PARIS (AFP) ― Two billion years from now, an ever-hotter Sun will have cooked the Earth, leaving microbes confined to pockets of water in mountains or caves as the last survivors, a study said.The bleak scenario is proposed by astrobiologist Jack O’Malley-James of the University of St. Andrews, Edinburgh.As the Sun ages over the next billion years, it will become more luminous, cranking up the thermostat on the Earth, O’Malley-James suggests in a computer model presented at a meeting of Britain’

PARIS (AFP) ― First cousins who marry run twice the risk of having a child with genetic abnormalities, according to the findings of a study in the English city of Bradford, published Friday in The Lancet.The city, which has a high proportion of South Asian immigrants and their descendants among its population, served as a microcosm for examining the risk of blood relative couplings.About 37 percent of marriages among people of Pakistani origin in the study involved first cousins, compared to les

PARIS (AFP) ― A year since the discovery of a subatomic particle set the science world aflutter, evidence is mounting it may be the elusive Higgs boson even as researchers warn the suspense is far from over.“We have established without a doubt that we have a new particle, and that it is a boson. What remains to be done is confirm that it is a Higgs,” said physicist Pauline Gagnon, a member of the team that made the discovery at the European Organization for Nuclear Research.The elusive boson dub

NASA launched a satellite late Thursday on a mission to explore a little-studied region of the sun and to better forecast space weather that can disrupt communications systems on Earth.Unlike a traditional liftoff, the Iris satellite rode into Earth orbit on a Pegasus rocket dropped from an airplane that took off around sunset from the Vandenberg Air Force Base on California's central coast. About 100 miles (160 kilometers) off the coast and at an altitude of 39,000 feet, the airplane released t

The ministries of science, environment and oceans and the weather agency signed an agreement to jointly develop two geostationary satellites and utilize information and related space technologies.Through the 669.7 billion won ($578.4 million) project, the government plans to launch a satellite in 2017 to monitor weather conditions and natural disasters and another to observe oceanic pollution and resources and climate change the following year. The agreement was signed by the Ministry of Science

The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning is opening a new research center for the development of the country’s first domestically produced space rocket this week.Located at the state-run Korea Aerospace Research Institute in Daejeon, the center will conduct cooperative research with related industries to design and develop a 75-ton thrust rocket engine. The opening ceremony is scheduled for Monday, the ministry said.Korea is pushing to develop its own three-stage space rocket, the KSLV-2

The muscle arrangement of an ancient fish may have included abdominal muscles, previously thought to be only found in land animals, an international team of paleontologists said. The scientists recently published their study in the journal Science on the preserved tissue found in the fossils of an ancient armored fish called a placoderm and managed to map its muscle arrangements.The study’s coauthor, professor Kate Trinajstic of Curtin University in Australia, told the media that she was “stunne

New fossil evidence of the earliest complete skeleton of an ancient primate suggests it was a hyperactive, wide-eyed creature so small you could hold a couple of them in your hand _ if only they would stay still long enough.The 55 million-year-old fossil dug up in central China is one of our first primate relatives and it gives scientists a better understanding of the complex evolution that eventually led to humans. This tiny monkey-like creature weighed an ounce (28 grams) or less and was not a

A perfectly preserved woolly mammoth carcass with liquid blood has been found on a remote Arctic island, fueling hopes of cloning the Ice Age animal, Russian scientists said Thursday.The carcass was in such good shape because its lower part was stuck in pure ice, said Semyon Grigoryev, the head of the Mammoth Museum, who led the expedition into the Lyakhovsky Islands off the Siberian coast.“The blood is very dark, it was found in ice cavities bellow the belly and when we broke these cavities wit

Astronauts who travel on future missions to Mars would likely be exposed to their lifetime limit of radiation during the trip, not to mention time spent on the Red Planet, scientists said Thursday.The measurements were made aboard the Mars Science Laboratory, an unmanned NASA rover and mobile lab that set off for Mars in 2011 before landing 253 days later in August 2012, said the report in the US journal Science."In terms of accumulated dose, it's like getting a whole-body CT scan once every fiv

ST. PETERSBURG, Florida (AP) ― When forecasters from the National Weather Service track a hurricane, they use models from several different supercomputers located around the world to create their predictions.Some of those models are more accurate than others. During Hurricane Sandy last October, for instance, the model from the European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasting in the United Kingdom predicted eight days before landfall that the large storm would hit the East Coast, while the A