Here in Austin, Texas, attendees at the American Astronomical Society meeting are buzzing about the discovery of a possible supernova in the irregular galaxy NGC 3239 by amateurs Bob Moore, Jack Newton, and Tim Puckett.

The supernova showed up in this unfiltered CCD image that the trio took during an automated observing run on January 7th with a 16-inch (40-cm) reflector in Portal, Arizona. At that time the putative supernova was at magnitude 14.6; Puckett confirmed it at 14.4 the next day with the same scope. The most recent value is 13.9, and it might continue to brighten before the explosion reaches its peak.

Several professional astronomers at the meeting have already started putting out e-mails and calls for spectroscopic observations. They hope to catch the supernova early and gain important information about what kind of explosion it is and, perhaps, what its progenitor was. Nothing shows up at this position in images taken by Puckett two weeks ago - at least, nothing brighter than magnitude 19.

When David Carroll wanted to find a way to make low-cost solar panels, he discovered he needed look no further than his own backyard.

In a weedy part of his Winston-Salem lot, pokeweed grows in wild, red-caned riot. Birds love the purple berries, and soon, so did Carroll. Because with pokeberries, the Wake Forest University scientist believes he's found a key to supplying electricity to parts of the developing world.

One Friday last year, Carroll, director of the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials at Wake Forest, was meeting with his students, brainstorming ways to get solar power to impoverished communities.

Traditional silicon solar panels are great, they agreed. But to make them, you need costly materials and a high-tech factory.

"We were sitting around thinking about the problem of how do you make it really, really cheap - and you can't get around the fact that (if you do), it's not going to be a very good solar cell. So it has to be very cheap to be worth it," Carroll recalled.

Natural dyes from plants rich in compounds called flavonoids can produce electrical current when sandwiched between the layers of a solar cell, in the spot where silicon would normally go.

The signs of aging show up in our genes as the protective caps on the ends of packets of our DNA, called chromosomes, gradually wear away over time.

Now, scientists have found that the length of these caps, called telomeres, measured early in life can predict life span.

Using 99 zebra finches, a small bird also popular as a pet, a team of researchers in the United Kingdom measured the lengths of the telomeres found in the birds' red blood cells over the course of their lives.

They found the length of the telomeres at the first measurement, made 25 days after the birds hatched, was the strongest predictor of how long the birds actually lived.

In addition, the birds with the longest telomeres early in life, and throughout the study, were the ones most likely to live into old age, up to 8.7 years old - a "ripe old age" for a finch, said study researcher Britt Heidinger, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow.

For relatively long-lived vertebrates, such as zebra finches and humans, aging and telomere loss appear to go hand-in-hand. And while it seems reasonable that telomere length early on could predict life span in humans, too, it's not yet certain, since no similar study has been completed in humans, according to Heidinger.

Extracting DNA from a museum collection of jellied autopsied brains dating back to the 1890s may give researchers a new take on the study mental disorders

Among the bloodletting boxes, ether inhalers, kangaroo-tendon sutures and other artifacts stored at the Indiana Medical History Museum in Indianapolis are hundreds of scuffed-up canning jars full of dingy yellow liquid and chunks of human brains.

Until the late 1960s the museum was the pathology department of the Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane. The bits of brain in the jars were collected during patient autopsies performed between 1896 and 1938. Most of the jars sat on a shelf until the summer of 2010, when Indiana University School of Medicine pathologist George Sandusky began popping off the lids.

Frustrated by a dearth of postmortem brain donations from people with mental illness, Sandusky - who is on the board of directors at the museum - seized the chance to search this neglected collection for genes that contribute to mental disorders.

In an effort to make data storage more cost-effective, a group of researchers from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have created a DNA-based memory device that is "write-once-read-many-times" (WORM), and that uses ultraviolet (UV) light to make it possible to encode information. The device, described in a paper accepted to the AIP's Applied Physics Letters, consists of a thin film of salmon DNA that has been embedded with silver nanoparticles and then sandwiched between two electrodes. Shining UV light on the system enables a light-triggered synthesis process that causes the silver atoms to cluster into nano-sized particles, and readies the system for data encoding. In some cases, using DNA may be less expensive to process into memory devices than using traditional, inorganic materials like silicon, the researchers say.

At 2:46 pm on a Friday afternoon in March last year, residents in the prefecture of Fukushima in Japan were jolted by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake centered off the Pacific coast at a depth of approx 15 miles. Almost immediately, three of the six reactors which were in operation at that moment in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant - located on the eastern shore of Honshu Island - automatically shut down as a result of the shaking.

The plant automatically switched to its backup diesel-fueled generators to supply the uninterrupted electric power required to keep the plant's reactors cooled. Approximately one hour later, a 46 foot tall tsunami wave swept over the seawall between the Fukushima plant and the Pacific Ocean, flooding and disabling the backup generators and washing away their fuel tanks. The seawall had been designed to withstand a 19 foot wave and was considered sufficient to protect the plant from the worst possible tsunami that could ever happen.

We know now that within days, fuel rods in three of the reactors melted and breached the reactor containment structures designed to keep radioactive material from escaping into the environment, though nothing of the sort was revealed at the time. We are still not certain how much airborne radioactive contamination escaped.

There were violent explosions and multiple fires at the plant which some observers now indicate were far more serious than how they were initially portrayed. There were, and continue to be, unspecified large releases of extremely contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean, but no data on what the results of that might be. It took several months for TEPCO, the Japanese utility company running the plant, to publicly admit the severity of the accident. There have been repeated 'explanations' that downplayed, understated or outright ignored the risks to the public and hid the reality of what was actually happening at any given time.

Belgian surgeons have successfully performed the country's first-ever face transplant, the 19th in the world, doctors announced Saturday.

Officials at the University Hospital of Ghent said a team of 65 surgeons and medical staff had performed the 20-hour operation a week earlier on a Belgian man with a severely mutilated face.

"He's fine, he's doing very well after six days," surgical team leader Phillip Blondeel told Belgian television. "He's already swallowed a little water."

Blondeel said the patient, whose name was not disclosed, was already able to speak, surpassing doctors' expectations.

"We didn't think he would be able to speak so soon."

The patient had been missing skin around the central part of his face, as well as lips, facial muscles and nerves.

The operation brings to 19 the number of face transplants carried out worldwide. The first was a partial face transplant on Frenchwoman Isabelle Dinoire in 2005.

Belgium is the third European country after France and Spain to have carried out the operation.

Nightmarish 'supersoldier' ants with huge heads and jaws have been created by activating ancient genes.

Scientists believe the monster ants may be a genetic throwback to an ancestor that lived millions of years ago.

Scientists say they can create the supersoldiers at will by dabbing normal ant larvae with a special hormone - the larvae then develop into supersoldiers rather than normal soldier or worker ants.

Supersoldier ants can occur naturally in the wild, but only rarely. In the deserts of America and Mexico, their job is to protect the colony from raids by invading army ants.

The supersoldiers use their enormous heads to block the nest entrance and attack any enemy ants that get too close.

Japan is planning a futuristic farm where robots do the lifting in an experimental project on land swamped by the March tsunami, the government said Thursday.

Under an agriculture ministry plan, unmanned tractors will work fields where pesticides will have been replaced by LEDs keeping rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables safe until robots can put them in boxes.

Carbon dioxide produced by machinery working on the up to 250-hectare (600 acre) site will be channeled back to crops to boost their growth and reduce reliance on chemical fertilizers, the Nikkei newspaper said.

The agricultural ministry will begin on-site research later this year with a plan to spend around four billion yen ($52 million) over the next six years, a ministry official said.

A mineral brought back to Earth by the first men on the Moon and long thought to be unique to the lunar surface has been found in Australian rocks more than one billion years old, scientists said Thursday.

Named after Apollo 11's 1969 landing site at the Sea of Tranquility, tranquillityite was one of three minerals first discovered in rocks from the Moon and the only one not to be found, in subsequent years, on Earth.

Australian scientist Birger Rasmussen said tranquillityite had "long been considered as the Moon's own mineral" until geologists discovered it, by chance, in rock from resources-rich Western Australia.

"In over 40 years it hadn't been found in any terrestrial samples," Rasmussen, from Curtin University, told AFP.

When the Moon samples first came back Rasmussen said they were considered to be "extremely precious" and had been subjected to intense, detailed study when -- ironically -- their contents were "right here all the time."