(CNN) -- A piece of ice four times the size of Manhattan island has broken away from an ice shelf in Greenland, according to scientists in the U.S.

The 260 square-kilometer (100 square miles) ice island separated from the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland early on Thursday, researchers based at the University of Delaware said.

The ice island, which is about half the height of the Empire State Building, is the biggest piece of ice to break away from the Arctic icecap since 1962 and amounts to a quarter of the Petermann 70-kilometer floating ice shelf, according to research leader Andreas Muenchow.

Ötzi has not been put on ice, on the contrary - things are hotting up for him! For the first time in his eventful history since his discovery almost twenty years ago, we now have access to the complete genetic profile of this world famous mummy. As a result the path is clear for an imminent solution to many of the puzzles surrounding the iceman.

Experts from three institutions have pooled their skills in order to map Ötzi’s entire genetic make-up: Albert Zink, Head of the EURAC Institute for Mummies and the iceman, together with Carsten Pusch, from the Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Tübingen and Andreas Keller from the bio-technological firm “febit” in Heidelberg. Together they have reached a historic moment in the study of the 5,000 year old mummy. The two scientists, Zink and Pusch, have been working together for some time and recently published, in collaboration with the Egyptian team led by Zahi Hawass, the latest findings on the life and the medical condition of Tutankhamen and his family.

New study suggests kangroos and their kin are from South America.

All living marsupials — such as wallabies, kangaroos and opossums — all originated in South America, a new genetic study suggests.

Yep the animals most famous for populating Australia actually started out on another continent altogether. But marsupials a group of mammals known for toting their young in belly pouches on the females are still common in South America, too.

It would have taken quite a few turns for natural selection to have produced dragons, but if you’re willing to stretch a bit, most classic dragon characteristics do exist in other species. They just don’t come packaged in one animal.

First up on the dragon checklist: flying. Dragon wings are usually depicted in one of two ways—a third pair of limbs connected to the backbone, or webbed forearms. Jack Conrad, a paleontologist and reptile expert at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, thinks the latter is more plausible. “It seems that six appendages are very unlikely in vertebrates,” he says. “The only thing close to having six limbs are these frogs in the western part of the U.S. that get this bad parasite and end up generating extra limbs. Even then, the new limbs are identical to the hind limbs, and the frogs don’t do well. It seems that anytime nature tries to generate a vertebrate hexapod, it dies. That seems to be the main limitation."

A new, implantable sensor that wirelessly transmits blood-glucose data has the potential to completely change the way most diabetics control their disease.

The round device is just a bit smaller than a Double-Stuf Oreo -- about 1.5 inches wide and half an inch thick -- and would be implanted in a person's torso. It's hermetically sealed, with an integrated antenna that wirelessly transmits data, a long-lived battery, and a pair of sensors. One sensor detects only oxygen, the other a reaction that involves both oxygen and glucose. No matter how dense the scar tissue surrounding the implant, the two-sensor combination compensates, allowing the device to correctly calculate glucose levels in the blood.

It is every backyard inventor's dream to develop a new power source that will provide unlimited energy to the world. More often than not, the dream is a mirage which leads its inventor ever farther from physics and deeper into fantasy. Then again, some out-there ideas could offer real hope for the future. Here are a handful of cutting-edge technologies that, their inventors hope, could lead to cheap, plentiful energy.

A pair of Earth-orbiting satellites designed to study the auroras are making a detour to visit the moon.

The two spacecraft are part of a fleet of five launched into Earth orbit by NASA in 2007 on a mission called THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). They have been studying the space storms that trigger the northern and southern lights, or auroras, on Earth.

But two of the satellites were set to go on death row earlier this year. If they had been left in their original orbits, the solar-powered craft would have made lengthy passages through Earth's shadow in March 2010, fatally draining their batteries, according to a Discovery News story.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Challenges of the future include energy use and continued population growth. And, while there are millions of square miles of land available in the world, not all of it is considered fit for human habitation. Shimizu Corporation, the company contemplating the Luna Ring, has another interesting project in the "just coming up with an idea" stage: The Desert Aqua-Net.

The Desert Aqua-Net is an idea that involves the building of interconnected lakes in the desert. These 18-mile-diameter lakes would be connected by canals fed from the ocean. The lakes would include built islands that could serve as homes for cities teeming with people. Supposedly, this would work because water from the lake would cool the cities, making them livable. There would also be arable land, theoretically, after this cooling above the desert lake islands. The cities would be powered by satellite power stations, and by the sun.

(PhysOrg.com) -- By suggesting that mass, time, and length can be converted into one another as the universe evolves, Wun-Yi Shu has proposed a new class of cosmological models that may fit observations of the universe better than the current big bang model. What this means specifically is that the new models might explain the increasing acceleration of the universe without relying on a cosmological constant such as dark energy, as well as solve or eliminate other cosmological dilemmas such as the flatness problem and the horizon problem.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers have imaged a very young brown dwarf, or failed star, in a tight orbit around a young nearby sun-like star. The discovery is expected to shed light on the early stages of solar system formation.

Astronomers have imaged a very young brown dwarf, or failed star, in a tight orbit around a young nearby sun-like star.

An international team led by University of Hawaii astronomers Beth Biller and Michael Liu with help from University of Arizona astronomer Laird Close and UA graduate students Eric Nielsen, Jared Males and Andy Skemer made the rare find using the Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager, or NICI, on the international 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile.

A new article in press of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Lettersunveils groundbreaking research on the hydrothermal formation of Clay-Carbonate rocks in the Nili Fossae region of Mars. The findings may provide a link to evidence of living organisms on Mars, roughly 4 billion years ago in the Noachian period.

The paper "Hydrothermal formation of Clay-Carbonate alteration assemblages in the Nili Fossae region of Mars", by Adrian J. Brown et al, suggests that carbonate bearing rocks found in the Nili Fossae region of Mars are made up of hydrothermally altered ultramafic (perhaps komatiitic) rocks.

It takes a twisted engineering mind to come up with something this brilliant: a biomimetic mold constructed from fly eyes. One particular type of fly eye has just the right shape that could be perfect for manufacturing efficient solar cells.

Lakhtakia and a team of Penn State researchers came up with a promising solution. First they picked corneas from blowflies because this common type of fly has ideal eyes for solar cell applications. According to a description from PSU, "Blowflies have compound eyes that are roughly hemispherical; but within that half sphere, the surface is covered by macroscale hexagonal eyes with nanoscale features."

A new technique blasts holes in cells to deliver vaccines or drugs to fight cancer at light-speed.

Drugs and vaccines could one day make their way into your body at the speed of light. Scientists from Georgia Tech can now blast a hole in a cell, place a molecule inside and seal it back up a split second later using a laser pulse.

The new technique could deliver drugs, vaccines and other molecules that otherwise wouldn't be able to get past a cell's defences.

Internationally-renowned dinosaur hunter Phil Manning, from the University of Manchester, and his team are hoping to bag a Triceratops skeleton from a 'secret location' they've found in the South Dakota Badlands, according to Manning.

He and his colleagues believe at least three skeletons of this iconic dinosaur are gently weathering in 65-million-year-old rocks at the undisclosed site.

Robotic devices equipped with electronic sensors, laser detection and ranging.

Snakes can creep and they can crawl, but they're not very good at defusing bombs or going on search-and-rescue missions. Snake robots, however, might be a different story.

In a project called the Robotic Tentacle Manipulator, engineers at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory are developing snake-like autonomous robots that can go into dangerous situations in place of live soldiers to aid in search and rescue missions and to inspect potential threats from Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs.

They went to investigate solar wind-stirred storms in our planet’s magnetic field, but, after working for three years, two NASA solar-powered probes faced a dark demise, trapped in the Earth’s shadow. NASA researchers now think they can give the twin satellites another shot by altering their courses and sending them instead to study the moon.

NASA launched the probes in 2007 as a set of five identical satellites in the THEMIS Mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms), meant to orbit Earth and send information during brief (2-3 hour) “substorms” when the magnetic field surrounding the Earth releases stored energy from solar winds. To understand the start of these “space tornadoes” responsible for the northern and southern lights, NASA placed the probes in very precise orbits, but for two craft that meant, one day, they would face prolonged battery-draining time in the Earth’s shadow.

Researchers camped on the Greenland ice sheet hit bedrock this week after almost three years of drilling, reaching a depth of 8,000 feet. They hope that the ice they’ve uncovered from some 120,000 years ago, might give them a better understanding of what a warmer future might look like, if Greenland has less ice and the sea level rises.

The team, which is part of the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project, is looking to learn more about carbon dioxide levels during the Eemian period, when global temperatures were over 2-3 degrees Celsius warmer and sea level was about 15 feet higher. They believe these conditions might mirror effects caused by the earth’s changing climate during the next century.

What's a Stone Age axe doing in an Iron Age tomb? The archaeologists Olle Hemdorff at the University of Stavanger's Museum of Archaeology and Eva Thäte are researching older objects in younger graves. They have found a pattern.

"If one finds something once, it's accidental. If it is found twice, it's puzzling. If found thrice, there is a pattern", the archaeologists Olle Hemdorff and Eva Thäte say.

A settlement dating back about 7000 years has been discovered by a hill near the village of Ivanovo, in Shoumen municipality, in eastern Bulgaria, Bulgarian National Television (BNT) reported on July 26 2010.

The settlement, 900 sq m in area, lies between two rivers on the south face of the hill. In spite of its natural defences, the settlement was fortified with a defensive wall of "unusual shape", BNT said.

"The shape of the fortification was not circular or oval-like, which was typical for the time but an irregular pattern resembling an octagon," archaeologist Svetlana Venelinova said in a television interview for BNT.

ScienceDaily (July 26, 2010) — Archaeological research in East Timor has unearthed the bones of the biggest rat that ever lived, with a body weight around six kilograms.

The cave excavations also yielded a total of 13 species of rodents, 11 of which are new to science. Eight of the rats weighed a kilogram or more.

"East Indonesia is a hot spot for rodent evolution. We want international attention on conservation in the area," CSIRO's Dr Ken Aplin says.