When it comes to indoor lighting, nothing beats the sun’s rays streaming in through windows. Soon, that natural light could be shining through walls, too. Scientists have developed transparent wood that could be used in building materials and could help home and building owners save money on their artificial lighting costs. Their material also could find application in solar cell windows.

Homeowners often search for ways to brighten up their living space. They opt for light-colored paints, mirrors and lots of lamps and ceiling lights. But if the walls themselves were transparent, this would reduce the need for artificial lighting and the associated energy costs.

Recent work on making transparent paper from wood has led to the potential for making similar but stronger materials. Lars Berglund and colleagues wanted to pursue this possibility.

The researchers removed lignin from samples of commercial balsa wood. Lignin is a structural polymer in plants that blocks 80 to 95 percent of light from passing through. But the resulting material was still not transparent due to light scattering within it.

To allow light to pass through the wood more directly, the researchers incorporated acrylic, often known as Plexiglass. The researchers could see through the resulting material, which was twice as strong as Plexiglass.

Although the wood isn’t as crystal clear as glass, its haziness provides a possible advantage for solar cells. Specifically, because the material still traps some light, it could be used to boost the efficiency of these cells, the scientists note.

The study is reported in ACS’ journal Biomacromolecules.

It will offer people a guided tour of an area of Mars with astronaut Buzz Aldrin this summer in an interactive exhibit using the Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality headset.

“Mixed reality” means that virtual elements are merged with the user’s actual environment, creating a world in which real and virtual objects can interact.

The “Destination: Mars” exhibit will open at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center’s visitor complex in Florida this summer, the US space agency said in a statement.

Guests will “visit” several sites on Mars, reconstructed using real imagery from NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover, which has been exploring the Red Planet since August 2012.

Aldrin, an Apollo 11 astronaut who walked on the moon in 1969, will serve as “holographic tour guide” on the journey.

Curiosity Mars rover driver Erisa Hines of JPL will also appear holographically, leading participants to places on Mars where scientists have made exciting discoveries and explaining what we have learned about the planet.

“This experience lets the public explore Mars in an entirely new way. To walk through the exact landscape that Curiosity is roving across puts its achievements and discoveries into beautiful context,” said Doug Ellison, visualisation producer at JPL.

“Destination: Mars” is an adaptation of OnSight, a Mars rover mission operations tool co-developed by Microsoft and JPL.

A pilot group of scientists uses OnSight in their work supporting the Curiosity Mars rover’s operations.

“We’re excited to give the public a chance to see Mars using cutting-edge technologies that help scientists plan Curiosity’s activities on Mars today,” added Jeff Norris, project manager for OnSight and “Destination: Mars”.

“While freely exploring the terrain, participants learn about processes that have shaped this alien world,” he added.

Abigail Fraeman, a Curiosity science team member at JPL, uses OnSight to make recommendations about where the rover should drive and which features to study in more detail.

Recently OnSight helped her and a colleague identify the transition point between two Martian rock formations which they would like to study in further detail.

By utilising the same technologies and datasets as OnSight, “Destination: Mars” offers participants a glimpse of Mars as seen by mission scientists.

“By connecting astronauts to experts on the ground, mixed reality could be transformational for scientific and engineering efforts in space,” Norris said.

As NASA prepares to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, the public will now be able to preview the experience the astronauts will have as they walk and study the Martian surface.

The extinction of Neanderthals took place at the same time as the beginning of the demise of giant animals or “Megafauna” in Europe, the researchers pointed out.

Neanderthals were similar to Homo sapiens, with whom they sometimes mated — but they were different, too. Among these many differences, Neanderthals were shorter and stockier, with wider pelvises and rib-cages than their modern human counterparts.

The study by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel found that the Ice-Age diet — a high-protein intake of large animals — triggered physical changes in Neanderthals, namely a larger ribcage and a wider pelvis.

According to the research, the bell-shaped Neanderthal ribcage or thorax had to evolve to accommodate a larger liver, the organ responsible for metabolising great quantities of protein into energy.

This heightened metabolism also required an expanded renal system (enlarged bladder and kidneys) to remove large amounts of toxic urea, possibly resulting in a wide Neanderthal pelvis.

“The anatomical differences between the thoraxes and pelvises of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals have been well known for many years, but now we’re approaching it from a new angle — diet,” said professor Avi Gopher, and colleagues.

The findings were published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

“During harsh Ice-Age winters, carbohydrates were scarce and fat was in limited supply. But large game, the typical prey of the Neanderthal, thrived,” study co-author Miki Ben-Dor explained.

“This situation triggered an evolutionary adaptation to a high-protein diet — an enlarged liver, expanded renal system and their corresponding morphological manifestations. All of these contributed to the Neanderthal evolutionary process,” Ben-Dor noted.

According to the researchers, the total dependence of Neanderthals on high-protein diet might have played a role in their eventual extinction.

The efforts led to the first temperature map that reveals extreme temperature swings from one side of the “55 Cancri e” planet to the other and hints that a possible reason for this is the presence of lava flows.

“We have entered a new era of atmospheric remote sensing of rocky exoplanets,” said study co-author Nikku Madhusudhan from the institute of astronomy at the University of Cambridge.

“It is incredible that we are now able to measure the large scale temperature distribution on the surface of a rocky exoplanet,” he added.

According to the team led by Cambridge, conditions on the hot side of the planet are so extreme that it may have caused the atmosphere to evaporate, with the result that conditions on the two sides of the planet vary widely.

Temperatures on the hot side can reach 2500 degrees Celsius while temperatures on the cool side are around 1100 degree Celsius.

“55 Cancri e” orbits a sun-like star located 40 light years away in the Cancer constellation.

It is a ‘super Earth’ – a rocky exoplanet about twice the size and eight times the mass of Earth and orbits its parent star so closely that a year lasts just 18 hours.

The planet is also tidally locked, meaning that it always shows the same face to its parent star, similar to the Moon, so there is a permanent “day” side and a “night” side.

Since it is among the nearest super Earths whose composition can be studied, 55 Cancri e is among the best candidates for detailed observations of surface and atmospheric conditions on rocky exoplanets.

“We haven’t yet found any other planet that is this small and orbits so close to its parent star, and is relatively close to us, so 55 Cancri e offers lots of possibilities,” added Dr Brice-Olivier Demory from Cambridge and the paper’s lead author.

“We still don’t know exactly what this planet is made of – it’s still a riddle. These results are like adding another brick to the wall, but the exact nature of this planet is still not completely understood,” he added in the paper appeared in the journal Nature.

According to Demory, one possibility for this variation could be either a complete lack of atmosphere, or one which has been partially destroyed due to the strong irradiation from the nearby host star.

Another possibility for the huge discrepancy between the day side and the night side may be that the molten lava on the day side moves heat along the surface, but since lava is mostly solid on the night side, heat is not moved around as efficiently.

What is unclear however, is where exactly the ‘extra’ heat on 55 Cancri e comes from in the first place.

The researchers may have to wait until the next generation of space telescopes are launched to find out.

In 2018, the successor to Hubble and Spitzer – the James Webb Space Telescope – will launch, allowing astronomers to look at planets outside our solar system with entirely new levels of precision.

After completing this milestone on its journey to Mars, NASA is ready to begin another phase of work on SLS where the next generation of astronauts will be sent to Mars and other deep-space destinations.

“NASA is developing and modernising the ground systems at Kennedy to safely integrate Orion with SLS, move the vehicle to the pad, and successfully launch it into space,” said Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s exploration systems development division.

“Modernising the ground systems for our journey to Mars also ensures long-term sustainability and affordability to meet future needs of the multi-use spaceport,” he added in a statement.

Engineers and experts reviewed hundreds of documents as part of a comprehensive assessment.

The Ground Systems Development and Operations Program (GSDO), responsible for processing SLS and Orion for flight and ensuring all systems and facilities are ready, completed its critical design review (CDR) of the facilities and ground support systems plans in December 2015.

In the final step before actual fabrication, installation and testing of Kennedy’s ground systems, the GSDO programme and review board briefed the results of their assessments to NASA’s Agency Program Management Council, led by associate administrator Robert Lightfoot.

Engineers are transforming Kennedy’s launch infrastructure to support the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft.

The heavy-lift rocket will be stacked in the Vehicle Assembly Building on the mobile launcher and roll out to Launch Pad 39B atop a modified crawler transporter.

The Orion spacecraft will be fueled with propellants in the multi-payload processing facility at Kennedy prior to stacking atop the rocket.

The launch team will use the new command and control system in the firing room as the clock counts down to liftoff of SLS’s first flight.

“The team is working hard and we are making remarkable progress transforming our facilities,” said Mike Bolger, GSDO programme manager.

For the spacecraft’s first mission on the SLS rocket, ESA (European Space Agency) is providing Orion’s service module which powers, propels, cools and provides consumables like air and water in space.

“Only this space-Earth system could reveal this temperature, and now we have to figure out how that environment can reach such temperatures,” said Yuri Kovalev, the RadioAstron project scientist.

“This result is a significant challenge to our current understanding of quasar jets,” he added.

Using an orbiting radio telescope in conjunction with four ground-based radio telescopes, the team achieved the highest resolution of any astronomical observation ever made.

The feat produced a pair of scientific surprises that promise to advance the understanding of quasars, supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies.

The scientists combined the Russian RadioAstron satellite with the ground-based telescopes to produce a virtual radio telescope.

They pointed this system at a quasar called 3C 273, more than two billion light-years from Earth.

Quasars like 3C 273 propel huge jets of material outward at speeds nearly that of light. These powerful jets emit radio waves.

The observations also showed, for the first time, substructure caused by scattering of the radio waves by the tenuous interstellar material in our own Milky Way Galaxy.

“This is like looking through the hot, turbulent air above a candle flame,” added Michael Johnson from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“We had never been able to see such distortion of an extragalactic object before,” he noted in a paper appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The amazing resolution from RadioAstron working with the ground-based telescopes gives scientists a powerful new tool to explore not only the extreme physics near the distant supermassive black holes but also the diffuse material in our home galaxy.

The RadioAstron satellite was combined with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, The Very Large Array in New Mexico, the Effelsberg Telescope in Germany, and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Signals received by the orbiting radio telescope were transmitted to an antenna in Green Bank where they were recorded and then sent over the internet to Russia.

Here, they were combined with the data received by the ground-based radio telescopes to form the high resolution image of 3C 273.

The experiments, to be conducted jointly by scientists from the university and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will put specimen of Aspergillus nidulans in the high-radiation and micro-gravity conditions in space to develop new medicines for use in space and on the Earth, USC researchers announced on Monday.

The specimen will be carried by the SpaceX CRS-8 mission scheduled for launch from Cape Canaveral on April 8. The launch will be the Hawthorne-based company’s first cargo resupply service mission since CRS-7 exploded shortly after launch on June 28, 2015, Xinhua reported.

“Certain types of fungi produce very important molecules called secondary metabolites that are not essential for their growth or reproduction but can be used to make beneficial pharmaceuticals. Examples of secondary metabolites include the antibiotic penicillin and the cholesterol-lowering drug lovastatin,” said a USC statement.

Researchers said the environment of space could trigger physiological changes in the fungi.

“The high-radiation, micro-gravity environment in space could prompt Aspergillus nidulans to produce molecules it doesn’t create in Earth’s less stressful conditions,” Clay Wang, professor of pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences and chemistry at the USC school of pharmacy, was quoted as saying by the media.

“We’ve done extensive genetic analysis of this fungus and found that it could potentially produce 40 different types of drugs,” Wang said.

“The organism is known to produce osteoporosis drugs, which is very important from an astronaut’s perspective because we know that in space travel, astronauts experience bone loss.”

Scientists also said that molecules from Aspergillus nidulans potentially may be useful in anti-cancer and Alzheimer’s disease research.

Every year, the cap of frozen seawater floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and its neighbouring seas melts during the spring and summer and grows back in the fall and winter months, reaching its maximum yearly extent between February and April, researchers said.

On March 24, Arctic sea ice extent peaked at 14.52 million square kilometres, a new record low winter maximum extent in the satellite record that started in 1979.

It is slightly smaller than the previous record low maximum extent of 14.54 million square kilometres that occurred last year. The 13 smallest maximum extents on the satellite record have happened in the last 13 years, NASA said.

The new record low follows record high temperatures in December, January and February around the globe and in the Arctic.

“The atmospheric warmth probably contributed to this lowest maximum extent, with air temperatures up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit above average at the edges of the ice pack where sea ice is thin,” said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland.

The wind patterns in the Arctic during January and February were also unfavourable to ice growth because they brought warm air from the south and prevented expansion of the ice cover.

But ultimately, what will likely play a bigger role in the future trend of Arctic maximum extents is warming ocean waters, Meier said.

“It is likely that we are going to keep seeing smaller wintertime maximums in the future because in addition to a warmer atmosphere, the ocean has also warmed up. That warmer ocean will not let the ice edge expand as far south as it used to,” he said.

“Although the maximum reach of the sea ice can vary a lot each year depending on winter weather conditions, we are seeing a significant downward trend, and that is ultimately related to the warming atmosphere and oceans,” said Meier.

This year’s record low sea ice maximum extent will not necessarily result in a subsequent record low summertime minimum extent, researchers said.

Summer weather conditions have a larger impact than the extent of the winter maximum in the outcome of each year’s melt season; warm temperatures and summer storms make the ice melt fast, while if a summer is cool, the melt slows down, they said.

Arctic sea ice plays an important role in maintaining Earth’s temperature – its bright white surface reflects solar energy that the ocean would otherwise absorb.

But this effect is more relevant in the summer, when the Sun is high in the sky in the Arctic, than in the winter, when the Sun does not rise for months within the Arctic Circle, NASA said.

“In the winter, the impact of missing sea ice is mostly felt in the atmosphere,” said Jennifer Francis from Rutgers University.

Researchers from the Cornell University in US and Flinders University in Australia had earlier discovered that Superb Fairy-wren nestlings learn to imitate their parents’ calls while still in the egg.

They wanted to see whether the behaviour extended to other species and to learn more about its ecological context. So they turned to the related Red-backed Fairy-wren.

All Red-backed Fairy-wren females in the new study called to their eggs while incubating, and most continued to call to their nestlings for five to six days after they hatched.

As a result, mother and offspring calls were more similar than would be expected by chance. Parents also put more effort into feeding nestlings with calls similar to their own.

“Fairy-wrens have become a new model system in which test new dimensions in the ontogeny of parent-offspring communication in vertebrates,” said Mark Hauber from Hunter College in New York.

Though the researchers had hypothesised that fairy-wren parents could use calls to identify alien nestlings, the result of eggs placed in their nests by parasitic cuckoos, the rate at which Red-backed Fairy-wren mothers called to their eggs did not increase significantly when more cuckoos were present in the habitat.

Researchers speculate that the similarity of nestlings’ calls to their own could also tip parents off about which nestlings are the most vigorous and the best learners, so that they can invest more resources in the ones most likely to thrive.

“Because fairy-wrens have high predation rates, we originally placed microphones under Superb Fairy-wren nests to record alarm calls against predators twenty-four seven,” said Diane Colombelli-Negrel from Flinders University.

“As a result, we discovered embryonic learning in Superb Fairy-wrens,” she said.

When they turned to Red-backed Fairy-wrens, they recorded vocalisations from 67 nests across four breeding seasons in Queensland, as well as playing recordings of begging nestlings to test parents’ responses.

“Prenatal vocal learning has rarely been described in any animal, with the exception of humans and Australian Superb Fairy-wrens,” said William Feeney of the University of Queensland.

The study was published in the journal The Auk: Ornithological Advances.

When these eruptions interact with Earth’s magnetic field they cause beautiful auroras.

When the Sun pours out gigantic amounts of hot plasma during the large solar eruptions, it may have severe consequences on Earth.

Solar eruptions are, however, nothing compared to the eruption we see on other stars, known as ‘superflares’.

Superflares have been a mystery since the Kepler mission discovered them in larger numbers four years ago.

The largest observed eruption took place in September 1859, where gigantic amounts of hot plasma from our neighbouring star struck Earth.

Telegraph system worldwide went haywire, and ice core records from Greenland indicate Earth’s protective ozone layer was damaged by the energetic particles from the solar storm.

Researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark used observations of magnetic fields on the surface of almost 100,000 stars made with the new Guo Shou Jing telescope in China to show that these superflares are likely formed via the same mechanism as solar flares.

“The magnetic fields on the surface of stars with superflares are generally stronger than the magnetic fields on the surface of the Sun,” said Christoffer Karoff, from Aarhus University.

However, of all the stars with superflares that researchers analysed, about 10 per cent had a magnetic field with a strength similar to or weaker than that of the Sun’s.

Therefore, even though it is not very likely, it is not impossible that the Sun could produce a superflare.

“We certainly did not expect to find superflare stars with magnetic fields as week as the magnetic fields on the Sun. This opens the possibility that the Sun could generate a superflare,” said Karoff.

If an eruption of this size was to strike Earth today, it would have devastating consequences. Not just for all electronic equipment on Earth, but also for our atmosphere and thus our planet’s ability to support life.

Evidence from geological archives has shown that the Sun might have produced a small superflare in 775 AD. Tree rings show that anomalously large amounts of the radioactive isotope 14C were formed in Earth’s atmosphere, researchers said.

14C is formed when cosmic-ray particles from our galaxy, the Milky Way, or especially energetic protons from the Sun, formed in connection with large solar eruptions, enter Earth’s atmosphere, they said.

The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

The historic outcome from that conference was the “Paris Agreement” in which each country agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius above temperatures seen near the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 1850s.

Such a level was considered acceptable, or “safe,” by all participating countries, but the goal is unrealistic and almost impossible to achieve, according to a new study by researchers at the Texas A&M University at Galveston.

Researchers modelled the projected growth in global population and per capita energy consumption, as well as the size of known reserves of oil, coal and natural gas, and greenhouse gas emissions to determine how difficult it will be to achieve the less-than-2 degree Celsius warming goal.

“It would require rates of change in our energy infrastructure and energy mix that have never happened in world history and that are extremely unlikely to be achieved,” said Glenn Jones, professor of marine sciences.

The Paris Agreement’s overall goal is to replace fossil fuels, which emit huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which in turn leads to higher temperatures, with renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power and biofuels.

“Just considering wind power, we found that it would take an annual installation of 485,000 5-megawatt wind turbines by 2028.

“The equivalent of about 13,000 were installed in 2015. That’s a 37-fold increase in the annual installation rate in only 13 years to achieve just the wind power goal,” said Jones.

Similar expansion rates are needed for other renewable energy sources.

“There will be about 11 billion people on Earth by 2100 (compared to 7.2 billion today),” Jones said.

“Currently 1.2 billion people in the world do not have access to electricity, and there are plans to try to get them on the grid,” he said.

“To even come close to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement, 50 per cent of our energy will need to come from renewable sources by 2028, and today it is only 9 per cent, including hydropower. For a world that wants to fight climate change, the numbers just don’t add up to do it,” Jones said.

“If we don’t worry about global warming and the 2-degree Celsius goal, we can continue to burn known fossil fuel reserves, but even here we will have to achieve more than 50 per cent renewable energy by 2054, but warming will exceed 2.5 to 3 degrees Celsius,” he said.

The research was published in the journal Energy Policy.

It is the first time that Jupiter’s X-ray aurora has been studied when a giant storm from the Sun arrived at the planet, researchers said.

“There’s a constant power struggle between the solar wind and Jupiter’s magnetosphere. We want to understand this interaction and what effect it has on the planet,” said lead author William Dunn, PhD student at University College London.

“By studying how the aurora changes, we can discover more about the region of space controlled by Jupiter’s magnetic field, and if or how this is influenced by the Sun,” said Dunn.

The Sun constantly ejects streams of particles into space in the solar wind. When giant storms erupt, the winds become much stronger and compress Jupiter’s magnetosphere, shifting its boundary with the solar wind two million kilometres through space.

The study found that this interaction at the boundary triggers the high energy X-rays in Jupiter’s Northern Lights, which cover an area bigger than the surface of the Earth.

“Comparing new findings from Jupiter with what is already known for Earth will help explain how space weather is driven by the solar wind interacting with Earth’s magnetosphere,” said Professor Graziella Branduardi-Raymont, from UCL.

The impact of solar storms on Jupiter’s aurora was tracked by monitoring the X-rays emitted during two 11 hour observations in October 2011 when an interplanetary coronal mass ejection was predicted to reach the planet from the Sun.

Scientists used the data collected to build a spherical image to pinpoint the source of the X-ray activity and identify areas to investigate further at different time points.

“In 2000, one of the most surprising findings was a bright ‘hot spot’ of X-rays in the aurora which rotated with the planet. It pulsed with bursts of X-rays every 45 minutes, like a planetary lighthouse,” Dunn said.

“When the solar storm arrived in 2011, we saw that the hot spot pulsed more rapidly, brightening every 26 minutes,” he said.

“We’re not sure what causes this increase in speed but, because it quickens during the storm, we think the pulsations are also connected to the solar wind, as well as the bright new aurora,” Dunn said.

The study was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Space Physics.

The research suggests that the Earth is now characterised by a geologically unprecedented pattern of global energy flow that is pervasively influenced by humans – and which is necessary for maintaining the complexity of modern human societies.

While analysing the Anthropocene phenomenon – an epoch where humans dominate the Earth’s surface geology – researchers identified that human patterns of production and consumption are a key factor characterising the epoch, and when measured against the billion-year old patterns of planet Earth, they form a striking new pattern.

“Very big changes in our planet’s pattern of biological production and consumption do not happen very often. The appearance of photosynthesis was one, about two and a half billion years ago,” said Jan Zalasiewicz from University of Leicester in the UK.

“Then, a little over half a billion years ago, animals like trilobites appeared, to add scavengers and predators into a food web of increasing complexity,” said Zalasiewicz.

“Other major events have happened since, such as five major mass extinctions, but even measured against these events, human-driven changes to production and consumption are distinctly new,” he added.

“It is without precedent to have a single species appropriating something like one quarter of the net primary biological production of the planet and to become effectively the top predator both on land and at sea,” said Carys Bennett from University of Leicester.

By digging phosphorus out of the ground and by fixing nitrogen out of the air to make fertilisers; and by exploiting hundreds of millions of years-worth of stored carbon-based energy in a still-accelerating trend, humans are increasing productivity well above natural levels – and directing much of it towards animals that have been re-engineered to suit our purposes.

“This refashioning of the relationship between Earth’s production and consumption is leaving signals in strata now forming, and this helps characterise the Anthropocene as a geological time unit,” said Zalasiewicz.

“It also has wider and more fundamental importance in signalling a new biological stage in this planet’s evolution,” he said.

According to researchers, recent changes in the Earth’s biosphere, caused in part by human activity, are starting to become evident in rock and soil strata.

Unprecedented stratigraphic signals are challenging disciplines like geology and archaeology to assess such changes and put them in temporal context, relative to other major transitions in Earth’s history, they said.

The findings were published in the journal Earth’s Future.

These conclusions were made from the fossilised skull of Elasmotherium sibiricum or “Siberian unicorn” – a Siberian rhinoceros, found in the Pavlodar Irtysh region of Kazakhstan.

“The skull is well preserved. There are some cracks but no trace of pelletisation, gnawing and exfoliation,” researchers said.

Most likely, south of Western Siberia was a refugium, where this rhino was preserved the longest in comparison to the rest of its range, said Andrey Shpanski, from Tomsk State University (TSU) in Russia.

“There is another option that it could migrate and dwell for a while on the more southern areas,” said Shpanski.

Analysis of the fossils showed that the skull belonged to the animal that died 29,000 years ago.

“The dimensions of this rhino today are the biggest of those described in the literature, and the proportions are typical,” researchers said.

Elasmotherium sibiricum was supposed to be extinct about 350,000 years ago. Its habitat was the vast territory from the Don River in Russia to the east of modern Kazakhstan.

Elasmotherium residue findings in the Pavlodar Irtysh showed quite a long existence of these rhinos in the southeast of the West Siberian Plain.

The finding were published in the American Journal of Applied Science.

The results, published in the journal Earth’s Future, showed definite signs that human beings have permanently changed the planet and have triggered Anthropocene — an era where humans dominated Earth’s surface geology.

Patterns of human production and consumption mainly characterise the era.

Also, when measured against the billion-year old patterns of planet Earth, the present era forms a striking new pattern.

Human beings have seized something like one quarter of the net primary biological production of the planet and has become effectively the top predator both on land and at sea.

In addition, by digging phosphorus out of the ground and by fixing nitrogen out of the air to make fertilizers; and by exploiting hundreds of millions of years worth of stored carbon-based energy in a still-accelerating trend, humans are increasing productivity well above natural levels — and directing much of it towards animals that have been re-engineered to suit our purposes.

By becoming evident in rock and soil strata, the recent changes in Earth’s biosphere are beginning to signal towards a new biological stage in the planet’s evolution.

“This refashioning of the relationship between Earth’s production and consumption is leaving signals in strata now forming, and this helps characterise the Anthropocene as a geological time unit,” said one of the researchers Jan Zalasiewicz, professor at University of Leicester in Britain.

The findings, detailed in the journal Earth’s Future, revealed that Earth is now characterised by a geologically unprecedented pattern of global energy flow that is pervasively influenced by humans — and is also increasingly necessary for maintaining the complexity of modern human societies.

The perturbation in the balance between the economic production and consumption, the essential trait of modern human society, notably since the mid-20th century, will display a lasting legacy of human existence on Earth.

“Very big changes in our planet’s pattern of biological production and consumption do not happen very often. The appearance of photosynthesis was one, about two and a half billion years ago,” Zalasiewicz pointed out.

“Other major events have happened since, such as five major mass extinctions, but even measured against these events, human-driven changes to production and consumption are distinctly new,” he concluded.

Dr. Raj Patel said that the allure of quantum computers is the unparalleled processing power that they provide compared to current technology. Much like the everyday computer, the brains of a quantum computer consist of chains of logic gates, although quantum logic gates harness quantum phenomena.

The main stumbling block to actually creating a quantum computer has been in minimising the number of resources needed to efficiently implement processing circuits.

Dr. Patel added that similar to building a huge wall out lots of small bricks, large quantum circuits require very many logic gates to function. However, if larger bricks are used the same wall could be built with far fewer bricks.

Researchers in their experiment demonstrate how one can build larger quantum circuits in a more direct way without using small logic gates.

Usually the Fredkin gate requires implementing a circuit of five logic operations. The research team used the quantum entanglement of photons particles of light to implement the controlled-SWAP operation directly.

Professor Geoff Pryde said what is exciting about their scheme is that it is not limited to just controlling whether qubits are swapped, but can be applied to a variety of different operations opening up ways to control larger circuits efficiently.

The research is published in the journal Science Advances.

While Earth science field experiments are nothing new for NASA, the next six months will be a particularly active period with eight major new campaigns taking researchers around the world on a wide range of science investigations.

“Combining the long-term global view from space with detailed measurements from field experiments is a powerful way of deciphering what’s happening in our world,” said Michael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division in Washington.

“Scientists worldwide use NASA Earth science field data together with satellite data and computer models to tackle many of today’s environmental challenges and advance our knowledge of how the Earth works as a complex, integrated system,” Freilich said.

The first of the new projects, currently in the field, is an examination of the extent to which the oceans around Greenland are melting the edges of the ice sheet from below.

The Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) team is now conducting its first airborne survey of the ice edge around the entire coast of Greenland.

Air quality is the focus of the Korea US-Air Quality (KORUS-AQ) campaign in South Korea, which begins in May.

This joint study between NASA and the Republic of Korea will advance our ability to monitor air pollution from space, with coordinated observations from aircraft, ground sites, ships and satellites.

Also in May, the North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study (NAAMES) takes to the sea and air for the second year to study how the world’s largest plankton bloom gives rise to small organic particles that influence clouds and climate.

Throughout much of this year, teams of scientists working on the Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) will be in the tundra and forests of Alaska and northwestern Canada studying the role of climate in wildfires, thawing permafrost, wildlife migration habits and insect outbreaks.

In June, the COral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) project team will begin testing airborne and in-water instruments in Hawaii to assess the condition of threatened coral-based ecosystems.

Three airborne research campaigns will take to the skies this summer, focusing on critical climate-related components of the atmosphere.

The Observations of Clouds above Aerosols and their Interactions (ORACLES) study will use airborne instruments to probe the impact on climate and rainfall of the interaction between clouds over the southeastern Atlantic Ocean and smoke from massive vegetation burning in southern Africa.

A better understanding of how the smoke particles alter stratocumulus clouds that play a key role in regional and global surface temperatures and precipitation will help improve current climate models.

While Earth science field experiments are nothing new for NASA, the next six months will be a particularly active period with eight major new campaigns taking researchers around the world on a wide range of science investigations, the US space agency said in a statement.

“Combining the long-term global view from space with detailed measurements from field experiments is a powerful way of deciphering what’s happening in our world,” said Michael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division in Washington.

The first of the new projects, currently in the field, is an examination of the extent to which the oceans around Greenland are melting the edges of the ice sheet from below.

Air quality is the focus of the Korea US-Air Quality (KORUS-AQ) campaign in South Korea, which begins in May. This joint study between NASA and the Republic of Korea is aimed at advancing the ability to monitor air pollution from space, with coordinated observations from aircraft, ground sites, ships and satellites.

Also in May, the North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study (NAAMES) takes to the sea and air for the second year to study how the world’s largest plankton bloom gives rise to small organic particles that influence clouds and climate.

Throughout much of this year, teams of scientists working on the Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) will be in the tundra and forests of Alaska and northwestern Canada investigating the role of climate in wild fires, thawing permafrost, wildlife migration habits and insect outbreaks, NASA said.

In June, the Coral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) project team will begin testing airborne and in-water instruments in Hawaii to assess the condition of threatened coral-based ecosystems. CORAL’s next stop will be Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Three airborne research campaigns will take to the skies this summer, focusing on critical climate-related components of the atmosphere. Flying tracks over the Pacific and Atlantic oceans thousands of miles long, the team of the Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission will gather measurements on more than 200 different chemical species from the ocean surface up to approximately seven miles in the atmosphere to understand how the movement and transformation of short-lived greenhouse gases, such as ozone and methane, contribute to climate change.

Focusing on the skies over the eastern half of the United States, the Atmospheric Carbon and Transport – America (ACT-America) research team will track the movement of atmospheric carbon to better understand the sources and sinks of greenhouse gases. Flights will originate from Louisiana, Nebraska and Virginia.

The Observations of Clouds above Aerosols and their Interactions (ORACLES) study will use airborne instruments to probe the impact on climate and rainfall of the interaction between clouds over the southeastern Atlantic Ocean and smoke from massive vegetation burning in southern Africa.

NASA believes that a better understanding of how the smoke particles alter stratocumulus clouds that play a key role in regional and global surface temperatures and precipitation will help improve current climate models.

In the study involving 358 adult subjects, researchers from the University of Chicago found that toxoplasmosis, a relatively harmless parasitic infection carried by about 30 per cent of all humans, was linked to intermittent explosive disorder (IED) and increased aggression.

“Our work suggests that latent infection with the toxoplasma gondii parasite may change brain chemistry in a fashion that increases the risk of aggressive behaviour,” said senior study author Emil Coccaro, professor at the University of Chicago.

“However, we do not know if this relationship is causal, and not everyone that tests positive for toxoplasmosis will have aggression issues,” Coccaro said.

IED is defined as recurrent, impulsive, problematic outbursts of verbal or physical aggression that are disproportionate to the situations that trigger them.

Researchers examined possible connections to toxoplasmosis, an extremely common parasitic infection.

Transmitted through the faeces of infected cats, undercooked meat or contaminated water, toxoplasmosis is typically latent and harmless for healthy adults.

However, it is known to reside in brain tissue, and has been linked to several psychiatric diseases, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and suicidal behaviour.

The research team recruited 358 adult subjects from the US, who were evaluated for IED, personality disorder, depression and other psychiatric disorders.

Study participants were also scored on traits including anger, aggression and impulsivity. Participants fell into one of three groups. Roughly one third had IED. One third were healthy controls with no psychiatric history. The remaining third were individuals diagnosed with some psychiatric disorder, but not IED.

The research team found that IED-diagnosed group was more than twice as likely to test positive for toxoplasmosis exposure (22 per cent) as measured by a blood test, compared to the healthy control group (9 per cent).

Around 16 per cent of the psychiatric control group tested positive for toxoplasmosis, but had similar aggression and impulsivity scores to the healthy control group.

Across all study subjects, toxoplasmosis-positive people scored significantly higher on scores of anger and aggression.

This finding suggests toxoplasmosis and aggression are most strongly correlated.

However, the researchers caution that the study results do not address whether toxoplasmosis infection may cause increased aggression or IED.

The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

The researchers found that all of Titan’s highest peaks are about 10,000 feet in elevation.

The study used images and other data from Cassini’s radar instrument, which can peer through the obscuring smog of Titan’s atmosphere to reveal the surface in detail.

“It’s not only the highest point we’ve found so far on Titan, but we think it’s the highest point we’re likely to find,” said Stephen Wall, deputy lead of the Cassini radar team at NASA.

Most of Titan’s tallest mountains appear to be close to the equator.

The researchers identified other peaks of similar height within the Mithrim Montes, as well as in the rugged region known as Xanadu.

“As explorers, we’re motivated to find the highest or deepest places partly because it’s exciting. But Titan’s extremes also tell us important things about forces affecting its evolution,” added Jani Radebaugh, a Cassini radar team associate at Brigham Young University in Utah.

Mountains and cliffs on Earth usually are found in locations where forces have shoved the surface upward from underneath.

The Himalaya and Andes Mountains are examples of places where interior forces are at work today.

Cassini has found that Titan also has rain and rivers that erode its landscape.

According to Radebaugh, the process probably proceeds much more slowly on Titan than on the Earth because, at 10 times Earth’s distance from the sun, there is less energy to power erosive processes in the moon’s atmosphere.

The fact that Titan has significant mountains suggests that some active tectonic forces could be affecting the surface, for example, related to Titan’s rotation, tidal forces from Saturn or cooling of the crust.

The next step for the researchers will be trying to figure out what could produce such tall peaks on an icy ocean world.

“There is lot of value in examining the topography of Titan in a broad, global sense, since it tells us about forces acting on the surface from below as well as above,” said Radebaugh.

The results were presented at the 47th annual lunar and planetary science conference in Texas on Thursday.