NASA engineers have produced a material that absorbs on average more than 99 percent of the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared light that hits it -- a development that promises to open new frontiers in space technology.

The team of engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., reported their findings recently at the SPIE Optics and Photonics conference, the largest interdisciplinary technical meeting in this discipline. The team has since reconfirmed the material's absorption capabilities in additional testing, said John Hagopian, who is leading the effort involving 10 Goddard technologists.

"The reflectance tests showed that our team had extended by 50 times the range of the material's absorption capabilities. Though other researchers are reporting near-perfect absorption levels mainly in the ultraviolet and visible, our material is darn near perfect across multiple wavelength bands, from the ultraviolet to the far infrared," Hagopian said. "No one else has achieved this milestone yet."

The frequent switching between languages in bilinguals' brains has led many to ask whether this lifelong exercise also makes bilinguals better at controlling other mental processes, giving them a cognitive edge. That remains to be determined. But in a new study, researchers took a more nuanced look at cognition in bilinguals, and rather than focusing on the question of the so-called bilingual advantage, examined how bilinguals used their brains while performing a simple cognitive task. And, as it turns out, they used them differently than monolinguals.

The idea of the bilingual advantage is supported by a number of studies that have shown that bilinguals may have enhanced executive control — a set of mental skills that help us manage our cognitive processes, from working memory, to multitasking and problem-solving. But some scientists have expressed skepticism about the strength of evidence that suggests bilinguals have a cognitive advantage over monolinguals. In a 2014 study, researchers examined conference abstracts outlining ongoing studies on bilingualism and executive control. They then followed up to see which of those studies eventually got accepted for publication in scientific journals and found that the studies whose results failed to support the idea of the bilingual advantage were less likely to get published than those that supported it. This led them to think that there might be a publication bias that skews the literature on bilingualism's cognitive boost.

Like cancers and heart disease, Alzheimer's is a sickness of the wealthy. That is because it is a sickness of the old. A study carried out in Spain in 2008 suggested that the risk of developing it doubles for every five years you live beyond 65. A richer world means a longer-lived world—and that, in turn, means a world which will suffer more and more from dementia. At least 40m people are thought to be affected by it already. The true number is likely to be higher, as many sufferers, particularly in the early stages of the disease, have yet to be diagnosed.

What actually causes Alzheimer's disease, though, is obscure. Workers in the field know that tangles and plaques of misshapen proteins play a big role. These accumulate in and between nerve cells, eventually killing them to create voids in the brain (see picture). It may be that the accumulation of these proteins is merely a biochemical ill to which human flesh is unfortunately heir, and which is a normal (if unwelcome) consequence of ageing. But some researchers doubt that, and are searching for external causes.

There is evidence, in varying degrees, for everything from bacterial or viral infections, via head injuries to smoking. But a paper just published in Scientific Reports adds another possibility to the pot. A group of researchers led by Luis Carrasco of the Autonomous University of Madrid, in Spain, have raised the idea that the ultimate cause of Alzheimer's is fungal.

Dr Carrasco and his team examined brain tissue from 25 cadavers, 14 of which belonged to people who had had Alzheimer's disease when alive. The other 11 (who had an average age of 61, versus 82 for the Alzheimer's sufferers) had been Alzheimer's-free. That may sound like a small sample from which to draw conclusions, but the signal the researchers found was overwhelming. Every single one of the Alzheimer's patients had signs of fungal cells of various sorts growing in his or her neurons. None of the Alzheimer's-free brains was infected.

New research, using spectrographic data, shows what are likely deposits from Europa's sub-surface ocean on it's so-called "chaos terrain."

Jupiter's moon Europa is believed to possess a large salty ocean beneath its icy exterior, and that ocean, scientists say, has the potential to harbor life. Indeed, a mission recently suggested by NASA would visit the icy moon's surface to search for compounds that might be indicative of life. But where is the best place to look?

New research by Caltech graduate student Patrick Fischer; Mike Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor and Professor of Planetary Astronomy; and Kevin Hand, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at JPL, suggests that it might be within the scarred, jumbled areas that make up Europa's so-called "chaos terrain."

"We have known for a long time that Europa's fresh icy surface, which is covered with cracks and ridges and transform faults, is the external signature of a vast internal salty ocean," Brown says. The areas of chaos terrain show signatures of vast ice plates that have broken apart, shifted position, and been refrozen. These regions are of particular interest, because water from the oceans below may have risen to the surface through the cracks and left deposits there.

Envy the tiger and the zebra no longer. You have stripes of your own.

Human skin is overlaid with what dermatologists call Blaschko's Lines, a pattern of stripes covering the body from head to toe. The stripes run up and down your arms and legs and hug your torso. They wrap around the back of your head like a speed skater's aerodynamic hood and across your face. Or they would, if you could see them.

In the early 1900s, German dermatologist Alfred Blaschko reported that many of his patients' rashes and moles seemed to follow similar formations, almost as though they were tracing invisible lines. But those lines didn't follow nerves or blood vessels. They didn't represent any known body system.

Researchers call it sheer coincidence that a newly discovered piece of space junk is officially designated WT1190F. But the letters in the name, which form the acronym for an unprintable expression of bafflement, are an appropriate fit for an object that is as mysterious as it is unprecedented.

Scientists have worked out that WT1190F will plunge to Earth from above the Indian Ocean on 13 November, making it one of the very few space objects whose impact can be accurately predicted. More unusual still, WT1190F was a 'lost' piece of space debris orbiting far beyond the Moon, ignored and unidentified, before being glimpsed by a telescope in early October.

An observing campaign is now taking shape to follow the object as it dives through Earth's atmosphere, says Gerhard Drolshagen, co-manager in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, of the European Space Agency's near-Earth objects office. The event not only offers a scientific opportunity to watch something plunge through the atmosphere, but also tests the plans that astronomers have put in place to coordinate their efforts when a potentially dangerous space object shows up. "What we planned to do seems to work," Drolshagen says. "But it's still three weeks to go."

Robert Kremer, Phd., co-author of the book Principles in Weed Management, is a certified soil scientist and professor of Soil Microbiology at the University of Missouri. He recently retired from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), where he worked as a microbiologist for 32 years.

He's conducted research since 1997 on genetically engineered (GE) crops, and in this interview he reveals how GE crops and glyphosate impact soil ecology and biology.

There is nothing quite like the image of a tinfoil hat to get people chuckling over the paranoia of "the conspiracy theorist" who takes precautions against brain scanning and electronic mind control. But if one topic has gone from conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact, it is government surveillance. Even more than the "revelations" of Edward Snowden, it was the way the system came out against him, as well as the further rollout of surveillance-friendly legislation that has convinced many average people that indeed sometimes they are actually watching you.

Various solutions have been offered about how to protect your privacy while connected to the Internet or when using your mobile phone, but one new product holds the potential to protect you at the source: your home. It's not quite tinfoil but it does claim to offer a physical shield against surveillance and attack.

Conductive Composites is a company based in Utah (home of the NSA's mega data center interestingly), which makes small cases and enclosures for shielding electronics. The company claims that their lightweight material made by layering nickel on carbon could be scaled up and essentially turn your entire home into a Faraday cage capable of blocking efforts at snooping, while also offering protection from electromagnetic radiation and EMP attacks.

Scientists contribute to observation of closest tidal disruption in nearly a decade

When a star comes too close to a black hole, the intense gravity of the black hole results in tidal forces that can rip the star apart. In these events, called tidal disruptions, some of the stellar debris is flung outward at high speeds, while the rest falls toward the black hole. This causes a distinct X-ray flare that can last for years.

A team of astronomers, including several from the University of Maryland, has observed a tidal disruption event in a galaxy that lies about 290 million light years from Earth. The event is the closest tidal disruption discovered in about a decade, and is described in a paper published in the October 22, 2015 issue of the journal Nature.

Have you ever wondered why we don't use light to transmit messages? Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but while we use light to carry signals along fiber optic cables, we use electrons to process sound and information in our phones and computers. The reason has always been because light particles - photons—are extremely difficult to manipulate, whereas electrons can be manipulated relatively easily.

But now a group of Harvard physicists has taken a major step toward solving that puzzle, and have brought us one step closer to ultra-fast, light-based computers.

The physicists, led by Professor Eric Mazur, have created a material where the phase velocity of light is infinite. Their results were published in Nature Photonics on Oct. 19th.