Ancient man did all this but without the fancy rigging. And they knew a lot more about the stars than many of us know and learn’t it all the hard way. A stone formation, The Hurlers, on Bodmin Moor in England has been baffling visitors, and scientists, for many years. The Hurlers were placed in a pattern 1500 years ago and it seems an amateur astonomer has been the one person who has solved their mystery. The Hurlers are formed in a pattern that mirror the belt of Orion and it is believed it was used as a calendar by inhabitants of the area at the time.

This is when local people were going from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers and used the Hurlers as a way to monitor the changes in season.

The uncontrolled chain reaction could make some orbits unusable for both commercial or military satellites, according to the U.S Space Posture Review sent to Congress in March. Since the first object, Sputnik One, was launched into space 53 years ago, mankind have created a swarm of perhaps tens of millions of items of debris.

The rubbish circling the planet comes from old rockets, abandoned satellites and missile shrapnel.

Animals that eat a lot and chew, such as elephants, need big heads to accommodate jaw muscles and molars. But a large head would not be needed if it did not chew. Long necks would also have helped big dinosaurs get to food without moving from a particular spot. While elephants need to spend 18 hours eating to satisfy their appetites, a giant dinosaur would have needed an impossible 30 hours a day.

This has been a puzzle for scientists wondering how gigantic plant-eating dinosaurs known as sauropods got to be so big. Well now we know!

The scientists believe the genetic adaptation technique could be used to resurrect body parts and proteins from other extinct animals. To recreate the blood, the scientists used DNA preserved in bones from frozen Siberian specimens up to 43,000 years old. It was used alongside genetic information from their descendants, Asian elephants. And this revealed the woolly mammoth’s blood adapted to cope with the freezing conditions.

This is thought to have evolved after mammoth ancestors moved from tropical Africa during the Ice Age.

They cooled it down to a 1000th of a degree above absolute zero. This is very close to its quantum mechanical ‘ground state’, which is when no more energy can be removed. The team then transmitted just one quantum of electrical energy from a specially devised electric circuit to the paddle. They were able to show the resonating paddle was in a quantum state, between one and zero quanta of energy. This meant it was effectively moving and standing still at the same time.

He described a situation where a cat is placed inside a steel chamber alongside a vial of acid and a small amount of radioactive substance. If one atom of this decays during a test period this will break the vial and kill the cat.Schrodinger said according to quantum law the cat was alive and dead in a super-position of states while the chamber was closed. The state of the cat is only decided when the chamber is opened and the cat is observed. So it is the observation or measurement itself that affects the outcome.

The planet was detected by the CoRoT space telescope operated by the French space agency, CNES. Its Sun-like parent star, Corot-9, is in the constellation of Serpens, the Snake. More than 400 exoplanets have been discovered to date, but most are so-called ‘hot Jupiters’ – gas giants that hug their parent stars in close orbits and have surface temperatures of 1,000C or more.
These are the easiest planets to find using the common method of measuring the “wobble” their gravity gives their parent stars. About 70 exoplanets have been found using a different method which relies on the planet passing in front of its star, or “transiting”. The planet reveals itself by blotting out some of the star’s light causing it to dim.

Corot-9b was identified by the transit method. The planet took eight hours to pass in front of its star, which provided astronomers with a lot of information. The planet turned out to be unusual because it was not a “hot” Jupiter. Depending on the extent of reflective clouds in its atmosphere, it has a surface temperature of between minus 20 and 160C.

I suppose the age of the astronauts – they are all well over 25 so that should be relatively cheap then; the speed of travel – very fast I’d say so are there extra rates for that…?; what area will the spaceship be travelling in…? a long way from earth – so what cost for that? one thing is certain though, there would be no third-party needed because who are they going to bump the spaceship into!

Only one young planet, aged 100 million years, was previously known but the newly-discovered planet is about three times younger. University of Hertfordshire astronomer Dr Maria-Cruz Galvez-Ortiz, who was among the international team which identified the planet, described it as ‘an exciting discovery’. Young stars are usually excluded from planet searches because they have intense magnetic fields that generate a range of phenomena known collectively as stellar activity, including flares and spots. This can make it difficult to disentangle the signals of planets and activity.

The news may come as something of a surprise to the U.S space agency, who down-scaled the threat of the 885ft rock hitting Earth in 2029 from one in 37 to virtually non existent. Nasa predicts the asteroid will peacefully pass us by, coming no nearer than 18,000miles away. There is a tiny possibility that Apophis could hit Earth in 2035 however, although again the odds of this happening have been lowered from 1 in 45,000 to 1 in 250,000.

Scientists have long theorised about asteroid deflection strategies. Some have proposed sending a probe to circle around a dangerous asteroid to gradually change its trajectory. Others suggested sending a spacecraft to collide with the asteroid and alter its momentum, or using nuclear weapons to hit it.

Scientists have created a Star Trek style phaser that can be used to both stun and revive creatures. However so far the weapon, which uses a special form of light, has only been used on tiny worms, not menacing Klingons. Canadian researchers fed pinhead-sized worms with a solution containing the molecule dithienylethene. This changed the molecular structure and colour of the worms when they were exposed to different light wavelengths. When the scientists shone an ultraviolet light on the transparent creatures they turned blue and couldn’t move. A beam of normal light then revived most of the worms although a few did not survive the process.

It is reminiscent of the fictional phaser used in the TV series Star Trek that could stun or kill adversaries using a beam of light. At present doctors use light-sensitive materials and photo-reactions in medicine to treat certain forms of cancer and the study authors hope their research can contribute.