Remember the Mommy Tummy, Kanagawa University's terrifically odd jacket that allows a fellow to become a human seahorse? Its creators have been taking the device on the road, showcasing its ability to simulate the development of a full-term baby in two minutes. My favorite part of all this is the unusually dire sign insisting that it is a "Serious Game."

NASA will hold a press conference today (Sept. 29) to unveil the latest discoveries on Mercury by a spacecraft orbiting the small rocky planet.
The NASA teleconference is set for 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT) and will reveal new details about Mercury observed by the space agency's Messenger spacecraft. The unmanned probe arrived at Mercury on March 17 and is the first spacecraft ever to orbit the innermost planet of the solar system. [Messenger's latest photos of Mercury]

Several Messenger mission scientists will give presentations during today's teleconference, NASA officials said in a statement. They include:

• Ed Graykzeck, Messenger program manager, NASA Headquarters, Washington
• James Head, III, professor of geological sciences, Brown University
• David Blewett, Messenger participating scientist and staff scientist, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Md.
• Patrick Peplowski, staff scientist, APL
• Thomas Zurbuchen, professor of space science and aerospace engineering, University of Michigan

NASA's $446 million Messenger mission to Mercury launched in 2004 on a 6 1/2-year journey to innermost planet. The spacecraft's name is short for the bulky moniker MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging.

Just one strong dose of hallucinogenic mushrooms can alter a person's personality for more than a year and perhaps permanently, a new study finds.

People given psilocybin, the compound in "magic mushrooms" that causes hallucinations and feelings of transcendence, demonstrated a more "open" personality after their experience, an effect that persisted for at least 14 months. Openness is a psychological term referring to an appreciation for new experiences. People who are more open tend to have broad imaginations and value emotion, art and curiosity.

This personality warp is unusual, said study researcher Katherine MacLean, because personality rarely changes much after the age of 25 or 30. (In fact, one recent study found that by first grade our personalities are set pretty much for life.)

"This is one of the first studies to show that you actually can change adult personality," said MacLean, a postdoctoral researcher at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have given a rat an artificial brain part -- the cerebellum -- to restore lost functions and thereby ushering in the era of true brain-to-computer communication for humans.

Matti Mintz, professor of psychobiology, and his colleagues, built a computerized cerebellum and linked it to an anaesthetized rat whose own cerebellum was disabled. The cerebellum is the round, cue ball-sized structure at the back of a the brain that controls how messages get from the brain to the body and back again. Critically, it controls the timing of movement, which is why injuries to the cerebellum cause people to lose their balance or suffer motor control disorders, rather than paralysis.

Attaching the synthetic cerebellum to the rat, the scientists tried to condition it to blink at the sound of a tone. To get the rat to blink they first fired a puff of air at the rat when the tone sounded and then just sounded the tone. The experiment worked: the rat blinked when it heard the sound. When the synthetic cerebellum was disconnected, the rat could not learn the response.

In 2009, Japanese scientists journeyed to Antarctica to recover evidence of alterations to Earth's atmosphere caused in medieval times by supernovae recorded by scholars - including obscure Irish monasteries where monks later interpreted them signs of the Antichrist . No, this isn't the plot of the next Dan Brown novel (or a Dan Brow fanfiction written by an X-Files addict): this is real science.

Supernovae release terrific amounts of energy, as in "If one happened too close the planet would be sterilized" truly terror-inducing terrific. Some of this energy is fired off as gamma rays, which can travel thousands of light-years and still pack enough of a punch after to alter the atmosphere - which is exactly what happened in 1006 and again in 1054, when gamma rays blasted the upper atmosphere and created spikes in NO3 levels. There was also quite a lot of visible light, creating a star visible even during the day which was noted by various Chinese, Egyptian and even monastic records.

To access past records of the atmosphere, a team of Japanese scientists carefully extracted 122 meters of ice core from Antarctica. Even better, to locate events on such a stretch of frozen time you use known volcanic atmosphere-altering events as reference points - in other words, these guys use exploding mountains as a ruler.

New tweezers can reach smaller particles and keep their cool

Scientists have been working on ways for decades to trap tiny microscopic parts of a cell. Today, scientists are going even further with the ability to trap even smaller nanoscale particles using optical tweezers. The original optical tweezers used on microscopic particles had issues with overheating that made them impractical for use with smaller nanoscale particles.

Engineers at Harvard have been able to create a device that makes it easier to isolate nanoparticles like viruses and tiny individual cellular components. The optical tweezers use light from a laser to trap particles. The light is shined through a microscope and the new design prevents overheating that was common in older designs.

"We can get beyond the limitations of conventional optical tweezers, exerting a larger force on a nanoparticle for the same laser power," says principal investigator Ken Crozier, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

The next generation optical tweezers are being called plasmonic nanotweezer and have an integrated heatsink. The smaller the particles scientists are trying to trap, the more laser energy is needed. The problem was that the researchers found that the higher power laser would cause the water that the particles they wanted to trap were suspended in to boil. The boiling occurred even when the team used a heatsink made up of tiny gold discs submerged into the water.

The team found that replacing the sheet of glass with gold discs on it with a sheet of silicon coated in copper and gold with raised gold pillars they were able to dissipate the heat from the laser. That means the water didn't boil and the particles the scientists wanted to trap were reachable.

"The gold, copper, and silicon under the pillars act just like the heat sink attached to the chip in your PC, drawing the heat away," says lead author Kai Wang (Ph.D. '11), who completed the work at SEAS and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The team also found that they were able to rotate the trapped particles by simply rotating the linear polarizer on the optical table where the experiments were conducted. The electromagnetic field used in the experiments moved at 1014 rotations per second. However, the particle rotated at a velocity of about five rotations per second due to fluid drag. The team calls that phenomenon a terminal velocity.

Back in 2009, acoustic tweezers were being used to target parts of a living cell.

Genome sequencing study suggests that Aboriginal Australians are descended from early wave of modern humans who migrated out of Africa perhaps 62,000 - 75,000 years ago

Little did he know that giving a team of scientists a lock of his hair would provide answers to some profound questions about the origins of humankind in his native Australia. But that is exactly what happened when scientists sequenced his genome and found that he was descended from a very ancient wave of modern humanity out of Africa and eventually into Australia some 62,000 - 75,000 years ago.

He is an Aboriginal Australian. The results of the genetic tests showed that modern humans migrated into Eastern Asia in more than one wave and that he, along with all of his fellow Aboriginal Australians, could claim direct heritage with a very early wave, perhaps even the first wave. This meant that his population constituted one of the oldest continuous populations outside of Africa.

Scientists at the Penn State College of Medicine said this week they have discovered a virus that is capable of killing all grades of breast cancer "within seven days" of first introduction in a laboratory setting.

The virus, known as adeno-associated virus type 2 (AAV2), is naturally occurring and carried by up to 80 percent of humans, but it does not cause any disease.

Researchers learned of its cancer-killing properties in 2005, after Penn State scientists observed it killing cervical cancer cells. They also found that women who carried the AAV2 virus and human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer, had a lower propensity to develop cervical cancer.

When combined in a lab recently, AAV2 eradicated all the breast cancer cells "within seven days," according to researchers. Better still, it proved capable of wiping out cancer cells at multiple stages, negating the need for differing treatments used today.

Dutch artist Jalila Essaïdi and cell biologist Abdoelwaheb El Ghalbzouri have blended spider silk with human skin to produce material that is three times stronger than kevlar.

There is mounting archaeological evidence for the evolution of a human "super-brain" no later than 75,000 years ago that spurred a modern capacity for novelty and invention, according to John Hoffecher, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado.

While the concept of a human super-brain is analogous to social insects like bees and ants, which collectively behave as a super-organism by gathering, processing, and sharing information about their environment, there is one important difference, Hoffecker said. "Human societies are not super-organisms -- they are composed of people who are for the most part unrelated, and societies filled with competing individuals and families."

While crude stone tools crafted by human ancestors beginning about 2.5 million years ago likely were an indirect consequence of bipedalism (walking upright) -- which freed up the hands for new functions -- the first inklings of a developing super-brain likely began about 1.6 million years ago when early humans began crafting stone hand axes, thought by Hoffecker and others to be one of the first external representations of internal thought.

The emerging modern mind in Africa was marked by a three-fold increase in brain size over 3-million-year-old human ancestors like Lucy, thought by some to be the matriarch of modern humans. Humans were producing perforated shell ornaments, polished bone awls and simple geometric designs incised into lumps of red ochre by 75,000 years ago. "With the appearance of symbols and language -- and the consequent integration of brains into a super-brain -- the human mind seems to have taken off as a potentially unlimited creative force," Hoffecker said.