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.

The global supply for hard drives will fall 70 million units short of the 180 million needed in 4Q11.

Following a similar price hike initiated by Acer, PC manufacturers Asus and Dell are expected to increase the prices of notebooks slated to arrive in December by 2 to 3-percent thanks to the current shortage of hard drives. In 4Q11 alone, the global supply is expected to be 35-percent short of the overall demand for 180 million units, leaving only around 110 to 130 million units available worldwide.

Retail channels in Taiwan have already seen a 20 to 30-percent HDD price hike since the flooding shortages began back in October, and will reportedly see another 10-percent price increase in December. Vendors like HP, Acer, Asus and Dell will get first priority, leaving the secondary retail buyers fighting for what's left -- some of which are already hoarding hard drives in fear of a depleted global supply.

According to unnamed sources in Taiwan, several PC manufactures are actually optimistic about the hard drive supply in 1Q12, believing that the shortage will finally ease before the spring. Other manufacturers aren't quite so positive, predicting that supply will begin to pick up in the second quarter of 2012. Either way, PC vendors will likely see increased hard drive costs throughout 2012, as the supply chain won't return to pre-Thailand flooding levels for another nine to twenty-four months.

Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN Laboratory in Switzerland, are trying to slam particles together hard enough to break them into never-before-seen pieces, which could solve some of the biggest puzzles in nature.

But UFOs - unidentified falling objects, that is - keep getting in their way.

The LHC is a 17-mile (27-km) circular tunnel lined with powerful magnets, which accelerate protons (particles in the nuclei of atoms) to 99.9999991 percent the speed of light. Beams of these super-brisk protons are accelerated clockwise around the ring and collide with beams traveling counter-clockwise, and, like a well-struck piñata, a dead-on hit produces a thrilling outburst of subatomic goodies. When they turn the proton beams up to full power, the physicists hope to find the Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle," which is believed to create the drag that gives everything else mass, among the collision debris. They'll also look for dark matter, the invisible substance that permeates the outskirts of galaxies.

The search for greener, more power-efficient lighting systems won't stop with compact fluorescents and LED systems if Dutch electronics giant Philips has anything to say about it. In an effort to embrace a truly natural approach to lighting, the company took a cue from fireflies and deep-sea creatures to create a (literally) green light powered not by electricity or sunlight, but by glowing bioluminescent bacteria.

As one of numerous systems in its Microbial Home (MH) concept, Philips tasked itself with creating a lighting system driven by the wastes typically generated in the average home. To feed the bacteria housed in the bio-light's unusual hand-blown glass compartments, methane - which could generated by the MH kitchen's bio-digester unit from composted bathroom solids and kitchen vegetable waste - is piped in through thin silicon tubes connected to a reservoir at the base.

Light produced by bacteria, or luminescence, is heat-free in contrast to incandescence, which is light generated by objects heated to glowing. A similar form of light, chemoluminescence, is given off by the familiar snap and shake glow sticks (a mixture of phenyl oxalate, fluorescent dye and hydrogen peroxide) but those are closed one-use systems with a limited light-production period.