Some Texas A&M University researchers examining ancient Egyptian mummies may have unwrapped – literally – some of the mysteries that embalmers used to preserve bodies more than 3,000 years ago.

Mahlon "Chuck" Kennicutt II, MoonKoo Kim and Yaorong Qian of Texas A&M's College of Geosciences, along with colleagues from the University of Alexandria, have discovered that tar originating from natural oil seeps in the Middle East area was used in the preservation and mummification process by Egyptians thousands of years ago.

Examining areas near the Suez Canal, Kennicutt and the team also learned that tar fueled fires in glass factories used by the surrounding communities.

Two of ESO's telescopes captured various stages in the life of a star in a single image - a cosmic ghost.

ESO PR Photo 42a/05 shows the area surrounding the stellar cluster NGC 2467, located in the southern constellation of Puppis ("The Stern"). With an age of a few million years at most, it is a very active stellar nursery, where new stars are born continuously from large clouds of dust and gas.

The image, looking like a colorful cosmic ghost or a gigantic celestial Mandrill [1] , contains the open clusters Haffner 18 (center) and Haffner 19 (middle right: it is located inside the smaller pink region - the lower eye of the Mandrill), as well as vast areas of ionized gas.

Astronomers have found possible proofs of stellar vampirism in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae. Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, they found that some hot, bright, and apparently young stars in the cluster present less carbon and oxygen than the majority of their sisters.

A biotech company, Tensor Biosciences of Irvine, California, has developed a method to keep pieces of living brain tissue alive for weeks, which will allow research on entire neural networks rather individual cells.

"We are building stripped-down mini-brains, if you will, directly on a chip," says Miro Pastrnak, business development director of Tensor.

"Behaviour is the result of the electrical activity of billions of brain cells connected in complex circuits, not the activity of a cell or a receptor acting in isolation," says Pastrnak. Currently, drugs are only tested on individual nerve cells because larger pieces of brain tissue couldn't be kept alive for more than a few hours.

Vampire bats, the only mammals to feed exclusively on blood, including human blood, recognize their prey by the sound of its breathing. In a study published today in the open access journal BMC Biology, vampire bats of the species Desmodus rotondus could recognise recorded human breathing sounds much better than human participants could.

Vampire bats feed on the same prey over several nights and the authors of the study propose that the bats use breathing sounds to identify their prey in the same way as humans use voice to recognise each other.

Cooked or raw, garlic has been a favorite ingredient of cooks for thousands of years, but almost any cook will tell you there's a major difference: raw garlic is much more pungent than cooked.

Now, a group of scientists from The Scripps Research Institute, the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation, and the Korea University College of Medicine is explaining the biological basis of raw garlic's burn.

In the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, the scientists, led by Scripps Research Associate Professor Ardem Patapoutian and Lindsey Macpherson, who is a graduate student in the Kellogg School of Science and Technology at Scripps Research, describe the cellular and molecular basis of raw garlic's pungency.