Science & Technology
Something special is happening to Venus. The brightest of all planets is hanging low in the western sky at sunset, and if you look at it with a backyard telescope, you'll see that it is a slender 4% crescent. But that's not the special part.
What's special is, Venus looks like a rainbow.

Brain scans have long been used to try to find the "seat of consciousness" in the brain
Electrodes implanted in the brains of people with epilepsy might have resolved an ancient question about consciousness.
Signals from the electrodes seem to show that consciousness arises from the coordinated activity of the entire brain. The signals also take us closer to finding an objective "consciousness signature" that could be used to probe the process in animals and people with brain damage without inserting electrodes.
Previously it wasn't clear whether a dedicated brain area, or "seat of consciousness", was responsible for guiding our subjective view of the world, or whether consciousness was the result of concerted activity across the whole brain.
Probing the process has been a challenge, as non-invasive techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging and EEG give either spatial or temporal information but not both. The best way to get both simultaneously is to implant electrodes deep inside the skull, but it is difficult to justify this in healthy people for ethical reasons.
Fossil remains of a huge and fearsome marine predator, dubbed "Predator X", have been discovered in Svalbard, a remote Arctic archipelago.
About 15 metres long and weighing 45 tonnes, the creature is a new species of pliosaur, and ruled the Jurassic seas some 147 million years ago.
Predator X had a head twice the size of Tyrannosaurus rex and its bite had four times the force, at around 15,000 kilograms (33,000 pounds). Its teeth were each around 30 centimetres (1 foot) long.
The remains were discovered in June 2008 during a two-week expedition led by Jørn Hurum of the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo.
The extension, called Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO), enables its users to opt out of 27 advertising networks that are employing behavioural advertising systems, wrote Christopher Soghoian, who developed it, on his website.
Soghoian, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and a doctoral candidate at Indiana University, modified a browser extension Google released under an Apache 2 open-source license.
Google's opt-out plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox blocks cookies delivered by its Doubleclick advertising network. A cookie is a small data file stored in a browser that can track a variety of information, such as websites visited and search queries, and transmit that information back to the entity that placed the cookie in the browser.
The laser, which has been dubbed a "weapon of mosquito destruction" fires at mosquitoes once it detects the audio frequency created by the beating of its wings.
The laser beam then destroys the mosquito, burning it on the spot.
Developed by some of the astrophysicists involved in what was known as the "Star Wars" anti-missile programs during the Cold War, the project is meant to prevent the spread of malaria.
Lead scientist on the project, Dr. Jordin Kare, told CNN that the laser would be able to sweep an area and "toast millions of mosquitoes in a few minutes."
The waters of the Black Sea contain very little oxygen. As such, the rare forms of life that live in the depths of the inland sea, so-called extremophile bacteria, survive by metabolising sulfate in the water. The sulfate fulfils a similar biochemical role to oxygen in respiration for these microbes allowing them to release the energy they need to live and grow from the nutrients they absorb from the water.
Some stars have a high level of comet activity around them, and that could spell doom for any life trying to take root on any local planets. Ongoing research is trying to determine what fraction of stellar systems may be uninhabitable due to comet impacts.
Many of our own solar system's comets are found in the Kuiper Belt, a debris-filled disk that extends from Neptune's orbit (30 AU) out to almost twice that distance. Other stars have been shown to have similar debris disks.
"The debris is dust and larger fragments produced by the break-up of comets or asteroids as they collide amongst themselves," says Jane Greaves of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Most surveys of lunar impact craters have used photos, but Herbert Frey of NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, wanted to know if there were any old craters buried beneath younger ones.

Volcanic eruptions like this one at Mount St Helens in 1980 have been found to emit roars similar to those of jet engines.
The first close-range, low-frequency recordings of volcanic eruptions have revealed a surprising similarity to the noise made by jet engines. The finding may provide clues to what happens prior to volcanic explosions.
Hear an infrasound recording of an eruption at Mount St Helens, speeded up 200x.
Robin Matoza of the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues measured infrasonic signals from volcanic eruptions around the globe, getting as near to them as 13 kilometres - relatively close for these sorts of measurements. This was the first time that infrasonic signals from very large eruptions had been measured at relatively close range.







