Where did Earth's oceans come from? Astronomers have long contended that icy comets and asteroids delivered the water for them during an epoch of heavy bombardment that ended about 3.9 billion years ago. But a new study suggests that Earth supplied its own water, leaching it from the rocks that formed the planet. The finding may help explain why life on Earth appeared so early, and it may indicate that other rocky worlds are also awash in vast seas.

Our planet has always harbored water. The rubble that coalesced to form Earth contained trace amounts - tens to hundreds of parts per million - of the stuff. But scientists didn't believe that was enough to create today's oceans, and thus they looked to alien origins for our water supply. Geologist Linda Elkins-Tanton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge didn't think researchers needed to look that far.

Russia has announced it will be investing $2 billion in a program to capture some of the thousands of pieces of dangerous debris that threaten the future of space technology. How might it work?

Energia, Russia's space corporation, has revealed plans to build a special space "pod" which will grab around 600 defunct satellites and then safely deorbit them so that they either burn up in the atmosphere or splash down into the ocean. The pod will rely on a nuclear power core, and cost around $2 billion to develop and deploy. Energia plans to complete design and testing by 2020 and have it in service no later than 2023, with an operational lifespan of around 15 years. The company also said it has been working on a space interceptor capable of tackling any dangerous objects from the outer solar system that may be on a collision course with Earth.

If it seems odd to think of Russia as Earth's space junk and comet defender, it's also welcome news. Space debris in the form of defunct or malfunctioning satellites is an increasingly severe problem. Numerous orbits are becoming inaccessible, or at least hopelessly dangerous, because of wandering hulls or showers of shredded metal debris--like the one caused by a collision between a working U.S. Iridium satellite and a dead Russian Cosmos satellite in 2009.

Scientists have discovered how a rare metal is able to absorb sunlight and store it as pure heat until it is needed.

The breakthrough paves the way for the next generation of solar power devices that are able to harness energy and heat collected from the sun and store it indefinitely.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say it could be used to create a 'rechargeable heat battery' that could be used to heat a home.

A recent paradigm-shattering discovery in neuroscience shows how our minds share actions, emotions, and experience - what we commonly call "the monkey see, monkey do" experience. When we see someone laugh, cry, show disgust, or experience pain, in some sense, we share that emotion. When we see someone in distress, we share that distress. When we see a great actor, musician or sportsperson perform at the peak of their abilities, it can feel like we are experiencing just something of what they are experiencing.

Only recently, however, with the discovery of mirror neurons, has it become clear just how this powerful sharing of experience is realized within the human brain. In the early 1990's Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma discovered that some neurons had an amazing property: they responded not only when a subject performed a given action, but also when the subject observed someone else performing that same action.

These results had a deep impact on cognitive neuroscience, leading the the world's leading experts to predict that 'mirror neurons would do for psychology what DNA did for biology'.

Vilayanur Ramachandran is a neurologist at the University of California-San Diego and co-author of Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind writes that "Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma has elegantly explored the properties of neurons - the so-called "mirror" neurons, or "monkey see, monkey do" neurons. His research indicates that any given cell in this region will fire when a test monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand: pulling, pushing, tugging, picking up, grasping, etc. In addition, it appears that different neurons fire in response to different actions."

The astonishing fact is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or even the experimenter) performing the same action. "With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: imitation learning, intentionality, "mind reading," empathy -- even the evolution of language." Ramachandran writes.

After colliding lead ions at close to the speed of light, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) using the ALICE detector have discovered the Universe acted like a fluid in the moments immediately after the Big Bang. Also, the ATLAS and CMS detectors have observed a phenomenon known as "jet quenching" for the first time.

Until recently, the LHC only accelerated protons and collided them inside the particle accelerator mainly to search for the infamous Higgs boson and other exotic particles. But earlier this month, heavier lead ions were injected into the LHC. This is when the quantum party really got started.

Smashing Lead

For three weeks, lead ions have raced around the accelerator ring at relativistic speeds, crashing head-on with other lead ions traveling in the opposite direction.

Lead ions are significantly bigger than protons, so they carry more energy. When they collide, they release so much energy that physicists often refer to the lead-lead collisions as "micro-Big Bangs."

Each ion collision can, quite literally, recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, some 13.75 billion years ago.

For a brief moment, these mini-Big Bangs flashed up to an estimated temperature of 10 trillion degrees Kelvin (that's more than 500,000 times hotter than the center of the sun), giving the ALICE detector a peek into how matter would have acted right at the Universe's superheated birth.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a $290-million US dispute between Microsoft Corp. and Canadian technology company i4i Inc. over complaints that the former's ubiquitous Word program violates one of i4i's patents.

The high court on Monday agreed to hear an appeal from the Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, which wants the multimillion-dollar judgment against it erased.

In its appeal, the world's largest software maker says the lower court that handles patent cases makes it too hard for those accused of infringement to argue that a patent should never have been granted initially. Tech giants Apple Inc. and Google Inc. have taken the unprecedented step of publicly backing their rival Microsoft in the dispute.

In Microsoft's appeal, Apple told the justices that the patent system "is tilting out of balance," giving disproportionate power to people who secure patents of questionable legitimacy, Bloomberg reported.

South Bend, Indiana - Generous impulses often are described in fundraising appeals, conversation and greeting cards as coming "from the heart."

In fact, the origins of giving probably are deep in the brain's circuitry.

Exactly how the complicated workings of the brain stimulate or suppress giving and how families, co-workers and values affect generosity remain a mystery despite years of study. The University of Notre Dame is leading a new research initiative that will merge economic, sociological, neurological and psychological studies to explain why some people give and some don't and to create a new academic field.

With a $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Notre Dame created the Science of Generosity Initiative in 2009. Research is underway here and at universities across the nation.

Project director Christian Smith, a Notre Dame sociology professor, hopes to unravel the physiological and behavioral mechanisms that make people generous - or not: Why do some people give blood? Why do some people go out of their way to help strangers?

A century of comet data suggests a dark, Jupiter-sized object is lurking at the solar system's outer edge and hurling chunks of ice and dust toward Earth.

"We've accumulated 10 years more data, double the comets we viewed to test this hypothesis," said planetary scientist John Matese of the University of Louisiana. "Only now should we be able to falsify or verify that you could have a Jupiter-mass object out there."

In 1999, Matese and colleague Daniel Whitmire suggested the sun has a hidden companion that boots icy bodies from the Oort Cloud, a spherical haze of comets at the solar system's fringes, into the inner solar system where we can see them.

In a new analysis of observations dating back to 1898, Matese and Whitmire confirm their first thought: In this area 20 percent of the comets visible from Earth were sent by a dark, distant planet.

This thought was a reaction to an earlier notion that a dim brown dwarf or red dwarf star, ominously dubbed Nemesis, has pummeled the Earth with deadly comet showers every 30 million years or so. Shortly research suggested that mass extinctions on Earth don't line up with Nemesis's predictions, so many astronomers now reckon the object doesn't exist.

Storage capacity by numbers, not resolution, fuels fluid intelligence, Oregon researchers say.

One person correctly remembers four of eight items just seen but is fuzzy on details. Another person recalls only two of the items but with amazingly precise clarity. So what ability translates to higher IQ?

According to a University of Oregon study, the answer is very clear: More items stored in short-term memory is linked to greater fluid intelligence, as measured in IQ tests. The resolution of those memories, while important in many situations, shows no relationship with fluid intelligence.

The notion that numbers of items is vitally important to short-term memory has been shown in previous studies at the UO. Those studies found that people, generally, have a capacity to temporarily store three to five items in short-term memory. Previous research has shown that capacity in short-term memory is a reliable predictor of an individual's IQ.

New sunspot 1130 is rapidly developing near the center of the sun's disk and "it is crackling with activity," reports Michael Borman of Evansville, Indiana. Using a backyard solar telescope, he took this picture of a B-class explosion from the active region on Nov. 28th:

So far, the flares have been relatively minor, but if the sunspot's growth continues apace, geo-effective blasts could be in the offing.