The circular patterns within the cosmic microwave background suggest that space and time did not come into being at the Big Bang but that our universe in fact continually cycles through a series of "aeons," according to University of Oxford theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, who says that data collected by NASA's WMAP satellite supports his idea of "conformal cyclic cosmology".

Penrose's finding runs directly counter to the widely accepted inflationary model of cosmology which states that the universe started from a point of infinite density known as the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, expanded extremely rapidly for a fraction of a second and has continued to expand much more slowly ever since, during which time stars, planets and ultimately humans have emerged. That expansion is now believed to be accelerating due to a scientific X factor called dark energy and is expected to result in a cold, uniform, featureless universe.

Penrose, however, said Physics World, takes issue with the inflationary picture "and in particular believes it cannot account for the very low entropy state in which the universe was believed to have been born - an extremely high degree of order that made complex matter possible. He does not believe that space and time came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang but that the Big Bang was in fact just one in a series of many, with each big bang marking the start of a new "aeon" in the history of the universe."

The core concept in Penrose's theory is the idea that in the very distant future the universe will in one sense become very similar to how it was at the Big Bang. Penrose says that "at these points the shape, or geometry, of the universe was and will be very smooth, in contrast to its current very jagged form. This continuity of shape, he maintains, will allow a transition from the end of the current aeon, when the universe will have expanded to become infinitely large, to the start of the next, when it once again becomes infinitesimally small and explodes outwards from the next big bang. Crucially, he says, the entropy at this transition stage will be extremely low, because black holes, which destroy all information that they suck in, evaporate as the universe expands and in so doing remove entropy from the universe."

Some people who receive deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease behave impulsively, making quick, often bad, decisions. New research published in Nature Neuroscience explains why, and shows that under normal circumstances key parts of the brain collaborate to buy time for careful consideration of difficult decisions.

Take your time. Hold your horses. Sleep on it.

When people must decide between arguably equal choices, they need time to deliberate. In the case of people undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson's disease, that process sometimes doesn't kick in, leading to impulsive behavior. New research into why that happens has led scientists to a detailed explanation of how the brain devotes time to reflect on tough choices.

Michael Frank, professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University, studied the impulsive behavior of Parkinson's patients when he was at the University of Arizona several years ago. His goal was to model the brain's decision-making mechanics. He had begun working with Parkinson's patients because DBS, a treatment that suppresses their tremor symptoms, delivers pulses of electrical current to the subthalamic nucleus (STN), a part of the brain that Frank hypothesized had an important role in decisions. Could the STN be what slams the brakes on impulses, giving the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) time to think?

"We didn't have any direct evidence of that," said Frank, who is affiliated with the Brown Institute for Brain Science. "To test that theory for how areas of the brain interact to prevent you from making impulsive decisions and how that could be changed by DBS, you have to do experiments where you record brain activity in both parts of the network that we think are involved. Then you also have to manipulate the system to see how the relationship between recorded activity in one area and decision making changes as a function of stimulating the other area."

Frank and his team at Brown and Arizona did exactly that. They describe their findings in a study published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Hundreds of pictures of Earth, each taken at about 06:00 local time, show the terminator - the day/night line - over the course of one year. The Earth is tilted with respect to its orbit, the so the angle of the sunrise line tilts first one way and then the other over time.

You can see Africa and Saudi Arabia to the upper right, and clouds frantically changing each day.

The images were taken with the METEOSAT-9 Earth-observing satellite.


Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

If modern medicine cannot provide an answer to multidrug-resistant microbes, perhaps ancient animals can. Biologists have resurrected a mammalian antimicrobial compound that was last seen on Earth 59 million years ago when mammals were recovering from the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. Even now it is potent enough to destroy some of our most troublesome pathogens.

Last year the Infectious Diseases Society of America launched an initiative with the aim of producing 10 antibiotics to tackle multidrug-resistant bugs by 2020. The lower reaches of the tree of life are being explored for those antibiotics, says Ben Cocks of La Trobe University in Bundoora, Australia.

Already, promising molecules have been found in the tissues of primitive fish called lampreys (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI).

Scientists at CERN, the world's largest physics lab, announced a startling finding yesterday that would be enough to make Albert Einstein roll over in his grave: Subatomic particles, called neutrinos, have been found to be traveling faster than the speed of light.

Berkeley - Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one's own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people's dynamic visual experiences - in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers.

As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers.

"This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery," said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published online today (Sept. 22) in the journal Current Biology. "We are opening a window into the movies in our minds."

CHAMP fries electronics with microwaves

Boeing has announced that its new CHAMP missile has had a successful first test flight. The CHAMP, or Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project, had its first test flight earlier this year at the Utah Test and Training Range at Hill Air Force Base. The CHAMP missile is a non-lethal alternative to kinetic weapons that is able to neutralize electronic targets.

The goal is to create a weapon that can eliminate the threat posed by weapons and structures that rely on electronics to operate without having to worry about collateral damage. The test flight pointed the CHAMP missile at a set of simulated targets and confirmed that the missile could be controlled in flight and that timing of the High-powered Microwave (HPM) system could be controlled.

"It was as close to the real thing as we could get for this test," said Keith Coleman, CHAMP program manager for Boeing Phantom Works. "This demonstration, which brings together the Air Force Research Laboratory's directed energy technology and Boeing's missile design, sets the stage for a new breed of nonlethal but highly effective weapon systems."

Using fMRI and computational models, researchers were able to decipher and reconstruct movies from our minds

Researchers from the University of California-Berkeley have used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models to watch clips of movies inside the minds of people who just viewed them.

Jack Gallant, study leader and a UC Berkeley neuroscientist, and Shinji Nishimoto, a post-doctoral researcher in Gallant's lab, were able to "read the mind" by deciphering and rebuilding the human visual experience.

In previous studies, Gallant was able to record activity in the visual cortex (which processes visual information in the brain) while participants viewed black-and-white photos, and then use a computational model to predict what the participant was looking at.

Now, Gallant and his team have decoded brain signals created by viewing moving pictures. They were able to do this by placing Nishimoto and two other research members in a MRI scanner while they viewed two sets of Hollywood movie trailers. While watching the first set of trailers, the fMRI measured blood flow through the visual cortex and this information was directed to a computer, which portrayed the brain as tiny three-dimensional cubes called "voxels," or volumetric pixels. For each voxel, there was a model that detailed how motion and shapes in the movie are translated into brain activity. The computer program learned to relate visual patterns in the trailers with corresponding brain activity.

The second set of clips tested the computer's algorithm by giving it 18 million seconds of YouTube clips allowing it to eventually predict the brain activity that each clip would induce.

Then, a reconstruction of the original trailer was produced by merging brain scans that were most similar to the YouTube clips. The end result came out a bit blurry, but represents a large step toward reconstructing images humans see and process.

The team hopes that this research can lead to technology that can decipher what is happening in the minds of those who cannot communicate verbally, such as stroke victims or coma patients. Eventually, this could lead to the creation of an interface that allows people (with paralysis, for instance) to use their minds to control machines.

If you thought the outlook for Earth's climate looked bleak, don't look up. A new study suggests that space weather - the hail of energetic particles above our atmosphere - is set to worsen in coming decades. The grim forecast suggests that astronauts and frequent flyers will face greater radiation hazards and could rule out a crewed mission to Mars before 2050.

Space weather is a general term for the environmental conditions above Earth's atmosphere. When space weather is bad, dangerous particles abound. These include protons and ions, known as galactic cosmic rays (GRCs), raining down at near-light speed from space, and similar particles coming in bursts from the sun, called solar energetic particles (SEPs).

The sun has the biggest impact on space weather. The radiation it emits fluctuates both over the short term and across centuries. When the sun is emitting more radiation, it generates a strong external magnetic field, which swaddles the solar system in the "heliosphere" - a shield against GRCs. On the downside, a more active sun is thought to emit SEPs more consistently. Currently, the sun's activity seems to be fading from a "grand maximum" that has been with us since the 1920s, suggesting a new minimum is upon us.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is probably the last person to suggest NASA falsify the threat of alien invasion to play on humanity's fears. I also doubt he'd suggest that the space agency exploit America's religious conservative movement with "proof" that said aliens are governed by demons.

But just for the sake of argument, let's you and I go there.

Along with my Stuff to Blow Your Mind co-host Julie Douglas, I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Tyson last week on the motivators for space exploration and his upcoming book Space Chronicles.

He stressed that while the whole "exploration is in our DNA" argument is fine and dandy for multibillion-dollar space projects, it simply doesn't work past the $10 billion funding ceiling. Here's what he had to say:

The only drivers that really stimulate people to spend money are war and economics -- and the third one, which is less common today, is the praise of royalty or deity. There was a day when you could invoke one or both of those and get anything done. You get the pyramids and all the church building in Europe, the cathedrals of England. You could do that if there is a power above you that you fear or you want to praise. But that doesn't happen much anymore. That leaves war and economics.