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The Hubble Space Telescope has detected what scientists believe may be the oldest galaxy ever observed.

It is thought the galaxy is more than 13 billion years old and existed 480 million years after the Big Bang.

An international team says this was a period when galaxy formation in the early Universe was in "overdrive".

The image, which has been published in Nature journal, was detected using Hubble's recently installed wide field camera.

The mother-of-three, who experiences all other emotions, is thought to be unique in the world in her ability to be completely unfazed by danger.

Her condition means she constantly puts herself at risk and in her 44 years has been threatened with a knife, held at gunpoint and assaulted on different occasions.

Yet she has come away completely untouched emotionally by her experiences.

She often just strolls away from the scene and has to be told to report them to the police.

Known simply as SM, the woman from Iowa in America, suffers from a condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease which has destroyed a part of her brain known as the amygdala.

A female boa constrictor snake has given birth to two litters of extraordinary offspring.

Evidence suggests the mother snake has had multiple virgin births, producing 22 baby snakes that have no father.

More than that, the genetic make-up of the baby snakes is unlike any previously recorded among vertebrates, the group which includes almost all animals with a backbone.

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In a new finding that could have game-changing effects if borne out, two astrophysicists think they've finally tracked down the elusive signature of dark matter.

This invisible substance is thought to make up much of the universe but scientists have little idea what it is. They can only infer the existence of dark matter by measuring its gravitational tug on the normal matter that they can see.

Now, after sifting through observations of the center of our Milky Way galaxy, two researchers think they've found evidence of the annihilation of dark matter particles in powerful explosions.

The camera-equipped MDARS can scoot around pre-determined paths on its own, alerting flesh-and-blood guards when it encounters an intruder or a broken lock. In development by the Navy and General Dynamics since the early 1990s, the diesel-fueled sentry bot can operate for up to 16 hours, and reach a top speed of 20 mph. The U.S. military has experimented with using the MDARS machines to patrol some of its Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada. The bots have even been tested with automatic weapons -- though I doubt that's the plan at the nuke site.

Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University -- supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo -- has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer -- calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week -- that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself.

It looks like any other sea slug, aside from its bright green hue. But the Elysia chlorotica is far from ordinary: it is both a plant and an animal, according to biologists who have been studying the species for two decades.

Not only does E. chlorotica turn sunlight into energy -- something only plants can do -- it also appears to have swiped this ability from the algae it consumes.

 

Native to the salt marshes of New England and Canada, these sea slugs use contraband chlorophyll-producing genes and cell parts called chloroplasts from algae to carry out photosynthesis, says Sidney Pierce, a biologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

 

That genetic material has since been passed down to the next generation, eliminating the need to consume algae for energy.

An ant mill is a phenomenon where a group of army ants separated from the main foraging party lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. The ants will eventually die of exhaustion. This has been reproduced in laboratories and the behaviour has also been produced in ant colony simulations. This phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies. Each ant follows the ant in front of it, and this will work until something goes wrong and an ant mill forms. An ant mill was first described by William Beebe who observed a mill 1,200 feet (365 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution. Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish.

The spider also makes the largest orb web yet found for any spider, and constructs it out of the most tough biomaterial yet known, say scientists.

Darwin's bark spider, a species new to science, weaves its huge web over flowing rivers, stretching from bank to bank.

It is so big that it can catch 30 or more prey insects at any one time.

Darwin's bark spider weaves what experts call an orb web, the most familiar spider web design

But this web is unusual as it is the largest orb web yet known to be made by any living spider, with the largest web measuring 2.8m².

You can read and see more here.

NDM-1 was first spotted in 2008, in a 59-year-old man of South Asian origin who lived in

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Sweden. He was hospitalized on a visit home to New Delhi, had surgery, recovered, went back to Sweden and was hospitalized there again. At that point, physicians recognized that he had a urinary tract infection that was unusually drug-resistant. The infection was caused by a common bacterium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, but the Klebsiella possessed an unusual and worrisome ability to disable carbapenems, a class of drugs given for very resistant infections. They named the enzyme and the gene directing its production for the place where the man had apparently acquired it: New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, and bla_NDM. In 2009, the United Kingdom's public-health agency sent out an alert saying the same resistance mechanism was appearing there and increasing rapidly, going from unknown in 2007 to 18 instances in the first half of 2009, most of them in people who had gone to India for medical care or had frequent family travel back and forth. In June this year, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out a bulletin about NDM-1's first US appearance, in three patients in three different states (California, Massachusetts and Illinois), again with ties to South Asian medical care.

"We've lost our drug of last resort," Fishman [director of infection control and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania and president of the Society of Healthcare Epidemiologists] says.

Doctors say the bacteria are more worrisome than another well-known superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), because more drugs are available to treat MRSA, Fishman says. "When MRSA started to develop 15 years ago, the industry started producing antibiotics now coming onto the market," he says. "We're in the same position with KPCs as we were with staph aureus 15 years ago, except that the pharmaceutical industry isn't rushing to produce new drugs."

How does one achieve The Quietest Place on Earth? Start with a room within a room, within a room: the Orfield Labs six sided anechoic chamber is a small room floating in a pit on I-beams that are on top of springs. A five sided chamber of identical construction surrounds it on the edge of the pit. Both chambers are made of double wall steel-insulation-steel. The anechoic chamber was manufactured by Eckel, the largest anechoic chamber builder in the country.

Both steel chambers are held within a larger room that was built with solid one foot thick concrete walls and ceiling panels. The smaller room is filled with 3.3 feet thick fiberglass acoustic wedges. This approach led to the anechoic chamber found at Orfield Labs being measured by engineers on January 21st of 2004 at negative 9.4 dB (with A-weighting), thus earning it the title of Quietest Place on Earth. By comparison, the low threshold for human hearing is considered to be 0 dB.

If someone near you yawns, do you yawn, too? About half of adults yawn after someone else does in a phenomenon called contagious yawning. Now a new study has found that most children aren't susceptible to contagious yawning until they're about 4 years old -- and that children with autism are less likely to yawn contagiously than others.

"Given that contagious yawning may be a sign of empathy, this study suggests that empathy -- and the mimicry that may underlie it -- develops slowly over the first few years of life, and that children with ASD may miss subtle cues that tie them emotionally to others," according to the researchers. This study may provide guidance for approaches to working with children with ASD so that they focus more on such cues.

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Paul K. Kuroda, a chemist from the University of Arkansas, calculated what it would take for a uraniumore body spontaneously to undergo selfsustained fission. Amazingly, the actual conditions that prevailed two billion years ago in what researchers eventually determined to be 16 separate areas within the Oklo and adjacent Okelobondo uranium mines were very close to what Kuroda outlined. These zones were all identified decades ago.

Once known as "horse hair" worms because they would appear mysteriously in horse troughs, Gordian worms spend their parasitic larval stage within the bodies of insects, especially crickets, but spend their non-parasitic adult stage in water. Crickets aren't known for their swimming ability, but try telling that to a parasitic nematode (really, try it. They don't even comprehend English, it's ridiculous.) When it's time for adulthood, the worm compels its cricket to seek out the nearest body of water and dive right in. The confused cricket usually drowns, while the worm wriggles free to find itself a mate.