After over 40 years of secrecy, the real cause of death of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, has been made public. Prominent Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov reveals the truth behind the events of that tragic day.

On the morning of April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin lifted off aboard Vostok 1 to become the first human in space, spending 108 minutes in orbit before landing in the Saratov region of the USSR. The soft-spoken and well-mannered Gagarin, just 27 years old at the time, became an instant hero, representing the success of the Soviet space program (Alan Shepard’s shorter, suborbital flight happened less than a month later) to the entire world. Gagarin later went on to become a director for the Cosmonaut Training Center and was preparing for a second space flight. Tragically, he was killed when a MiG-15 aircraft he was piloting crashed on March 27, 1968.

According to an article published online on 14-June-2013 on Russia Today (RT.com) former cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov — who performed the first EVA on March 18, 1965 — has revealed details about the accident that killed both Yuri Gagarin and his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin in March 1968.

However, the name of the man responsible for Gagarin’s death is still not being disclosed. Keeping him anonymous was a condition under which Leonov was allowed to talk. It is only known that the pilot is now 80 years old and is in poor health.

Conspiracy theories have surrounded the events of that day for years. They included suicide – even a collision with a UFO.

But for all intents and purposes, the case is closed, and the newfound truth should provide those affected with closure. Such is the conclusion of the first woman in space, Russian Valentina Tereshkova. She spoke at a press conference at the UN headquarters in Vienna, where she participated in a conference of the Committee for the Peaceful Use of Outer Space.

"The only regret here is that it took so long for the truth to be revealed," she said. "But we can finally rest easy."

Antarctica, as many of us know, is a continent around the South Pole, situated mainly within the Antarctic Circle and almost entirely covered by ice sheets.

Antarctica is considered a desert, and here is why:

There is little precipitation in Antarctica since it is a polar region. It has neither lakes nor rivers and is actually the driest continent.

It is known as the world’s driest desert, because in its interior region the extreme cold freezes the water vapor out of the air.

Annual snowfall is equal to less than 5 centimeters of rain. Antarctica is also the only place in the world not claimed or owned by any country.

The Big Ben, the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster in London, is leaning and its tilt is now visible to the naked eye, engineers have claimed.

Civil engineers have discovered that the clock tower at the Palace of Westminster is no longer ramrod straight and the problem is getting worse every year.

The top of the tower is now almost one-and-a-half feet off the perpendicular and if left uncorrected it would eventually fall.

It would still take four thousand years for the tower to reach the angle of Italy's famous leaning tower of Pisa and even longer to reach tipping point.

The problem has been blamed on decades of building work that have gone on around the foot of the structure - 315ft (96m) tall, with 11 storeys and 393 stairs - since it was completed in 1858.

These have ranged from a sewer built in the 1860s to the District Line the following decade and an underground car park for MPs in the 1970s.

When the Jubilee Line was extended through Westminster in the late 1990s, special techniques were used to create a concrete barrier under the tower, in a bid to secure it.

Yet a new survey for London Underground and the Parliamentary Estates Department has found that the rate of movement has accellerated in recent years.

The tower is now leaning towards the northwest at an angle of 0.26 degrees, meaning the top of the tower is 1ft 5in from vertical. John Burland, emeritus professor and senior research investigator from Imperial College London who has worked on the Big Ben tower, said: "The tilt is now just about visible. You can see it if you stand on Parliament Square and look east, towards the river."

From the moment the scientists across the world established that the elevated attentiveness of several substance in synaptic vesicles, which is generally identified as an important portion of the neuron, which supplies neurotransmitters, till date the researchers have been trying hard to fix the role of zinc in the functioning of the brain.

Of late, zinc has made its presence felt in the medical arena both as a helper and a threat, if present in excess.

Now, scientists at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC), and colleagues at MIT and Duke University have found that zinc plays a key role in regulating how neurons communicate with one another, and could affect how memories form and how we learn.

The researchers studied neurons in a brain region called the hippocampus, which is associated with learning and memory formation. They found that removing zinc interfered with a process called long-term potentiation, which strengthens the connection between two neurons, and is believed to be important for memory and learning.

Scientists belonging to the Harvard University have made a claim that the universe is also home to two 'alien' planets, which they refer to as being 'invisible'.

Both the planets, known as Kepler-19b and Kepler-19c, were detected by NASA's Kepler space telescope which was launched in 2009 with an aim to hunt for alien worlds.

First, Kepler spotted 19b as it passed in front of, or transited, its host star. Then, scientists inferred the existence of 19c after observing that 19b's transits periodically came a little later or earlier than expected. The gravity of 19c tugs on 19b, changing its orbit.

The method used to discover Kepler-19c is only a few years old, it is a modern variation on the process used to identify Neptune.

Kepler, an Earth-orbiting space observatory responsible for finding hundreds of alien planet candidates, was launched in March 2009. It searches for planets by looking for dips in stars' light caused by planets passing in front of them.

The telescope's Holy Grail is to find an Earth-sized planet orbiting within the "habitable zone" of its star that would enable it to support liquid water, and possibly life.

"Although additional observations will be needed to achieve that milestone, Kepler is detecting planets and planet candidates with a wide range of sizes and orbital distances to help us better understand our place in the galaxy," NASA officials wrote in a statement.

A new study has found that one of the world's strangest animals — a unique fish that lives on land and can leap large distances despite having no legs — has a rich and complex social life.

Alticus arnoldorum is a species of combtooth blenny found in coral reefs in the Pacific ocean. It was first named by Curtiss in 1938, and is commonly known as the Pacific leaping blenny or the Leaping rockskipper.

The odd lifestyle of the Pacific leaping blenny (Alticus arnoldorum) has been detailed for the first time in research findings that throw new light on how animal life first evolved to colonise the land.

The Pacific leaping blenny is a marine fish in all aspects...except for the tiny detail that it spends all its time living on land. It could help us understand how the first animals colonized the land billions of years ago.

Adult blennies shelter in rock crevices at high and low tide, emerging only at mid-tide to feed, breed and socialize in surprisingly complex ways, Terry Ord of the UNSW Evolution and Ecology Research Center said.

The study has been published in the journal Ethology.

A high-tech 'kitchen garden' may be the answer to the worry about what astronauts may eat on a long journey to Mars.

Astronauts on the first manned missions to Mars could tend “kitchen gardens” of salad and vegetables onboard spaceships, scientists claim.

Maya R Cooper, a senior research scientist at the NASA Johnson Space Center in the Space Food Systems Laboratory in Houston, Texas, says that feeding astronauts could be one of the greatest challenges to the first manned mission to Mars.

Cooper explained that the challenges of provisioning space vehicles and Martian surface bases begin with tangible factors, such weight and nutrition, and encompass psychological nuances, such as providing a varied, tasty menu that wards off boredom.

Experts say the crops would not only give crews healthy food to eat during the long journey to the red planet, but would also improve the atmosphere onboard by producing oxygen and removing carbon dioxide.

These gardens, maintained by the astronauts, can give all the necessary fruits and veggies during the mission. The only weight added to the shuttle will be seeds. Currently, the list consists of lettuce, spinach, carrots, tomatoes, spring onions, radishes, peppers, strawberries, herbs and cabbage.

Space food has evolved from freeze-dried blocks and gooey messes - squeezable from toothpaste-like tubes - since the advent of space travel in the early 1960s. These days, astronauts are able to select their own menus in advance of the mission, which features rehydratable, thermostabilized, irradiated and natural form items, according to NASA's Web site.

A newly found mammal fossil pushes back the date when two lines of mammals diverged, researchers say. Scientists unearthed the 160-million-year-old fossil of a shrew-like mammal in northeast China.

Named the "Jurassic mother from China" (Juramaia sinensis), the newfound fossil species is the earliest known ancestor of placental mammals—animals, such as humans, that give birth to relatively mature, live young—according to a new study.

The small, furry placental mammal lived in what is now north east China during the Jurassic era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

Features of the creature clearly set it apart from marsupial mammals, which adopt a very different reproductive strategy.

The discovery pushes back the date the two groups took up their separate lines, according to Nature magazine.

Until now, the oldest known ancestor to placentals was a small mammal that dates back about 125 million years, to the Cretaceous period.

The new fossil has a well-preserved skull with all its teeth intact. Based on the teeth, the researchers determined that the mammal was more closely related to modern placentals than to modern marsupials.

"Because it lived 160 million years ago, and nobody was there to sign the birth certificate of its descendants, Juramaia could be our great grandmother 160 million years removed or it could also be our great grand aunt that represents a relative on the side lines," lead author Zhe-Xi Luo told Discovery News.

Luo, a Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontologist, and his colleagues Chong-Xi Yuan, Qing-Jin Meng and Qiang Ji analyzed the well-preserved remains of the prehistoric animal, which was discovered in Liaoning Province.

Senkodi, 27, a woman member of a Tamil chauvinist group died on her way to hospital within two hours after her self-immolation outside a government office in Kanchipuram, police said.

The campaign to seek commutation of the death sentences of three convicts in former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi's assassination turned tragic on Sunday (28-Aug-2011) with a woman setting herself afire to allegedly press for the demand, according to a letter recovered from her.

P. Senkodi died within two hours after she set herself on fire. She emptied two litres of petrol from a bottle before setting herself ablaze.

Police sources said eyewitnesses had noticed a young woman, dressed in a salwar kameez, walking into the office around 5.45 p.m. Minutes later, they heard a woman's cries and rushed to the spot and noticed her engulfed in a ball of fire. Residents and the skeleton staff of government offices, including the police and fire stations, put out the fire. A government ambulance stationed nearby rushed her to the Government General Hospital, where she succumbed to injuries around 7.30 p.m.

Police sources said Senkodi was completely charred above her waist and her chances of survival were slim when she was brought to the hospital.

Elsewhere in Tamil Nadu various Tamil groups have launched fast demanding the commutation of the death penalty to the Rajiv assassins.

Kancheepuram police recovered a suicide note from Senkodi in which she urged Chief Minister Jayalalithaa to take a humane view and release the three convicts, who have already spent 21 years in jail. “If my life can save their three lives I will die happily’” she had said in the note.

The process to hold their death sentences was set in motion on Friday (26-Aug-2011) with the Vellore Prison authorities receiving the communication from Rashtrapathi Bhavan that the president has rejected the clemency petition filed by the three LTTE activists.

Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated while proceeding to an election meeting in Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991.

The three convicts, along with 23 others, who stood trial in the case, were sentenced to death by the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act Court-1, Poonamallee on January 28, 1998.

The mercy petitions of the three were rejected by President Pratibha Patil earlier this month, 11 years after they were filed, and the Union Home Ministry has notified her decision to the Tamil Nadu government. Of the three, Murugan and Santhan are Sri Lankan Tamils.

Scientists led by an Indian-origin researcher have discovered a huge underground river which, they believe, is flowing some 13000 feet beneath the mighty Amazon River in Brazil.

In an amazing discovery, scientists have found signs of an underground river flowing below the Amazon.

The Amazon basin covers more than 7 million square kilometres in South America and is one of the biggest and most impressive river systems in the world. But it turns out that - until now - we have only known half the story.

Researchers at the department of geophysics of the Brazil National Observatory have showed evidence of the existence of an underground river that flows 13,000 feet beneath the Amazon.

The finding came from studying temperature variations at 241 inactive oil wells drilled in the 1970s by Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras, the Daily Mail reported.

Researchers decided to name the underground river the Hamza, in tribute to the scientist of Indian origin Valiya Mannathal Hamza, who has been studying the region for more than four decades.

It is believed the river originates from the region of Acre and reaches the sea at Foz do Amazonas, flowing through the basins of Solimoes, Amazona and Marajo.

Even though the two rivers cover a similar path they have differences. The underground river flows at a far slower pace and empties into the ocean deep underground.

The findings were presented recently at a meeting of the Brazilian Geophysical Society in Rio de Janeiro.

In what could be called a gem of a discovery, astronomers claim to have found a planet entirely made of diamonds.

An international team of astronomers, led by Australia's Swinburne University of Technology professor Matthew Bailes, has discovered a planet made of diamond crystals, in our own Milky Way galaxy.

But, at 4,000 light years from Earth, it is out of human reach - for now.

The odd planet was discovered orbiting what's known as a millisecond pulsar — a tiny, fast-spinning corpse of a massive star that died in a supernova.

Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation. The radiation can only be observed when the beam of emission is pointing towards the Earth.

The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.

"The ultimate fate of the binary is determined by the mass and orbital period of the donor star at the time of mass transfer. The rarity of millisecond pulsars with planet-mass companions means that producing such exotic planets is the exception rather than the rule, and requires special circumstances," said Benjamin Stappers from the University of Manchester.

Astronomers estimate that the newfound planet is 34,175 miles (55,000 kilometers) across, or about five times Earth's diameter.

Coriander oil could be used to cure a host of infections including food poisoning and the superbug MRSA, say researchers.

Coriander (Coriandrum sativum) is an annual herb in the family Apiaceae. Coriander is native to southern Europe and North Africa to southwestern Asia. It is a soft, hairless plant growing to 50 centimetres (20 in) tall.

A team of researchers at the University of Beira Interior, Portugal, found coriander to be toxic to a broad range of harmful bacteria.

The scientists tested samples of the oil — taken from the seeds of a coriander plant — against 12 bugs and found that their growth was reduced significantly.

More importantly, most of the bacteria were killed by a solution containing less than 1.6 per cent of the oil, the Daily Mail reported. According to the researchers, the oil attacks and kills the outer membrane of bacteria cells, including salmonella, E.coli and MRSA.

This study not only shows that coriander oil also has an antibacterial effect, but provides an explanation for how it works, which was not previously understood.

The long-missing parent yeast of lager beer was discovered newly, and is believed to have sailed from Patagonia in South America, taking a 7000-mile journey to Bavaria, the birth place of the most popular alcoholic beverage of today.

Lager is a type of beer made from malted barley that is brewed and stored at low temperatures. There are many types of lager; pale lager is the most widely-consumed and commercially available style of beer in the world; Pilsner, Bock, Dortmunder Export and Märzen are all styles of lager.

Yeasts are microscopic fungi that feast on sugar, converting it to carbon dioxide and alcohol via the process of fermentation.

German lager yeast appears to have originated on beech trees in southern Argentina. But how did it get to Europe 600 years ago?

Scientists have identified a yeast that led to the discovery of lager.

The researchers isolated the new species in the frozen forests of Patagonia in South America.

Their discovery suggests that this yeast crossed the Atlantic hundreds of years ago and combined with one traditionally used in Europe to make ale.

The discovery is described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Credit for the discovery of this wild yeast goes to Diego Libkind of the Institute for Biodiversity and Environment Research in Bariloche, Argentina, who was interested in the ball-shaped lumps of sugar that form on beech trees there.

The lumps, called galls, are an immune response to invasion by a fungus. They are abundant in the spring and local Aborigines such as the Mapuche traditionally use them as a slightly-sweet topping for salads.

After decades of research, researchers at Southampton University have developed a theory, according to which, the first 1,000 days of a child's life – the nine months in the womb and the first two years out of it, are vital in determining a child’s long-term health prospects.

According to Professor David Barker and his colleagues from the Southampton University, the stages in a child’s development have an impact on later life, like poor nutrition in a prospective mother may have an adverse effect on her baby’s weight.

Similarly smoking, stress, drugs and alcohol also leaves their impact on the child.

Since, the development of pancreatic cells responsible for making insulin takes place in the womb; the seeds of diabetes are also sown before birth.

Professor Barker believes many health problems can be traced back to poor growth in the womb.

He has shown that the lighter a baby is at birth, the higher its odds of heart disease in later life. On average, a baby weighing less than 5lb 7oz is twice as likely to die from a heart attack than one born at 9lb 7oz.

Barker adds that the key to health is ensuring women eat well throughout their lives.

He says, "What we are seeing is a window of opportunity where we can make better people."

For the first time a tsunami has been observed by radar, raising the possibility of new early warning systems. As it swept toward their coasts the tsunami that devastated Japan on March 11 was picked up by high-frequency radar in California and Japan according to U.S. and Japanese scientists.

Scientists in California got an early look at the tsunami generated by the massive earthquake in Japan as it rippled across the Pacific Ocean.

This is the first time a tsunami has been observed by radar, raising the possibility of new early warning systems.

A new radar system could help California brace for the next tsunami.

At least, that is the hope of John Largier, oceanography professor at the University of California, Davis, Bodega Marine Laboratory. In a paper published in the journal Remote Sensing, Largier and co-authors describe how radar detected the March 11 Japan tsunami that also damaged Crescent City and Santa Cruz.

Scientists have stumbled on a potential new treatment for delayed asthma attacks which can occur several hours after exposure to allergens, a study shows.

A typical early asthmatic response occurs within an hour of exposure to allergens such as chemicals, grass pollen or house-dust mites. However, after the primary attack, about 50 percent of the asthma patients experience delayed symptoms that causes difficulties in breathing for up to as long as 24 hours.

In research on mice and rats, scientists from Imperial College London have now found evidence that the late asthmatic response happens because the allergen triggers sensory nerves in the airways.

These nerves activate reflexes which trigger other nerves that release the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, causing the airways to narrow. It means that drugs that block acetylcholine - called anticholinergics, which includes tiotropium - could be used to treat asthma patients who experience late phase responses.

At present, steroids are the main treatments for asthma but they are not effective for all patients.

In what appears to be seriously big news from a team of NASA-funded researchers, scientists have found evidence that some building blocks of DNA--including two of the four nucleobases that make up our genetic code--found in meteorites were created in space, lending credence to the idea that life is not homegrown but was seeded here by asteroids, meteorites, or comets sometime in Earth’s early lifetime.

Life on Earth may have its origins in outer space, according to Nasa research.

Scientists have analysed meteorites that formed billions of years ago before falling to Earth.

For 50 years, scientists have debated whether the components of DNA — the molecule central to all life on Earth — could spontaneously form in space. A new analysis of a dozen meteorites found in Antarctica and elsewhere presents the strongest evidence yet that the answer is yes.

Meteorites are space rocks that have fallen to the ground, and the new report bolsters the notion that heavy meteorite bombardment of the early Earth may have seeded the planet with the stuff of life.

The discovery has added to a growing body of evidence that the chemistry inside asteroids, meteorites and comets is capable of making building blocks of essential biological molecules.

DNA research suggests genetic differences could account for up to half the difference in individuals' intelligence. Researchers have found that up to half of our intelligence (or lack of it) is inherited.

Previous family and twin studies strongly suggest that many characteristics of intelligence are inherited, but no specific genes or gene variants have been linked with intelligence traits.

The international team, led by Ian Deary of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Peter Visscher of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia, compared the DNA of more than 3,500 people, middle aged and older, who also had taken intelligence tests. They calculated that more than 40% of the differences in intelligence among test subjects was associated with genetic variation.

Past research had suggested that bright parents tend to have bright kids. However, the extent to which genetics contributes to intelligence, as opposed to other contributing factors such as environment, has been hotly debated.

No single gene variant has yet been identified as reliably linked with intelligence. Instead, scientists investigated the potential role of many common genetic variations on human intelligence.

In the new study, investigators found that many different gene variants with small individual effects are involved in human intelligence. But the scientists still couldn't pinpoint the specific genes involved.

"It's been kind of a shock to the system that it hasn't worked," said psychologist Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia, who had no role in the study. "We can't find the effects of any individual genes that are large enough to seem worth worrying about."

British scientists have developed an implanted sleeve that looks like a giant sausage skin, which they claim can cure diabetes.

A team, led by Dr. John Mason of the Trafford Healthcare National Health Service Trust U.K., says that the two-feet-long device can reverse diabetes within weeks — in fact, it acts as an incision-less alternative to a weight loss surgery known as duodenal switch.

The duodenum is the name for the first 10 to 12in of the small intestine, which attaches to the stomach.

A duodenal switch is a keyhole procedure that involves making two incisions at the start and end of the duodenum. The lower part of the intestine is attached to the stomach, forming a new pathway.

Food then bypasses most of the duodenum, which limits absorption.
Long-term risks include hernia and bowel obstruction.

The device, the EndoBarrier, is designed to have the same effects as surgery but is far safer. It is a plastic sleeve that lines the duodenum, meaning food can only be absorbed lower down the intestine.

However, the procedure is performed under anesthetic, which is less than an hour and the sleeve made from a thin plastic is inserted through the mouth then passed into the digestive tract with a thin tube. Once it’s placed, a ‘sprung titanium anchor’ stops it from slipping out and it is taken out after a year.

In the research, the researchers discovered that in obese patients with diabetes, the disease was excluded, and at first the experts were of the belief it came as a result of weight loss, though many patients were able to stop their diabetes medication before they began losing weight.

The discovery has led to clinical trials at three British hospitals, which found the implant also lowers cholesterol levels and blood pressure.

Planetary scientists claim to have for the first time spotted a thin band of anti-matter particles, called anti-protons, enveloping the Earth.

The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirms theoretical work that predicted the Earth's magnetic field could trap antimatter.

A team of more than 60 researchers identified signs of antiprotons in the Van Allen belt using data from the Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics (Pamela) satellite.

The team says a small number of antiprotons lie between the Van Allen belts of trapped "normal" matter.

Cosmic rays bring our planet a steady stream of protons, electrons, and other particles. As these collide with nuclei in the upper atmosphere, they create new particles, including antiprotons. And some of this antimatter is sticking around above our world.

The discovery could help manking to explore the stars, with some researchers believing that the belt of antimatter could be used as a source of fuel.