Science & Tech News

Dr Brenna Hasset of the Natural History Museum in London led the team of physical anthropologists at the archaeological dig site at Başur Höyük, in Upper Tigris region of southeast Turkey. The location of a coffin-like tomb (above, main) with evidence of child sacrifice (pictured, left) pushes back estimates of when human sacrificial deaths began in the region by half a century.

A student from Aalen University in Germany has invented an 'airbag' for smartphones. Sensors automatically detect when the phone is in free fall, and then deploy springs to catch the device when it hits the ground. After picking it back up, the user can simply fold the springs back into the case so it's ready for the next drop. The designer won the top award from the German Society for Mechatronics for his phone case, even though the design is still a prototype.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are about to get an AI personal assistant. Known as CIMON (Crew Interactive MObile CompanioN) the bot, developed by Airbus, will use IBM's Watson AI technology to help astronauts.  Researchers hope that with its face, voice and artificial intelligence, it will become a genuine 'colleague' on board, helping astronauts with their daily routines, and warning of any impending problems - much like the HAL robot in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 was designed to do.

Kroger is about to test whether it can steer supermarket customers away from crowded grocery aisles with a fleet of diminutive driverless cars designed to lower delivery costs. The test program announced Thursday could make Kroger the first U.S. grocer to make deliveries with robotic cars that won't have a human riding along to take control in case something goes wrong. Cincinnati-based Kroger is teaming up with Nuro, a Silicon Valley startup founded two years ago by two engineers who worked on self-driving cars at Google. That Google project is now known as Waymo, which plans to introduce a ride-hailing service that is supposed to begin picking up passengers in fully autonomous cars by the end of this year.

Experts from the University of Cambridge trained New Caledonian crows to drop particular sized pieces of paper into a vending machine to receive rewards (right). They were given pieces of card (left) but no templates of previously rewarded shapes. The crows tore up the card to form items that were similar in size to the reward shape. They also improved on their own designs by recreating and then modifying patterns that they had memorised from other crows. Experts say this shows they had formed a mental image of their tool designs. Similar abilities enabled our ancestors to improve on their tool designs over time.

Experts have described the site, near Woodbridge, Suffolk, as having 'international significance' after organic material like bone and wood was preserved by natural spring waters in the area. Around 70 archaeologists have been working since February, carefully unearthing the 100 foot (30-metre) long wooden track (left), which forms the centrepiece of the prehistoric monument. Some of the wood is so well preserved (post, top right) that experts can see markings made by an apprentice, before a more experienced tradesman completed the job. Diggers also found the skull of an auroch (bottom right), an extinct species of large wild cattle, which has been carbon dated to around 4,300 BC.

The concept was created by the firm set up by acclaimed designer Norman Foster, best known in the tech world for his work on Apple's 'spaceship' campus in Cupertino, California. London firm Foster + Partners will present its grand vision for extra-terrestrial living to visitors at this year's Goodwood Festival of Speed. Visitors will be able to view a scale model of the habitats as well as robotics and futuristic designs developed by the company to explore the future of life in space. Forming a central part of its display will be a scale model based on the Mars and lunar habitation pods it has designed. Pictured left are concept images for Mars, while a proposed lunar colony is shown right.

In 2015 archaeologists from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) found a gruesome 'trophy rack' near the site of the Templo Mayor, one of the main temples in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which later became Mexico City. Now, they say the find was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the 'skull tower' was just a small part of a massive display of skulls known as Huey Tzompantli. Pictured, a stone 'skull wall' which was part of the complex. 

Humanity's best hope for finding alien life may be Saturn's moon Enceladus (right image). Scientists say the icy celestial body is the only world in the solar system other than Earth with all the ingredients needed for life. The natural satellite pumps organic molecules from its liquid subsurface ocean (bottom left), an analysis led by scientists at the Southwest Research Insitute in San Antonio, Texas, shows. Researchers said the results could direct future searches for extra-terrestrial life as the organic molecules may be the precursors for alien microbes. Scientists have long suspected that Enceladus may host alien life since Nasa's Cassini probe (top left) discovered the icy body has a subsurface ocean in 2015.

NASA has revealed its much delayed and hugely over budget James Webb Space Telescope will finally launch in 2021 - eighteen months late, and a billion dollars over budget. An Independent Review Board (IRB) established by NASA to assess progress on the project today unanimously recommended that the project should go ahead, prompting NASA to established a new launch date for Webb of March 30, 2021. It comes as NASA revealed a catalogue of errors with the project made by primary contractor Northrop Grumman, including using the wrong type of glue to components being lost inside the telescope. 

The Wendelstein 7-X reactor, located in Greifswald, Germany, has been fired up for longer and at higher energy than ever before (left), beating records for a stellarator type reactor. The new success was thanks to modifications made to the walls of the reactor (top right), researchers say. Their eventual aim it to create a high plasma density (initial attempt, bottom right), a gaseous soup of subatomic particles, that will lead to a self-sustaining fusion reaction. The device uses the same processes that fuel the sun.

These are the amazing scenes as USAF F-15E Strike Eagles were seen flying through the Mach Loop in north Wales earlier today. The fighters dropped to as low as 250ft during their training flight. The area is popular with plane spotters who can climb to the top of a hill and watch the fighter jets and attack helicopters blast through the valley below. Military pilots need to learn to fly low in order to avoid enemy radar if ever faced with flying in a combat zone. By flying low, they are able to mask their aircraft using the terrain.

Stargazers worldwide will be able to see an asteroid in the coming weeks as 4 Vesta, the brightest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, will be visible near the Sagittarius constellation. At 310 square miles (800,000 square kilometres) in size, 4 Vesta is four times larger than the UK and more than 50 times wider than the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. To stargazers in the northern hemisphere, Vesta will appear beyond the northwest tip of the Sagittarius constellation, with Saturn and Mars nearby. This graphic shows its path from May to August in the northern hemisphere. For those in the southern hemisphere, the mirror image is true – with the asteroid appearing south-westerly of the constellation.

The Roborace car, which is powered by four 135kW electric motors and uses an artificial intelligence driver, will drive up the event's 1.16-mile hillclimb course famed for its tight turns, hay bales, flint walls and forests. It has previously raced city circuits around the world as part of the Formula E race series.