It's the celestial equivalent of a horror movie villain-a star that wouldn't stay dead.

An international team of astronomers including Carnegie's Nick Konidaris and Benjamin Shappee discovered a star that exploded multiple times over a period of 50 years. The finding, published by Nature, completely confounds existing knowledge of a star's end of life, and Konidaris' instrument-construction played a crucial role in analyzing the phenomenon.

In September 2014, the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory team of astronomers detected a new explosion in the sky, iPTF14hls.

The light given off by the event was analyzed in order to understand the speed and chemical composition of the material ejected in the explosion.

This analysis indicated that the explosion was what's called a type II-P supernova, and everything about the discovery seemed normal. Until, that is, a few months later when the supernova started getting brighter again.

Type II-P supernovae usually remain bright for about 100 days. But iPTF14hls remained bright for more than 600! What's more, archival data revealed a 1954 explosion in the exact same location.

A stunning new Nasa image shows an extremely rare pattern streaming from the sun at close to 7,000 miles per hour (11,200 km/h).

A dark snake-like filament can be seen erupting from the star, but while the formations are normally stretched out like a strand, this one is circular like a whirlpool.

This is because it is being yanked back by the star's staggering gravitational pull - which is about 27.9 times that of Earth.

The rare sight, captured by Nasa's orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), has only been seen a 'handful of times', the agency said.

It is one of the driest regions of the Earth, yet, in a cave in the Egyptian Sahara, researchers have found paintings depicting people swimming. This stone-age art is thought to be up to ten thousand years old and falls into the so-called African Humid Period between 11,500 and 5,500 years before now. Climate scientists still puzzle about the rapidity of aridification and the climate processes that led to this. Now, a group of researchers from several European institutions found that northern high-latitude cooling played a role in triggering the rapid termination of the African Humid Period.

According to the study, published in Nature Communications, the temperature drop in the Arctic and in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere weakened strong winds at high altitudes over Africa, the so-called Tropical Easterly Jet. "This cooling reduced precipitation over Africa, and in combination with a range of other complex climate feedback mechanisms tipped the humid system towards aridification," explains the first author of the study, James Collins from Helmholtz Centre Potsdam.

The findings are based on analyses of ancient plant leaf wax found in the sediments of the Gulf of Guinea in combination with computer models of the climate system. The wax lipids comprise n-alkanes, i.e. long-chain hydrocarbons, that are produced by plants to protect their leaves. Their hydrogen isotopic composition can be used as an indicator of past precipitation intensity. The wax isotopes told the researchers about rainfall in Cameroon and the central Sahel-Sahara over the past several millennia and showed a rapid aridification around 5500 years before now.

The Earth's magnetic field, generated some 3,000km below our feet in the liquid iron core, threads through the whole planet and far into space - protecting life and satellites from harmful radiation from the sun. But this shielding effect is far from constant, as the field strength varies significantly in both space and time.

Over the last century, the field strength has changed relatively slowly: the biggest change is a 10% fall in the southern Atlantic, which is still a large enough effect to cause electronic problems for satellites that have passed through the region. However, new observations and modelling suggest that a much greater change strangely occurred around 1000BC in a much smaller region.

This "geomagnetic spike" offers a potentially profound new insight into the dynamics and evolution of Earth's hidden interior that is now starting to be uncovered.

So what are geomagnetic spikes and what are the prospects and implications of another one coming along? The geomagnetic spike of 1000BC was first identified from copper slag heaps located in Jordan and Israel. These were dated from organic material within the slag heaps using radiocarbon dating.

Scientists then investigated the copper using sophisticated laboratory techniques to work out what the Earth's magnetic field was at the time - relying on the fact that when melted iron cools rapidly, it freezes with a signature of the field at that instant. By taking samples from different layers of the slag heap - with slightly different ages and magnetisation - they could also see how the field strength changed with time. They found that the copper slag had recorded Earth's magnetic field strength rising and then falling by over 100% in only 30 years.

Work on large-scale projects to protect the Earth from meteorites should be carried out in cooperation with other countries, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with workers of the Chelyabinsk compressor plant.

Commenting on the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteorite incident, the head of state noted that this event had not been foreseen. "Although today experts try to take into account the trajectory of the most dangerous objects [from outer space], there are numerous protection mechanisms. Many concepts are futuristic and still in the works nevertheless they exist. These include splitting these objects using various explosive devices, including nuclear ones, sending corresponding probes to land on these objects and transport them aside," the president said, adding that there are numerous different projects, which, according to experts, are feasible.

"So far, thank God, there seems to be nothing serious, but we will be working on that. However, these are such large-scale projects that need to be implemented together with our partners," Putin concluded.

Tiny human brains injected into rats have sparked a major ethical debate among scientists worried it may give the rodents some type of human consciousness.

Esteemed science ethicists claim the experiments might reach a point where the test lab rats will be "entitled to some kind of respect".

Advances in science have allowed experts to connect tiny human brains with that of a rat.

To do this, they created clumps of cells that behave similarly to human brains called organoids.

Several labs have inserted those organoids into rat brains, connected them to blood vessels and successfully grown physical links.

People will be able to buy new memories and delete unwanted ones in the near future as experts believe they are close to biohacking the body's most powerful tool, according to a leading technology entrepreneur.

Speaking at Lisbon's Web Summit, Bryan Johnson, the founder of Kernel - a start-up researching the possibilities of microchips being inserted on the brain - says unlocking the true potential of the mind is the "single greatest thing" humanity can achieve.

Kernel's first step is to design chips that can help fight disease, but then it hopes to evolve the brain to offer superhuman abilities.

The firm's website reads: "To further explore our own human boundaries, a wave of new technologies needs to emerge that can access, read, and write from the most powerful tool we have - the human brain.

Uber signed a deal with NASA Wednesday to help develop traffic systems for its flying car project which it hopes to start testing in 2020.

The ride-hailing service published details of its "on demand aviation" ambitions last year which it has called Uber Elevate.

It is now stepping up its efforts to make the project a reality. Uber said at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon that it signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA for the development of "unmanned traffic management." This is NASA's push to figure out how unmanned aerial systems (UAS), such as drones that fly at a low altitude, can operate safely.

Uber wants to make vertical take-off and landing vehicles. That will allow their flying cars to take off and land vertically. They will fly at a low altitude.

From NASA's Jet propulsion Laboratory and the "inconvenient science" department comes this study that dashes hopes of pinning melting in Antarctica entirely on human activity.

Hot News from the Antarctic Underground

Study Bolsters Theory of Heat Source Under West Antarctica

A new NASA study adds evidence that a geothermal heat source called a mantle plume lies deep below Antarctica's Marie Byrd Land, explaining some of the melting that creates lakes and rivers under the ice sheet. Although the heat source isn't a new or increasing threat to the West Antarctic ice sheet, it may help explain why the ice sheet collapsed rapidly in an earlier era of rapid climate change, and why it is so unstable today.

Here's a tip for the novice pet owner: don't buy your pooch a red ball and then throw it in a green field. Chances are, neither of you will have a lot of fun.

The reason for that, it transpires, is that dogs are colour blind.

A team of researchers at the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Bari in Italy made this discovery after conducting a series of tests on dogs to try to determine their visual capacity.

The old saying that dogs see only in black and white was found to be only partially true as far back as 1989, when a study identified two types of cones - cells that detect colour - in dog retinas.

A 1995 analysis of vision studies in dogs, published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association in 1995, concluded that the two types of cones - sensitive to wavelengths around 450 nanometres and one at about 550 nanometres respectively - meant dogs probably had dichromatic vision.