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Tracking the comings and goings of a planet was a matter of space research more than a thousand year ago before first telescopes were discovered. That time, simple arithmetic was a way to track motion of a planet across the night sky.

A new study on ancient clay tablets revealed that the Babylonia astronomers used geometry to track the planet Jupiter, or what they called ‘the White Star’ at least 1,400 years before Europeans. They were the first to calculate the gas giant’s orbit, it added.

According to Hubble Space Telescope astronomers, the popular old saying that ‘what goes up must come down’ is even applicable on a huge cloud of hydrogen gas beyond our Milky Way galaxy. The invisible cloud is falling in the direction of our galaxy at roughly 700,000 miles per hour.

There are a large number of huge, high-velocity gas clouds speeding around the outskirts of our galaxy, but the so-called ‘Smith Cloud’ is different as its trajectory is well known. New Hubble observations have suggested that it was launched from the galactic disk’s out regions, nearly 70 million years back. The cloud was found in the early 1960s by doctoral astronomy student Gail Smith, who spotted the radio waves emission form its hydrogen.

Octopuses have the ability to turn their colour into black whenever they are intimidated by their neighbors. They not only turn black, but also stand tall and loom over their rivals threateningly, giving them the image of an eight-armed Dracula.

The finding, published as part of a study in the journal Current Biology, shows that some of the octopuses have a social life. It also busts the existing belief in the scientific community that the invertebrates are loners.

The study focuses on a species called octopus tetricus or the gloomy octopus, which was found in the shallows of Jervis Bay, Australia. Probably, the octopuses had gathered at the site to munch on tasty scallops.

Bob Ebeling, along with four other engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol, did all they could to stop the launch of the space shuttle Challenger 30 years ago. The nation lost seven astronauts when the space shuttle exploded 73 seconds after the its launch. The incident left Ebeling in depression and to date the 89-year-old engineer has not recovered from the guilt and grief.

A latest study that has appeared in the Journal of the American Heart Association has discovered that caffeine doesn't lead to heartbeat irregularities, though it has been heard so in the past.

The University of California San Fransisco researchers assessed the coffee, tea and chocolate consumption of 1,388 healthy men and women over a 365-day period.

In this time span, the participants were told to wear a portable device that monitored their heart rhythm the whole day, 24X7.

Scientists have come up with a wearable sweat monitor that keeps check on an individual’s health by monitoring the chemical composition of his/her perspiration.

Described on Wednesday in Nature, the new device is sufficiently flexible to move with the body. It has Bluetooth capabilities, thus, can send data in real time to a smartphone.

There could be a day soon when it might alert sweat drenched users to their vulnerability of dehydration, fatigue, stress and other physical ailments, and may make activity monitors such as Fitbit look terribly basic.

Senior author on the paper, Ali Javey, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the ultimate aim is to have a pathology lab right on the body.