Listening to Ed Witten talk physics can be a little unsettling. His concise sentences resemble steps in a logical proof: his grammar is flawless and his eyes occasionally close as he translates the great sweep of knowledge that has earned him exospheric academic status. This softly spoken man leaves you in a state of mental disarray.

This year Witten is in Europe, on sabbatical at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland, where the mathematical foundations of reality are about to be rocked by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). As it happened, he turned up on the day last September that the LHC switched on. "Ed's very active, so it's great to have him around," says Luis Alvarez-Gaume, head of CERN's theory department. "He's a genius, it's as simple as that."

Such accolades haven't secured Witten a plush office, as I discovered when I met him in his sparse accommodation at CERN. Nor does he appear comfortable with the effusive descriptions sometimes applied to him - such as the "world's cleverest man" or "Einstein's successor". "Believe me," he says, "I'm definitely no Einstein." Yet these monikers are founded in more than mere hyperbole. For the past 25 years Witten has been at the forefront of attempts to unify nature's four fundamental forces in a single framework - a goal pursued for a similar period by Einstein. And he has been credited with writing the largest number of high-impact papers of any living physicist.

This example pay-off matrix for a Prisoner's Dilemma game shows that defecting is the rational choice, since a player receives greater pay-offs when defecting (10 or 25) than when cooperating (5 or 20). However, if both players cooperate, each will receive a larger pay-off (20) than if both defect (10). Using a quantum probability model, scientists provide a psychological explanation for why a player might choose to cooperate without any knowledge of his opponent. Image credit: Pothos and Busemeyer.

Humans don't always make the most rational decisions. As studies have shown, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction, sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply "wishful thinking." This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. But now, scientists have shown that a quantum probability model can provide a simple explanation for human decision-making - and may eventually help explain the success of human cognition overall.

Scientists from the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia have helped unveil the birthplaces of ancient stars using a two-ton telescope carried by a balloon the size of a 33-storey building.

After two years spent analyzing data from the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope (BLAST) project, an international group of astronomers and astrophysicists from Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. reveals today in the journal Nature that half of the starlight of the Universe comes from young, star-forming galaxies several billion light years away.

"While those familiar optical images of the night sky contain many fascinating and beautiful objects, they are missing half of the picture in describing the cosmic history of star formation," says UBC Astronomy Prof. Douglas Scott.

Australia's expanding nanotechnology industry must be regulated to protect the health of both workers and consumers, the ACTU says.

Citing Scottish research showing some nanomaterials - as minute as one billionth of a metre - might be as deadly as asbestos particles, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is calling for a mandatory national register of who is importing, manufacturing, supplying and selling the materials.

The ACTU has also recommended products containing nanomaterials be appropriately labelled with regular monitoring of the health of local workers involved in the nanotechnology industry.

A scientist says the world's first cloned camel has been produced in the desert emirate of Dubai.

Nisar Ahmad Wani, a senior reproductive biologist at the government's Camel Reproduction Centre, says the cloned camel is a six-day-old, one-humped female called Achievement or Injaz in Arabic.

Injaz was born April 8 after an uncomplicated gestation of 378 days, the centre said in a press release on Tuesday.

Astronomers say that exploding bubbles of magnetic energy might have helped form galaxy clusters.

A little over fifty years ago, before space shuttles, before the Hubble Space Telescope, and before satellite technology, electricity in space was not considered. Because the first teams of space scientists were "steely eyed missile men" with backgrounds in aeronautics and chemical fuel reactions, when evidence for electric current flow around Earth was found it was called a "radiation belt."

Although Kristian Birkeland had conducted experiments almost fifty years before the first science package was launched into Earth orbit, electricity remained unfamiliar to researchers conditioned to think in terms of gravity and mass. They had no concept of charged particles generating filamentary structures that could interact and create energetic phenomena - Birkeland's terella research and his study of Earth's aurorae were forgotten.

Nasa's ageing Mars rover Spirit has rebooted its computer at least twice for unknown reasons.

Rover project manager John Callas at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said the rover is in a stable operations state called automode and can remain that way for some time while the problem is diagnosed.

Cisco CEO John Chambers is "healthily paranoid," he told the BBC today. Maybe that's why he's planning to spread sci-fi, panopticon-esque vigilance across entire cities and even ecosystems, in a collaboration with NASA with the portentous name of Planetary Skin.

"In a nutshell, Planetary Skin is a massive global-monitoring system of environmental conditions that will enable effective decision making in the private and public sectors and in communities, with data that is collected from myriad sources including space, airborne, maritime, terrestrial and people-based sensor networks, analyzed, verified and reported over an open standards based Web 2.0 and 3.0 collaborative spaces for decision makers."

Translation: Electric eyes counting traffic on roads. RFID tags tracing apples from field to market. Satellites in space tracking ice sheets and tidal flows. All of it connected through wireless networks, monitored, measured and managed with the same kind of software that a Wal-Mart would use to provide just-in-time delivery of its products from China.

Twin NASA spacecraft have provided scientists with their first view of the speed, trajectory, and three-dimensional shape of powerful explosions from the sun known as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. This new capability will dramatically enhance scientists' ability to predict if and how these solar tsunamis could affect Earth.
When directed toward our planet, these ejections can be breathtakingly beautiful and yet potentially cause damaging effects worldwide. The brightly colored phenomena known as auroras -- more commonly called Northern or Southern Lights -- are examples of Earth's upper atmosphere harmlessly being disturbed by a CME. However, ejections can produce a form of solar cosmic rays that can be hazardous to spacecraft, astronauts and technology on Earth.

Space weather produces disturbances in electromagnetic fields on Earth that can induce extreme currents in wires, disrupting power lines and causing wide-spread blackouts. These sun storms can interfere with communications between ground controllers and satellites and with airplane pilots flying near Earth's poles. Radio noise from the storm also can disrupt cell phone service. Space weather has been recognized as causing problems with new technology since the invention of the telegraph in the 19th century.

NASA's twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, spacecraft are providing the unique scientific tool to study these ejections as never before. Launched in October 2006, STEREO's nearly identical observatories can make simultaneous observations of these ejections of plasma and magnetic energy that originate from the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona. The spacecraft are stationed at different vantage points. One leads Earth in its orbit around the sun, while the other trails the planet.

A jet of gas spewing from a huge black hole has mysteriously brightened, flaring to 90 times its normal glow.

For seven years the Hubble Space Telescope has been watching the jet, which pours out of the supermassive black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy. It has photographed the strange phenomenon fading and then brightening, with a peak that even outshines M87's brilliant core.

Scientists have dubbed the enigmatic bright blob HST-1, and are so far at a loss to explain its weird behavior.

"I did not expect the jet in M87 or any other jet powered by accretion onto a black hole to increase in brightness in the way that this jet does," said astronomer Juan Madrid of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who conducted the Hubble study. "It grew 90 times brighter than normal. But the question is, does this happen to every single jet or active nucleus, or are we seeing some odd behavior from M87?"