The shield that protects the Earth from solar radiation is under attack from within. We can't prevent it, but we ought to prepare.

One day in 1905, the French geophysicist Bernard Brunhes brought back to his lab some rocks he'd unearthed from a freshly cut road near the village of Pont Farin. When he analyzed their magnetic properties, he was astonished at what they showed: Millions of years ago, the Earth's magnetic poles had been on the opposite sides of the planet. North was south and south was north. The discovery spoke of planetary anarchy. Scientists had no way to explain it.

Today, we know that the poles have changed places hundreds of times, most recently 780,000 years ago. (Sometimes, the poles try to reverse positions but then snap back into place, in what is called an excursion. The last time was about 40,000 years ago.) We also know that when they flip next time, the consequences for the electrical and electronic infrastructure that runs modern civilization will be dire. The question is when that will happen.

Until about 20 years ago, helio-scientists believed sunspots were caused by some mysterious magnetic process within the Sun that has periods of about eleven years, because they could not conceive of a regular rain of bodies crashing into the Sun. Then SOHO, STEREO and other Sun-staring satellites observed over 3,000 such bodies, called Kreutz sungrazers, all in the same unique orbit, every one of which disappeared into the Sun. These are referred to as 'comets', because when they get close to the Sun, they leave trails, but none of these have been observed in the vicinity of the Earth. Although comets are imagined to comprise solely water, no such bodies have ever been observed close-up. When approached by probes, every one of them has displayed a solid core. Comets are merely 'leaking' asteroids. Despite the observations of these bodies hundreds of papers are being written attempting to explain the magnetic process within the Sun which creates the sunspots.

The > 3,000 Kreutz sungrazers are unique in ways that were not known until 2014, when the Rosetta mission approached and orbited 'comet' 67P C-G. Although this body emitted a few streaks of gas, it was never visible from Earth, except by powerful telescopes and thousands more are circulating unobserved. The belief that it was just water ice, because of its low density 0.5 g/cm³, the popular image of 'comets', was disproven when Rosetta's 200 lb. lander Philae, equipped with spikes that were supposed to penetrate the ice and become locked on the surface, failed to penetrate and Philae bounced off the surface. This is the same tough stuff that comprises all asteroids. Rosetta images of 67P belie its low reflected radiance, only 4% of the incident light. The brightness of the Kreutz tails as they approach the Sun are used to estimate their mass, assuming they are pure water ice, and when they become invisible the 'comet' is imagined to have been consumed before impact. But they all have the same composition as 67P, which is obviously much tougher than water ice. That assumption leads to estimates of their diameters of several meters. However, 67P, was measured to be about 4 km in diameter. Images acquired by Rosetta show only a few thin streams of vapor - nothing like what would produce a large tail.

Another pertinent factor about the 3,000+ Kreutz sungrazers is that not a single one survived their close encounters with the Sun. This is well illustrated by a NASA video constructed using data from several Sun staring satellites. Despite this, astronomers claim that these 'comets' are not the cause of sunspots, because of their estimated size. Attempts to explain their origin as the result of the break-up of large comets thousands of years ago are futile, since all the fragments would be placed in different orbits. The 3,000 Kreutz sungrazers in exactly the same orbit dismisses this argument.

Roughly 15 percent of Americans report some sort of hearing difficulty; trouble understanding conversations in noisy environments is one of the most common complaints. Unfortunately, there's not much doctors or audiologists can do. Hearing aids can amplify things for ears that can't quite pick up certain sounds, but they don't distinguish between the voice of a friend at a party and the music in the background. The problem is not only one of technology, but also of brain wiring.

Most hearing aid users say that even with their hearing aids, they still have difficulty communicating in noisy environments. As a neuroscientist who studies speech perception, this issue is prominent in much of my own research, as well as that of many others. The reason isn't that they can't hear the sounds; it's that their brains can't pick out the conversation from the background chatter.

Harvard neuroscientists Dan Polley and Jonathon Whitton may have found a solution, by harnessing the brain's incredible ability to learn and change itself. They have discovered that it may be possible for the brain to relearn how to distinguish between speech and noise. And the key to learning that skill could be a video game.

This hardcore yeast thrives amidst acid and radiation.

During the Cold War, the United States produced a truly mind-boggling amount of radioactive waste. We failed to properly dispose of much of that sludge, and it's been leaking from underground storage tanks since the 1950s. Over the years it has contaminated more than 2 billion cubic feet worth of soil and nearly 800 billion gallons of groundwater at low levels.

Cleaning this mess up will be a daunting task, but scientists have just enlisted a new ally. It turns out our best bet for containing radioactive waste might be to stick yeast on it. Many of these tiny fungi can survive extremely radioactive and acidic conditions, scientists reported January 8 in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. What's more, they form gunk called biofilms that could potentially trap the waste.

Alexandra Elbakyan is plundering the academic publishing establishment
In cramped quarters at Russia's Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world. It was the reason that, one day in June 2015, Alexandra Elbakyan, the student and programmer with a futurist streak and a love for neuroscience blogs, opened her email to a message from the world's largest publisher: "YOU HAVE BEEN SUED."

It wasn't long before an administrator at Library Genesis, another pirate repository named in the lawsuit, emailed her about the announcement. "I remember when the administrator at LibGen sent me this news and said something like 'Well, that's... that's a real problem.' There's no literal translation," Elbakyan tells me in Russian. "It's basically 'That's an ass.' But it doesn't translate perfectly into English. It's more like 'That's f*cked up. We're f*cked.'"

Sci-Hub posed a direct threat to the academic publishers' business model

Scientists at the University of Maryland have fortified wood using a process which makes it 12 times stronger, producing a natural substance more durable than many titanium alloys and capable of stopping high-speed projectiles.

"This could be a competitor to steel or even titanium alloys, it is so strong and durable. It's also comparable to carbon fiber, but much less expensive," said Liangbing Hu, head of the research team at UMD's A. James Clark School of Engineering, in a press release. "This new way to treat wood makes it 12 times stronger than natural wood and 10 times tougher."

The team of researchers boiled different varieties of wood in a caustic solution of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite for seven hours. This process removes some of the compounds that surround the cellulose in the wood, creating additional space within. They then pressed the block at 100 degrees Celsius for an entire day. This reduced the wood to one fifth its original thickness but increased its density threefold.

The blue light, which can sometimes be seen by humans, is cast by tiny ridges of different height and spacing on petals, scientists have discovered

Flowers might seem like one of life's simple pleasures, but it turns out there might be more to them than meets the eye.

Researchers have discovered that certain species of flowering plants boast tiny ridges on their petals that, thanks to variations in their height or spacing, scatter light to cast a blueish hue over the blooms.

While the effect is not always visible to humans, it can be spotted by bees - suggesting the optical effect might help to attract the pollinators.

"The exciting thing is that it is a new optical trick - we didn't know that flowers could use disorder to generate a specific colour, and that is quite clever," said Professor Beverley Glover, co-author of the research from the University of Cambridge.

Russia's state-owned space corporation Roscosmos has brushed off the significance Elon Musk's successful launch of a reusable rocket toward Mars carrying a red Tesla.

Although the upstart billionaire's SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch on Tuesday was seen as a landmark moment in space exploration, the reaction in Russia was more ambivalent.

"I don't know if this is a conspiracy or not, but in fact it's a very good trick," Roscosmos spokesman Igor Burenkov said about the launch in an interview with the Ekho Moskvy radio station on Thursday.

The benefits of talking to houseplants have long been relegated to the halls of pseudoscience, while the benefits of playing them music has seemed even goofier. Now, a study published in The Annals of Botany journal suggests that plants are much more complex in their range of reactions and much closer to animals than previously assumed.

The study used a single-lens reflex camera to follow organ movements in plants before, during, and after recovery to exposure to diverse and unrelated anesthetics. "Mimosa leaves, pea tendrils, Venus flytraps and sundew traps all lost both their autonomous and touch-induced movements after exposure to anesthetics," it said. "In Venus flytrap, this was shown to be due to the loss of action potentials under diethyl ether anesthesia. The same concentration of diethyl ether immobilized pea tendrils. Anaesthetics also impeded seed germination and chlorophyll accumulation in cress seedlings."

By trapping pea plants in ether-filled glass chambers, soaking garden cress roots and seedlings in lidocaine, and measuring the electrical activity of Venus flytrap cells, they soon determined the plants become unresponsive. This meant the anesthetics worked, and the plants' cells stopped firing. Once the medicine wore off, they seemed to regain consciousness.

Inside a giant igloo in a snowy Norwegian village, the sound of a horn rings out, warming the mood of a freezing audience, huddled together in -24 Celsius. But the four musicians performing are even colder: the instruments they are playing are all made of ice.

The xylophone, claves and wind instruments have been painstakingly carved from ice blocks extracted from a frozen lake, and are now part of a finger-numbing performance at the 13th Ice Music Festival in the mountain village of Finse.

The problem is, the longer the musicians play, the more the instruments start to disintegrate. It is not an easy task "to perform on instruments that are melting while you play them," says percussionist Terje Isungset, also the founder of the festival. Wearing thick wool gloves, he blows warm air into his ice-sculpted horn, illuminated under blue and turquoise lights.

Next to him, a singer with an angelic voice covers her mouth with a scarf to stay warm, while a bass player removes his gloves so he can pull the strings on his ice-made instrument.