Will this be the future of luxury bachelor and bachelorette parties? Maybe it's something you could get your grandkids. By 2050, bordellos will offer for-hire sex robots for disease- and guilt-free pleasure, according to a new scientific paper.

The research, published in the May issue of the journal Futures, sits incongruously among more staid titles about new spatial planning methods and urban sprawl. The paper is meant to be a "futuristic scenario" that "pushes plausibility to the limit," write its authors, Michelle Mars and tourism professor Ian Yeoman, both of the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

Nevertheless, they said, "It is feasible. Society has had relationships with machines and we continue to have increasingly intimate relationships with more and more sophisticated technologies." And for the sex tourism industry, it's something to look forward to, they said. Commercial sex robots would be free of disease and would reduce the trafficking of real people for sex work, they write.

To explore their ideas, Yeoman and Mars envisioned Amsterdam's sex tourism industry in 2050. They imagined "Yub-Yum," a sex club for business travelers, which would sell "all-inclusive service" - including massages, lap dances and intercourse - for 10,000 Euros, or about $13,000.

Rises in human trafficking and in drug-resistant strains of HIV, which Yeoman and Mars predict will occur in the 2040s, motivated Amsterdam officials to license robotic bordellos. In spite of serious problems with human brothels, city tourism council members didn't want to shut down brothels altogether because they worried such a crackdown might drive away tourists. Robots were the answer.

Did a comet wipe out woolly mammoths and an ancient Indian culture almost 13,000 years ago? Geologists have fiercely debated the topic since 2007. Now a new study says an extraterrestrial impact wasn't to blame, though the scientists who originally proposed the impact idea still aren't convinced.

Three unexplained phenomena happened on Earth around 12,900 years ago. An extended cold spell known as the Younger Dryas cooled the world for 1300 years. Large creatures such as mammoths, mastodons, and their predators went extinct. And the Clovis culture - a group defined by the distinctive stone and bone tools that they manufactured, and presumed by many archaeologists to be the first inhabitants of the New World - suddenly disappeared.

In 2007, a team of researchers tried to tie together these seemingly disparate events to a single cause: an extraterrestrial object, possibly a comet, exploded above eastern Canada, they speculated. Their claimed evidence, which has been much disputed since it was first reported, included several types of "impact markers" sometimes found after an extraterrestrial object strikes Earth. These purported markers include unusual grains of a titanium-rich form of the mineral magnetite; tiny magnetic spherules; and elevated levels of iridium, a relatively rare element that's more common in extraterrestrial objects than in Earth's crust.

The researchers found all of these markers embedded within unusual layers of dark, organic-rich sediments that scientists often call "black mats." These strata are the remains of ancient marshes and swamps, and at many sites across North America, especially in the American Southwest, black mats began accumulating at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, the researchers noted. Many paleontologists have noted that black mats are often a sort of dividing line between older sediments containing fossils of ice-age megafauna, and younger sediments that don't. And many archaeologists have observed that black mats seem to mark the demise of the Clovis culture, because the distinctive spear points that they produced are common in sediments below the layers but nonexistent above.

Just as Africa's geography displays evidence for electrical discharge machining, so does the American Southwest.

In recent Thunderbolts Picture of the Day accounts, we have described a number of locations around the world where the giant scars from electric arcs may be found. Some of those structures are uplifts, isolated within a large expanse higher than the surrounding plain. One of those uplifts is found within the deserts of New Mexico and reveals the telltale characteristics of a fulgurite.

Orthodox theory considers formations like Shiprock to be volcanic intrusions called plutons, though in truth volcanoes and 'volcanic intrusion' are not presently understood. As the theory goes, some sort of geological activity causes magma to move closer to the surface, perhaps to form a volcano or a sub-surface pool of molten rock. After the active phase has passed, the magma within the underground chamber cools and hardens, forming a plug of solidified lava. Due to the slow and steady progress of erosion over millions of years the surrounding landscape wears down and is blown away, uncovering the now solid stone which is more resistant to the erosion that wore away the softer strata. In an electric universe, however, Shiprock and similar forms are suggestive of electric arc impacts.

Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of groundwater.

They argue that the total volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount found on the surface.

The team have produced the most detailed map yet of the scale and potential of this hidden resource.

Writing in the journal Environmental Research Letters, they stress that large scale drilling might not be the best way of increasing water supplies.

Across Africa more than 300 million people are said not to have access to safe drinking water.

Demand for water is set to grow markedly in coming decades due to population growth and the need for irrigation to grow crops.

Freshwater rivers and lakes are subject to seasonal floods and droughts that can limit their availability for people and for agriculture. At present only 5% of arable land is irrigated.

Researchers at Ames Laboratory's team claim to have found a way to significantly reduce the environmental impact on qubits to avoid that stored quantum information is being lost lost.

"The big step forward here is that we were able to decouple individual qubits from the environment, so they retain their information, while preserving the coupling between the qubits themselves" said Viatsheslav Dobrovitski, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory.

The team built what they call a hybrid system for quantum processing that has different types of qubits for different purposes. In this case, there was an electron and a nucleus with measurable magnetic states. "This type of hybrid system may be particularly good for quantum information processing because electrons move fast, can be manipulated easily, but they also lose quantum information quickly. Nuclei move very slow, are difficult to manipulate, but they also retain information well," said Dobrovitski. "You can see an analogy between this hybrid quantum system and the parts of a classical computer: The processor works fast but doesn't keep information long, while the memory works slowly but stores information for a long time."

Decoupling of qubits from their environment has been considered for some time to be a method to increase the time of quantum data being retained. However, so far the decoupling was an all-or-nothing question and even the qubits were decoupled from each other. Dobrovitski said that he found a "narrow window of opportunity where both the electron and nucleus can be decoupled from their environment, while retaining their relationship to each other." As a result, both qubits can store their information reliably. The scientist believes that the discovery will open a door to robust quantum computation with solid-state devices.

Eolewater wind turbines generate hundreds of gallons of fresh water on a daily basis.

Although the concept of obtaining clean water out of thin air is nothing new, most designs aren't efficient enough for a larger, commercial scale use. Hoping to remedy this shortcoming, Eolewater founder Marc Parent has designed an innovative wind turbine that can extract hundreds of gallons of clean, fresh water on a daily basis.

After several years of prototypes and revisions, Parent's turbine was finally put to the test in October of last year. Set up in the dry desert air of Abu Dhabi, his wind turbine was able to reliably gather 130-200 gallons of fresh water every day. While many of us are lucky enough to be blessed with an abundance of clean drinking water, many underdeveloped countries aren't so lucky.

Experts have long noted that both autism and antisocial personality disorder are marked by problems with empathy, yet the differences between the two conditions couldn't be starker.

Autistic people are anxious and misread social cues, but they typically care about not hurting others; they are also often incapable of manipulation. Those with antisocial personality disorder, however, are masters of bending people to their will and tend to have little fear. They actually enjoy causing people pain.

In recent research, scientists highlighted the brain differences associated with autistic and antisocial traits, finding clear distinctions that remain stable during children's development. Researchers imaged 323 typically developing youth, starting at an average age of 11. They children were also rated by their parents on levels of autistic and antisocial traits: for example, autistic traits might include "has difficulty relating to peers" or "would rather be alone than with others," and parents would be asked to designate how well these phrases fit their child. Antisocial traits included things like "lies easily and skillfully" and "acts without thinking of the consequences."

Following the posting on the Central Bureau's Transient Object Confirmation Page about a possible Nova in Sgr (TOCP Designation: PNV J17452791-2305213) we performed some follow-up of this object remotely through 0.25-m f/3.4 reflector + CCD from MPC code H06 (Mayhill station, NM)

On our images taken on April 22.4, 2012 we can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with unfiltered CCD magnitude 9.1 at coordinates: R.A. = 17 45 28.02, Decl.= -23 05 23.2 (equinox 2000.0; USNO-B1.0 catalogue reference stars).

According to VIZIER there is a 16.21 R1-magnitude star at 0.237 arcseconds from the transient position (USNO-B1.0 0669-0621295).

Our confirmation image:

An animation showing a comparison between our confirmation image and the archive POSS2/UKSTU plate (R Filter - 1996) can be seen here.

Whether you're using wireless internet in a coffee shop, stealing it from the guy next door, or competing for bandwidth at a conference, you've probably gotten frustrated at the slow speeds you face when more than one device is tapped into the network. As more and more people - and their many devices - access wireless internet, clogged airwaves are going to make it increasingly difficult to latch onto a reliable signal.

But radio waves are just one part of the spectrum that can carry our data. What if we could use other waves to surf the internet?