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The virtually impassable mountain range is home to millions of black granite boulders the size of cars and houses piled hundreds of metres high

Cape Melville, a plateau of boulder-strewn rainforest on top

a small boulder-dwelling frog, the Blotched Boulder-frog, which during the dry season lives deep in the labyrinth of the boulder-field where conditions are cool and moist

In the absence of water

tadpole develops within the egg and a fully formed frog hatches out.

The Cape Melville Leaf-tailed Gecko, which has huge eyes and a long, slender body, is highly distinct from its relatives

National Geographic, the team plans to return to Cape Melville within months to search for more new species, including snails, spiders, and perhaps even small mammals

A press release from his office said the presence of the private space company would boost jobs in the region

There’s little information on SpaceX’s website about what the Raptor engine is or specific development plans

Space News reports that it would be used for deep-space missions

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has mentioned the engine previously when talking about Mars missions, according to multiple media reports

test the whole engine at Stennis

the first phase starts with the components

E-2 stand at Stennis is big enough for components, but we would need a bigger stand for the whole Raptor

reportedly hashing out a Space Act agreement to establish user fees and other parameters

Once that’s finished, the testing will begin, perhaps as early as next year

SpaceX currently does most of its rocket testing in Texas

planet circles its star every eight and a half hours at a distance of less than one mile

one of tightest known orbit on record and due to this its formation is deemed as impossible and not suitable for life.

The scientists believe no planet can form so close to its star nor could it have moved to its current position.

Kepler-78b poses a challenge to theorists

When this planetary system was forming, the young star was larger than it is now.

the current orbit of Kepler-78b would have been inside the swollen star

The star of Kepler-78b is slightly smaller and less massive than the sun

Sun-like G-type star, which is  located 400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus

The exoplanet was discovered using data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope

follow up observations were made using W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii

more exotic possibilities is that it is the remnant core of a disrupted gas giant

The extreme gravitational pull from its star will draw it ever closer in, ripping the entire planet apart in about three billion years

orbits

close to its star, the planet exerts a greater gravitational pull on the star that it would if it were as far as Earth is from our sun

demonstrated that zebrafish had the ability to repair a badly damaged heart, thanks to a particular protein that regulates the regenerative process

That trick could work for humans as well as fish

this month, researchers from the Gladstone Institutes showed that they could turn human scar tissue into electrically conductive tissue in a lab dish by fiddling with just a few key genes

Among the hurdles that lie ahead: taking that technique out of the lab and applying it to living human hearts

humans already have demonstrated some ability to regenerate body parts

very young children can fill out the tips of chopped off fingers and toes

the salamander, which can regrow a whole arm below the joint

Young mice are able to regenerate toes, too

been studying mouse toes to understand how a similar regrowth mechanism can be reactivated or imitated in adult humans

In 2010, his lab showed it was possible to enhance the regenerative response in adult mice

researchers are cautious about predicting how studies of animal regeneration will be applied to humans

it's dangerous to say, 'Yes, we expect to regenerate a limb

the field is reaching a turning point

provided enough data to complete its mission objective: to determine how many of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy have potentially habitable planets

Based on a statistical analysis

astronomers now estimate that one in five stars like the sun have planets about the size of Earth and a surface temperature conducive to life.

nearly 20 years since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet around a normal star

Since then we have learned that most stars have planets of some size and that Earth-size planets are relatively common in close-in orbits that are too hot for life

Earth-size planets in Earth-size orbits are not necessarily hospitable to life, even if they orbit in the habitable zone of a star where the temperature is not too hot and not too cold

thick atmospheres, making it so hot at the surface that DNA-like molecules would not survive

rocky surfaces that could harbor liquid water suitable for living organisms

Last week,

provided hope that many such planets actually are rocky

NASA launched the Kepler space telescope in 2009 to look for planets that cross in front of, or transit, their stars, which causes a slight diminution – about one hundredth of one percent – in the star's brightness

150,000 stars photographed every 30 minutes for four years

reported more than 3,000 planet candidates

the Keck Telescopes in Hawaii

help them determine each star's true brightness and calculate the diameter of each transiting planet, with an emphasis on Earth-diameter planets.

The team's definition of habitable is that a planet receives between four times and one-quarter the amount of light that Earth receives from the sun

Independently

focused on the 42,000 stars that are like the sun or slightly cooler and smaller, and found 603 candidate planets orbiting them

Only 10 of these were Earth-size, that is, one to two times the diameter of Earth and orbiting their star at a distance where they are heated to lukewarm temperatures suitable for life

Accounting for missed planets, as well as the fact that only a small fraction of planets are oriented so that they cross in front of their host star as seen from Earth, allowed them to estimate that 22 percent of all sun-like stars in the galaxy have Earth-size planets in their habitable zones.

All of the potentially habitable planets found in their survey are around K stars, which are cooler and slightly smaller than the sun

analysis shows that the result for K stars can be extrapolated to G stars like the sun

the team has been testing their blood substitute in both mice and in cultured cells

initial results suggest that many of the adverse effects normally associated with either perfluorocarbon (PFC) or hemoglobin-based oxygen carrier (HBOC) substitutes can be eliminated, or at least minimized

Human blood only has a shelf life of a few weeks

It also needs to be matched to the recipient's blood type,

the risks of disease transmission can be minimized by testing, dangers still present if the donor has been recently infected

What makes hemoglobin such a success, is a phenomenon known as cooperative binding

as more oxygen binds to hemoglobin in the lungs, it becomes even easier for additional oxygen to bind

The problem

is that one way or another, the hemoglobin they contain ends up escaping and causing serious damage to organs like the kidneys

While their small size allows them to penetrate and oxygenate the nooks and crannies of the body much better than RBCs, that same feature also leads to undesireable extravasation into tissue

The goal is not to develop a permanent replacement solution, but rather something that could be used to bridge a critical situation for the few hours or days

Researchers have found when these modified hemoglobins do get into tissues, they bind nitric oxide, which appears to have the result that the patient's blood pressure rises precipitously

launch

ISRO engineers successfully completed the first of six orbit raising “Midnight Maneuver” burns at 01:17 hrs IST

Nov. 6

The goal is to gradually maneuver MOM – India’s 1st mission to the Red Planet – into a hyperbolic trajectory so that the spacecraft will

eventually arrive at the Mars Sphere of Influence after a 10 month interplanetary cruise

India’s PSLV rocket is not powerful enough to send MOM on a direct flight to Mars

The launch “placed MOM very precisely into an initial elliptical orbit around Earth

ISRO’s engineers devised a

procedure to get the spacecraft to Mars on the least amount of fuel via six “Midnight Maneuver” engine burns over the next several weeks – and at an extremely low cost

engine fires when

is at its closest point in orbit above Earth. This increases the ships velocity and gradually widens the ellipse

raises the apogee of the six resulting elliptical orbits around Earth that eventually injects MOM onto the Trans-Mars trajectory

expected to achieve escape velocity on Dec. 1 and depart Earth’s sphere of influence tangentially to Earth’s orbit to begin the 300 day

voyage

arrives in the vicinity of Mars on September 24, 2014

, NASA’s

MAVEN orbiter remains on target to launch

on Nov. 18 – from Cape Canaveral, Florida

Both MAVEN and MOM’s goal

study the Martian atmosphere , unlock the mysteries of its current atmosphere and determine how, why and when the atmosphere and liquid water was lost

MOM science teams will “work together” to unlock the secrets of Mars atmosphere and climate history

The real reason for the spacewalk is to do some routine Russian maintenance outside the station

Then,

three crew members will return

and they will bring the torch back home

The torch then will be given back to Olympic officials and it will be used in the opening ceremonies of the February games

There have not been nine crew members on the ISS since 2009.

recent studies of musicians suggest lifelong musical training may offset these and other cognitive declines

previous studies show such age-related declines are not inevitable

the current study,

explored whether limited musical training early in life is associated with changes in the way the brain responds to sound decades later

t the more years study participants spent playing instruments as youth, the faster their brains responded to a speech sound.

For the study, 44 healthy adults, ages 55-76, listened to a synthesized speech syllable ("da") while researchers measured electrical activity in the auditory brainstem

This region of the brain processes sound and is a hub for cognitive, sensory, and reward information

researchers discovered that, despite none of the study participants having played an instrument in nearly 40 years

participants who completed 4-14 years of music training early in life had the fastest response to the speech sound (on the order of a millisecond faster than those without music training).

a millisecond faster may not seem like much, but the brain is very sensitive to timing and a millisecond compounded over millions of neurons can make a real difference