Stunning new visuals of the brain reveal a deceptively simple pattern of organization in the wiring of this complex organ.

Instead of nerve fibers travelling willy-nilly through the brain like spaghetti, as some imaging has suggested, the new portraits reveal two-dimensional sheets of parallel fibers crisscrossing other sheets at right angles in a gridlike structure that folds and contorts with the convolutions of the brain.

This same pattern appeared in the brains of humans, rhesus monkeys, owl monkeys, marmosets and galagos, researchers report today (March 29) in the journal Science.

"The upshot is the fibers of the brain form a 3D grid and are organized in this exceptionally simple way," study leader Van Wedeen, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, told LiveScience. "This motif of crossing in three axes is the basic motif of brain tissue."

The improvement in power output comes from the vertical surfaces of the 3D structures

MIT researchers have created new solar designs that stray away from the traditional panel-like shape and instead resemble 3D towers.

Jeffrey Grossman, study leader and Carl Richard Soderberg Career Development Associate Professor of Power Engineering at MIT, along with a team of MIT researchers, constructed 3D solar designs that are vertical and capable of increasing the solar power generated from a certain area.

To do this, the team used a computer algorithm to test a series of possible designs under different conditions regarding weather, seasons and latitudes. Once the predictions were computer generated, the team built three separate models and tested them on the MIT laboratory roof. The structures ranged from simple cube shapes to more complex accordion-type shapes.

Male bottlenose dolphins organise gang-like alliances - guarding females against other groups and occasionally "changing sides".

A team studying dolphins in Shark Bay, western Australia, say the animals roam hundreds of square kilometres, often encountering other dolphin groups.

The researchers observed the dolphins there over a five-year period, recording their movements.

They report their findings in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.

Dr Richard Connor, a researcher from the US who took part in this study, first began his studies of the Shark Bay dolphins in the early 1980s.

This latest study reveals that these highly intelligent marine mammals live in an "open society". Rather than males guarding a specific territory, groups have what Dr Connor described as a "mosaic of overlapping ranges".

A hidden and never before recognized layer of information in the genetic code has been uncovered by a team of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) thanks to a technique developed at UCSF called ribosome profiling, which enables the measurement of gene activity inside living cells - including the speed with which proteins are made.

By measuring the rate of protein production in bacteria, the team discovered that slight genetic alterations could have a dramatic effect. This was true even for seemingly insignificant genetic changes known as "silent mutations," which swap out a single DNA letter without changing the ultimate gene product. To their surprise, the scientists found these changes can slow the protein production process to one-tenth of its normal speed or less.

As described today in the journal Nature, the speed change is caused by information contained in what are known as redundant codons - small pieces of DNA that form part of the genetic code. They were called "redundant" because they were previously thought to contain duplicative rather than unique instructions.

This new discovery challenges half a century of fundamental assumptions in biology. It may also help speed up the industrial production of proteins, which is crucial for making biofuels and biological drugs used to treat many common diseases, ranging from diabetes to cancer.

"The genetic code has been thought to be redundant, but redundant codons are clearly not identical," said Jonathan Weissman, PhD, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in the UCSF School of Medicine Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology.

"We didn't understand much about the rules," he added, but the new work suggests nature selects among redundant codons based on genetic speed as well as genetic meaning.

Similarly, a person texting a message to a friend might opt to type, "NP" instead of "No problem." They both mean the same thing, but one is faster to thumb than the other.

Consider, for a moment, the following list: Republican. Abortion. Democrat. Future. Afghanistan. Health care. Same-sex marriage.

There is an enormous amount of information reflected in the way you just read that list. Did your eyes pause for a fraction of a second on certain words? Did your pupils dilate, ever so slightly, at any point while you were reading the list? For some words did your eyes blink at a different rate? Did you backtrack to reread any words, and if so, which ones, when, and for how long?

Eye-tracking, which uses images from one or more cameras to capture changes in the movements and structure of our eyes, can measure all of these things with pinpoint accuracy. There are many benevolent applications for eye-tracking, most notably in providing disabled people with a way to interact with objects on a screen. But recent advances are taking the technology into the mainstream, with the biggest initial applications likely to be in user interfaces and gaming.

Apple, for example, has filed a patent application for a three-dimensional, eye-tracking user interface, and European company Sensye aims to have its eye-tracking software built into smartphones next year. As eye-tracking becomes increasingly deployed in laptops, tablets, and smartphones in the coming years, it will open a new front in the fractious digital privacy debate.

Take the most common type of star in the Milky Way -- so-called red dwarf stars that are cooler, smaller and longer-lived than stars like the sun.

Then, survey a sampling for orbiting planets and extrapolate the results. What do you get?

A stunning claim that 40 percent of our galaxy's 160 billion red dwarf stars have plus-sized Earths orbiting the right distance for liquid water to exist on their surfaces, a condition believed to be necessary for life.

If this finding is correct, that would mean the Milky Way is home to tens of billions of planets in habitable zones, concludes a team of scientists using an Earth-based telescope to look for planets beyond the solar system.

The effort is complementary to studies by NASA's Kepler space telescope, which hunts for extrasolar planets around sun-like stars.

About 80 percent of the stars in the Milky Way are red dwarfs, which, on average, are about one-third smaller and 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the sun.

Kepler lead scientist William Borucki, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., said he's not surprised by the finding of the European team, which uses a light-splitting spectrograph called HARPS on a telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile to look for planets beyond the solar system.

But claiming that red dwarfs' planets are rocky worlds goes too far, Borucki told Discovery News.

"I am astounded that they're saying they are rocky planets. I don't see any reason to assume they're rocky planets," Borucki said.

No one really knows the details of how our body clocks work. But when the rhythms get messed up, the results can be horrendous. Accidents, loss of productivity, disease, including serious illnesses like cancer, are known to be caused, in part, by a messed up body clock.

"Biological clocks regulate almost every function in the human body," said military physician Christian Macedonia, who is overseeing a biochronicity program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

The timing and interplay of these clocks drive everything from cell growth to metabolism and from aging to death.

"If scientists can get a better grasp on how time factors into biological functions, the Department of Defense could potentially better preserve the health and readiness of the warfighter," Macedonia wrote in an email to Discovery News.

It's not just the military that would like the keys to the body's timepieces. NASA, for example, has to figure out how to help people living off Earth. That mind-bending view from the International Space Station, which orbits about 240 miles above the planet, comes with a dizzying price: a sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes.

NASA is looking at practical solutions, like installing blue lights aboard the station, a wavelength which studies show increases alertness by suppressing the body's release of melatonin, a natural sleep hormone, and stimulating the retinas to secrete an alertness protein called melanopsin.

Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory have identified a new mode of coupling between the stratosphere - which can drive variations at the summer mesopause - and the ionosphere, thereby establishing a new means where changes in the stratosphere can impact space weather. This research appeared in the January 6th, 2012 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

One of the most striking characteristics of the Earth's upper atmosphere is that at the edge of space, 80 to 100 km, at polar latitudes, it is much colder in summer than winter, despite the presence of 24-hour sunlight, explains Dr. David Siskind, who works in NRL's Space Science Division and is the principal investigator for this research.

Scientists have attributed this peculiar temperature reversal to the propagation of small-scale atmospheric gravity waves, which spread up from the lower atmosphere and by momentum deposition, drive the atmosphere away from a simple radiative equilibrium state.

The 80 to 100 km region, which is known as the "mesopause," is so cold that ice clouds can condense in the rarefied air. These polar mesospheric clouds are being studied by a NASA mission called Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere in which NRL is involved.

NRL researchers are using the high-altitude extension of the Navy operational weather forecast model, NOGAPS-ALPHA (Advanced Level Physics High Altitude) to study how lower atmospheric disturbances propagate up to the thermosphere and ionosphere, above 100 km. This investigation is part of a long-term program to explore the coupling between the lower and upper atmosphere. NOGAPS-ALPHA extends up to 100 km, so the NRL team has mated the NOGAPS-ALPHA code with a community thermosphere-ionosphere model developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

Following the posting on the Central Bureau's Transient Object Confirmation Page about a possible Nova in Oph (TOCP Designation: PNV J17260708-2551454) we performed some follow-up of this object remotely through the 0.10-m f/5 reflector + CCD from MPC code H06 (Mayhill station, NM) of iTelescope network.

On our images taken on 2012, March 27.5 we can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with unfiltered CCD magnitude 10.9 at coordinates:

R.A. = 17 26 07.02, Decl.= -25 51 42.1 (equinox 2000.0; USNO-B1.0 catalog reference stars).

Our confirmation image:

You can see an animation showing a comparison between our confirmation image and the archive POSS2/UKSTU plate (R Filter - 1997).

The Greek poet Hesiod described the Five Ages of Man in mythology.

They progress from the Golden Age, when people lived among the gods, through the warlike Bronze Age and on to the Heroic Age. His narrative ends with the Iron Age, a period of toil and misery for mankind.

Science has now replaced these mythologies. We are at the point where we look at the entire universe as a grand series of game-changing leaps toward our emergence as an intelligent species. It is an epic story more compelling than anything from creation mythology.

In a recent paper, Marcelo Gleiser of Dartmouth College describes the universe's first three ages as the physical age, chemical age, and biological age. He says that we are now entering the cognitive age, the emergence of intelligence life on Earth and presumably across the universe.

This leaves us with an enticing question: what will be the fifth age of the universe? Will this be a period of decline toward the burnout of the last star, as our extrapolations from current astrophysics predict? Or could it be something more existential and unpredictable given the potential influence of "thinking matter" on the arrow of time? Are we entering a cosmological Age of Aquarius?