A new analysis of people's brain waves when surrounded by different magnetic fields suggests that people have a "sixth sense" for magnetism.

Birds, fish and some other creatures can sense Earth's magnetic field and use it for navigation. Scientists have long wondered whether humans, too, boast this kind of magnetoreception. Now, by exposing people to an Earth-strength magnetic field pointed in different directions in the lab, researchers from the United States and Japan have discovered distinct brain wave patterns that occur in response to rotating the field in a certain way.

These findings, reported in a study published online March 18 in eNeuro, offer evidence that people do subconsciously respond to Earth's magnetic field - although it's not yet clear exactly why or how our brains use this information.

There is a good chance that simple bacteria populate the atmosphere of Venus, a Russian scientist told local media. A joint US-Russian space mission planned for 2026 is expected to look for life traces in the planet's clouds.

Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system as temperatures on its surface can reach a staggering 465 degrees Celsius (870 degrees Fahrenheit). However, simple forms of life may still have survived in the atmosphere, according to Ludmila Zasova, co-chair of the joint Russian-US 'Venera-D' ("Venus-D") project.

Clouds on Venus are mostly made of sulfuric acid but there's also 15-20 percent of water in them, the scientist said, adding that temperature and atmospheric pressure in the lower layer of the cloud cover is similar to those on Earth.

Soyuz rockets stand ready to deliver astronauts to space if US manned spacecraft development is delayed, Roscosmos said, after NASA announced plans to purchase additional seats onboard the Russian spacecraft.

"We are ready to help American partners in case trials of their new manned spacecraft are delayed," chief of the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin said on Twitter. "We agree with NASA's proposal to use both US and Russian spacecraft for delivering mixed international crews to the [International Space Station] ISS in the future."

Calculations and simulations confirm that on average, Mercury is the nearest planet to Earth-and to every other planet in the solar system.

Quick: Which planet is closest to Earth? Ask an astronomer or a search engine, and you'll probably hear that though the situation changes frequently, Venus is the closest when averaged over time. Several educational websites, such as The Planets and Space Dictionary, publish the distance between each pair of planets, and they all show that Venus is nearest to Earth on average. They're all wrong. NASA literature even tells us Venus is "our closest planetary neighbor," which is true if we are talking about which planet has the closest approach to Earth but not if we want to know which planet is closest on average.

As it turns out, by some phenomenon of carelessness, ambiguity, or groupthink, science popularizers have disseminated information based on a flawed assumption about the average distance between planets. Using a mathematical method that we devised, we determine that when averaged over time, Earth's nearest neighbor is in fact Mercury.

Two dusty discoveries may shake up our understanding of the inner solar system.

Mercury shares its supertight orbit with a big ring of wandering dust, a recent study suggests. And a cloud of as-yet-undiscovered asteroids likely gave rise to a similar halo in Venus' neighborhood, another new paper concludes.

"It's not every day you get to discover something new in the inner solar system," Marc Kuchner, a co-author of the Venus study and an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. "This is right in our neighborhood."

A boiling tea kettle diffuses its heat to gradually warm surrounding air, yet it will still be the warmest region even as it, too, slowly cools. But what if the kettle cooled down to room temperature almost instantly, losing its heat in a wave traveling through the material close to the speed of sound? MIT researchers have observed this rare, counterintuitive phenomenon-known as "second sound"-in graphite, the stuff of pencil lead. They described their results in a paper published earlier this week in Science.

Chances are you've never heard of the concept of "second sound," even though the phenomenon has been known for decades. "It's been confined to only a handful of materials that are really very low temperature," said co-author Keith Nelson, severely limiting its potential usefulness. There might be a paragraph or two on the topic in your average solid-state textbook, but the field "has been kind of a backwater."

A miniature brain grown in a lab from human stem cells has developed a mind of its own - or at least enough awareness to send out neural 'tendrils' to connect to the spinal cord and muscle tissue of a mouse, then flex that muscle.

"We like to think of them as mini-brains on the move," said Madeline Lancaster of Cambridge University, who led the experiment with the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology and published the results in Nature: Neuroscience.

The mini-brain is their most sophisticated "organoid" yet, approaching the complexity of a 12-16 week old fetus' brain. While the researchers claim it's "too small and primitive to have anything approaching thoughts, feelings or consciousness," there's no accurate way to measure consciousness, and the "organoid" has a couple million neurons - meaning it's operating with the same grey matter equipment as the average cockroach.

After placing a tiny 1mm-long piece of spinal cord and back muscle from a mouse next to the germinating brain-blob, the researchers watched (presumably in awe) as the brain shot out neuronal connections to intertwine with the spine, eventually sending out electrical impulses and causing the mouse muscle to twitch.

According to seismologists, Vancouver Island is overdue for a magnitude 7 earthquake and has entered a period of time where an additional magnitude 9 mega-thrust rupture earthquake, likely to cause a tsunami, can be expected.

"In our part of the world, there are the big Pacific and North American [tectonic] plates, and caught in-between the two is the Juan de Fuca plate system," says Taimi Mulder, seismologist at the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), which monitors all seismic activity in Western Canada.

Over millions of years, these plates push and grind under and past each other in areas called subduction zones. Earthquakes are caused and can be tiny or they can be massive, like the 2004 Sumatran earthquake, which ruptured 1,000 kilometres of coastline.

"An earthquake is like ringing a bell. The earthquake is the clapper that sets it off and the bell reverberates," said Mulder. "In an earthquake, energy is sent shooting in all directions and it pings around inside the earth making the whole earth vibrate."

Magnitude 4 or 5 earthquakes will likely wake you up, while a 7 will result in toppled bookcases and fallen chimneys. Thanks to B.C.'s stringent building code, structural collapse is not expected in magnitude 7s. Magnitude 8 or 9s have the same severity of shaking as a 7, but their duration lasts longer, often over 2 or 3 minutes. They cause structural building damage and ruptured gas lines, often causing fire.

During development, cells seem to decode their fate through optimal information processing, which could hint at a more general principle of life.

In 1891, when the German biologist Hans Driesch split two-cell sea urchin embryos in half, he found that each of the separated cells then gave rise to its own complete, albeit smaller, larva. Somehow, the halves "knew" to change their entire developmental program: At that stage, the blueprint for what they would become had apparently not yet been drawn out, at least not in ink.

Since then, scientists have been trying to understand what goes into making this blueprint, and how instructive it is. (Driesch himself, frustrated at his inability to come up with a solution, threw up his hands and left the field entirely.) It's now known that some form of positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. But the signals carrying that information seem to fluctuate wildly and chaotically - the opposite of what you might expect for an important guiding influence.

When it comes to health, race can be a double-edged sword.

On one hand, it's a dismal fact that being in certain ethnic groups is a sentence to poorer health. For example, a 2018 study of nearly 900,000 cases of lung, breast, bowel and prostate cancer found black patients had the lowest survival rates.

Some of that miserable outlook may be socio-economic, including less social support and access to healthcare, and more risk factors such as smoking. But part of the problem is biology.

Race can influence how invasive a cancer is and how well it does with treatment. A February 2019 study, for example, found African American men were more likely to have genes that predict aggressive prostate cancer.

But, and here's the upside, armed with a person's ethnicity doctors can get a jump on the problem with targeted screening and treatment. It's all part of the push for "precision medicine" that, in theory, works better because it is tailored to the individual.

A new study, however, led by Rick Kittles at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Centre in Duarte, California, US, puts something of a spanner in those precision works.

The team decided to take a fresh look at a key research tool for targeted medicine: so-called "immortal" cell lines. These are cells, often sourced from human cancers, that replicate indefinitely and are crucial for modelling disease. They can be used to test, for instance, the effectiveness and toxicity of cancer drugs.

But there's a catch.

Because ethnicity is a risk factor for some cancers, it's essential the cell lines come from racially diverse groups to guide treatment across the divide. Kittles' team decided to test 15 commercially available cell lines to see if their ethnicity, as claimed by suppliers, squared with their genetic ancestry.

To do that, they used methods similar to those of the genealogy companies 23andMe and Ancestry.com. For a fee, those outfits take a spit sample and tell you whether your forebears were Manchurian, Iberian or perhaps Native American.