Scientists have discovered that people think men who are carrying a weapon are bigger than they actually are.

Researchers from UCLA asked hundreds of people guess the size and muscularity of four men based solely on photographs of their hands holding a range of objects.

It was found that brandishing a weapon makes men appear bigger and stronger, with boffins concluding an unconscious mental mechanism recognises a threat and makes us think it is worse.

On average, participants judged pistol-packers to be 17 percent taller and stronger than those judged to be the smallest and weakest men.

"There's nothing about the knowledge that gun powder makes lead bullets fly through the air at damage-causing speeds that should make you think that a gun-bearer is bigger or stronger, yet you do," said Daniel Fessler.

An "exquisitely preserved" woolly mammoth has been discovered in a frozen cliff in Siberia, giving a important insight into the animals.

Named 'Yuka' by scientists, the creature is thought have been three or four years old when it was killed lions and humans who took over the kill at an early stage.

Since then it has spent more than 10,000 years it an icy tomb -- but amazingly its foot pads and "strawberry-blonde" hair are still clearly visible.

"Already there is dramatic evidence of a life-and-death struggle between Yuka and some top predator, probably a lion," said Prof Daniel Fisher of the University of Michigan.

While some scientists were busy trying to cure cancer, others were apparently more preoccupied by the question 'Can trees suffer jetlag?"

Researcher from say that the internal biological clock that gets altered in humans when travelling across time zones, leading to jetlag also applies to trees.

But it's not a wast of time, the team from the University of Western Sydney say their findings could be useful in an era of tackling climate change.

Dr Víctor Resco de Dios said: "If you could move a whole forest from Sydney to Barcelona all of the trees – in fact the whole ecosystem – would likely have the plant equivalent of jetlag.

"The research results provide a much better understanding of ecosystem function and its capacity to store carbon which is essential in an era of climate change and carbon accounting."

Boffins from Russia and South Korea have signed an agreement which will see them attempt to clone a woolly mammoth.

That's right the researchers hope to go all Jurassic Park and  recreate a creature which last walked the earth 10,000 years ago.

North-Eastern Federal University of the Sakha Republic and Hwang Woo-Suk of South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation will work on the project.

They will start by working with thawed woolly mammoth remains which were recovered after global warming thawed Siberia’s permafrost.

If they are able to restore mammoth cells (after suitable science-pokerey) the eggs will be implanted into the womb of a live elephant.

There's something reassuring about seeing a boffin wearing a white lab coat isn't there?

Well apparently the feeling is justified, because researcher have discovered wearing a lab coat makes people concentrate on their work and make fewer errors.

The boffins from Northwestern University -- who we assume were wearing their own lab coats -- tested their theory with 58 undergraduates.

The students (half wearing lab coats) were asked to name the colour of a word flashed on a computer screen, while ignoring the word itself.

It was found that those wearing the classic white lab coat made half as many errors.

Boffins have proposed creating the world's most accurate clock -- a device tied to the orbiting of a neutron around an atomic nucleus.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales say the proposed clock would neither gains nor loses 1/20th of a second in 14 billion years, the age of the Universe.

Because the neutron is held so tightly to the nucleus, its oscillation rate is almost completely unaffected by any external perturbations, unlike those of an atomic clock’s electrons, which are much more loosely bound.

"This is nearly 100 times more accurate than the best atomic clocks we have now," says one of the researchers, Scientia Professor Victor Flambaum, of the UNSW School of Physics.

"It would allow scientists to test fundamental physical theories at unprecedented levels of precision and provide an unmatched tool for applied physics research."

School children in Birmingham have burst their way into the record books and made science history by taking part in the World’s Biggest Practical Science Lesson.

More than 250 pupils from Bishop Challoner Catholic College took part in the science lesson led by world bubble mastermind, Samsam Bubbleman, and hoped to master the science behind bubble-blowing.

Equipped with bubble swords, and under the watchful eye of an official Guinness World Records adjudicator, they were blown-away with a lesson in gravity and light refraction, producing thousands of gigantic soap spheres and bouncing bubbles.

Samsam said: "Today has been un-bubble-ievable! (oh yes he did!) I can’t think of a better way to celebrate The Big Bang Fair coming to Birmingham than blowing our way into the books of Guinness World Records.

Men are more attracted to women who wear red coloured clothing… because they think they'll be more interested in having sex, it has been found.

Researchers at the University of Rochester say that in many non-human primate species, female red displays are a signal of sexual receptivity and this signal attracts male conspecifics.

As such they decided to look at whether the same in humans and conducted experiments in which man were asked to rate the attractiveness of women and gauge, on a scale of 1 to 9, if they was "interested in sex."

It was found that not only did men perceive women in red as sexually receptive, but that they  also perceive sexually receptive women as attractive… like we needed a scientific study to tell us that.

Here's some bad news for arachnophobes. People who are scared of spiders will actually believe creepy crawlies they encounter are bigger than they really are.

Researchers conducted a study of arachnophobes to see how the condition impacted their impression of spiders.

Psychologist Professor Michael Vasey from the Ohio State University had his team recruit 57 arachnophobes who were then subjected to five encounters with live tarantulas.

The suitably scared participants were then asked to rate their anxiety and describe how big they thought the hairy spiders were.

It was found that the more scared people were of the spiders the more they tended to overestimate the size of the beasts.

Scientists claim the D'oh catchphrase of Homer Simpson could have been one of the first words ever uttered by modern man.

Boffins from the University of Amsterdam say this is because of the way in which our prehistoric ancestors vocal tract was formed.

The shape and mechanics of the mouth and throat meant that while speech would have been limited, the 'u' sound would have been one of the easiest to make.

Dr de Boer -- who studied the hyoid bone of ancient vocal tracts -- says this would frequently have been put together to make 'Duh' and 'Buh' sounds.

He suggests the first words would have been spoken about million years ago… and are not dissimilar to those used by many men today.