Scientists have found the fossil of a 60-million-year-old creature in Morocco, which is the rabbit sized ancestor of the modern day elephant.

Paleontologist Emmanuel Gheerbrant discovered the rabbit-size proto-elephant’s skull fragments in a basin 60 miles (100 kilometers) east of Casablanca, Morocco.

The creature, called Eritherium azzouzorum, bolsters the case that whole new orders of mammals were already around less than 6 million years after global catastrophe ended the age of reptiles some 65.5 million years ago.

Elephant ancestors now join the likes of rodents and early primates as some of the first known mammals to walk the Earth during the Paleocene era, 65.5 to 55 million years ago (prehistoric time line), according to Gheerbrant.

Round-the-world balloooning pioneer Bertrand Piccard unveiled his solar-powered aircraft in Switzerland on Friday, ready for another trend-setting circumnavigation of the globe powered solely by the sun.

The wasp-shaped prototype of Solar Impulse, with the wingspan of a jumbo jet, was rolled out before some 800 guests at an airfield near Zurich after six years of development.

Ten years after Piccard and Briton Brian Jones achieved the first non-stop flight around the globe in the Orbiter balloon, the Solar Impulse team are aiming to demonstrate that reliance on renewable energy is not a pipedream.

AORA, a leading Israeli solar energy technology company, launched world’s first hybrid solar thermal power station at Kibbutz Samar in southern Israel.

This marked the first time that concentrating solar power (CSP) stations can provide environmentally-friendly power 24 hours a day, according to AORA’s CEO, Haim Fried.

AORA’s “Power Flower” station, named due to its unique yellow tulip design, consists of a field of 30 tracking mirrors (heliostats) situated on half an acre of land.

Each of the station’s 30 heliostats tracks the sun and reflects its rays towards the top of a 30 meter-high tower housing a special solar receiver along with a 100 kilowatt gas turbine.

Pigeons may sometimes appear to randomly target city sculptures with their droppings, but according to a new Japanese study they also have the potential to become discerning art critics.

Researchers at Tokyo’s Keio University say they have found that the birds have “advanced perceptive abilities” and can distinguish between “good” and “bad” paintings, recognising beauty the way humans do.

The team — which previously published research saying that pigeons can tell a Monet from a Picasso — was seeking to find out whether the animals may also be able to prefer one to the other.

For their experiment, the scientists took paintings by elementary school children and selected those that were commonly deemed to be “good” and “bad” by teachers and a control group of other adults.

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, along with researchers in Italy, have found two types of liquid water that have long been suspected to exist below water’s normal freezing point.

Unlike most liquids, water becomes less rather than more dense when it freezes — and it is densest not when it is coldest (at 0 degrees Celsius, just before it freezes) but at 4 degrees C.

These are just two of water’s host of anomalous properties, some of which are crucial to its behaviour in the natural environment.

In 1992, Gene Stanley of Boston University, Massachusetts, and his co-workers carried out computer simulations of water, which suggested that hydrogen bonds in water might produce two different types of liquid if water was made very cold and squeezed to high pressures.

An artificial underground cave, the largest in Israel, has been exposed in the Jordan Valley in the course of a survey carried out by the University of Haifa’s Department of Archaeology. Prof. Adam Zertal, who headed the excavating team, reckons that this cave was originally a large quarry during the Roman and Byzantine era and was one of its kind. Various engravings were uncovered in the cave, including cross markings, and it is assumed that this could have been an early monastery. “It is probably the site of “Galgala” from the historical Madaba Map,” Prof. Zertal says.

The enormous and striking cave covers an area of approximately 1 acre: it is some 100 meters long and about 40 meters wide. The cave is located 4 km north of Jericho. The cave, which is the largest excavated by man to be discovered in Israel, was exposed in the course of an archaeological survey that the University of Haifa has been carrying out since 1978.

As with other discoveries in the past, this exposure is shrouded in mystery. “When we arrived at the opening of the cave, two Bedouins approached and told us not to go in as the cave is bewitched and inhabited by wolves and hyenas,” Prof. Zertal relates. Upon entering, accompanied by his colleagues, he was surprised to find an impressive architectonic underground structure supported by 22 giant pillars. They discovered 31 cross markings on the pillars, an engraving resembling the zodiac symbol, Roman letters and an etching that looks like the Roman Legion’s pennant. The team also discovered recesses in the pillars, which would have been used for oil lamps, and holes to which animals that were hauling quarried stones out of the cave could have been tied.

Scientists claim to have discovered a massive star 10 times the mass of Sun but with similar oscillations which could open new possibilities of probing the interiors of celestial bodies and understanding the reasons behind the fluctuations inside the Sun.

Researchers at LESIA, a laboratory of the Paris observatory (France), and AGO, a laboratory of the Lihge University (Belgium) studied the massive star — V1449 Aql (HD180642) — for more than 150 days and observed that it displays solar-like pulsations which have, so far, never been detected in any heavenly body.

The study, conducted by CoRoT space mission, launched on December 27, 2006, has been developed and operated by CNES, a French government space agency, with contribution from Austria, Belgium, Brazil, ESA (RSSD and Science Programme), Germany and Spain.

“The unprecedented high-precision photometric data gathered for this star by the CoRoT mission allows us to report the first detection of solar-like oscillations in a massive star, V1449 Aql,” said Belkacem Kevin, Department of Astrophysics, AGO, in an email interview to PTI.

The Sun oscillates (fluctuations in its diameter) at a period of around five minutes and these motions represent the superposition of literally millions of independent modes, resonating below its surface at extremely precise periods.

“They afford enormous diagnostic potential for the (otherwise invisible) internal structure and dynamics of this conveniently close star,” Kevin said.

Woolly mammoths survived in Britain until 14,000 years ago, around 6,000 years longer than previously thought, according to a study released Thursday.

The study should settle a raging debate over the extinction of mammoths in Europe, unleashed when fossils from an adult male and four youngsters were found in the central English county of Shropshire in 1986, its author believes.

Conventional wisdom has held that mammoths died out in northwestern Europe some 21,000 years ago during a deep freeze called “the last glacial maximum.”

But the new research, published in Britain’s Geological Journal, proves that the giant tuskers of prehistory hung on for at least another six millennia.

“Our new radiocarbon dating of the Shropshire mammoths shows they returned to Britain and survived until around 14,000 years ago,” said Adrian Lister, a professor at the Natural History Museum in London and author of the study.