Archaeologists say they have disproved the fifty-year-old theory underpinning our understanding of how the famous stone statues were moved around Easter Island. Fieldwork led by researchers at University College London and The University of Manchester has shown the remote Pacific island's ancient road system was primarily ceremonial and not solely built for transportation of the figures.

A complex network of roads up to 800-years-old crisscross the Island between the hat and statue quarries and the coastal areas. Laying alongside the roads are dozens of the statues - or moai.

As the effort continues to find new treatments for Alzheimer's Disease (AD), researchers have found that music may have a role to play. A study from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) has shown that patients with the disease are better able to remember new verbal information when it is provided in the context of music even when compared to healthy, older adults.

Results of the study appear in Neuropsychologia.

Researches at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics have carried out the first fully three-dimensional computer simulations of a core collapse supernova over a timescale of hours after the initiation of the blast. The model will explain how initial asymmetries, which emerge deep in the dense core during the very early stages of the explosion, fold themselves into inhomogeneities observable during the supernova blast, researchers say.

Our daily lives are filled with changes that force us to abandon old behavioral strategies and develop new, more appropriate responses. While it is clear that new rules are often deduced through trial-and-error learning, the neural dynamics that underlie the change are not well understood.

A study in Neuron has uncovered new information about the neural dynamics of developing new problem solving strategies. The research supports the idea of "a-ha" moments in the brain that are associated with sudden insight, the authors say.

Since Darwin proposed universal common ancestry (UCA) More than 150 years ago, the theory, though well supported, has remained beyond the scope of formal testing. But the author of a new letter in Nature says that the famous theory that underpins modern evolutionary biology has finally passed the first large scale quantitative hurdle.

Darwin proposed that, "all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form." Over the last century and a half, qualitative evidence for this theory has steadily grown, in the numerous, surprising transitional forms found in the fossil record, for example, and in the identification of sweeping fundamental biological similarities at the molecular level.

Scientists from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and the University of Bayreuth say they have discovered how spiders form long, highly stable and elastic fibers from the proteins  stored in the silk gland. The results of their study are published in Nature.

Spider silk consists of protein molecules, long chains comprising thousands of amino-acid elements. X-ray structure analyses show that the finished fiber has areas in which several protein chains are interlinked via stable physical connections. These connections provide the high stability. Between these connections are unlinked areas that give the fibers their great elasticity.