The X-37B was supposed to land 270 days after launch, but the Air Force is extending the space plane's mission with no exact landing date in sight

The U.S. Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office has decided to extend the trip of the secretive X-37B experimental robotic space plane, which is pushing its own orbital record.

The X-37B, also known as Orbital Test Vehicle-2, is a mysterious unmanned craft that was built by Boeing Co.'s Space and Intelligence Systems unit in Huntington Beach. It is a 29-foot space plane that is the second of its kind, and has been circling the Earth since its launch atop an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida earlier this year.

The Air Force has said that the X-37B is used to test new technologies in space, but some industry analysts believe that it is a test unit for a potential orbiting weapon, which could disable foreign satellites or drop bombs as it makes its way around the Earth.

Object type: Gamma-ray burst

Constellation: Andromeda

The timing could hardly have been more auspicious. Like a 2000-year-old gamma-ray echo of the biblical star of Bethlehem, on Christmas day 2010 an unprecedented tussle broke out in the heavens.

It sent a flood of high-energy radiation towards Earth that lasted much longer than is typical for a gamma-ray burst (GRB). Now it seems the peculiar event clashes with the leading theory for how such blasts of radiation form, and may instead involve the grisly demise of a comet.

At 18:37 GMT on 25 December 2010, the spectacular light show erupted, though you would have needed gamma-ray eyes to see it. Researchers did the next best thing, watching it with instruments on NASA's Swift satellite.

Gamma-rays are extremely energetic photons and it takes a very violent event to produce them in large quantities. Hundreds of GRBs flash on and off in the sky like fireflies each year. Satellites designed to detect nuclear bomb blasts first noticed them in the late 1960s and the Swift satellite was launched in 2004 to study them in greater detail.

Monsanto's best-selling herbicide Roundup has created a new category of superweeds that are heavily resistant to the herbicide that Roundup contains known as glyphosate.

These resistant weeds currently cover over 4.5 million hectares in the United States alone, though experts estimate the world-wide land coverage to have reached at least 120 million hectares by 2010.

The onset of superweeds is being increasingly documented in Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Europe and South Africa.

Meanwhile, Monsanto pushes its genetically modified crops and biopesticides under the guise of helping the environment and reducing pesticide use.

In reality, the resistant weeds are now so resistant to Roundup that they require significantly more pesticides.

Due to the large-scale use of Roundup, pesticide spraying will have to increase worldwide in order to combat the new superweeds.

Lightning flashes in the skies above the Earth about 50 times every second, creating a burst of electromagnetic waves that circle around the planet's atmosphere.

Some of these waves combine and increase in strength, creating something akin to an atmospheric heartbeat that scientists can detect from the ground and use to better understand the makeup of the atmosphere and the weather it generates.

For the first time, scientists have detected this heartbeat - called the Schumann resonance - from space. This detection was surprising because the resonance was thought to be confined to a particular region of the atmosphere, between the ground and a layer of Earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere.

"Researchers didn't expect to observe these resonances in space," said Fernando Simoes, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "But it turns out that energy is leaking out and this opens up many other possibilities to study our planet from above."

Simoes co-authored a study on the detection of this resonance made by the U.S. Air Force's Communications/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite.

A New Zealand man has become the first amateur astronomer to take a direct photograph of a solar system in the first stages of development. Rolf Olsen's stunning image shows Beta Pictoris, a bright young star in the southern hemisphere, surrounded by a "circumstellar disk" - a huge, flat cloud of swirling debris kicked up by a flurry of comet, asteroid and minor body collisions near the new star.

Olsen captured the image of the Beta Pictoris solar system, located 63 light-years away, using a 10-inch (25-centimeter) homemade telescope. After posting the photo to his blog and the Australian Amateur Astronomy forum IceInSpace, it quickly shot around the Web and into the field of view of professional astronomers, who are calling Olsen's achievement "amazing," "bold" and "impressive."

An international team of researchers has reviewed the evidence linking exposure to atrazine - an herbicide widely used in the U.S. and more than 60 other nations - to reproductive problems in animals. The team found consistent patterns of reproductive dysfunction in amphibians, fish, reptiles and mammals exposed to the chemical.

Atrazine is the second-most widely used herbicide in the U.S. More than 75 million pounds of it are applied to corn and other crops, and it is the most commonly detected pesticide contaminant of groundwater, surface water and rain in the U.S.

The new review, compiled by 22 scientists studying atrazine in North and South America, Europe and Japan, appears in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

The researchers looked at studies linking atrazine exposure to abnormal androgen (male hormone) levels in fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals and studies that found a common association between exposure to the herbicide and the "feminization" of male gonads in many animals.

The most robust findings are in amphibians, said University of Illinois comparative biosciences professor Val Beasley, a co-author of the review. At least 10 studies found that exposure to atrazine feminizes male frogs, sometimes to the point of sex reversal, he said.

An extensive look at what chimpanzees consume each day reveals that many of the plants they consume aren't for nutrition but are likely ingested for medicinal purpose.

The findings, published in the journal Physiology & Behavior, indicate that the origins of medicine go way back, beyond the human species.

"We conclude that self-medication may have appeared in our ancestors in association with high social tolerance and lack of herbivorous gut specialization," lead author Shelly Masi and her colleagues write.

Masi, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and her team recorded the items consumed by a community of over 40 wild chimpanzees at Kibale National Park, Uganda. They also documented the availability of the foods, as well as the social interactions between the chimps.

They also documented the same information for about a dozen wild western gorillas in Dzanga-Ndoki National Park, Central African Republic.

Unusual food consumption in chimpanzees, meaning foods not normally associated with nutritional needs, was twice as high as it was for gorillas. Gorillas turn out to have more specialized guts that are better capable of detoxyifying harmful compounds, making them have have less of a need to self-medicate than chimps and humans may need to.

Experiments with dogs, chimpanzees and other intelligent animals show that humans aren't the only beings who are able to learn the meanings of words. What distinguishes us is our ability to string those words together in meaningful ways, with one word order conveying something different than another. In short, sentences, not vocabulary, are the true hallmark of language.

Now, a team of researchers who study the neural basis of language have pinpointed the pathway in the brain that allows humans to combine words together into sentences. It's a separate pathway than the one we use to recall the meanings of individual words, a capability we share with other animals.

Most prior work on the neuroscience of language focused on bundles of neurons in two brain areas called Broca's region and Wernicke's region - the main hubs of language processing. It has long been known that the regions are connected to one another by upper and lower "white matter" pathways - strings of lipid cells that carry nerve signals - but these haven't been studied nearly as extensively as the neurons in the regions themselves. The new research, published in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed journal Neuron, reveals for the first time the important and distinct roles played by the two pathways.

While vocabulary is accessed along the lower pathway, the meaning of combinations of words is accessed along the upper one.

Men may think about sex more often than women do, but a new study suggests that men also think about other biological needs, such as eating and sleep, more frequently than women do, as well.

And the research discredits the persistent stereotype that men think about sex every seven seconds, which would amount to more than 8,000 thoughts about sex in 16 waking hours. In the study, the median number of young men's thought about sex stood at almost 19 times per day. Young women in the study reported a median of nearly 10 thoughts about sex per day.

As a group, the men also thought about food almost 18 times per day and sleep almost 11 times per day, compared to women's median number of thoughts about eating and sleep, at nearly 15 times and about 8 1/2 times, respectively.

The college-student participants carried a golf tally counter to track their thoughts about either eating, sleep or sex every day for a week. Each student was assigned to just one type of thought to record. Before receiving the tally counter, they had completed a number of questionnaires and were asked to estimate how often they had daily thoughts about eating, sleeping and sex.

Overall, a participant's comfort with sexuality was the best predictor for which person would have the most frequent daily thoughts about sex.

"If you had to know one thing about a person to best predict how often they would be thinking about sex, you'd be better off knowing their emotional orientation toward sexuality, as opposed to knowing whether they were male or female," said Terri Fisher, professor of psychology at Ohio State University's Mansfield campus and lead author of the study. "Frequency of thinking about sex is related to variables beyond one's biological sex."

Correcting this stereotype about men's sexual thoughts is important, Fisher noted.

"It's amazing the way people will spout off these fake statistics that men think about sex nearly constantly and so much more often than women do," she said. "When a man hears a statement like that, he might think there's something wrong with him because he's not spending that much time thinking about sexuality, and when women hear about this, if they spend significant time thinking about sex they might think there's something wrong with them."

The study appears online and is scheduled for publication in the January issue of the Journal of Sex Research.

Though crossword puzzles may give your brain an edge every now and then, research suggests other types of brain training can be more effective in improving cognitive function -- for older adults at least.

The findings add to what scientists are beginning to learn: attention-based visual training has the potential to strengthen neural connections in the brain.

Researchers plan to finish the project in January, but the first round of results are available in British Medical Journal Open.

The team drew data from the Iowa Healthy and Active Minds Study. In the setup, 681 participants 50 years and older were randomly assigned to testing groups. One group received 10 hours of training under supervision, while another participated in one session of brain training with a four-hour follow-up session 11 months later. The third group completed one session of brain training at home, and the fourth participated in a computerized crossword puzzle training session under supervision. Most people trained for two hours at a time.