Throughout its 4.5-billion-year history, Earth has been repeatedly pummelled by space rocks that have caused anything from an innocuous splash in the ocean to species annihilation.

When the next big impact will be, nobody knows.

But the pressure is on to predict—and intercept—its arrival.

"Sooner or later we will get... a minor or major impact," Rolf Densing, who heads the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, told AFP ahead of International Asteroid Day on Friday.

It may not happen in our lifetime, he said, but "the risk that Earth will get hit in a devastating event one day is very high."

This is new to me. Brian Josephson is a Welsh physicist and 1973 Nobel laureate who estimates his confidence in intelligent design at about 80 percent. It comes up on in an interview with host Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the PBS series Closer to Truth. Click [here] to go there.

Given the choice between ID, theistic evolution, and unguided or "random" evolution, Dr. Josephson opts for intelligent design:

I believe that intelligence may play a role in how evolution has occurred. One of the big mistakes of those who attack intelligent design is to regard evolution and God as mutually exclusive, so they say that someone who believes in intelligent design doesn't believe in evolution, but that's not the case. Also, I'd say science has disappeared into something political, really, as the statement that "creationism disguised as science" is a totally false view of what's happened.

He distinguishes between ID and Young Earth Creationism, saying that while ID proponents may hold religious beliefs, those do not determine their scientific conclusions:

We may have these [religious] beliefs but let's see what science can tell us, and that's what intelligent design is, it isn't "creationism in disguise" at all.

Physicists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are seeing an everyday phenomenon in a new light.

By focusing laser light to a brightness one billion times greater than the surface of the sun - the brightest light ever produced on Earth - the physicists have observed changes in a vision-enabling interaction between light and matter.

Those changes yielded unique X-ray pulses with the potential to generate extremely high-resolution imagery useful for medical, engineering, scientific and security purposes. The team's findings, detailed June 26 in the journal Nature Photonics, should also help inform future experiments involving high-intensity lasers.

Donald Umstadter and colleagues at the university's Extreme Light Laboratory fired their Diocles Laser at helium-suspended electrons to measure how the laser's photons - considered both particles and waves of light - scattered from a single electron after striking it.

Under typical conditions, as when light from a bulb or the sun strikes a surface, that scattering phenomenon makes vision possible. But an electron - the negatively charged particle present in matter-forming atoms - normally scatters just one photon of light at a time. And the average electron rarely enjoys even that privilege, Umstadter said, getting struck only once every four months or so.

Though previous laser-based experiments had scattered a few photons from the same electron, Umstadter's team managed to scatter nearly 1,000 photons at a time. At the ultra-high intensities produced by the laser, both the photons and electron behaved much differently than usual.

"When we have this unimaginably bright light, it turns out that the scattering - this fundamental thing that makes everything visible - fundamentally changes in nature," said Umstadter, the Leland and Dorothy Olson Professor of physics and astronomy.

NASA's Opportunity rover has been busy examining the edge of a crater on the desolate Red Planet that scientists think may have once been the site of an ancient lake.

Opportunity landed on Earth's nearest neighbor 13 years ago and has been scouring the planet for signs of life ever since, despite being hampered by numerous technical problems.

Since 2011, the rover has been investigating sites near a large crater, some 22 kilometers (13.6 miles) across, known as Endeavour. Earlier in June, Opportunity found rocks at the edge of the crater's rim crest above Perseverance Valley.

Liquid water comes in two forms — low density and high density, scientists have found.

The findings add to the anomalous properties of this ubiquitous, life-giving liquid, which is like no other on Earth.

"The new remarkable property is that we find that water can exist as two different liquids at low temperatures where ice crystallization is slow," Anders Nilsson, a chemical physicist at Stockholm University in Sweden, said in a statement.

Studies of human populations suggest that our health and longevity could be affected by the diets and experiences of our grandparents. For example, studies of a small community in northern Sweden where detailed historical records were kept found correlations between food availability for one generation and the mortality rate for that generation's grandchildren.


But the exact nature of these effects and how they are transmitted across generations remain unclear. In Susan Strome's lab at UC Santa Cruz, research on a tiny roundworm called C. elegans is helping to solve this puzzle.

"NIH is supporting this basic research in a model organism because it is the only way to crack open the mechanisms behind the correlations seen in human studies. You can't do these kinds of experiments in humans," said Strome, a distinguished professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology.

Biologists have suspected for years that some kind of epigenetic inheritance occurs at the cellular level. The different kinds of cells in our bodies provide an example. Skin cells and brain cells have different forms and functions, despite having exactly the same DNA.

The EU2017 Conference: Future Science -- Aug 17 - 20, Phoenix: https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2017...

The most violent type of weather storm on planet Earth is a tornado. Meteorologists tell us that the unstable air in a thunderstorm produces updrafts and downdrafts, which interacts with a wind shear to ultimately create a tornado vortex. But many scientists acknowledge that the exact processes that cause a tornado remain mysterious. In recent Space News episodes, Thunderbolts contributor Andrew Hall has explored the electrical genesis of lightning and other earthly weather phenomena. Today, Hall offers his own thesis on the electrical genesis of tornadoes on Earth.

Andy's original Thunderblog: https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2017...

The inability to remember has long been considered a failure of the brain, but a new study has found that our brains are actively working to forget memories in order to retain the truly important information.

In fact, the study's researchers believe the brain is not designed to keep memories intact, but its actual purpose is to only hold onto valuable information to optimize intelligent decision making overtime.

"It's important that the brain forgets irrelevant details and instead focuses on the stuff that's going to help make decisions in the real world," says Blake Richards, author of the study and associate fellow in the Learning in Machines and Brains program.

A new bioactive nanomaterial, powered by sugar, shows promise at stimulating bone regeneration. While the new method has only been studied in an animal model of spinal fusion, researchers at Northwestern University say it could readily translate to humans.

Samuel I. Stupp, professor of materials science and engineering, chemistry, medicine and biomedical engineering at Northwestern University, said:

"Regenerative medicine can improve quality of life by offering less invasive and more successful approaches to promoting bone growth. Our method is very flexible and could be adapted for the regeneration of other tissues, including muscle, tendons, and cartilage."

In the US, more and more of an aging but active population undergoes spinal fusion to treat pain due to disc degeneration, trauma, and other back problems. Other medical procedures could benefit from the nanomaterial as well, including bone trauma repair, bone cancer treatment, and bone growth for dental implants.

Lab-produced dogs cloned from bio material taken from the two best representatives of the Yakutian Laika species have arrived in Russia from South Korea for genetic research. One met its 'original mother' as a Ruptly crew filmed the moment.

The puppies, which were cloned by South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, one of the world's leading dog cloning laboratories, arrived in Yakutsk, the capital of Siberia's Yakutia Republic, on Friday. The research was led by Dr. Hwang Woo Suk and his team.