From Alaska to Chile, Norway to New Zealand, 65 random number generators (RNGs) were going about their business generating random numbers. Then the unexplainable happened. But more about that later. The RNGs are part of a larger scientific effort called the Global Coherence Initiative (GCI), a research project that uses a vast array of magnetic field detectors to monitor fluctuations in the earth's geomagnetic fields. They also measure pulsations and resonances in the ionosphere--the portion of the atmosphere extending approximately 30 to 250 miles above the Earth--associated with what scientists call "excitations."

Picking up good vibrations and monitoring excitations. . . sounds suspiciously like The Beach Boys are running this project. But I wander off topic.

So far, the research has yielded some interesting and perhaps significant findings. Stripped of scientific jargon, the discoveries fall into three interrelated categories:

• The Earth is communicating with us.
• We are communicating with the Earth.
• And, we may also be influencing the function of computers.

The fact that the Earth communicates with us may not come as a galloping surprise to those who actually get out of their lab or office and pay attention to the natural world. To borrow an axiom from the newspaper trade, that's a dog-bites-man story, meaning not much of a story at all. Still, the challenge has always been to capture and accurately interpret the communications.

Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher is an astrophysicist and nuclear scientist whose resume includes Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Lawrence Livermore Lab, and consulting gigs with NASA and the U.S. Navy. She and her late husband built sensitive detectors that monitor shifts in the geomagnetic field. They found that up to three weeks prior to major geological events such as earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, the Earth's magnetic field noticeably changes. That allows for a high degree of predictive accuracy. According to the Global Coherence Initiative website, Rauscher was able to anticipate the Mount St. Helens blast. More impressively, in the 10 months following the eruption, she "predicted 84 percent of the seismic activity occurring within a 100-square-mile area around a single detector."

Research by international scientists concluded that giant asteroids, similar or larger than the one believed to have killed the dinosaurs, hit Earth billions of years ago with more frequency than previously thought, U.S. space agency NASA announced Wednesday.

To cause the dinosaur extinction, the killer asteroid that impacted Earth 65 million years ago would have been almost six miles (10 kilometers) in diameter. By studying ancient rocks in Australia and using computer models, researchers estimate that approximately 70 asteroids the same size or larger impacted Earth 1.8 to 3.8 billion years ago. During the same period, approximately four similarly-sized objects hit the moon.

Evidence for these impacts on Earth comes from thin rock layers that contain debris of nearly spherical, sand-sized droplets called spherules. These millimeter-scale clues were formerly molten droplets ejected into space within the huge plumes created by mega-impacts on Earth. The hardened droplets then fell back to Earth, creating thin but widespread sedimentary layers known as spherule beds.

The new findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The Universities of Exeter (UK), Postdam (Germany), Deakin and Queensland (Australia) announced the discovery of the first known evidence that birds cultivate plants for nonfood purposes that will be published in the April 24, 2012 issue of Current Biology that was reviewed at the Eureka Alert web site on April 23, 2012.

Male bowerbirds in Taunton National Park in Queensland were found to be collecting the fruit of the potato bush (Solanum ellipticum) to increase the appeal of the male bowerbird's bowers to female bowerbirds. The bright purple flowers and green fruit of the potato bush increased the attractiveness of a bower to a potential mate.

Most of the time our autobiographical memories and beliefs match up - we remember last week's journey to a conference and believe that journey really took place. Other times, we believe an event happened - we know we travelled to that conference - but our memory for the event eludes us, perhaps because the trip was so boring or because we drank too much wine.

Recently, psychologists have begun to examine the rarer reverse scenario, in which we have what feels like a memory for an event, but we know (or believe) that the event never happened - we recall the conference journey but know we couldn't have made it. A recent survey (pdf) of over 1,500 undergrads found that nearly a quarter reported having a non-believed memory of this kind. Now Andrew Clark and his colleagues have gone further - for the first time actually provoking non-believed memories in the lab.

A superplume, or massive episode of volcanic eruptions that related to extensive melting of the Earth's mantle, could explain the puzzling reappearance of major iron formations long after the rise in atmospheric oxygen about 2.4 billion years ago, which should have prevented iron forming, according to a study published in Nature this week.

The research team, led by Professor Birger Rasmussen of Curtin University, includes Dr Janet Muhling from The University of Western Australia's Centre for Microscopy, Characterisation and Analysis.

Iron formations are unique sedimentary rocks composed of iron and silica and are unlike any modern rocks, the study noted. Most iron formations were deposited in the oceans before free oxygen first accumulated in Earth's atmosphere about 2.4 billion years ago (the so-called Great Oxidation Event).

However, the re-occurrence of major iron formations nearly 500 million years later has been an enduring enigma for geologists.

Major iron formations about 1.9-1.8 billion years old occur in both North America and Australia. However, because the Australian iron formations were thought to be significantly younger than those in North America, it was uncertain whether they provided information about the composition of the global ocean or conditions in a restricted or closed basin.

The new study has dated volcanic ash beds in the Australian iron formations, showing that they were deposited at the same time as those in North America.

Astronomers using the Faulkes Telescope are first to re-image the comet before its Rosetta spacecraft meet-up in 2014

Astronomy is one of the few sciences that allows amateur practitioners to actively take part in real research projects -- be it monitoring planetary atmospheres or studying distant galaxies.

Over recent years, the advance in technology has led to the availability of research-grade telescopes across the Internet such as the Faulkes telescopes in Hawaii and Siding Spring (Austalia).

It was with these instruments that a team of amateur astronomers have been the first to re-image Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as it makes its latest dive toward the inner solar system.

PHOTOS: 6 Intimate Comet Encounters

The comet, originally discovered in 1969 by Klim Churyumov and Svetlana Gerasimenko, orbits the sun once every six and a half years. The European Rosetta mission is currently en route to the comet and, in 2014, the spacecraft will have a close encounter with the "dirty snowball," dropping a small lander onto its icy surface.

At a recent conference for the Rosetta mission with both professional and amateur astronomers, Faulkes Telescope Pro-Am Program Manager Nick Howes put forward a detailed plan for long-term observations of the comet, using the 2-meter Faulkes telescopes.

UFO hunters have spotted a curious object near the sun in a new NASA image. It is, in the words of a blogger for the website Gather, "what looks like a metallic, jointed spaceship with a gigantic extension, perhaps a boom arm, anchored off its lower end."

The YouTube video drawing attention to the object has quickly made its way to discussion forums and the tabloid press, and many seasoned UFO believers are calling it a definite "spot."

But does this image, which was taken by a camera on board NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on Tuesday (April 24), really show a spaceship dropping by the sun to harvest some solar energy, as one YouTube commenter suggested? Or is this object something much more mundane? We asked scientists in the solar physics branch at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) - the group that analyzes data from Lasco 2, the telescopic camera that snapped the picture.

The way doctors categorise illness and manage it is usually highly influenced by panels of doctors. One problem here, though, is that these doctors can have financial ties to companies that can gain from those doctors' recommendations. These ties can come in a variety of forms but include consultancy fees, speaking fees and stock/shareholdings in the company. These conflicts of interest can cause 'bias', and in an effort to do something about this, panel members are generally asked to declare their conflicts of interest.

It turns out, that in the US, psychiatrists on these panels more often than not have conflicts of interest. For example, 70 per cent of the members of panels responsible for drawing up the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM - the 'psychiatry bible') have declared conflicts of interest. The actual number may be worse as certain sources of funding (including some research funding) does not need to be declared.

Now, it's generally accepted in the medical and scientific communities that declaration of conflicts of interest is a good thing. But does it actually help to stamp out bias? A recent piece in the on-line journal PLoS Medicine [1] suggests that declaration of conflicts of interests does not get to the root of the problem, and may make bias worse, not better.

After two decades of examining a microscopic algae-eater that lives in a lake in Norway, scientists on Thursday declared it to be one of the world's oldest living organisms and man's remotest relative.
The elusive, single-cell creature evolved about a billion years ago and did not fit in any of the known categories of living organisms -- it was not an animal, plant, parasite, fungus or alga, they said.

"We have found an unknown branch of the tree of life that lives in this lake. It is unique!" University of Oslo researcher Kamran Shalchian-Tabrizi said.

"So far we know of no other group of organisms that descends from closer to the roots of the tree of life than this species", which has been declared a new category of organism called Collodictyon.

Pygmies have unique changes in their genomes that help their life in forested habitats and keep them short, a new analysis of their genes suggests.

Researchers analyzed the genomes, the "building code" that directs how an organism is put together, of Western African Pygmies in Cameroon, who average 4 feet, 11 inches tall, and compared them to their neighboring relatives, the Bantus, who average 5 feet, 6 inches, to see whether these differences were genetic or a factor of their environment.

"There's been a longstanding debate about why Pygmies are so short and whether it is an adaptation to living in a tropical environment," study researcher Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania said in a statement. "Our findings are telling us that the genetic basis of complex traits like height may be very different in globally diverse populations."

Short population

The Pygmy and Bantu populations separated about 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, then came back into contact roughly 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, and started interbreeding.

Some Pygmy women have given birth to half-Bantu babies, which integrates Bantu genes into the Pygmy population, but offspring of male Pygmy and female Bantu are rare, so the Bantus don't have many Pygmy genes.

The researchers analyzed the genomes of 67 Pygmies and 58 Bantus for changes that would provide information about an individual's ancestry.

These changes are small, nonharmful misspellings in the code (the chemical bases A, C, T and G) that makes up the genome. For example, a Bantu might have an A where a Pygmy has a T.

By analyzing large numbers of these changes, researchers can tell how much of an individual's genome is Bantu and how much is Pygmy.