When it comes to visiting asteroids, NASA doesn't pick run-of-the-mill space rocks. The target of NASA's latest asteroid mission is not only thought to be rich in the building blocks of life, it also has a chance - although a remote one - of threatening Earth in the year 2182.

The asteroid 1999 RQ36 is the target of a new unmanned spacecraft, which NASA plans to launch in 2016 to collect a sample from the space rock and return it to Earth by 2023.

The mission's leaders spent a long time surveying possible destinations for the mission, and finally settled on 1999 RQ36. NASA calls the mission OSIRIS-Rex, which is short for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer.

"We went through a whole series of selection criteria," OSIRIS-Rex's deputy principal investigator Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, told SPACE.com. "There are over 500,000 asteroids known. [1999 RQ36] looks really optimum."

Hi Dr. West,

I've been following the latest news. And I thought you could use a bit of moral support.

It probably sounds crazy for a certified welding inspector and ironworker to retire and pursue impact research full-time. Especially since I'm pretty much a nobody. But like many others, I'm looking to identify the planetary scarring and blast-affected materials of the impact storms of the Early Holocene. A little military training in battle damage assessment from aerial photography and a copy of Google Earth goes a long way here.

And being a nobody makes me especially sensitive to ad hominem attacks. I am prepared to debate the science I propose with the big kids. But as an autodidact, an outsider and a complete nobody, I have no defense if the attacks are personally about me, and not the science. So whenever I'm reading along and one side or another, in any given debate, sinks to ad hominem, I have a policy of looking past it at the science that's being ignored or smoke-screened. I tend to mentally disqualify any debater who sinks to such small-minded tactics, and ignore further comments from them in the future. And from what I see of it, the science of yours I see smoke-screened by all the ad hominem crap in the popular press lately is, nevertheless, as good as it gets.

Like you and the others of Firestone et al, what I've been able to find pretty much flies in the face of the kind of Uniformitarian/Gradualist assumptive reasoning that's been the foundation postulate of the Earth Sciences since Sir Charles Lyell published Principles of Geology back in 1830. And regarding the events of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, I'm ready to make the case that the foundation geologic principle in the Earth sciences, expressed in the slogan, "The present is the key to the past", is almost as naïve as flat-world theory.

One of the more heated scientific debates of recent years has been stirred up again with the publication of new criticisms of the reported finding of "arsenic life."

The prestigious journal Science published the criticisms today (May 27) along with a defense of the study, which Science had posted online this past December.

A team of researchers led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon of NASA's Astrobiology Institute had studied bacteria collected from California's Mono Lake and reported finding evidence that these microorganisms were substituting the poisonous molecule arsenic for the phosphorous usually used to build DNA.

The discovery stood to overthrow scientists' understanding of the basic requirements for life.

Igniting a firestorm

The December report in Science was immediately met with skepticism from other scientists, as the journal noted today.

"Science received a wide range of correspondence that raised specific concerns about the Research Article's methods and interpretations," editor-in-chief Bruce Alberts wrote.

Others put it more bluntly: "The paper was harshly criticized for its lack of controls and unjustified conclusions," zoologist Rosemary Redfield of Canada's University of British Columbia wrote on her blog today.

Arctic reindeer can see beyond the "visible" light spectrum into the ultra-violet region, according to new research by an international team.

They say tests on reindeer showed that the animal does respond to UV stimuli, unlike humans.

The ability might enable them to pick out food and predators in the "UV-rich" Arctic atmosphere, and to retain visibility in low light.

Details are published in the The Journal of Experimental Biology.

After Microsoft buy - servers now down

Skype appears to have suffered a significant and bizarre crash, with users worldwide reporting problems on Twitter.

Not long after the company has announced a major deal with Microsoft it has become victim to unspecified problems, with some reports of the programme shutting down with a Windows error message.

Twitter is now seeing floods of angry messages by users who have been booted of the system and are now unable to login or even start up the Skype programme itself.

An error message appears on Skype and users are not able to even get to the next log-in screen.

Much of the vitriol is aimed at Microsoft, with one user tweeting: "Major worldwide Skype crash, thanks Microsoft!".

We have no idea what the problem is. But Skype has suffered from unexplained outages before. Our C. Shanti reports from December last year.

Skype is also leaving behind Asterisk, with a letter circulated that the contract with Digium, the firm behind Asterisk, has now been terminated.

A 22-year-old Australian university student has solved a problem which has puzzled astrophysicists for decades, discovering part of the so-called "missing mass" of the universe during her summer break.

Undergraduate Amelia Fraser-McKelvie made the breakthrough during a holiday internship with a team at Monash University's School of Physics, locating the mystery material within vast structures called "filaments of galaxies".

Monash astrophysicist Dr Kevin Pimbblet explained that scientists had previously detected matter that was present in the early history of the universe but that could not now be located.

"There is missing mass, ordinary mass not dark mass ... It's missing to the present day," Pimbblet told AFP.

"We don't know where it went. Now we do know where it went because that's what Amelia found."

Fraser-McKelvie, an aerospace engineering and science student, was able to confirm after a targeted X-ray search for the mystery mass that it had moved to the "filaments of galaxies", which stretch across enormous expanses of space.

"Our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe." In a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time, Nikodem Poplawski, a physicist at Indiana University, suggests that a small change to the theory of gravity implies that our Universe inherited its arrow of time from the black hole in which it was born.

Poplawski says that the idea that black holes are the cosmic mothers of new universes is a natural consequence of a simple new assumption about the nature of spacetime. Poplawski points out that the standard derivation of general relativity takes no account of the intrinsic momentum of spin half particles. However there is another version of the theory, called the Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama theory of gravity, which does.

This theory predicts that particles with half integer spin should interact, generating a tiny repulsive force called torsion. In ordinary circumstances, torsion is too small to have any effect. But when densities become much higher than those in nuclear matter, it becomes significant. In particular, says Poplawski, torsion prevents the formation of singularities inside a black hole.

It looks like a pancake, crossed with a fish, and a bat... with arms. And it hops. So it's no surprise scientists have labelled one of their new discoveries the hopping pancake batfish.

The creature is one of ten 'new species' to have made it onto a list of weird and wonderful creatures published today.

New parents might be forgiven for thinking their bundles of joy have little understanding of the world around them.

But research suggests that babies as young as a year old are capable of using sophisticated analytical processes to correctly predict how certain scenarios will play out - even if they have no experience of the situation.

Many species are able to react to a chain of events only after they have seen a similar event occur before.

But humans use 'pure reason' to correctly guess the future, even when they are seeing something for the first time.

Google is being sued by internet payment firm PayPal over claims the web giant stole technology allowing smartphones to buy things in shops.

PayPal allege that former executives Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius defected and used trade secrets to help their new company create Google Wallet.

The lawsuit was filed just hours after Mr Bedier, who was hired just five months ago, launched the product in New York, where it will be tested this summer.