IBM's research director John E. Kelly has described the next decade in computing at the University of Melbourne, which is where IBM is building and will soon launch a research and development facility

Back in August, IBM announced that it was in the midst of creating neurosynaptic chips to roll in the era of cognitive computing, where computers imitate processes of the human brain. These chips are able to learn, remember, find correlations and create hypotheses through a neurosynaptic core, which consists of an integrated memory (mimicking synapses), communication (mimicking axons) and computation (mimicking neurons).

IBM also showcased a supercomputer earlier this year, named "Watson," who challenged human contestants in a game of "Jeopardy."

Now, IBM's research director John E. Kelly has described the next decade in computing at the University of Melbourne, which is where IBM is building and will soon launch a research and development facility. IBM is looking to bring the era of Watson-like cognitive computing where machines can learn from their environments just like humans.

Trillions of beneficial bacteria live in the digestive tract and help break down food, but two new studies suggest these microbes can be exploited by certain viruses to infect the body.

In research that casts a shadow on the otherwise helpful role of symbiotic gut bacteria, U.S. scientists found that at least three viruses - polio, a reovirus and mouse mammary tumour virus - were severely impeded from transmitting or replicating in mice without the help of intestinal germs to slip past the body's defences.

Scientists with NASA's Operation IceBridge airborne research campaign this week began the mission's third year of surveys over the changing ice of Antarctica.

Researchers are flying a suite of scientific instruments on two planes from a base of operations in Punta Arenas, Chile: a DC-8 operated by NASA and a Gulfstream V (G-V) operated by the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The G-V will fly through early November. The DC-8, which completed its first science flight on Wednesday, will fly through mid-November.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured images of water vapour and ice jets on Saturn's moon Enceladus.

At its closest approach, the spacecraft flew approximately 62 miles (100 kilometres) above the moon's surface. The close approach was designed to give some of Cassini's instruments, including the ion and neutral mass spectrometer, the chance to "taste" the jets themselves.

At a higher vantage point during the encounter, Cassini's high-resolution camera captured pictures of the jets emanating from the moon's south polar region. The images of the surface include previously seen leading-hemisphere terrain.

G299.2-2.9 is an intriguing supernova remnant found about 16,000 light years away in the Milky Way galaxy. Evidence points to G299.2-2.9 being the remains of a Type Ia supernova, where a white dwarf has grown sufficiently massive to cause a thermonuclear explosion.

Because it is older than most supernova remnants caused by these explosions, at an age of about 4,500 years, G299.2-2.9 provides astronomers with an excellent opportunity to study how these objects evolve over time. It also provides a probe of the Type Ia supernova explosion that produced this structure.

The original "proto-human language" that many linguists believe all modern languages evolved from might have closely resembled the out-of-order speech pattern of the Star Wars character Yoda, claims a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study, which was the work of Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages co-directors Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann, discovered that the original tongue used in East Africa some 50,000 years ago used a subject-object-verb (SOV) structure instead of a subject-verb-object (SVO) structure used by most modern languages.

For example, says LiveScience/Life's Little Mysteries reporter Natalie Wolchover, the English language uses SVO ordering, so a sentence would be structured like this: "I like you." Other languages, such as Latin - and, assuming the study is correct, the "proto-human language" - use SOV ordering in which the same sentence would be written and spoke like this: "I you like."

Ruhlen and Gell-Mann studied approximately 2,200 languages, both dead and alive, and grouped them into a "family tree" of sorts, according to the Huffington Post.

Computer programs used to reveal findings now available free.

Virtual brains modeling epilepsy and schizophrenia display less complexity among functional connections, and other differences compared to healthy brain models, researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine report.

The researchers worked backward from brain rhythms - the oscillating patterns of electrical activity in the brain recorded on electroencephalograms - from both healthy and ill individuals.

These oscillations relate to the state of awareness. But, instead of seeking answers to how the rhythms emerge, the investigators built models that, when they reproduced the different neural activity patterns seen in real brains, revealed underlying structural differences among the healthy and ill.

Their work is published in the online journal PLoS Computational Biology.

"Our hypothesis is that healthy brains share features with the virtual healthy brains and unhealthy brains share features with virtual unhealthy brains," said Roberto Fernández Galán, a professor of neurosciences at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. Galán has a background in physics, electrophysiology and computational neuroscience.

Galán worked with G. Karl Steinke, a former graduate student in Biomedical Engineering at Case School of Engineering, and now a researcher at Boston Scientific Neroumodulation.

After breaking down the oscillating patterns of brain activity collected from real EEGs and MEGs into a usable form, the researchers applied inverse calculations and reverse engineering to develop brain models they refer to as virtual brains.

An eastern diamond rattlesnake recently gave successful birth five years after mating, according to a new paper that describes this longest known instance of sperm storage, outside of insects, in the animal kingdom.

The study, published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, also presents the first documented virgin birth by a copperhead snake. In this case, the female never mated, proving that snakes and certain other animals can either give true virgin -- dadless -- birth, or may store sperm for long periods.

Actual mate-less virgin birthing, known as parthenogenesis, "has now been observed to occur naturally within all lineages of jawed vertebrates, with the exception of mammals," co-author Warren Booth told Discovery News. "We have recently seen genetic confirmation in species such as boa constrictors, rainbow boas, various shark species, Komodo dragons, and domestic turkeys, to name a few.

Booth, an integrative molecular ecologist at North Carolina State University, analyzed DNA from the female copperhead that had been on exhibit -- without a mate -- for years at the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher. Molecular DNA fingerprinting excluded the contribution of a male in her giving birth, which produced a litter of four normal-looking offspring.

Using the natural luminosity of sand grains, researchers have discovered that a record-breaking flood hit the Dutch coast in either 1775 or 1776.

The finding reveals a new way to look back in time at extreme weather events. Measurements of floods, storm surges and other phenomena didn't begin in earnest until the late 1800s. That makes it hard for scientists to track whether weather is becoming more severe, and it also makes it difficult to predict worst-case scenarios for an area.

To go back further in time, researchers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands examined a layer of beach dune sand exposed by a storm in 2007. They sampled buried sand grains from the layer and conducted an analysis called optical stimulated luminescence to find out how long ago the sand had been laid down.

Optical stimulated luminescence takes advantage of the fact that low levels of background radiation are everywhere. Sediment absorbs this radiation, but when sand is exposed to the sun, that radiation "leaks" out, resetting the radiation level to zero. Using a special light wavelength, researchers can stimulate similar radiation "leaks" in the lab, measuring how much radiation comes out of the sand grains over time. The result is a measurement of how long it's been since the sediment last saw sunlight.

Super-volcanoes are the worst natural disaster the Earth can face, besides a meteor strike, said Patricia Gregg, a post-doc at Oregon State University and lead author of a study that may have found what triggers the massive eruptions.

Luckily, super-volcanoes only devastate the planet ever 100,000 years or so. But why they erupt has had scientists stumped, since they aren't like their puny cousins, the regular volcano, which are triggered by internal precursor eruptions.

But there seems to be no internal precursor to a super-volcano eruption. The trigger comes from above.

"Instead of taking the evidence in these eruptions at face value, most models have simply taken small historic eruptions and tried to scale the process up to super-volcanic proportions," said Shanaka de Silva, an OSU geologist and co-author of the study, in a press release.

"Those of us who actually study these phenomena have known for a long time that these eruptions are not simply scaled-up Mt. Mazamas or Krakataus - the scaling is non-linear. The evidence is clear," said de Silva.