A thorough investigation of the 'jelly doughnut shaped rock', known by NASA as Pinnacle Island, confirms it isn't an alien fungus, it isn't a meteorite fragment, it's just a chipped bit of rock.

Doubts have emerged about the radical stem cell breakthrough that suggested acid or other stress could turn mature cells into stem cells. The jury's still out on this.

Scientists have developed a detailed model of curly hair, which could give insights into the behaviours of all curved rods. Most importantly, headphone cables.

An artificial hand wired directly into the nerves of an amputee gives the sensation of touch. The recipient could tell if objects were hard or soft, and even their shapes.

A trace fossil gives clues how dinosaurs peed. We don't know which dinosaur, but we do know it was a lot of pee.

The Burgess Shale is famous for its large collection of varied soft-tissue fossils, and another similar site has been found nearby.

A 248 million year old fossil of a dinosaur giving birth has been found and raises questions about whether ancient sea monsters gave birth on land.

Stephen Hawking has some new thoughts on black holes, but he's not saying they don't exist.

For a few weeks, weather uncovered the footprints of five prehistoric humans. And then washed them away again.

There's a leech that can survive being submerged in liquid nitrogen for 24 hours.

Astronomers have discovered what could be one of the oldest stars, formed from the exploded remains of one of the first stars.

The crippled Kepler Space Telescope has been resurrected, with an ingenious solution that restores part of its function.

A new method of turning adult cells into pluripotent stem cells is discovered. According to the paper, simply bathing cells in acid could be cause mature cells to revert to stem cells that could become any cell in the body.

Heart researchers in the UK have managed to turn stem cells into heart cells, that actually beat in petri dishes.

NASA plans to create the coldest spot in the universe on board the International Space Station. They're talking 100 pico-Kelvin, which is one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero.

Antioxidants may worsen lung cancer. Swedish scientists have determined why two antioxidants speed up the development of tumours.

By training wallabies to 'play the pokies', an Australian team has discovered that wallabies see colours more like dogs than fellow marsupials.

Jelly donut shaped rock surprises NASA, then gets them sued.

Tracking dogs by GPS may give clues to pack structure, but probably not.

West Australia's shark cull begins, the same week that a report finds 1/4 of sharks and rays are threatened with extinction.

Men supposedly forget more than women do, but the study has big issues.

After nearly 11 years, the Rosetta comet-chasing spacecraft has awoken and is preparing for an ambitious mission.

A new hypothesis for 'lactose persistence' - why most humans can still drink milk into adulthood.

Why do sloths climb down from their trees to poo on the ground? It could be because of moths.

China is getting into genetic modification and cloning on an 'industrial scale'. That's a lot of pigs.

Biotechnology company Illumina has announced a machine that can sequence the human genome for under US$1,000.

Personal genetics company 23andMe has run afoul of the FDA, but are they really that bad?

2013 was Australia's hottest year on record, and the sixth hottest globally. Plus the 'polar vortex' hitting North America, and one of Australia's "most significant heatwaves". And the effect of "C2O" on jumping sea snails.

Physics professors have searched the internet for evidence of time travel, and didn't find any.

Are dolphins getting high on a toxin secreted by puffer fish? Truth is we really don't know.

A new Staph vaccine shows promise in rabbits, but might not work as well in humans.

A species of sea anemone has been found on the underside of Antarctica's ice sheets. They are the only marine animals known to live embedded in the ice, and no one is sure how they survive.

When seven-year-old Sophie wrote a letter to CSIRO, Australia's peak governmental science organisation, she wanted to know what research was being done on dragons. The CSIRO responded beautifully, first apologising for the lack of dragon-research and then making her a titanium dragon with a 3D printer.

The turn of the millennium has brought a new dimension to the Space Age - one that was undreamed of only a few years ago. Thanks to a combination of visionary entrepreneurs and an ailing Russian spaceflight programme, space tourism is now a reality that is set to take off dramatically in the near future. In this entertaining and fully-illustrated talk, Professor Fred Watson outlines what we might see as space tourism evolves into a mainstream branch of the industry. He argues that the new venture is not merely an expensive diversion for the very rich, but a necessary step in humankind's emergence as a space-faring species.