr has ultra-light wings, and flew for three-and-a-half-days in a test flight above the Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona.
The project's technical director, Chris Kelleher, says the solar plane charges its batteries for night flight and could stay aloft for months on end.
Scientists have long wondered how stars develop in such extreme conditions.
Molecular clouds - the normal birth places of stars - would be ripped apart by the immense gravity, a team explains in Science magazine.
But the researchers say stars can form from elliptical discs - the relics of giant gas clouds torn apart by encounters with black holes.
They made the discovery after developing computer simulations of giant gas clouds being sucked into black holes like water spiralling down a plughole.
"These simulations show that young stars can form in the neighbourhood of supermassive black holes as long as there is a reasonable supply of massive clouds of gas from further out in the galaxy," said co-author Ian Bonnell from St Andrews University, UK.
Ripped apart
Their findings are in accordance with actual observations in our Milky Way galaxy that indicate the presence of a massive black hole, surrounded by huge stars with eccentric orbits.
The simulations, performed on a supercomputer - and taking over a year of computing time - followed the evolution of two separate giant gas clouds up to 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, as they fell towards the supermassive black hole.
The simulations show how the clouds are pulled apart by the immense gravitational pull of the black hole.
The disrupted clouds form into spiral patterns as they orbit the black hole; the spiral patterns remove motion energy from gas that passes close to the black hole and transfers it to gas that passes further out.
This allows part of the cloud to be captured by the black hole while the rest escapes.
In these conditions, only high mass stars are able to form and these stars inherit the eccentric orbits from the elliptical disc.
These results match the two primary properties of the young stars in the centre of our galaxy: their high mass and their eccentric orbits around the supermassive black hole.
"That the stars currently present around the galaxy's supermassive black hole have relatively short lifetimes of [about] 10 million years, which suggests that this process is likely to be repetitive," Professor Bonnell explained.
"Such a steady supply of stars into the vicinity of the black hole, and a diet of gas directly accreted by the black hole, may help us understand the origin of supermassive black holes in our and other galaxies in the Universe."
Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG.
The worm was first detected on earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games.
Nasa said it was not the first time computer viruses had travelled into space and it was investigating how the machines were infected.
Orbital outbreak
Space news website SpaceRef broke the story about the virus on the laptops that astronauts took to the ISS.
Nasa told SpaceRef that no command or control systems of the ISS were at risk from the malicious program.
The laptops infected with the virus were used to run nutritional programs and let the astronauts periodically send e-mail back to Earth.
The laptops carried by astronauts reportedly do not have any anti-virus software on them to prevent infection.
Once it has scooped up passwords and login names the Gammima.AG worm virus tries to send them back to a central server. It targets a total of 10 games most of which are popular in the Far East such as Maple Story, HuangYi Online and Talesweaver.
Nasa is working with partners on the ISS to find out how the virus got on to the laptop in the first place.
The ISS has no direct net connection and all data traffic travelling from the ground to the spacecraft is scanned before being transmitted.
It is thought that the virus might have travelled via a flash or USB drive owned by an astronaut and taken into space.
The space agency also plans to put in place security systems to stop such incidents happening in the future.
Nasa told Wired News that viruses had infected laptops taken to the ISS on several occasions but the outbreaks always only been a "nuisance".
Nasa is celebrating 50 years of space exploration - which has taken the American space agency up into the Earth's orbit, on to the Moon, and deep into our Solar System.
That journey has produced many iconic images - from the Apollo moon landings, to the space shuttle missions, and the colourful pictures beamed back from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Here, space writer and historian Piers Bizony recalls some of Nasa's defining moments:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7530327.stm
After 15 months of pregnancy, Qila the Vancouver Aquarium's 12-year-old beluga whale has given birth to her first calf.
The birth was captured live by television cameras.
Qila was the first beluga whale to be conceived and born in a Canadian aquarium.
She has remained in the aquarium with her mother Aurora, who is 21 years old.
Check this out here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7447994.stm
The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as Euro-English (Euro for short). In the first year, 's' will be used instead of the soft 'c'. Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the hard 'c' will be replaced with 'k.' Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome 'ph' will be replaced by 'f'. This will make words like 'fotograf' 20 per sent shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent 'e's in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.
By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing 'th' by 'z' and 'W' by 'V'. During ze fifz year, ze unesesary 'o' kan be dropd from vords kontaining 'ou', and similar changes vud of kors; be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil b no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru.
Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
In clear, nontechnical language, string theorist Brian Greene explains how our understanding of the universe has evolved from Einstein's notions of gravity and space-time to superstring theory, where minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe. (This mind-bending theory may soon be put to the test at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.)
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/251
Dr Warneken and colleague Professor Michael Tomasello wanted to see whether very young children who had not yet learned social skills were willing to help strangers. The experimenters performed simple tasks like dropping a clothes peg out of reach while hanging clothes on a line, or mis-stacking a pile of books.
| By M Ilyas Khan BBC News, Karachi |
Two Pakistani boys have been reunited with their family days after they strayed into Indian territory after running away from school.
The boys say they were beaten by Indian police, who suspected them of spying.
A Pakistani official said the boys were returned under a deal requiring the two countries to return innocent citizens straying into each other's territory.
In the past, people crossing the border by mistake have been arrested and charged with spying.
Stole money
The two boys, Azhar Ali, 16, and Zohaib, 10, who are cousins, left for school on the morning of 10 April but did not return home.
"We walked for a day, then took a train, and then a bus to the border which we crossed on the third day," Azhar Ali told journalists in the southern city of Hyderabad, where the boys were handed over to their families by the Sindh Rangers, the Pakistani paramilitary border force.
Azhar said he had stolen some money from his father which the boys exchanged for Indian currency.
"We just wanted to go sightseeing," said Zohaib.
Azhar said that once across the border, they gave themselves up to the police and asked to be sent home.
The boys said the Indian police beat them, accusing them of having been sent across the border by the Sindh Rangers.
"They set up a machine before us and said if we lied, the red button would flash. But the button flashed even when we told them our names," Azhar said.
The Sindh Rangers director-general said the Indian border security force had been very co-operative and helped to get the boys back quickly.
The boys' parents said they had lost all hope of ever seeing their children.
"In a way, they have been reborn to us," Zohaib's mother said.
The parents admitted that their constant scolding of the boys over school matters caused them to run away.
by Aubrey BelfordFri Apr 11, 10:38 AM ET
The discovery of a rare species of Indonesian frog that breathes without lungs could shed light on how evolution works, a scientist said Friday.Dissection of the frog, which was found on Borneo last August, showed it breathed entirely through its skin, biologist David Bickford told AFP.
While many frogs breathe partially through their skin, the Barbourula kalimantanensis is the first to have entirely evolved away from having lungs, he said.This runs counter to one of the key events in evolution, when animals developed primitive lungs and moved from water to land.
"Here is a frog that has reversed that trend, it has totally turned against the conventional wisdom, if you will, of millions of years of evolution," said Bickford, a biologist at the National University of Singapore.The frog appears to have shed its lungs over millions of years to adapt to its home in the fast-flowing cold water rivers in the island's rainforests, Bickford said.
Cold water contains more oxygen, making it possible to breathe through skin, he added.
Only three other amphibians -- two species of salamander and a worm-like creature called a caecilian -- are known to have evolved to breath without lungs.
"It's like a cookie, it's almost completely flat. So initially when you pick it up in the water you know this thing is strange," said Bickford.
"It's surprisingly cute, you know, like a bulldog is cute. It's one of those things that is so ugly, it's cute."
While many animals have organs they no longer use -- such as the human appendix -- evolution normally works on the principle of "if it's not broke don't fix it," Bickford said.
"Most things we don't use don't get lost... so there had to be a big negative side-effect of having lungs for them to be lost."
Bickford believes lungs may have made the frog's ancestors too buoyant in the fast-flowing water, increasing their risk of being swept away.
The downside, Bickford said, is that the frog cannot survive on land or even in still water.
Indonesian scientist Djoko Iskandar, who accompanied Bickford on the expedition, first heard about the strange-looking creature 30 years ago and had been searching for it ever since.
He said that every time he went to Borneo he found habitats had been destroyed by industry, with pollution to rivers from gold mining apparently making it impossible for the frogs to breathe.
"We think that a little bit of pollution will affect the skin, and the skin is more important than for other species," said Iskandar, a scientist at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia, adding that even a small amount of pollution could be devastating.
Hundreds of new species of insect, animal and plant have been discovered on Borneo, with a find every month on average, conservation group WWF has said.
Other recent exotic discoveries include poisonous "sticky frogs," "forest walking catfish" able to travel short distances out of water and the transparent "glass catfish".
