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Our eyebrows are shaggy ecosystems, habitat to a number of microscopic hair mites. But according to a DNA analysis, our mites are very loyal to us that could be helpful for scientists in tracing ancient human migrations and possibly could find new ways of treating general skin ailments.

A species called demodex folliculorum lives in and around the hair follicles of living beings. Michael Palopoli, Bowdoin College evolutionary geneticist, along with his colleagues sampled the DNA of the mites that live on different group of 70 human hosts.

NASA on Monday announced that it has now officially opened up its application process for the agency’s next round of astronaut candidates. These applications are not merely for a job in NASA, rather the selected candidates could help the agency to go on Mars.

The interested candidates can submit their applications starting from now and the last date of accepting applications is February 28, 2016. The announcement of the selected candidates will be made in mid-2017.

NASA administrator Charles Bolden, said, “NASA is on an ambitious journey to Mars and we’re looking for talented men and women from diverse backgrounds and every walk of life to help get us there”.

Some prominent tech giants have poured in $1billion in a non-profit called Open AI. The backers of the new company include Tesla head Elon Musk, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the start-up incubator Y-Combinator and Amazon Web Services.

In a recent blog post announcing about the news, the team behind the Open AI project said that Artificial Intelligence research firm’s goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as whole.

The new company will disclose its patent and research before public in a bid to increase transparency about AI’s potential rather than focusing on its commercial implications.

The Shell and the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have joined hands to sponsor a $7 million XPrize, which they say will help promote the development of new sensors, robotic submerisbles and other technologies.

This new initiative aims to explore the seafloor as it can lead to advances in a variety of areas. For example, a Caribbean Sea sponge was used in developing a number of drugs, including HIV medicine.

Citing the often-referenced fact that 95% of the ocean remains unexplored, Virmani said presently scientist have far better maps of the surface of Mars but they lack in depth information about seafloor.

American space agency NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) has recently captured some breathtaking images of earth. The images provide some visually stunning view of earth.

According to NASA experts EPIC is placed aboard agency’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), which orbits the sun about 1 million miles from Earth. This huge distance makes it a perfect point to capture earth’s sunlit area every two hours.

The agency has even released a video showing how this location of EPIC allows it to captures some distinct features of earth like its clouds, particulates in the air or volcanic ash clouds. It also details about the energy budget of the planet. This information is of very much importance to scientists as it helps to prepare climate models.

The world’s best dark matter detector has been upgraded by researchers from Edinburgh. Now, the detector, called the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment, is 20 times more sensitive than it was previously, thanks to a new technique.

The instrument in the Black Hills of South Dakota helps researchers find new things on the formation of the universe. It has already proved why it is called the best detector in search for dark matter, which accounts for most of the matter in the universe. Now, the researchers use some new calibration techniques to improve the detector’s sensitivity.