Measurements from a telescope in Hawaii show blue light reflected from Earth turns turquoise when it bounces off moon

In a demonstration of the power of science to ruin a perfectly respectable work of art, researchers have discovered the colour of the dark side of the moon.

Measurements from a telescope in Hawaii mean that pedants may now argue that, technically speaking, if one wanted to be entirely accurate, the side of the moon referred to in Pink Floyd's 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon should really be described as "turquoise".

Empathy-driven behavior has been observed in rats who will free trapped companions from restrainers. This behavior also extends toward strangers, but requires prior, positive social interactions with the type (strain) of the unfamiliar individual, report scientists from the University of Chicago in the open access journal eLife, on Jan. 14.

The findings suggest that social experiences, not genetics or kin selection, determine whether an individual will help strangers out of empathy. The importance of social experience extends even to rats of the same strain -- a rat fostered and raised with a strain different than itself will not help strangers of its own kind.

"Pro-social behavior appears to be determined only by social experience," said Inbal Bartal, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study "It takes diverse social interactions during development or adulthood to expand helping behavior to more groups of unfamiliar individuals. Even in humans, studies have shown that exposure to diverse environments reduces social bias and increases pro-social behavior."

The state's key estuary is in serious jeopardy, but can a bold new plan solve the problem?

Behind many of the shiny fruits and vegetables in the produce aisle, there's a decidedly ominous backstory: California, supplier of much of our domestic produce, is just one earthquake away from drying up.

The problem is that most of the state's agricultural water, as well as drinking water for large parts of Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, San Diego, and other major metropolitan areas, comes from a vast estuary northeast of the San Francisco Bay. It's an estuary that's about to collapse. The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, or more simply, the Delta, relies on old levees that will crumble in an earthquake or buckle under pressure from rising sea levels, say experts, and in fact already do crumble on a regular basis. A large-scale collapse would put the state's water supplies in grave jeopardy, and in turn impact the entire country, which relies on California both economically and for a large amount of its food.

A controversial new plan, developed by California's Governor Jerry Brown in conjunction with various state agencies, offers a potential solution. Dubbed the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP), it suggests boring two massive tunnels to subvert the levees entirely, while simultaneously attempting to help endangered species through large-scale habitat restoration. Critics of the plan say it throws small Delta family farms under the bus by cutting off their freshwater supply, and, in fact, further imperils the estuary's tottering ecosystem in order to satisfy the needs of big ag in the Central Valley. But supporters say it's the best solution to a problem that, if not addressed, could severely impact the state's $1.8 trillion-economy and leave up to 25 million people in the state without drinking water. What both sides agree on is that something must be done before it's too late.

In the wake of recent discoveries, a new way of seeing the physical universe is emerging. The new vantage point emphasizes the role of electricity in space and shows the negligible contribution of gravity in cosmic events.

Images returned by high-powered telescopes and recent space probes have challenged astronomers' long-standing assumptions about galaxies and their constituent stars, about the evolution of our solar system, and about the nature and history of Earth.

The new discoveries also suggest that our early ancestors may have witnessed awe inspiring electrical events in the heavens - the source of myths and symbols around the world.

In December 2013 on Sott Talk Radio we interviewed Australian physicist Wallace Thornhill. Wallace graduated in physics at Melbourne University in 1964 and began postgraduate studies with Prof. Victor Hopper's upper atmosphere research group. Before entering university, he had been inspired by Immanuel Velikovsky through his controversial best-selling book, Worlds in Collision. Wallace has published several books with David Talbott including Thunderbolts of the Gods and The Electric Universe, on the combined subjects of the recent history of the solar system and the Electric nature of the Universe. So, in short, he was the ideal person to discuss this most interesting of topics with us.

Running Time: 01:54:00

Download: MP3

Nine women in Sweden have successfully received transplanted wombs donated from relatives and will soon try to become pregnant, the doctor in charge of the pioneering project has revealed.

The women were born without a uterus or had it removed because of cervical cancer. Most are in their 30s and are part of the first major experiment to test whether it's possible to transplant wombs into women so they can give birth to their own children.

Life-saving transplants of organs such as hearts, livers and kidneys have been done for decades and doctors are increasingly transplanting hands, faces and other body parts to improve patients' quality of life. Womb transplants - the first ones intended to be temporary, just to allow childbearing - push that frontier even farther and raise some new concerns.

There have been two previous attempts to transplant a womb - in Turkey and Saudi Arabia - but both failed to produce babies. Scientists in Britain, Hungary, the U.S. and elsewhere are also planning similar operations but the efforts in Sweden are the most advanced.

Asteroid 2014 AY32 passed by the Earth at a distance of 4 478 000 km (over 11.54 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon) slightly before 8.00 am on Monday 6 January 2013. There was no danger of the asteroid hitting us, and had it done so it would have been highly unlikely to have caused any harm. 2013 AY32 is estimated to be between 9 and 28 m in diameter, and such an object would be expected to break up in the Earth's atmosphere between 35 and 17 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material reaching the planet's surface.

A diet rich in starchy foods may have led to high rates of tooth decay in ancient hunter-gatherers, says a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Research by a team from Oxford University, the Natural History Museum, London, and the National Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Heritage (INSAP) in Morocco challenges the long-held view that dental disease was linked to the advent of farming. Their research shows widespread tooth decay occurred in a hunter-gathering society in Morocco several thousand years before the dawn of agriculture.

The research team analysed 52 sets of adult teeth from hunter-gatherer skeletons found in Taforalt in Morocco, dating between 15,000 and 13,700 years ago. Unexpectedly, they found evidence of decay in more than half of the surviving teeth, with only three skeletons showing no signs of cavities. Previously, scholars had thought that high rates of dental disease were associated with agricultural societies that grew domesticated plant crops.

From January to August of last year, John Bohannon submitted an academic study to 304 peer-reviewed scientific journals. All of the them were open access journals, a newer breed of digital-only academic publications that are free for readers but often charge researchers to publish. Bohannon's study concerned a molecule, extracted from a lichen, that appeared to show promise as a treatment for cancer. It was accepted for publication by 157 of the journals - slightly over half.

There was only one problem. Bohannon isn't a scientist; he's a journalist. And he completely made up the study.

Actually he did more than that. He deliberately inserted unscientific material to test whether or not it would be caught by the journals' peer reviewers. The "cure for cancer" proposition of the study, for instance, should have seriously raised some eyebrows, though in 157 cases, it did not. A bit subtler, though as much a red flag for scientists, was Bohannon's claim that the lichen-based molecule could be used as a treatment for humans, though it hadn't gone through a clinical trial. This, too, was missed by half of the journals. What little feedback Bohannon did receive had more to do with the formatting of his manuscript than the content itself.

Bohannon's sting operation was not the first of its kind. There are many more examples of fake studies getting published in academic journals. Taken together, they point to serious flaws in academic publishing at large: Journals are too eager to publish surprising studies, and the rigor of peer review is faltering.

Though Bohannon (or his editors at Science, the preeminent American scientific journal where he published the details of his hijinx) blamed open access journals, fake (or at least extremely dubious) studies have also been published in traditional, subscription-based journals.

Sydney - Amid a plague of reports that Windows 8 is dying the death of Mucho No Sales, with only 3.6 percent of computers running 8.1, "excitement" is again on the chopping block with Windows 9, codenamed Threshold.

Sydney Morning Herald:

Of course, these plans could change. But it's almost certain that Microsoft isn't too happy with the adoption rate of Windows 8.1, which stood at just 3.6 per cent this month.

Mashable and every news outlet under the sun is already thrashing the news that yet another tin egg has been laid and hatched at what used to be a plausible company producing good products. Even a computer service guy told me last week, "Don't get Win 8. It's one good, one bad with Microsoft: XP Good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad."

The trouble is he's right. What was wrong with 7? Not much, as far as I can see. There was nothing wrong with XP, either. Instead of a natural progression from XP to 7, we got a knee jerk "Hey, it's whatever year it is. Let's release some pile of crap."

Add to this the "clean install and to hell with your games" motif, and you may be wondering why Microsoft is pretending to be much more than a phone company. There's a reason for that. A lot of developers make a lot of money producing this garbage. It's a club, not a company strategy any more.

It's like DVD zoning, "media players" and other garbage. It's the same data, with proprietary strings attached, making lots of money for geriatrics and people who know PR but don't know a damn thing about computers or users.

Let's get this straight- While you're using binary, all else is window dressing, pun intended. What's wrong with something better than binary? Trinary or nonary, for example? We didn't find that in the cornflakes packet and nobody bothered to think about it. So we clunk along... forever, presumably.

The most abundant photosynthetic organism in the world sheds countless little sacs into the oceans, which could be having a dramatic impact on marine ecosystems, according to a new study. These microbial buds contain proteins and genetic material, which may influence the growth of other marine microbes and even protect them against viruses.

The oceans comprise the world's largest ecosystem, and cyanobacteria - single-celled organisms that get their energy through photosynthesis - are the keystone group. One type of cyanobacteria, Prochlorococcus, is the most abundant photosynthetic organism on the planet, numbering in the billion billion billions. These tiny organisms account for about 10% of all photosynthesis on Earth, which forms the base of the food chain and provides the atmosphere with oxygen. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) led by biological oceanographer Sallie Chisholm have found that cyanobacteria may play an even bigger role in the ecosystem than previously thought.