All planets move around their stars in the same direction as the star spins - at least that's what we thought. But now Australian National University astronomer Dr. Daniel Bayliss and his colleagues have found a planet that breaks the mold.

Dr. Bayliss, from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, is one of 16 early-career scientists unveiling their research to the public at Fresh Science - a national program sponsored by the Australian Government.

Using one of the world's largest telescopes in Chile, Daniel and his collaborators discovered that a distant planet WASP-17b is moving in the opposite direction to the spin of the star around which it orbits. The discovery throws traditional theories about how planets form around stars into doubt.

Planets form from the same disk of rotating material that gives birth to the star around which they move. So until now it has been assumed that any planets orbiting a star would be moving in the same direction as the star's spin. This is certainly true in our own Solar System.

WASP-17b is quite different, Dr. Bayliss says, and its backwards motion is somewhat of a mystery to scientists.

After a long day of swimming and preying on sea life, sharks need to take a load off just like us humans. Instead of watching massive amounts of reality TV (not that I've ever done that), researchers have found that sharks enjoy some tunes to help them relax. According to a team studying the effects of music on a group of great white sharks in Australia, AC/DC - more specifically the song "You Shook Me All Night Long" - has been shown to calm the animals.

When hearing that particular hard-rock anthem, the sharks became inquisitive and much less aggressive. Some of them even rubbed their faces along the speaker in a gesture of affection. I wonder if something like Enya would have the opposite effect and make them bloodthirsty? Not that I have any desire to find out.

A new type of supernova that shines up to 10 times brighter than any previously recorded has been discovered by an international team of astronomers. However, the team has yet to explain the exact mechanism that drives this new type of exploding star, with existing models failing to reproduce the radiation emanating from this new class of violent events.

Supernovae - highly energetic events caused by the explosion of a star - can often shine brighter than an entire galaxy for a brief period of time. To date, three mechanisms have been used to explain the vast amount of associated radiation observed by astronomers during these events. However, a team led by Robert Quimby at the California Institute of Technology in the US has identified a batch of six supernovae with radiation properties that cannot be explained by any of the three mechanisms.

The first cause discounted by Quimby was radioactive decay. During the highly energetic explosion of a supernova the temperature skyrockets. This allows heavy elements, including 56Ni, to be synthesized. Their subsequent radioactive decay produces gamma-rays that slow down the rate at which the supernova fades away. Crucially, the explosions observed by Quimby were too short-lived. "These supernovae faded about three times as quickly as those driven by radioactive decay," he explains.

Planetary scientists have long wondered why Mars is only about half the size and one-tenth the mass of Earth. As next-door neighbors in the inner solar system, probably formed about the same time, why isn't Mars more like Earth and Venus in size and mass? A paper published in the journal Nature provides the first cohesive explanation and, by doing so, reveals an unexpected twist in the early lives of Jupiter and Saturn as well.

Dr. Kevin Walsh, a research scientist at Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®), led an international team performing simulations of the early solar system, demonstrating how an infant Jupiter may have migrated to within 1.5 astronomical units (AU, the distance from the Sun to Earth) of the Sun, stripping a lot of material from the region and essentially starving Mars of formation materials.

"If Jupiter had moved inwards from its birthplace down to 1.5 AU from the Sun, and then turned around when Saturn formed as other models suggest, eventually migrating outwards towards its current location, it would have truncated the distribution of solids in the inner solar system at about 1 AU and explained the small mass of Mars," says Walsh. "The problem was whether the inward and outward migration of Jupiter through the 2 to 4 AU region could be compatible with the existence of the asteroid belt today, in this same region. So, we started to do a huge number of simulations.

About 510 employees in the Space Exploration division have received 60-day advance layoff notices

Now that the NASA Space Shuttle program is near completion, Boeing is announcing layoffs to employees in its Space Exploration division.

Since the beginning of this year, NASA has begun retiring the last functional orbiters in the Space Shuttle program. In February 2011, space shuttle Discovery made its final flight, and in May 2011, space shuttle Endeavor launched for the last time. With both missions being successful, NASA is now planning space shuttle Atlantis' final launch, which is scheduled for July 8.

With NASA slowly completing its Space Shuttle program, Boeing is issuing 60-day advance layoff notices to about 510 employees in the Space Exploration division. Those receiving layoff notices are about 260 employees in Houston, 150 employees at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and 100 employees at a company facility in Huntington Beach, California.

Close to the end of the last ice age there was a sudden disappearance of many mammalian species which some paleontologists say was the most severe since the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. In North America 95 percent of the megafauna became extinct, these being predominantly mammals having body weights greater than 25 to 50 kilograms. But even small animals were affected, as in the disappearance of 10 genera of birds.

Although North America was most affected, it had a severe impact also in Europe, Siberia, and South America. The cause of the extinction has long remained a mystery. Theories that have been put forth have ranged from overkill by North American paleolithic hunters to the impact of a large comet or swarm of meteors. But all have been shown to have serious flaws.

Now, Starburst Foundation researcher Dr. Paul LaViolette has found evidence that this mysterious die-off may have had a solar flare cause. In his paper published this week in the journal Radiocarbon, LaViolette concludes that a super sized solar proton event (SPE) impacted the earth about 12,900 years ago (12,837+/- 10 calendar years BP).*

He notes that this date roughly coincides with that of the Rancholabrean termination, a time boundary beyond which the numbers of extinct megafaunal remains are found to sharply decline.

Solar proton events, blasts of energetic solar cosmic ray particles that are shot out with the eruption of a solar flare, can arrive with little advance notice, traversing the 93 million mile distance from the Sun to the Earth in a matter of hours. They are usually followed some days later by a slower moving solar wind plasma shock called a coronal mass ejection.

They have been observed to occur from time to time in past decades, but none in modern times have been strong enough to pose a serious ground-level radiation hazard.

LaViolette carefully studied data spanning the onset of the Younger Dryas cold period near the end of the ice age during which there was a progressive long-term rise in the atmosphere's radiocarbon concentration.

Although some of this 14C rise was due to changes in the ocean's carbon reservoir due to deep ocean circulation, a large part of it was believed to be due to a real rise in atmospheric radiocarbon concentration.

Welcome to the Dead Zone.

I was one of the very last people to take my mobile phone onto the site which Australia and New Zealand hope will become the epicentre of the world's largest radio telescope array.

Not that my phone was very much use. You'd be better off with a carrier pigeon eight hours northeast of Perth, at a place called Boolardy Station in Murchison Shire.

There are already six radio dishes here, of a total of 36 which will form the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder. The other 30 dishes are due to be built by the end of the year.

However authorities hope the site will also become the epicentre of a much larger project - SKA, the largest array of radio telescopes ever built, with 3000 dishes stretching 5500km from Boolardy to New Zealand.

With the processing power of "about a billion PCs", the SKA hopes to play the central role in unlocking the mysteries of how our universe came into being - from the nature of gravity to the evolution of our galaxies.

On Thursday I joined a gaggle of journalists, stakeholders, indigenous leaders and CSIRO scientists - along with their video cameras, phones and digital recording devices - to visit Boolardy Station.

A team of physicists is claiming to have coaxed sparks from the vacuum of empty space.¹ If verified, the finding would be one of the most unusual experimental proofs of quantum mechanics in recent years and "a significant milestone", says John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study.

The researchers, based at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, will present their findings early next week at a workshop in Padua, Italy. They have already posted a paper on the popular pre-print server arXiv.org, but have declined to talk to reporters because the work has not yet been peer-reviewed. High-profile journals, including Nature, discourage researchers from talking to the press until their findings are ready for publication.

Nevertheless, scientists not directly connected with the group say that the result is impressive. "It is a major development," says Federico Capasso, an experimental physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has worked on similar quantum effects.

Antimatter, an elusive type of matter that's rare in the universe, has now been trapped for more than 16 minutes - an eternity in particle physics.

In fact, scientists who've been trapping antihydrogen atoms at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva say isolating the exotic particles has become so routine that they expect to soon begin experiments on this rare substance.

Antimatter is like a mirror image of matter. For every matter particle (a hydrogen atom, for example), a matching antimatter particle is thought to exist (in this case, an antihydrogen atom) with the same mass, but the opposite charge.

"We've trapped antihydrogen atoms for as long as 1,000 seconds, which is forever" in the world of high-energy particle physics, said Joel Fajans, a University of California, Berkeley professor of physics who is a faculty scientist at California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) experiment at CERN.

By gazing at the edges of sunspots, astronomers now are pinpointing key details of how these mysterious dark marks form.

Sunspots are blotches on the sun that appear dark because they are cooler than the rest of the solar surface. Astronomers do know they are linked to intense magnetic activity on the sun, which can suppress the flow of hot matter, but much about their structure and behavior remains enigmatic.

The dark heart of a sunspot, called the umbra, is surrounded by a brighter edge known as the penumbra, which is made of numerous dark and light filaments more than 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) long. They are relatively thin, at approximately 90 miles (150 km) in width, making it difficult to resolve details that could reveal how they arise.