As the sun's spots get blanked out for the fourth time in 2016, it becomes totally blank, which may herald a mini Ice Age

Shivers! Yesterday, NASA images showed that the sun has gone "blank" without any sunspots for the fourth time this year. The solar surface shows complete inaction. It could lead us to the Ice Age, say climate experts.

Usually, our sun doesn't have a pleasant face, but looks burning hot, pocked by sunspots. But now, it looks smooth, with sunspots at the lowest rate for 10,000 years. Solar activity too has slowed down.

However, the sun's pleasant face isn't too pleasant for the earth. Such blank faces, without sunspot activity could usher in a cold spell, just like the Maunder Minimum, which began in 1645 and went on till 1715. That was called the Little Ice Age and even became well-known because of the winter frost fairs that became popular on the frozen surface of the Thames.

The warning was issued by meteorologist and renowned sun-watcher Paul Dorian in his report, which spread some tension: "The blank sun is a sign that the next solar minimum is approaching and there will be an increasing number of spotless days over the next few years," said Dorian. "At first, the blankness will stretch for just a few days at a time, then it'll continue for weeks at a time, and finally it should last for months at a time when the sunspot cycle reaches its nadir. The next solar minimum phase is expected to take place around 2019 or 2020."

Australia may become the first country in the world to microchip its public. NBC news predicted that all Americans would be microchipped by 2017, but it seems Australia may have already beaten them to it.

Back in 2010, CBS news reported that the Australian government had a potential RFID microchipping plan in the works related to the health care system.

Now, it seems that this plan is beginning to unfold but the push is not a result of mandated health care reforms, but rather a clever propaganda campaign that equates RFID microchipping with becoming superhuman, and people are begging for it.

Under the headline Australians embracing super-human microchip technology, Australia's premier media outlet news.com.au (News Corp Australia) reports:

It may sound like sci-fi, but hundreds of Australians are turning themselves into super-humans who can unlock doors, turn on lights and log into computers with a wave of the hand.

Shanti Korporaal, from Sydney, is at the centre of the phenomenon after having two implants inserted under her skin.

Now she can get into work and her car without carrying a card or keys, and says her ultimate goal is to completely do away with her wallet and cards.

She told news.com.au:

You could set up your life so you never have to worry about any password or PINs; it's the same technology as Paypass, so I'm hoping you'll be able to pay for things with it.

With Opal you get a unique identification number that could be programmed into the chip. Any door with a swipe card ... it could open your computer, photocopier. Loyalty cards for shops are just another thing for your wallet.

The microchips, which are the size of a grain of rice, can act like a business card and transfer contact details to smartphones, and hold complex medical data.

It was only 3000 years ago that humans first set foot on Fiji and other isolated islands of the Pacific, having sailed across thousands of kilometers of ocean. Yet the identity of these intrepid seafarers has been lost to time. They left a trail of distinctive red pottery but few other clues, and scientists have confronted two different scenarios: The explorers were either farmers who sailed directly from mainland East Asia to the remote islands, or people who mixed with hunter-gatherers they met along the way in Melanesia, including Papua New Guinea.

Now, the first genome-wide study of ancient DNA from prehistoric Polynesians has boosted the first idea: that these ancient mariners were East Asians who swept out into the Pacific. It wasn't until much later that Melanesians, probably men, ventured out into Oceania and mixed with the Polynesians.

"The paper is a game-changer," says Cristian Capelli, a population geneticist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, noting that that it settles a decades-long dispute. By showing that the East Asians hopscotched past islands already populated by Melanesians without picking up their genes, it is also a case study in how culture can initially bar mixing between groups. "Farmers move in and don't mix much with the hunter-gatherers," says evolutionary geneticist Mark Thomas of University College London. "We see this again and again and again" elsewhere in the world.

The first Polynesians left plenty of tantalizing artifacts, including distinctive stamped red pottery, obsidian tools, and shell ornaments. Collectively known as the Lapita culture, this set of artifacts first appeared more than 3000 years ago in the Bismarck Archipelago in New Oceania (see map below). This culture grew taro, yams, and breadfruit; brought pigs and chickens; and spread rapidly to the islands of Vanuatu and New Caledonia and eventually to Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and beyond.

Our brains hold on to memories via physical changes in synapses, the tiny connections between neurons. Unexpected molecular mechanisms by which these changes take place have now been revealed by new research

A new study by researchers at Duke University and the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience reveals unexpected molecular mechanisms by which these changes take place. Published in advance online Sept. 28 in the journal Nature, the findings could also shed light on how some diseases develop, including certain forms of epilepsy.

"We're beginning to unlock some of the mysteries underlying both the acquisition of a memory in the normal brain, as well as how a normal brain is transformed into an epileptic brain," said the study's co-senior investigator James McNamara, M.D., a professor in the departments of neurobiology and neurology at Duke University.

As we acquire a new memory, the connections, or synapses, between certain sets of neurons strengthen. In particular, the receiving end of a pair of these neurons -- consisting of a little nub called a spine -- gets a little larger.

A star known by the unassuming name of KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus has been raising eyebrows both in and outside of the scientific community for the past year. In 2015 a team of astronomers announced that the star underwent a series of very brief, non-periodic dimming events while it was being monitored by NASA's Kepler space telescope, and no one could quite figure out what caused them. A new study has deepened the mystery.

Five major technology companies said Wednesday that they had created an organization to set the ground rules for protecting humans — and their jobs — in the face of rapid advances in artificial intelligence.

The Partnership on AI, unites Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft in an effort to ease public fears of machines that are learning to think for themselves and perhaps ease corporate anxiety over the prospect of government regulation of this new technology.

The organization has been created at a time of significant public debate about artificial intelligence technologies that are built into a variety of robots and other intelligent systems, including self-driving cars and workplace automation.

ESA's Planck satellite has revealed that the first stars in the Universe started forming later than previous observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background indicated. This new analysis also shows that these stars were the only sources needed to account for reionising atoms in the cosmos, having completed half of this process when the Universe had reached an age of 700 million years.

With the multitude of stars and galaxies that populate the present Universe, it's hard to imagine how different our 13.8 billion year cosmos was when it was only a few seconds old. At that early phase, it was a hot, dense primordial soup of particles, mostly electrons, protons, neutrinos, and photons -- the particles of light. In such a dense environment the Universe appeared like an 'opaque' fog, as light particles could not travel any significant distance before colliding with electrons.

As the cosmos expanded, the Universe grew cooler and more rarefied and, after about 380,000 years, finally became 'transparent'. By then, particle collisions were extremely sporadic and photons could travel freely across the cosmos.

Today, telescopes like Planck can observe this fossil light across the entire sky as the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB. Its distribution on the sky reveals tiny fluctuations that contain a wealth of information about the history, composition and geometry of the Universe.

At super-low temperatures, a crystal called samarium hexaboride behaves in an unexplained, imagination-stretching way.

In a deceptively drab black crystal, physicists have stumbled upon a baffling behavior, one that appears to blur the line between the properties of metals, in which electrons flow freely, and those of insulators, in which electrons are effectively stuck in place. The crystal exhibits hallmarks of both simultaneously.

"This is a big shock," said Suchitra Sebastian, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Cambridge whose findings appeared today in an advance online edition of the journal Science. Insulators and metals are essentially opposites, she said. "But somehow, it's a material that's both. It's contrary to everything that we know.

The material, a much-studied compound called samarium hexaboride or SmB₆, is an insulator at very low temperatures, meaning it resists the flow of electricity. Its resistance implies that electrons (the building blocks of electric currents) cannot move through the crystal more than an atom's width in any direction. And yet, Sebastian and her collaborators observed electrons traversing orbits millions of atoms in diameter inside the crystal in response to a magnetic field — a mobility that is only expected in materials that conduct electricity. Calling to mind the famous wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics, the new evidence suggests SmB₆ might be neither a textbook metal nor an insulator, Sebastian said, but "something more complicated that we don't know how to imagine."

"It is just a magnificent paradox," said Jan Zaanen, a condensed matter theorist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. "On the basis of established wisdoms this cannot possibly happen, and henceforth completely new physics should be at work."

Genetically modified (GM) mosquito company Oxitec has admitted a major risk of its technology - reducing one mosquito species may increase the numbers of a second disease-carrying species.

The information surfaced Friday when four environment and food safety groups including International Center for Technology Assessment, GeneWatchUK, Food and Water Watch and Friends of the Earth released court documents from the Cayman Islands. Oxitec, a subsidiary of Intrexon, applied for trial releases of its GM mosquito, which, according to the new information, would be inefficient and risky.

Oxitec previously denied that releasing millions of GE Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, with the aim of suppressing wild mosquito numbers, would result in increased numbers of the Aedes albopictus species (known as the Asian Tiger mosquito). The Aedes albopictus also transmits viral tropical diseases such as dengue and zika, and recently has been shown to be a vector of chikungunya, a devastating and sometimes lethal viral disease. The FDA recently approved trial releases of the GE mosquitoes in Florida.

"These court documents show that Oxitec's GM mosquito trials are not worth the risk. The State of Florida and its mosquito control boards have in the past effectively controlled disease from multiple mosquito species using much more benign approaches such as vaccines, screens, repellents, larvicides and removing breeding sites like abandoned tires," said Jaydee Hanson, policy director of the International Center for Technology Assessment.

The Western defense coalition is already planning on its sixth-generation fleet of fighter jets to counter the aviation advances made by Russia and China in recent years.

The United States and its NATO allies have begun the planning stage for its next generation fighter jets in a bid to ensure lasting air superiority over novel fifth-generation Russian and Chinese fighter jets with a view for producing the next generation combat aircraft in the early 2030s.

While the West has long held the mantle on stealth designed fighter jets starting with the F-22 Raptor and subsequently the F-35 Lightning, both China and Russia's defense aviation industries have caught up to the United States in recent years with the unleashing of the Chengdu J-20 and the Russian T-50 (PAK-FA) which pose a significant threat to NATO's longstanding aerial dominance.