£825,000 prize awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne for their work on Ligo experiment which was able to detect ripples in the fabric of spacetime

Three American physicists have won the Nobel prize in physics for the first observations of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago.

Rainer Weiss has been awarded one half of the 9m Swedish kronor (£825,000) prize, announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Tuesday. Kip Thorne and Barry Barish will share the other half of the prize.

All three scientists have played leading roles in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or Ligo, experiment, which in 2015 made the first historic observation of gravitational waves triggered by the violent merger of two black holes a billion light years away. Prof Olga Botner, a member of the Nobel committee for physics, described this as "a discovery that shook the world".

The Ligo detections finally confirmed Einstein's century-old prediction that during cataclysmic events the fabric of spacetime itself can be stretched and squeezed, sending gravitational tremors out across the universe like ripples on a pond.

The direct detection of gravitational waves also opens a new vista on the "dark" side of the cosmos, to times and places from which no optical light escapes. This includes just fractions of a second after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, when scientists believe gravitational waves left a permanent imprint on the cosmos that may still be perceptible today.

Several pairs of supermassive black holes have been detected by NASA observatories in a rare find that scientists say could shed light on how the phenomena produce the strongest gravitational wave signals in the universe.

The 'couples' form when two galaxies collide and merge with each other, forcing their supermassive black holes close together.

Five black hole 'couples' were identified by astronomers using a combination of data from a number of telescopes, including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Wide-Field Infrared Sky Explorer Survey (WISE) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

RT has released the first-ever 360-degree footage shot by man in outer space, putting viewers in the shoes of two Russian cosmonauts launching nanosatellites from outside the International Space Station (ISS).

The video, which shows out-of-this-world views of Planet Earth, is the first time that the so-called extravehicular activity (EVA) has been filmed in 360. The immersive new format previously helped viewers explore the ISS modules as part of the Space 360 project.

Cosmonauts Sergey Ryazansky and Fedor Yurchikhin captured the breathtaking scenery while doing their 7.5-hour spacewalk in August, which included maintenance tasks and the launch of five miniature satellites.

Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in smart sex toys, including those made in the US, that allows hackers to easily take control of the devices from the street.

Walking through the streets of Berlin, Alex Lomas, a researcher from security group Pen Test Partners, said he was "genuinely surprised" to see an adult sex toy pop up on his phone.

Using a technique Lomas dubbed "screwdriving" - a play on "wardriving," a term hackers use for locating Wi-Fi networks while driving - Lomas showed how hackers could "fairly accurately" locate a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-enabled sex toy using triangulation.

"We went hunting...and found some devices in an exploitable state...in people," Lomas wrote in a blog.

By the end of the Hesperian period, all of the Red Planet's water should have been locked up in ice form. But 3.5-million-year-old lake beds, like those found within Gale Crater, suggest otherwise.

Frequent belches of methane could explain how a younger Mars maintained liquid water on its surface despite a cold, arid climate.

The evidence that water once flowed freely on Mars is overwhelming. Over the last decade, scientists have found signs that water moved across the surface of the Red Planet as recently as 3 billion years ago.

The problem is, scientists have also uncovered a large body of evidence suggesting Mars' climate was especially cold and dry some 3 billion years ago.

Planetary scientists have been fishing for a solution to the contradiction.

"It's a paradox, an unresolved paradox of Mars," Kevin Zahnle, a NASA scientist who was not involved in the research, told The Verge. "On the one hand, some people say that it looked warmish and wettish, at least occasionally. On another hand, nobody can figure out how it could have been warmish and wettish."

An asteroid estimated to be up to 100 feet wide is set for a close shave with Earth next week, when it will soar past at a distance of just 27,000 miles above the surface - or, as some scientists have put it, 'damn close.'

The space rock, dubbed asteroid 2012 TC4, is about 30-100 feet (10-30 meters) in size, and will fly by at just one-eighth of the distance between Earth and the moon on October 12.

It first flitted past our planet in October 2012 at about double the distance of its next expected pass, before disappearing.

But, after tracking it down last month, scientists now assure it will make a safe pass.

Introduction

The Google Earth software has turned out to be an excellent tool for observing the Earth's surface features though it cannot be considered the direct equivalent of an optical camera since much image processing is needed to produce the imagery we look at on our PC screens.

The latest issue of the New Concepts in Global Tectonics has been published and in the letters section Bruce Leybourne notes a linkage between gravity anomalies and lightning and earthquakes, and I suspect volcanic activity. But just how gravity could be linked to lightning seems problematical unless our understanding of gravity is faulty, and that gravity is instead some sort of electrical phenomena. Gravity being electrical is not a new idea and the in situ field data I collected from a drilling operation in 2009 supports the idea that it's electrical in nature. But first some assumptions.

Atomic nuclei can be considered as discrete entities surrounded by a cloud of electrons. The dual nature of the electron remains problematical and here I assume it to be a wave in an underlying substrate or aether. As well light, being essentially a transverse oscillation requires a physical medium through which to traverse, and having an aether allows this.

The observable universe is comprised of condensed matter (solids) and to an extent, liquids, gases and plasma. According to the plasma-universe model, 99.997% of the observable matter is in the plasma state, implying that 0.003% isn't and that solid matter is an even smaller proportion.

Newton's equations of motion and gravity apply only to solid matter since physically his equations can only describe solid objects. His equations cannot be applied to atomic scale phenomena nor to liquids or gases since matter in these states does not exist as discrete physical objects organised into atomic lattices or fixed structures.

This has not stopped science from extending his equations to uncondensed matter via the use of imaginals of point masses or centres-of-gravities. While quite adequate for the description of motion of solid bodies or objects, Newton's equations don't work too well, if at all, when fluid motion is being described, and the idea of magnetohydrodynamics was proposed last century by Hannes Alfven, with the warning issued during his Nobel Prize investiture that magnetic fields cannot be frozen electrical plasma; plasma is not a perfect electrical conductor, in other words.

As a first-pass, back of envelope guess, it is here assumed that plasma physics is applicable to describing the physical behavior of liquids (essentially viscous plasma), gases and of course plasma, while Newton's equations restricted to solids or condensed matter. So cyclonic structures in the Earth's atmosphere and oceans are due to the motion of electrically charged particles, rather than the gross physical behavior of liquids and gases in the conventional sense.

The biggest problem remaining in geology to this day remains the formation of the Earth's oceans. Continental drift, plate tectonics, earth expansion, wrench tectonics and surge tectonics all are attempts at explaining how the oceans formed. All of these theories rely on the assumption that the geomagnetic field is endogenous and that any changes in orientation of the palaeomagnetic fields is due to the crustal movement though today we now know that the geomagnetic field is quite mobile and changeable, but still within the constraints of an endogenous origin; this leads to trying to work out how the internal dynamo mechanism, (never modeled physically), achieves this. It remains a serious problem. It seems more useful to assume the geomagnetic field is produced externally.

Conventional thinking on visual attention is that our attention is automatically drawn to "salient" objects that stand out from the background. Researchers at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain mapped hundreds of images (examples far left) by eye tracking (center left), "meaning" (center right) and "salience" or outstanding features (far left). Statistical analysis shows that eyes are drawn to "meaningful" areas, not necessarily those that are most outstanding. Credit: John Henderson and Taylor Hayes, UC Davis

Our visual attention is drawn to parts of a scene that have meaning, rather than to those that are salient or "stick out," according to new research from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. The findings, published Sept. 25 in the journal Nature Human Behavior, overturn the widely-held model of visual attention.

Gravity comes about in a flash, a model of how wave forms of quantum systems collapse reveals a way they could create gravitational fields, and perhaps even reconcile two pillars of physics

How do you reconcile the two pillars of modern physics: quantum theory and gravity? One or both will have to give way. A new approach says gravity could emerge from random fluctuations at the quantum level, making quantum mechanics the more fundamental of the two theories.

Of our two main explanations of reality, quantum theory governs the interactions between the smallest bits of matter. And general relativity deals with gravity and the largest structures in the universe. Ever since Einstein, physicists have been trying to bridge the gap between the two, with little success. Part of the problem is knowing which strands of each theory are fundamental to our understanding of reality.

One approach towards reconciling gravity with quantum mechanics has been to show that gravity at its most fundamental comes in indivisible parcels called quanta, much like the electromagnetic force comes in quanta called photons. But this road to a theory of quantum gravity has so far proved impassable.

Now Antoine Tilloy at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, has attempted to get at gravity by tweaking standard quantum mechanics.

An unexpectedly strong blast from the Sun hit Mars this month, observed by NASA missions in orbit and on the surface.

"NASA's distributed set of science missions is in the right place to detect activity on the Sun and examine the effects of such solar events at Mars as never possible before," said MAVEN Program Scientist Elsayed Talaat, program scientist at NASA Headquarters, Washington, for NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission.

The solar event on Sept. 11, 2017 sparked a global aurora at Mars more than 25 times brighter than any previously seen by the MAVEN orbiter, which has been studying the Martian atmosphere's interaction with the solar wind since 2014.

It produced radiation levels on the surface more than double any previously measured by the Curiosity rover's Radiation Assessment Detector, or RAD, since that mission's landing in 2012. The high readings lasted more than two days.

Strangely, it occurred in conjunction with a spate of solar activity during what is usually a quiet period in the Sun's 11-year sunspot and storm-activity cycle. This event was big enough to be detected at Earth too, even though Earth was on the opposite side of the Sun from Mars.