African elephants can differentiate between human languages and move away from those considered a threat, a skill they have honed to survive in the wild, researchers said.

The study suggests elephants, already known to be intelligent creatures, are even more sophisticated than previously believed when it comes to understanding human dangers.

Researchers played recordings of human voices for elephants at Amboseli National Park in Kenya to see how they would respond, according to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Some of the voices were from local Maasai men, a group that herds cattle and sometimes comes into conflict with elephants over access to water and grazing space. Occasionally, elephants are killed in clashes with Maasai men, and vice-versa.

Last week the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) stated rather nonchalantly that they will be hosting a press conference on Monday, March 17th, to announce a "major discovery." Without a potential topic for journalists to muse on, this was as melodramatic as it got.

But then the Guardian posted an article on the subject and the rumors went into overdrive. The speculation is this: a U.S. team is on the verge of confirming they have detected primordial gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of spacetime that carry echoes of the big bang nearly 14 billion years ago.

If there is evidence for gravitational waves, it will be a landmark discovery, ultimately changing the face of physics.

Not only are gravitational waves the last untested prediction of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, but primordial gravitational waves will allow astronomers to glimpse the universe in its infancy.

Lightning appears to be killing and injuring increasing numbers of people in developing countries, meteorologists and experts say.

The total casualties could even be higher than other weather-related disasters like floods, landslides and droughts.

"The frequency of lightning has somehow increased from what it used to be," says Michael Nkalubo, commissioner at Meteorological Department of Uganda, a country where lightning storms are common.

"I cannot say that a study has been carried out on this but I am saying this on the basis of my general observation.

"It is something increasing every year and we think this is a manifestation of climate change but we also need to establish whether deforestation has also contributed."

South Africa is another country in the African continent where lightning-related deaths and injuries are or the rise, officials say.

In South East Asia too experts believe lightning incidents and casualties are going up.

"It is a growing problem in the region," said Hartono Zainal Abidin, a lightning protection expert in Malaysia.

The replacement of the forest by urban areas has been causing an increase in the lightning activity in the Amazon region, Brazilian researchers suggest.

According to a study led by scientist Osmar Pinto Junior of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, the city of Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, has seen a 50% rise in lightning strikes in the past 30 years, reaching a current rate of 13.5 strikes per km² per year.

Looking at satellite images, Mr Pinto Junior and his team have found that, over the city, the lightning activity is larger than that in neighbour regions.

"Our results indicate that such changes have been caused by what we call Urban Heat Island (UHI)", he said.

"While in the last three decades the surface air temperature in the tropics has increased by approximately 0.4C, it has increased by 0.7C in Manaus."

Pinto Junior explains that this phenomenon occurs when green areas are replaced by buildings and other urban features, pushing the temperatures up and prompting more lightning storms.

The authors of a study calling for GM crops to be fast-tracked into Britain's farms and kitchens all have links to the industry, it can be revealed.

The report was presented as the work of 'independent' scientists and was published on Thursday by a government advisory body.

It was used to support a bid to speed up the development of the controversial crops in the UK, but it has emerged that all five authors have a vested interest in promoting GM crops and food - and some are part-funded by the industry.

Cbet nr. 3828, issued on 2014, March 14, announces the discovery of a comet on CCD images taken by C. Jacques, E. Pimentel and J. Barros using a 0.45-m f/2.9 reflector at the SONEAR Observatory near Oliveira, Brazil. The new comet has been designated C/2014 E2 (JACQUES).

We performed follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 19 unfiltered exposures, 30-sec each, obtained remotely from MPC code Q62 (iTelescope, Siding Spring) on 2014, March 13.6 through a 0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet: very bright coma nearly 2 arcmin in diameter elongated in PA 10.

Our confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version).
M.P.E.C. 2014-E84 assigns the following very preliminary parabolic orbital elements to comet C/2014 E2: 2014 June 29.52; e= 1.0; Peri. = 349.10; q = 0.60; Incl.= 157.19

Big Congrats to our friend Cristovao Jacques and all the SONEAR team for the discovery of their second comet! Click here to find more info about their first comet.

Warnings that phone call "metadata" can betray detailed information about your life has been confirmed by research at Stanford University. Researchers there successfully identified a cannabis cultivator, multiple sclerosis sufferer and a visitor to an abortion clinic using nothing more than the timing and destination of their phone calls.

Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler, the researchers behind the finding, used data gleaned from 546 volunteers to assess the extent to which information about who they had called and when revealed personally sensitive information.

The research aimed to answer questions raised by the NSA wiretapping revelations, where it was revealed that the US intelligence agency collects metadata - but not content - of millions of phone calls on mobile networks.

After a glitch forced NASA's long-running Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to switch from normal operations into "safe mode," scientists are hard at work attempting to recover the spacecraft.

The incident occurred after the MRO made an unscheduled switch from its main computer to a backup system, an occurrence that officials still don't have an explanation for. As a result, the satellite was sidelined and operations were suspended while scientists worked out a solution.

Specifically, the MRO has been sending data back to Earth regarding seasonal and atmospheric changes on Mars since its arrival in the planet's orbit in 2006. It also relays information from the two rovers currently exploring the Red Planet, though data from those vehicles is still being sent to NASA via a second satellite, the 2001-era Odyssey.

Battle-scarred diamond provides evidence of 'wet zone' 410km below the surface where water is locked up inside minerals

A small, battered diamond found in the gravel strewn along a shallow riverbed in Brazil has provided evidence of a vast "wet zone" deep inside the Earth that could hold as much water as all the world's oceans put together.

The water is not sloshing around inside the planet, but is held fast within minerals in what is known as the Earth's transition zone, which stretches from 410 to 660km (250-400 miles) beneath the surface.

"It's not a Jules Verne-style ocean you can sail a boat on," said Graham Pearson, a geologist who studied the stone at the University of Alberta. The water-rich zone could transform scientists' understanding of how some of the Earth's geological features arose.

Tests on the diamond revealed that it contained a water-rich mineral formed in the zone. Researchers believe that the gemstone, which is oblong and about 5mm long, was blasted to the surface from a depth of about 500km by a volcanic eruption of molten rock called kimberlite.

The battle-scarred gem has a delicate metallic sheen, but is pitted and etched from its violent journey, which probably took several days and ended with the stone shooting up through the Earth's crust at a speed of about 70km/h (40mph).

"It's a fairly ugly diamond. It looks like it's been to hell and back," said Pearson, adding that the gem was worth about $20 at most. The stone was found in 2008 by artisan miners working the Juína riverbeds in Mato Grosso in western Brazil.

Creating designer babies who are free from disease and super athletic or smart may finally be around the corner.

But American society hasn't fully thought out the ethical implications for the future of baby making or policies to regulate these techniques, an ethicist argues in an article published today (March 13) in the journal Science.

"We're on the cusp of having much more information, and the appearance of having much greater discretion, in choosing the traits of our children," said article author Thomas H. Murray, a bioethicist at the Hastings Center, a nonprofit research center in Garrison, N.Y.

People also need to think about what parents and doctors will do with the technology, he said. "What use will they make of it, and should there be limits?"

In fact, in February, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) met to consider conducting clinical trials to test out genetic manipulation techniques to prevent mitochondrial disease from occurring in offspring.

Mutations within the gene FTO have been implicated as the strongest genetic determinant of obesity risk in humans, but the mechanism behind this link remained unknown. Now, an international team of scientists has discovered that the obesity-associated elements within FTO interact with IRX3, a distant gene on the genome that appears to be the functional obesity gene. The FTO gene itself appears to have only a peripheral effect on obesity. The study appears online March 12 in Nature.

"Our data strongly suggest that IRX3 controls body mass and regulates body composition," said senior study author Marcelo Nobrega, PhD, associate professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago. "Any association between FTO and obesity appears due to the influence of IRX3."

Mutations to introns (noncoding portions) of the gene FTO have been widely investigated after genome-wide association studies revealed a strong link between FTO and obesity and diabetes. Yet over-expressing or deleting FTO in animal models affects whole body mass and composition, not just fat, and experiments have failed to show that these obesity-linked introns affect the function of the FTO gene itself.