Scientists have invented self-folding sheets of fiberglass that can flex themselves into origami airplanes and boats.

The achievement could help pave the way for "programmable matter" that could one day serve much like a Swiss Army knife, bending and creasing into any number of tools.

The sheets are each less than a half-millimeter thick and made of triangular fiberglass tiles each roughly less than a half-inch (1 cm) wide, connected together by elastic silicone rubber creases.

WASHINGTON — The White House rolled out a sweeping national space policy for the United States on Monday, one that aims to boost international cooperation and reiterates plans to send Americans to visit an asteroid by 2025.

The 14-page space policy reaches beyond President Barack Obama's plans for NASA — which would shift the goal of U.S. human spaceflight from the moon to visiting asteroids and Mars, according to a plan unveiled in February — touching on future needs for Earth observation, space debris and space security.

Greek inventor Archimedes is said to have used mirrors to burn ships of an attacking Roman fleet. But new research suggests he may have used steam cannons and fiery cannonballs instead.

PARIS: Dreams of braking global warming by storing carbon emissions from power plants could be undermined by the risk of leakage, according to a study published on Sunday.

Rich countries have earmarked tens of billions of dollars of investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is still only at an experimental stage. Under CCS, carbon dioxide (CO2) would be snared at source from plants that are big burners of oil, gas and coal.

TOKYO: There is no room for romance on board the cosy confines of the International Space Station, a Nasa space shuttle commander said on Monday when asked what would happen if astronauts had sex in space.

"We are a group of professionals," said Space Shuttle Discovery commander Alan Poindexter during a visit to Tokyo, after a reporter asked about the consequences if astronauts boldly went where probably no others have been. In fact, commanders do not allow sexual intercourse on the International Space Station.

Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers have devised a method that may allow clinicians to use higher doses of a powerful chemotherapy drug that has been limited because it is toxic not only to tumors but to patients' kidneys.

The research, conducted in laboratory animals, marries chemistry and nanotechnology to deliver toxic platinum atoms to tumors while almost entirely blocking the platinum from accumulating in the kidney, according to Shiladitya Sengupta, a Harvard assistant professor of medicine and health sciences and technology whose Laboratory for Nanomedicine at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital conducted the work.

By stimulating certain areas of the brain, scientists can alleviate the effects of disorders such as depression or Parkinson's disease. That's the good news. But because controlling that stimulation currently lacks precision, over-stimulation is a serious concern — losing some of its therapeutic benefits for the patient over time.

LONDON: At a time when airports around the globe are planning to install full body scanners to maximise security, the US Congress has been warned that the X-ray imaging could increase the risk of skin cancer in air passengers.

The body scanners emit radiation up to 20 times more powerful than previously thought and could be particularly risky for children, said Dr David Brenner, head of Columbia University's centre for radiological research.

Members of the public will be given the right to nominate unpopular laws they want scrapped, Nick Clegg has announced the Your Freedom initiative intended to begin a shift of power away from the state to the people.

http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/

Introduced in Sweden in 1901, military service had been winding down for several years, with only those expressing a wish to serve picked during for conscription.

Sweden remained neutral during the two world wars, but with the Soviet Union nearby, wanted to have the capacity to call in 500,000 soldiers at short notice during the Cold War, out of a population of about eight million at the time.

Since we're coming up on the Fourth of July, and towns everywhere are preparing their better-than-ever fireworks spectaculars, we would like to offer this humbling bit of history. Back in the summer of 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in outer space, some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. It was a weapons test, but one that created a man-made light show that has never been equaled — and hopefully never will.

The initial peopling of North America from Asia occurred approximately 15,000-18,000 years ago, however estimations of the genetic diversity of the first settlers have remained inaccurate. In a report published online today in Genome Research (www.genome.org), researchers have found that the diversity of the first Americans has been significantly underestimated, underscoring the importance of comprehensive sampling for accurate analysis of human migrations.

KASHIHARA, Nara Prefecture (Kyodo) Nara-based archaeologists said they have succeeded in drawing three-dimensional maps of the surface of large burials mounds for the first time by flashing them with laser beams at a rate of more than 100,000 times a second from a helicopter.

The new method, revealed at an academic conference Saturday in Suita, Osaka Prefecture, is an important advance because archaeologists don't have free access to most of the large ancient mounds, which are managed by the Imperia Household Agency.

"With this epoch-making technology, we can precisely measure (the mounds) without entering the compounds. It will be very useful for our research," said a researcher from the Archaeological Institute of Kashihara.

Berlin - A lost manuscript, one of the earliest by a missionary to detail the ancient Indian language of Old Sanskrit, has been rediscovered in an Italian library, the University of Potsdam in Germany said Monday.

For decades, archaeologists thought of the Amazonian Indians as lowly hunter-gatherers who inhabited widely scattered villages and barely eked out a living in the harsh landscape.

Now that image is collapsing. In a study to be published later this summer, scientists detail an ancient system of monumental public works in a swath of the Amazon in eastern Bolivia. The researchers relied in part on satellite pictures to penetrate the thick jungle, allowing them to inventory vast earthen mounds 25 to 30 feet high and tidy networks of canals and causeways, all built centuries ago.

Cairo, Asharq Al-Awsat- When we talk about the grand history of [Egypt] which extends more than fifty centuries into the past, we find ourselves continually speaking about the ancient Egyptian man, whether this is ancient Egyptian engineers who built temples and pyramids, the ancient Egyptian doctors who carried out the first medical operations in human history, or the ancient Egyptian artists who carved huge statues and inscribed hieroglyphics on the walls of temples and tombs. However we rarely find mention of ancient Egyptian women, as if this great civilization was built by men alone, and as if ancient society was comprised solely of men, which of course is something that is completely untrue.

According to a Jan. 1, 2010 BBC news article, by BBC News science reporter, Paul Rincon, "DNA analyzed from early European," scientists have studied and extracted DNA from the remains of a 30,000 year old European cave man who hunted wild mammoths in the region of Kostenki, Russia about five to ten thousand years before the last ice age began, at a time when Russia was warmer than it is today. Also, in another study, scientists found that about 4 percent (from 2% to 5%) of Europeans, East Asians, Papua-New Guineans, but not any Africans, have inherited Neanderthal genes, at least traces of them. The prehistoric man is known as the Markina Gora skeleton.

For Darrel Higgins, finding an ancient arrowhead in a creek isn't surprising, it's actually expected. Finding a record-setting artifact that dates back to an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 years? Definitely unexpected.

Higgins has been hunting creek beds for artifacts since he began finding them on farmland when he was a child. But nothing he had found compared to the 9 3/4 inch by 2 3/4 inch specimen he recently found in western Kentucky. The item, described as a clovis point made of buffalo river chert, was submerged in a creek bed when Higgins stumbled upon it.

Why do kangaroos have such small arms?

Scientists now think they know why, helping to explain why the unusually-shaped marsupials have tiny arms yet such long legs.

Kangaroos have small forelimbs because short arms are necessary to survive within their mother's pouch soon after they are born, a new analysis confirms.

arlier this month, inside Paris' majestic Grand Palace, Russia was showcasing its cultural and technological achievements.

Portraying a harmonious and progressive society, colourful musical performances and art exhibits were showing alongside impressive displays of Russia's aerospace power, oil industry and other high-tech sectors.

At the heart of the Russian space pavilion was an exhibit for the NPO Lavochkin design bureau - the nation's veteran developer of unmanned planetary probes.