People who take sleeping pills more than twice a month are how many times more likely to die prematurely?

According to a study published in the British Medical Journal Open, people taking higher doses of the commonly-prescribed temazepam pills, which were dispensed 2.8 million times in England in 2010, were six times more likely to die in the next two-and-a-half years. People taking the drugs were also more likely to develop cancer. For the drug zolpidem, which was prescribed 733,000 times in England in 2010, the risk of death was 5.7 times higher for those taking them most frequently

Over the last 20 years, scientists have painstakingly collected data from the stomach, bowels and teeth of the 45-year old man, who was found sticking out of a glacier by German climbers in 1991 in the Tyrolean Alps on the Austro-Italian border.

The oldest and thickest Arctic sea ice is disappearing at a faster rate than the younger and thinner ice at the edges of the Arctic Ocean’s floating ice cap, a new study by NASA has revealed. The thicker ice, known as multi-year ice, survives through the cyclical summer melt season, when young ice that has formed over winter just as quickly melts again.

Scientists have identified an asteroid which has a one in 625 chance of hitting Earth. The width of the space rock, called 2011 AG5, is 460 feet.

Astrophysicists including one of an Indian-origin, studying X-rays emitted a long time ago in a far away galaxy, has unmasked a stellar mass black hole in Andromeda, a spiral galaxy about 2.6 million light-years from Earth. Scientists had suspected the black hole was possible since late 2009 when an X-ray satellite observatory operated by the Max Planck Institute detected an unusual X-ray transient light source in Andromeda.

Falling levels of cloud height across the world, possibly triggered by increasing global temperatures, may have a cooling impact on global warming, a new study has suggested. The first 10 years of data from the NASA Terra satellite, which uses nine cameras at different angles to produce a stereo image of the world’s clouds, revealed that their average height has come down by about 1 per cent, or 30 to 40 metres.

According to the team of scientists from the University of Melbourne in Australia, when one ant fights with an intruder from another colony it retains that enemy's odour and passes it on to the rest of the colony. This enables any of its nest-mates to identify an ant from the offending colony.

According to lecturer and author Timothy Good, the 34th President of the United States and other FBI officials organised the showdown with the space creatures by sending out ‘telepathic messages’.

Sir Isaac Newton, who laid the foundations of classical physics and is considered to be one of the greatest scientists ever, also had a keen interest in the occult and applied a scientific approach to the study of scripture and Jewish mysticism, according to newly uploaded texts. Israel’s national library, which contains a vast treasure of Newton’s esoteric writings, has digitised his occult collection and posted it online.

In a large, prospective study led by a researcher at Rush University Medical Center, women who were exposed to higher levels of ambient particulate matter (PM) over the long term experienced more decline in their cognitive functioning over a four-year period. Higher levels of long-term exposure to both coarse PM (PM2.5-10) and fine PM (PM2.5) were associated with significantly faster cognitive decline.