As we march steadily toward a cashless society, Google is naturally at the forefront of seeing it come to fruition as quickly as possible.

Despite the fact that several years ago Google had a major security scare with its first incarnation of the digital wallet smartphone app, which required a temporary shutdown, they are announcing a new system being tested which does not even require the smartphone at all.

A growing number of people apparently find that having to remove their smartphone is just such a hassle that they are prepared to embrace payment via biometrics - in this case, facial recognition.

A nuclear power propulsion system could propel a spacecraft to Mars in just over a month, a huge step forward from the current 18 months required. Russia might test a nuclear engine as early as 2018, the head of the Rosatom nuclear corporation revealed. Another advantage of a nuclear engine is that it enables a spacecraft to maneuver throughout the flight, whereas existing technology only makes a defined trajectory flight possible.

"A nuclear power unit makes it possible to reach Mars in a matter of one to one and a half months, providing capability for maneuvering and acceleration," the head of Rosatom Sergey Kirienko said. "Today's engines can only reach Mars in a year and a half, without the possibility of return," Kirienko said.

The nuclear engine project was launched in 2010 and by 2012 an engineering design had been created. The project's budget is estimated at 20 billion rubles (about $US274 million). It has been reported that a prototype nuclear drive could start testing by 2018. Traditional rocket engines are believed to have reached the limit of their potential and can't be used for deep space exploration.

Most death and destruction inflicted by tornadoes in North America occurs during outbreaks—large-scale weather events that can last one to three days and span huge regions. The largest ever recorded happened in 2011. It spawned 363 tornadoes across the United States and Canada, killing more than 350 people and causing $11 billion in damage.

Now, a new study shows that the average number of tornadoes in these outbreaks has risen since 1954, and that the chance of extreme outbreaks —tornado factories like the one in 2011—has also increased.

The study's authors said they do not know what is driving the changes. "The science is still open," said lead author Michael Tippett, a climate and weather researcher at Columbia University's School of Applied Science and Engineering and Columbia's Data Science Institute. "It could be global warming, but our usual tools, the observational record and computer models, are not up to the task of answering this question yet." Tippett points out that many scientists expect the frequency of atmospheric conditions favorable to tornadoes to increase in a warmer climate—but even today, the right conditions don't guarantee a tornado will occur. In any case, he said, "When it comes to tornadoes, almost everything terrible that happens, happens in outbreaks. If outbreaks contain more tornadoes on average, then the likelihood they'll cause damage somewhere increases."

The results are expected to help insurance and reinsurance companies better understand the risks posed by outbreaks, which can also generate damaging hail and straight-line winds. Over the last 10 years, the industry has covered an average of $12.5 billion in insured losses each year, according to Willis Re, a global reinsurance advisor that helped sponsor the research. The article appears this week in the journal Nature Communications.

Chemicals used as flame retardants that are potentially harmful to humans are found in hair, toenails and fingernails, according to new research from Indiana University.

The discovery of an easily available biomarker should ease the way for further research to determine the human impact of chemicals commonly found in the environment, including in indoor dust, water and air.

Exposure to flame retardants in various forms has been linked to obesity, learning disabilities, neuro and reproductive toxicity, and endocrine disruption. Flame retardants are frequently added to plastic, foam, wood and textiles.

They are used in both commercial and consumer products worldwide to delay ignition and to slow the spread of fire. Flame retardants persist in the environment and bioaccumulate in ecosystems and in human tissues.

"Little is known about the human exposure to flame retardants, especially new classes of the retardants," said researcher Amina Salamova at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IU Bloomington. "The first step is to establish a relatively easy and reliable way of measuring chemical levels in people, especially children, and we've determined that hair and nails can provide exactly that."

Until now, researchers depended on samples of human milk, blood and urine, and those samples are more difficult to obtain than hair and nails.

Astronomers for the first time have detected repeating short bursts of radio waves from an enigmatic source that is likely located well beyond the edge of our Milky Way galaxy. The findings indicate that these "fast radio bursts" come from an extremely powerful object which occasionally produces multiple bursts in under a minute.

Prior to this discovery, reported in Nature, all previously detected fast radio bursts (FRBs) have appeared to be one-off events. Because of that, most theories about the origin of these mysterious pulses have involved cataclysmic incidents that destroy their source - a star exploding in a supernova, for example, or a neutron star collapsing into a black hole. The new finding, however, shows that at least some FRBs have other origins.

FRBs, which last just a few thousandths of a second, have puzzled scientists since they were first reported nearly a decade ago. Despite extensive follow-up efforts, astronomers until now have searched in vain for repeat bursts.

That changed last November 5th, when McGill University PhD student Paul Scholz was sifting through results from observations performed with the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico - the world's largest radio telescope. The new data, gathered in May and June and run through a supercomputer at the McGill High Performance Computing Centre, showed several bursts with properties consistent with those of an FRB detected in 2012.

The search for aliens in faraway worlds could be made easier, with new research determining a way to establish the difference between life and the illusion of life. The study focuses on the importance of 'biosignatures' in the atmospheres of exoplanets.

Researchers from the University of Washington believe the evidence of oxygen - a biosignature - is key in the search for life outside our solar system.

But just because a planet has oxygen does not mean life is sustainable or present there. For example, Venus contains both oxygen and carbon dioxide, but its atmosphere is too hot and acidic to sustain life - so the oxygen is a 'false positive.'

Ruling out such false positives is essential for scientists searching for life, and the researchers claim they have a found a way to do so easily. That process hinges on the process of spectroscopy, the study of spectral features of light visible through a planet's atmosphere when it transits or passes in front of its host star.

It's well-known that lightning is an electric current—a quick, powerful burst of charge that flows within a cloud or between a cloud and the ground. But surprisingly, scientists still don't fully understand how the initial spark forms that generates such powerful lightning.

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, researchers from Langmuir Laboratory at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology near Socorro, New Mexico, have reported observations of a rare but extremely powerful type of lightning spark, or discharge, called narrow bipolar events. The scientists found that this powerful type of lightning is caused by a newly recognized type of discharge called fast positive breakdown, and the data suggests that this same discharge initiates most or even all of the lightning flashes typically seen in thunderstorms. These sparks travel at speeds that are fast even for lightning—around 10 to 100 million meters per second—and produce very powerful radiofrequency (RF) radiation as high as a few megawatts, making them the strongest natural sources of RF radiation on Earth.

This discovery is surprising, since previous simulations have shown that lightning breakdown appears to be negative, meaning the spark moves upward in the cloud from a negative to a positive region. In positive breakdown, the spark moves downward from a positive to a negative region.

"It is impossible to simulate thunderstorm conditions in a conventional laboratory," coauthor William Rison at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology told Phys.org. "The sparks in thunderstorms are hundreds of meters to kilometers long, a scale that is orders of magnitude larger than in any laboratory environment. Theorists have been trying to simulate these conditions in computer experiments, and the most plausible results have suggested that the sparks are initiated with relativistic electron avalanches, which is a type of negative breakdown. Our results clearly show that the initiation is with a positive breakdown, not a negative breakdown."

The results could help scientists better understand how a cloud can generate a current that is powerful enough to cause lightning. Currently, the largest electric fields that have been measured inside thunderstorms are several times weaker than what is needed to break down cloudy air and initiate lightning.

Russian engineers working on the Mayak crowd funded satellite project have announced that the satellite is nearing a launch date—once in space, the team claims that it will be the most visible object in the night sky.

The project has been instigated by engineers and others with the University of Mechanical Engineering in Moscow. The team reported that they had collected a million and a half rubles (approximately USD 20,000) via the Boomstarter crowd-funding site which has been added to other donations—together, it has been enough to build and test the satellite.

The project has three main goals, the first is to prove that such an effort can work, i.e. that crowd-funding can be used to pay for space research projects. The team wants to show that space exploration is no longer confined to just governments or wealthy groups or individuals—and that going forward, most any group or person with a passion for space exploration can start a project and get it funded. The second goal is for the satellite to do its job, which is to unfurl and use its large swath of reflectors to reflect rays from the sun back to Earth—which will make it the brightest object in the night sky. Mayak was designed and built at UME. The third goal, which requires further funding, is to build an aerodynamic braking system for satellites that can be used to bring them back down to Earth, removing the need to add an engine. As a side project, the team also has plans to build a model of the Mayak satellite to be housed in Moscow's Museum of Cosmonautics.

Most biology students will be able to tell you that neural signals are sent via mechanisms such as synaptic transmission, gap junctions, and diffusion processes, but a new study suggests there's another way that our brains transmit information from one place to another.

Researchers in the US have recorded neural spikes travelling too slowly in the brain to be explained by conventional signalling mechanisms. In the absence of other plausible explanations, the scientists believe these brain waves are being transmitted by a weak electrical field, and they've been able to detect one of these in mice.

"Researchers have thought that the brain's endogenous electrical fields are too weak to propagate wave transmission," said Dominique Durand, a biomedical engineer at Case Western Reserve University. "But it appears the brain may be using the fields to communicate without synaptic transmissions, gap junctions or diffusion."

Anyone who has ever watched a sci-fi film and wished they could upload information to their brain in seconds could be in luck.

Scientists have developed a way of amplifying learning in a way that almost mimics the methods used in The Matrix.

In the film, Neo - played by Keanu Reeves - has a range of kung-fu skills 'uploaded' directly into his brain in just a few seconds.

Experts working at the HRL Information and System Sciences Laboratory in California, have been able to do the same thing, albeit on a lesser scale.

By studying electric signals in the brain of a trained pilot, and feeding that data into an unskilled person through a electric scalp-cap, novices were able to learn the task 33% better than the placebo group.