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A drilling crew has accidentally become the first humans known to have drilled into

gma, which is the melted form of rock that sometimes erupts to the surface as lava.

According to a report in National Geographic News, the drilling crew cracked through rock layers deep beneath awaii and touched magma in its natural environment.

The find was made 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) underground during exploratory drilling for geothermal energy.

The crew hit something unusual during routine operations at the Puna Geothermal Venture, owned by Ormat echnologies, Inc., of Reno, Nevada.

When the workers tried to resume drilling, they discovered that magma had risen about 25 feet (8 meters) up the ipe they’d inserted.

The rock solidified into a clear glassy substance, apparently because it chilled quickly after hitting groundwater.

“This is an unprecedented discovery,” said Bruce Marsh, a volcanologist from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, ho will be studying the find.

“Normally, volcanologists have to do “postmortem studies” of long-solidified magmas or study active lava during olcanic eruptions,” he said.

But this time, they’d found magma in its natural environment, something Marsh described as nearly as exciting as a aleontologist finding a dinosaur frolicking on a remote island.

Scientists had long known that magma chambers must lie in the vicinity of the drill site.

The drilling was being conducted for an existing geothermal power plant built to harvest heat from the world’s most ctive volcanic zone, Kilauea volcano, which has been spewing lava continuously since 1983.

According to Don Thomas, a geochemist from the University of Hawaii’s Center of the Study of Active Volcanoes, it as just a matter of time until some drilling operation there struck hot magma.

In addition, researchers found that the magma is made of dacite, a type of rock that’s a precursor to granite, ather than the basalt that forms most of Hawaii.

Volcanologist Marsh is excited by the prospects for further study.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “We don’t know where it’s going to lead, but it’s a golden pportunity,” he added.

It might even be possible to do experiments inside the magma.

“This could be the first magma observatory in the Earth,” Marsh said. “This is a singular event of first contact ith inner Earth, where magma lives,” he added.

With an estimated temperature of 1,050 degrees Celsius, the magma is also valuable as a high-quality heat source or geothermal energy production.

Scientists have discovered more than 1,000 species in Southeast Asia’s Greater Mekong region in the past decade, including a spider as big as a dinner plate, the World Wildlife Fund said Monday.

A rat thought to have become extinct 11 million years ago and a cyanide-laced, shocking pink millipede were among creatures found in what the group called a “biological treasure trove”.

The species were all found in the rainforests and wetlands along the Mekong River, which flows through Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the southern Chinese province of Yunnan.

“It doesn’t get any better than this,” Stuart Chapman, director of WWF’s Greater Mekong Programme, was quoted as saying in a statement by the group.

“We thought discoveries of this scale were confined to the history books.”

The WWF report, “First Contact in the Greater Mekong”, said that “between 1997 and 2007, at least 1,068 have been officially described by science as being newly discovered species.”

These included the world’s largest huntsman spider, with a leg span of 30 centimetres (11.8 inches), and the “startlingly” coloured “dragon millipede”, which produces the deadly compound cyanide.

Not all species were found hiding in remote jungles — the Laotian rock rat, which the study said was thought to be extinct about 11 million years ago, was first encountered by scientists in a local food market in 2005, it said.

One species of pitviper was first noted by scientists after it was found in the rafters of a restaurant at the headquarters of Thailand’s Khao Yai national park in 2001.

“This region is like what I read about as a child in the stories of Charles Darwin,” said Dr Thomas Ziegler, curator at the Cologne Zoo, who was involved in the research.

“It is a great feeling being in an unexplored area and to document its biodiversity for the first time both enigmatic and beautiful,” he said.

The new species highlighted in the report include 519 plants, 279 fish, 88 frogs, 88 spiders, 46 lizards, 22 snakes, 15 mammals, four birds, four turtles, two salamanders and a toad — an average of two previously undiscovered species a week for the past 10 years.

The report warned, however, that many of the species could be at risk from development, and called for a cross-border agreement between the countries in the Greater Mekong area to protect it.

Reports indicate that the temperature inside India’s first unmanned lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 has gone over 50 degrees Celsius, prompting scientists to explore various options to cool down the unexpected surge.

According to a report by BBC News, scientists say that the problem arose because of very hot temperatures during the lunar orbit.

“Now the moon, our satellite and the sun are in same line this means our craft is receiving 1,200 watts of heat from the moon and 1,300 watts from the sun per meter square,” said M Annadurai, project director of Indian’s moon mission.

If the temperature is not kept in check, many instruments on board the orbiter may fail to perform, according to scientists.

This has prompted them to take urgent measures. Most of the instruments are now switched off or being used sparingly.

“We have rotated the spacecraft by 20 degrees and this has helped to reduce the temperature of the craft. We have also switched off certain equipment like mission computers and this has resulted in the reduction of temperature to 40C now. At this temperature, all the equipment can perform very well,” Annadurai said.

“Although we did factor in the thermal conditions in the lunar orbit, the temperature is a bit higher than we anticipated,” he added.

Annadurai insisted all the instruments carried on board of the satellite have been tested and were working properly.

While the turning-off of certain equipment will have an impact on lunar research, Annadurai said that it was not worth “taking the risk to run it” at present.

Scientists also plan to raise the orbit of the Indian craft to cool it down. It is presently in orbit 100km (62 miles) from the moon.

However, Annadurai said that would only be done as a last resort.

He said that the next month would be critical for the survival of the mission, which has an intended life span of two years.

India launched its first lunar mission on October 22 this year. The mission aims to map the lunar surface, look for traces of water and the presence of helium.

“We are able to use terrain mapping cameras to take picture of the moon whenever required,” Annadurai said.

The current difficulties are the first to be experienced by the mission, which has been praised for sending the probe onto the moon’s surface.

A new method that uses lasers to produce streams of truly random numbers faster than ever before may help improve security at a time when digital traffic and cyber crime are both growing.

Strings of random numbers are used to make secret keys and other parts of encryption protocols.

But, software that generates random numbers can generally only manage a close approximation to random.

Statistical analysis reveals underlying if near-invisible patterns that mean an attacker could predict the sequence and break the code.

Now, according to a report in New Scientist, a new trick using the semiconductor lasers that power fibre-optic links offers a more practical way to improve security.

The new system can generate truly random numbers 10 times faster than existing devices, which can typically only produce 10s or 100s of megabits of random numbers per second, according to Atsushi Uchida, an electrical engineer at Saitama University, Japan.

Uchida and colleague Peter Davis, from NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Kyoto, can now generate truly random sequences at up to 1.7 gigabits per second.

They took a standard semiconductor laser and added an external mirror to reflect some of the light back inside the laser.

That feedback causes the light produced to oscillate randomly. This can be converted into an AC current and then into a binary signal that can be used by a computer.

Signals from two lasers are combined into a single, truly random number sequence.

According to the researchers, relatively inexpensive versions of the system could be built into cryptographic systems for secure network links, or quantum communication systems.

A new research by a team of scientists has suggested that climate change can open new avenues for spread of invasive plants.

The team’s findings indicate that certain plants could become invasive if they spread to places that were previously too cold for them.

“This paper is the first to suggest that the mechanisms that aid invasive species when they move from one continent to the next may actually work within continents when climate change gradually extends the distributional range of a species,” said Koen J.F. Verhoeven, an evolutionary biologist at The Netherlands Institute of Ecology.

“Plants may be able to outrun, so to speak, their enemies from the southern range,” he added.

Often, exotic plants and animals are introduced to new continents or geographic regions by travelers and commerce.

Separation from their natural enemies can drive their invasive success in the new range. But, increasingly, the distribution of many species is shifting because of climate change and changes in land use.

Led by scientists Tim Engelkes, Elly Morrien and Wim van der Putten of The Netherlands Institute of Ecology, with collaborators from the University of Florida, Wageningen University and Leiden University, the researchers compared exotic plant species that had recently established in Millingerwaard, a nature preserve in The Netherlands, with related native plant species from the same area.

“We set out to see whether the native and exotics responded differently to natural enemies such as herbivores or microorganisms in the soil,” said Lauren McIntyre, an associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology in UF’s College of Medicine and a member of the UF Genetics Institute.

Scientists grew six exotic and nine native plant species in pots with field-collected soil from the Millingerwaard area, allowing natural soil pathogenic microbes to accumulate in the pots.

Then, they removed the plants and replanted the soils with the same plant species.

The growth of native plants was reduced far more than the growth of exotic species, indicating natives were more vulnerable to natural soil-borne microbes.

In addition, all plant species were exposed to North African locusts and a widespread species of aphid.

These herbivores were not expected to show a preference for either the native or the exotic species. But, they preferred the native plants and left the exotic ones relatively alone.

According to researchers, the findings help to better assess the ecological consequences of climate change.

Earth seems to have its first fuzzy photos of alien planets outside our solar system, images captured by two teams of astronomers.

The pictures show four likely planets that appear as specks of white, nearly indecipherable except to the most eagle-eyed experts. All are trillions of miles away - three of them orbiting the same star, and the fourth circling a different star.

None of the four giant gaseous planets are remotely habitable or remotely like Earth. But they raise the possibility of others more hospitable.

It’s only a matter of time before “we get a dot that’s blue and Earthlike,” said astronomer Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. He led one of the two teams of photographers.

“It is a step on that road to understand if there are other planets like Earth and potentially life out there,” he said.

Macintosh’s team used two ground-based telescopes, while the second team relied on photos from the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope to gather images of the exoplanets - planets that don’t circle our sun. The research from both teams was published in Thursday’s online edition of the journal Science.

In the past 13 years, scientists have discovered more than 300 planets outside our solar system, but they have done so indirectly, by measuring changes in gravity, speed or light around stars.

NASA’s space sciences chief Ed Weiler said the actual photos are important. He compared it to a hunt for elusive elephants: “For years we’ve been hearing the elephants, finding the tracks, seeing the trees knocked down by them, but we’ve never been able to snap a picture. Now we have a picture.”

In a news conference Thursday, Weiler said this fulfills the last of the major goals that NASA had for the Hubble telescope before it launched in 1990: “This is an 18 1/2-year dream come true.”

There are disputes about whether these are the first exoplanet photos. Others have made earlier claims, but those pictures haven’t been confirmed as planets or universally accepted yet. The photos released Thursday are being published in a scientifically prominent journal, but that still hasn’t convinced all the experts. Alan Boss, an exoplanet expert at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Harvard exoplanet hunter Lisa Kaltenegger both said more study is needed to confirm these photos are proven planets and not just brown dwarf stars.

MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager, at the NASA press conference, said earlier planetary claims “are in a gray area.” But these discoveries, “everybody would agree is a planet,” said Seager, who was not part of either planet-finding team.

The Hubble team this spring compared a 2006 photo to one of the same body taken by Hubble in 2004. The scientists used that to show that the object orbited a star and was part of a massive red dust ring which is usually associated with planets - making it less likely to be a dwarf star.

Macintosh’s team used ground-based telescopes to spot three other planets orbiting a different star. That makes it less likely they are a pack of brown dwarf stars.

The planet discovered by Hubble is one of the smallest exoplanets found yet. It’s somewhere between the size of Neptune and three times bigger than Jupiter. And it may have a Saturn-like ring.

It circles the star Fomalhaut, pronounced FUM-al-HUT, which is Arabic for “mouth of the fish.” It’s in the constellation Piscis Austrinus and is relatively close by - a mere 148 trillion miles away, practically a next-door neighbor by galactic standards. The planet’s temperature is around 260 degrees, but that’s cool by comparison to other exoplanets.

The planet is only about 200 million years old, a baby compared to the more than 4 billion-year-old planets in our solar system. That’s important to astronomers because they can study what Earth and planets in our solar system may have been like in their infancy, said Paul Kalas at the University of California, Berkeley. Kalas led the team using Hubble to discover Fomalhaut’s planet.

One big reason the picture looks fuzzy is that the star Fomalhaut is 100 million times brighter than its planet.

The team led by Macintosh at Lawrence Livermore found its planets a little earlier, spotting the first one in 2007, but taking extra time to confirm the trio of planets circling a star in the Pegasus constellation. The star is about 767 trillion miles away, but visible with binoculars. It’s called HR 8799, and the three planets orbiting it are seven to 10 times larger than Jupiter, Macintosh said.

“I’ve been doing this for eight years and after eight years we get three at once,” he said.

Google has developed a 3D model of the ancient city of Rome that is available for Internet surfers on the company’s virtual globe program called Google Earth.

The project has been developed by Google, in collaboration with the Rome Reborn Project and Past Perfect Productions.

According to a report in the Times, the realisation of the ancient city in Google Earth lets viewers stand in the centre of the Colosseum, trace the footsteps of the gladiators in the Ludus Magnus and fly under the Arch of Constantine.

The computer model, a collection of more than 6,700 buildings, depicts Rome in the year 320 AD.

Rome is the first ancient city to be viewable in three dimensions in Google Earth. The feature uses satellite imagery, maps and search to show viewers a wide range of geographical information for the entire planet.

The computer graphics are based on a physical model - the Plastico di Roma Antica, which was created by archaeologists and model-makers between 1933 and 1974 and is housed in the Museum of Roman Civilisation in Rome.

“The project is the continuation of five centuries of research by scholars, architects and artists since the Renaissance who have attempted to restore the ruins of the ancient city with words, maps and images,” said Bernard Frischer, the director of the Rome Reborn Project.

“The partnership with Google Earth is another step in creating a virtual time machine which our children and grandchildren will use to study the history of Rome,” he added.

The Ancient Rome feature is designed for students and historians as well as people with a more casual interest in the city.

Viewers can find out more through pop-up “information bubbles” for more than 250 sites identified in the ancient city.

The first bubble provides basic information for schoolchildren and a second click provides more advanced information including a topographical encyclopedia, ancient literary sources and bibliographical information about each building.

The information is available in a variety of languages.

According to Gianni Alemanno, the Mayor of Rome, “It’s an incredible opportunity to share the stunning greatness of Ancient Rome, a perfect example of how the new technologies can be ideal allies of our history, archaeology and cultural identity.”

While sunlight can cause wrinkles, the red glow from LEDs may help smooth them out, finds a new study.

A light-emitting-diode (LED) is a semiconductor diode that emits light when an electric current is applied in the forward direction of the device, as in the simple LED circuit.

The red LEDs do this by altering the interactions between water and elastic proteins in the skin.

In a new study, Andrei Sommer and Dan Zhu of the University of Ulm in Germany, found how water molecules in the skin interact with different substances.

They found that water molecules close to a hydrophobic, or “water-hating”, substance formed a slippery crystalline layer, and those surrounding a hydrophilic, or water-loving, substance were glue-like.

It is known that Elastin, the fibrous protein that gives skin its elasticity and prevents wrinkling, is hydrophobic.

However, with age, fatty acids, amino acids and calcium salts build up on the elastin fibres, and make them hydrophilic.

It makes the water film around the fibres increasingly glue-like, which makes them to stick to the surrounding tissue and reduce their elasticity.

It has earlier been confirmed that red light with a wavelength of around 670 nanometres can render more mobility to the water molecules close to hydrophilic substances.

Thus, the researchers aimed powerful red LEDs at the skin around the eyes for 90 seconds daily for 10 months.

They observed a significant reduction in wrinkles after applying red LEDs.

“The result was rejuvenated skin,” New Scientist quoted Sommer, as saying.

Such LEDs have also been used earlier for reversing eye damage and promote wound healing.

A team of cosmologists from the University of the Basque Country has determined that the accelerated expansion of the Universe can be explained by dark ‘phantom’ energy.

To explain the majority of the phenomena occurring in the Universe, complicated calculations with a computer are required and which have to be based on appropriate mathematical models.

This is what the Gravitation and Cosmology research team at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) is involved in: analyzing models capable of explaining the evolution of the Universe.

One of the phenomena that standard models of physics have not yet been able to explain is that of the accelerated expansion of the Universe.

Although Einstein proposed a static model to describe the cosmos, today it is well known, thanks to supernovas amongst other things, that it is, in fact, expanding.

By measuring the quantity of light that gets to us from a supernova, we can calculate its distance from us, and its colour indicates the speed at which it is distancing itself from us.

The more reddish it is, the faster it is travelling. In other words, comparing two supernovas, the one that is distancing itself more slowly from us is a more bluish colour.

According to observations by astrophysiscists, besides supernovas distancing themselves from us, they are doing so more and more rapidly, i.e. distancing themselves at an accelerated velocity, just like the rest of the material of the Universe.

The energy known to exist in the Universe, however, is not sufficient to cause such acceleration.

Thus, the theory most widely accepted within the scientific community is that there exists a ‘dark energy’, i.e. an energy that we cannot detect except by the gravitational force that it produces.

In fact, it is believed that 73 percent of the energy of the Universe is dark.

The unique characteristic of dark energy known to us is that it possesses repulsive gravitational force. That is, unlike the gravity we know on Earth, this force tends to distance stars, galaxies and the rest of the structures of the Universe from each other.

This would explain why the expansion of the Universe is not constant, but accelerated.

Such powerful dark energy is known as phantom energy, with which the Universe is able to expand to such an extent that the structures we know today would disappear.

This research group considers that the phantom energy model may be the most suitable to explain the accelerated expansion of the Universe.