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On Sunday, Earth's magnetic field was pelted by a solar wind stream reaching velocities of more than 600 kilometers (372 miles) per second.While that's nothing too alarming – solar storms often pummel our planet triggering spectacular auroras – what is weird is that this storm was totally unexpected.  "This event was not in the forecast, so the resulting auroras came as a surprise," SpaceWeather reported. Solar wind occurs when a stream of highly energized particles and plasma can no longer be held back by the Sun's…

In the near future, NASA and other space agencies will send astronauts beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for the first time in over fifty years.But unlike the Apollo Era, these missions will consist of astronauts spending extended periods on the Moon and traveling to and from Mars (with a few months of surface operations in between).  Beyond that, there's also the planned commercialization of LEO and cis-Lunar space, meaning millions of people could live aboard space habitats and surface settlements well beyond Earth. This…

Scientists have demonstrated that locusts are adept at differentiating healthy human cells from cancerous cells using their sense of smell – and that could open opportunities for detecting the disease earlier, improving the chances of recovery.  Even better, the insects can actually pick out individual cancer cell lines, suggesting that the type of cancer, as well as the presence of cancer, can be detected.If we can work out how to harness this ability in medical devices, there's a huge amount of potential.Published on…

In spite of their reputation as living dinosaurs, birds have come a long way since the days of T. rex and friends. Gone is the toothy rostrum, replaced by the more familiar beak. Their skeletons have adapted for flight, as have their forelimbs. Even their pelvis is twisted into a shape that their more ancient ancestors would barely recognize.  These changes weren't spontaneous developments, nor are they absolute. For a brief period early in their development, in fact, birds of all variety grow a pelvis that wouldn't have…

A turtle hospital in Florida said all the turtles they tested for the past four years have been female, a worrying trend it attributes to climate change.The temperature of the sand where the eggs are buried influences the sex of sea turtles.  Males are already a small minority of sea turtles – outnumbered around 10 to one – and as the sand gets hotter fewer and fewer males develop.Experts disagree about the effect of this trend on the survival of sea turtle species. Regardless, climate change is putting heavy pressure on…

From the smallest bacterium to the greatest galaxy, death looms on the horizon; even if, in cosmic terms, the time scales are too large for us to truly comprehend. Eventually, even the Universe itself should come to an end – when the last light winks out, and the cold, dense lumps of dead stars are all that remain.  That is, at least, how it is under current cosmological models. What if our Universe doesn't die a cold death, but collapses, reinflates, and collapses again, over and over, like a giant cosmic lung?It's not…

Is there a "fourth phase of water"? From time to time you might see people talking up the health benefits of so-called hexagonal water, or structured water, or exclusion-zone (EZ) water.  A few weeks ago Kourtney Kardashian's Poosh website was spruiking a US$2,500 "structured water filter". Last weekend even Australia's Sydney Morning Herald got in on the act, running a now-deleted story on the virtues of "structured water".So what's going on?As a professor of chemistry, I can tell you "EZ water" is nonsense. But let's…

One in five adults in Michigan doesn't have children and isn't planning on starting a family any time soon.Regardless of fertility, childfree adults have decided to opt out of parenthood entirely.  "We estimate 21.64 percent of Michigan adults are #childfree," Michigan State University (MSU) sociologist Zarchary Neal wrote in a tweet about the study.He's the lead author of these new findings, along with research psychologist Jennifer Watling Neal, also at MSU.The pair set out to determine how many American adults are…

As antibiotic-resistant bacteria become increasingly challenging to defeat, consulting those who've been in battle with our ancient foe long before us just makes a whole lot of sense.   Viruses called bacteriophages have been clashing with bacteria since long before we even existed. So researchers from the University of California, San Diego, took a closer look at some of the lesser studied jumbo phages, specifically 201phi2-1, which infects Pseudomonas chlororaphis bacteria.Named for their large genomes of over 200,000…

Ask astronomers about dark matter and one of the things they talk about is that this invisible, mysterious 'stuff' permeates the universe. In particular, it exists in halos surrounding most galaxies.  The mass of the halo exerts a strong gravitational influence on the galaxy itself, as well as on others in the neighborhood. That's pretty much the standard view of dark matter and its influence on galaxies.However, there are problems with the idea of those halos. Apparently, some oddly shaped dwarf galaxies exist that look…