A new robotic telescope designed to study planets around other stars has taken its first image. Although based in Chile, the Trappist telescope will be operated from a control room in Belgium, 12,000km away. As well as detecting and characterising so-called exoplanets, Trappist will also study comets orbiting our Sun. The 0.6m fully-automated telescope will be based at the La Silla Observatory, on the outskirts of Chile's Atacama Desert. "Terrestrial planets similar to our Earth are obvious targets for the search for life outside the Solar System," said Emmanuel Jehin, one of the astronomers on the project. "Comets are suspected to have played an important role in the appearance and development of life on our planet." The telescope's stunning first image shows...

This is nothing to spit at: Scientists say they may be able to track deadly mosquito-borne diseases by studying the saliva the insects leave behind when they feed on sugary bait. Mosquito-borne diseases are a major health hazard worldwide. Some, like malaria, chronically afflict certain regions. But others, such as dengue fever, West Nile virus, and chikungunya, can rapidly emerge in new locations or reappear in areas where they've gone dormant. That means public health officials must keep a constant eye on the diseases' movement. The usual methods for detecting mosquito-borne viruses all have a weakness: Relying on clinical diagnoses means a disease has already arrived in the population; keeping ''sentinel'' animals is costly, and the animals themselves provide a...

In March, Discovery News had a look at a Mars rover concept that could revolutionize how we carry out planetary exploration. This rover has no wheels, it's inspired by a bizarre desert plant and its only means of propulsion is the Martian wind. And now, North Carolina State University (NCSU) scientists have designed a computer program to test different designs of the rover before it is even built. Enter the Mars Tumbleweed Rover, destined to roll where no robot has rolled before. The Mars landscape has so far been dominated by landers and wheeled rovers, and that probably won't change for some time to come. Sure, NASA's current Mars Exploration Rovers are (or "was" in the case of the hibernating Spirit) showing us amazing longevity, but is there another way to...

A mysterious gray whale sighted off the coast of Israel in the Mediterranean Sea has been seen again off the north east coast of Spain. The second sighting, made 23 days and 3000km after the first, has continued to perplex whale experts. Gray whales were thought to be extinct across the Atlantic Ocean, so the appearance of an individual within the Mediterranean Sea was a major surprise. Now it is not clear where the whale is heading or why. Once, three major populations of gray (also spelt grey) whale existed: in the western and eastern North Pacific Ocean, and in the North Atlantic. However, the North Atlantic population of gray whale became extinct sometime in the 17th or 18th Century, for reasons that are not clear. No sightings of the species had been made in the Atlantic Ocean since....

Eerie lights in the sky in Sydney, Wollongong and Canberra early today prompted multiple UFO sightings up and down the east coast. People reported throughout the states say they witnessed a mysterious light travelling in an erratic fashion across the sky in the early morning hours. One caller told the ABC that she saw a light 'racing across the sky' about 5.50am Saturday. She described the light as 'like a lollipop swirl' that came from the west and was headed east out to sea. "It was unreal," she said. "There was a cloud in the sky - just this light with a swirl in the middle." Another said: "It was a perfect spiral of light. "I realised soon it was not the moon but that it was shooting like a comet from the southern sky and off into the...

Meet "Phoenix," a new pterosaur that once flew over what is now the Sahara desert. The giant flying reptile, also known as a pterodactyl, lived 95 million years ago and is described in the latest issue of the journal PLoS ONE. Its scientific name is Alanqa saharica, which basically means "Phoenix of the Sahara" in Arabic. The Phoenix was a mythological flying creature that died in a fire and was reborn from the ashes of that fire. This pterosaur Phoenix, however, was reborn out of ancient fossils unearthed in the Sahara. “When this pterosaur was alive, the Sahara desert was a river bed basin lush with tropical plant and animal life,” explains project leader Nizar Ibrahim, a University College Dublin researcher.

An object that hit Jupiter last year with a force equivalent to a few thousand nuclear bombs, which left it with a scar the size of Pacific Ocean was probably an asteroid, say astronomers. Images of the "bruise" captured by the Hubble telescope show the aftermath of an asteroid striking a planet. It could provide clues about what might happen if a similar object hit Earth. The spot was first seen in 2009 by an Australian amateur astronomer. The astronomer in question, Anthony Wesley, has recently taken another striking image of an bright fireball hitting the gas giant. Scientists believe it to be a meteoroid - a small particle of space debris. A team of scientists described in the Astrophysical Journal Letters how they compared the 2009 Hubble images with those of scars left on...

ANGEL FIRE — For Dee Gragg the question isn’t “Did a UFO land in a field just outside of Angel Fire.” Instead, the question is “What kind of a UFO was it?” Gragg, the assistant director of the New Mexico chapter of MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network), gave a presentation Saturday afternoon (May 29) to an audience of alien aficionados at which he shared evidence that was gathered in a “10-month investigation” on an empty Moreno Valley pasture. The talk was touted as a report on an “authentic landing site” and was sponsored by the Angel Fire-based Alliance Studying Paranormal Experiences (ASPE) and its president Janet Sailor. She refers to the area in the mountains of Northern New Mexico as a “UFO hot spot.”“We’re going to...

Archaeologists have found what they say is the earliest evidence of Neanderthals living in Britain. Two pieces of flint unearthed at motorway works in Dartford, Kent, have now been dated to 110,000 years ago. The finds push back the presence of Neanderthals in Britain by 40,000 years or more, said Dr Francis Wenban-Smith, from Southampton University. A majority of researchers believe Britain was uninhabited by humans at the time the flint tools were made. An absence of archaeological evidence suggests people abandoned this land between 200,000 years ago (or 160,000 years ago, depending on who you ask) and 65,000 years ago. But one researcher, unconnected with the study, said he was not convinced by the evidence presented so far.

An unmanned Japanese spacecraft designed to return samples from an asteroid has completed an important step on its journey back to Earth. Hayabusa achieved the second and largest of four engine firings designed to guide the probe back home. The probe visited the asteroid Itokawa in 2005, making close approaches designed to capture soil samples. But the mission has been plagued by technical glitches affecting the engines and communications with Earth. It remains unclear whether the probe managed to grab any material from Itokawa; scientists will have to open the capsule to find out. At the weekend, the Japanese Space Agency (Jaxa) announced that Hayabusa had successfully completed its second Trajectory Correction Manoeuvre (TCM), guiding the spacecraft to Earth's "outer...