An apparent crater as big as Ohio has been found in Antarctica. Scientists think it was carved by a space rock that caused the greatest mass extinction on Earth, 250 million years ago.

Giant Crater Found: Tied to Worst Mass Extinction Ever

The first sequences of nuclear DNA to be taken from a Neanderthal have been reported at a US science meeting.

Neanderthal yields nuclear DNA

In ideal [quantum] teleportation, the original is destroyed and its exact properties are transmitted to a second, remote particle; the Heisenberg principle does not apply because no definitive measurements are made on the original particle. In telecloning, the original is destroyed, and its properties are sent to not one but two remote particles, with the original's properties reconstructed to a maximum accuracy (fidelity) of less than 100 percent. (The Heisenberg principle limits the ability to make clones as otherwise researchers could keep making copies of the original particle and learn everything about its state.)

[...]

In addition to representing a new quantum-information tool, telecloning may have an exotic application: tapping quantum cryptographic channels. Quantum cryptographic protocols are so secure that they may discover tapping. Nonetheless, with telecloning, the identity and location of the eavesdropper could be guaranteed uncompromised.

Telecloning -- Anonymous eavesdropping on quantum cryptography

A monstrous discovery suggests that viruses, long regarded as lowly evolutionary latecomers, may have been the precursors of all life on Earth.

Unintelligent Design

A theory of the Hindenburg fire that has recently gained popular acceptance proposes that the paint on the outer surface of the airship caused both the fire and its rapid spread. However, application of physical laws and numerical calculations demonstrate that the theory contains egregious errors. Specifically: (1) The proposed ignition source (an electrical spark) does not have sufficient energy to ignite the paint. (2) The spark cannot jump in the direction demanded by the theory. If a spark were to occur, it could jump only in the direction that the author of the theory has shown will not cause a fire. (3) The most obvious flaw in the theory is the burn rate of the paint, which, in the theory, is likened to solid rocket fuel. The composition of the paint is known, and it is not a form of solid rocket fuel. Even if it were, it would, at best, burn about 1,000 times too slowly to account for the rapid spread of the fire. For example, if the Hindenburg were coated with exactly the same solid rocket fuel as that used in the Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters, it would take about 10 hours for the airship to burn from end to end, as compared to the actual time of 34 seconds. The arguments and calculations in this paper show that the proposed incendiary paint theory is without merit.

The Hindenburg Hydrogen Fire: Fatal Flaws in the Incendiary-Paint Theory

An 800-kilometre-wide sea, surviving as broken plates, appears to
lie just beneath the surface in observations from the Mars Express
spacecraft. The sea is just 5 degrees north of the Martian equator
and would be the first discovery of a large body of water outside
the planet's polar ice caps.

'Pack ice' suggests frozen sea on Mars

No model yet proposed explains all observed gully features, the scientists note. However, their data points them toward gully creation due to subsurface water. Carbon dioxide, melting ground ice, dry landslide, and snowmelt models, they explain, "inadequately conform to the MGS observations and are the least likely mechanisms of gully formation proposed to date."

Mars Gullies Likely Formed By Underground Aquifers

Scientists have discovered a new and tiny species of human that lived in Indonesia at the same time our own ancestors were colonising the world.

The new species - dubbed "the Hobbit" due to its small size - lived on Flores island until at least 12,000 years ago.

'Hobbit' joins human family tree

After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape. Hawking will present his latest finding at a conference in Ireland next week.

The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern physics, known as the black hole information paradox.

Hawking cracks black hole paradox

] In 1912 Wilfrid Voynich, an American rare-book
] dealer, made the find of a lifetime: a manuscript
] some 230 pages long, written in an unusual script
] and richly illustrated with bizarre images of
] plants, heavenly spheres and bathing women. Despite
] 90 years of effort by some of the world's best
] code breakers, no one has been able to decipher the
] script. The failure of the code-breaking attempts
] has raised the suspicion that it may simply be an
] elaborate hoax.

Scientific American has a writeup by Gordon Rugg
on how the manuscript may have been faked.

SciAm: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript