Plants perceive the world without eyes, ears or brains. Understanding how can teach us a lot about them, and potentially a lot about us as well

Plants, according to Jack C Schultz, "are just very slow animals".

This is not a misunderstanding of basic biology. Schultz is a professor in the Division of Plant Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and has spent four decades investigating the interactions between plants and insects. He knows his stuff.

Instead, he is making a point about common perceptions of our leafy cousins, which he feels are too often dismissed as part of the furniture. Plants fight for territory, seek out food, evade predators and trap prey. They are as alive as any animal, and - like animals - they exhibit behaviour.

"To see this, you just need to make a fast movie of a growing plant - then it will behave like an animal," enthuses Olivier Hamant, a plant scientist at the University of Lyon, France. Indeed, a time-lapse camera reveals the alien world of plant behaviour in all its glory, as anyone who has seen the famous woodland sequence from David Attenborough's Life series can attest.

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have cooled a mechanical object to a temperature lower than previously thought possible, below the so-called "quantum limit."

The new NIST theory and experiments, described in the Jan. 12, 2017, issue of Nature, showed that a microscopic mechanical drum -- a vibrating aluminum membrane -- could be cooled to less than one-fifth of a single quantum, or packet of energy, lower than ordinarily predicted by quantum physics. The new technique theoretically could be used to cool objects to absolute zero, the temperature at which matter is devoid of nearly all energy and motion, NIST scientists said.

"The colder you can get the drum, the better it is for any application," said NIST physicist John Teufel, who led the experiment. "Sensors would become more sensitive. You can store information longer. If you were using it in a quantum computer, then you would compute without distortion, and you would actually get the answer you want."

"The results were a complete surprise to experts in the field," Teufel's group leader and co-author José Aumentado said. "It's a very elegant experiment that will certainly have a lot of impact."

The drum, 20 micrometers in diameter and 100 nanometers thick, is embedded in a superconducting circuit designed so that the drum motion influences the microwaves bouncing inside a hollow enclosure known as an electromagnetic cavity. Microwaves are a form of electromagnetic radiation, so they are in effect a form of invisible light, with a longer wavelength and lower frequency than visible light.

The microwave light inside the cavity changes its frequency as needed to match the frequency at which the cavity naturally resonates, or vibrates. This is the cavity's natural "tone," analogous to the musical pitch that a water-filled glass will sound when its rim is rubbed with a finger or its side is struck with a spoon.

NIST scientists previously cooled the quantum drum to its lowest-energy "ground state," or one-third of one quantum. They used a technique called sideband cooling, which involves applying a microwave tone to the circuit at a frequency below the cavity's resonance. This tone drives electrical charge in the circuit to make the drum beat. The drumbeats generate light particles, or photons, which naturally match the higher resonance frequency of the cavity. These photons leak out of the cavity as it fills up. Each departing photon takes with it one mechanical unit of energy -- one phonon -- from the drum's motion. This is the same idea as laser cooling of individual atoms, first demonstrated at NIST in 1978 and now widely used in applications such atomic clocks.

The latest NIST experiment adds a novel twist -- the use of "squeezed light" to drive the drum circuit. Squeezing is a quantum mechanical concept in which noise, or unwanted fluctuations, is moved from a useful property of the light to another aspect that doesn't affect the experiment. These quantum fluctuations limit the lowest temperatures that can be reached with conventional cooling techniques. The NIST team used a special circuit to generate microwave photons that were purified or stripped of intensity fluctuations, which reduced inadvertent heating of the drum.

The Mariana Trench "is a little crazy," Jian Lin says. The scythe-shaped cleft in the western Pacific sea floor, 2550 kilometers long, plunges nearly 11 kilometers, deeper than any other place in the oceans. But what wows Lin, a marine geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, is the zany topography. The trench marks a subduction zone, where one slab of crust slides beneath another. But whereas many other subducting plates slope gradually downward, in the Mariana the Pacific Plate dives nearly vertically.

Scientists have long wondered what accounts for that precipitous dive, and why the massive earthquakes that generate long-ranging tsunamis at other subduction zones have not been recorded in the trench. Now, a Chinese-U.S. team has planted an array of seismometers on the Mariana's slopes. By listening for seismic waves, says Lin, a project co-leader, the 5-year, $12 million Mariana Trench initiative aims to image in fine detail the warped rock layers in and around the trench, looking for clues as to what shapes them.

Amazon is preparing to test experimental wireless communications technology, including mobile devices and fixed-base stations, in rural Washington and Seattle, the company disclosed in government filings this week.

The filings do not specify what the tests would be for, but they hint at a new type of technology or wireless service, noting that the project would involve prototypes designed to support "innovative communications capabilities and functionalities."

Even more intriguing is that Amazon listed Neil Woodward as the main contact on the filings. Woodward, a retired NASA astronaut who joined Amazon in 2008, is now a senior manager for Prime Air, the team in charge of Amazon's drone-delivery effort, according to his LinkedIn page.

That suggests the tests could involve some kind of communications system to control Amazon's delivery drones. But the details in the filings could also point to a wireless service designed to work with mobile handsets, such as Amazon's Kindle tablets, or perhaps the Echo home speakers that Amazon sells.

Astronomers have discovered an object in the active galaxy Cygnus A that wasn't there before.

Last week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Grapevine, Texas, astronomers made an announcement that's caught the interest of several researchers: a very bright something has appeared in a well-known galaxy.

That galaxy is the elliptical Cygnus A. Cygnus A is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky. It lies approximately 800 million light-years from us (redshift of 0.056). In its core sits a supermassive black hole madly eating and cocooned in gas, while two jets shoot out to either side and light up the intergalactic medium. This activity produces the radio radiation that makes Cygnus A so bright.

Using the recently upgraded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, Rick Perley (NRAO) and colleagues took a gander at Cygnus A — the first time the instrument has looked at the galaxy since 1989. (Apparently astronomers spent so much VLA time observing the galaxy in the 1980s that they didn't feel the need to look again, Perley joked January 6th in his AAS presentation.) The new observations showed a surprise: a new, secondary object just southwest of the central black hole. This object wasn't in the 1989 radio image. Additional, higher-resolution observations with the Very Long Baseline Array also picked up the object, clearly distinct from the galaxy's nucleus. It's roughly 1,300 light-years from the center.

The whatever-it-is is about twice as bright as the brightest known supernova at these frequencies. In fact, it's much brighter than just about any transitory radio signal known, except for accreting supermassive black holes and tidal disruption events, outbursts created when a black hole eats a star.

The team scoured other archives and found the object in 2003 Keck infrared observations and, more iffily, in some images from Hubble. (The object is so red that it doesn't show up well at optical wavelengths, and in this range the space telescope's resolution isn't as good as that of Keck's adaptive optics.)

The apocalyptic time that many believe wiped out the dinosaurs has been reconstructed by scientists in unprecedented detail. They found tiny droplets of sulfuric acid formed high up in the air after the well-known impact of a large asteroid 66 million years ago, blocking the sunlight for several years.

They say this 'big chill' had far more catastrophic effects that first thought, causing global temperatures to plummet for three years, even mixing oceans and killing off sea life.
'The big chill following the impact of the asteroid that formed the Chicxulub crater in Mexico is a turning point in Earth history,' says Julia Brugger from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), lead author of the study to be published today in the Geophysical Research Letters.

'We can now contribute new insights for understanding the much debated ultimate cause for the demise of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous era.'

Information analysis, followed by step-by-step logical deduction is often our go-to method to solve problems we encounter in life. Yet, for some problems we seem to suddenly gain insight - we realize the solution in an "Aha!" kind of moment. Known as 'insight problems', they can seem impossible or unsolvable until creative insight appears and a solution is unexpectedly realized.

Is it possible to increase the likelihood of the arrival of such creative insight? PhD candidate Ruben Laukkonen along with Dr. Jason Tangen at the University of Queensland in Australia, have recently published a study in the journal Consciousness and Cognition suggesting that it is.

"We might be taking a walk, riding a bike, or having a shower, when we finally understand something we've been struggling with. One goal of this study, and ongoing research, is to understand what it is about those situations that evoke epiphanies," Laukkonen says.

Scientists have found more clues about what happens in the brains of baby mammals as they try to make visual sense of the world.

The study in mice is part of an ongoing project in the lab of Spencer Smith, assistant professor of cell biology and physiology at the UNC School of Medicine, to map the functions of the brain areas that play crucial roles in vision. Proper function of these brain areas is likely critical for vision restoration.

"There's this remarkable biological operation that plays out during development," Smith says. "Early on, there are genetic programs and chemical pathways that position cells in the brain and help wire up a 'rough draft' of the circuitry. Later, after birth, this circuitry is actively sculpted by visual experience: simply looking around our world helps developing brains wire up the most sophisticated visual processing circuitry the world has ever known.

Even the best supercomputers and our latest algorithms still can't compete with the visual processing abilities of humans and animals. We want to know how neural circuitry does this."

Scientists have transformed the harmless mouse into a killing machine with the flip of a switch, using lasers to manipulate the rodent's brain circuit and turn on their predatory instinct.

Mice, which usually serve as prey for larger mammals, became threatening predators when researchers used a laser light to activate two sets of neurons in the amygdala - the area of the brain involved in emotions, behavior and motivation.

The study, led by Ivan de Araujo, a neurobiologist at Yale University, and published in Cell, set out to find whether the amygdala actually controls hunting behaviors using a process called optogenetics. This involved adapting neurons so they could be activated by laser light.

This week a comet that started life in the outer reaches of our solar system will be visible from Earth for the first time, as it approaches our planet's orbit.

The comet will be 66 million miles (106 million km) from Earth at its closest approach.

Another recently-discovered object, called 2016 WF9, has also been taking a scenic tour of our solar system, approaching Jupiter's orbit at its greatest distance from the sun, Daily Mail reports.

On 25 February this year, it will approach Earth's orbit, passing at a distance of nearly 32 million miles (51 million kilometers) from Earth. But Nasa still doesn't know whether the object is an asteroid or a comet.

The comet, C/2016 U1 NEOWISE, "has a good chance of becoming visible through a good pair of binoculars, although we can't be sure because a comet's brightness is notoriously unpredictable," said Paul Chodas, manager of Nasa's Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.