What killed the dinosaurs?

That was a mystery for decades; when I was a kid, there were tons of ideas but precious little evidence for any of them, making them little more than speculation. In the late 1970s and early '80s, though, the hypothesis was put forward that a giant asteroid or comet impact did the deed, and over the years evidence mounted.

The impact idea gained wide acceptance, but some details remained stubbornly difficult to explain with a single catastrophic event. Another idea that started gaining traction was that a series of huge and sustained volcanic eruptions occurred for a couple of hundred thousand years before the impact. These were no ordinary eruptions; they formed the Deccan Traps, a soul-crushingly huge region in India consisting of igneous rock layers more than two kilometers deep and covering an area of 500,000 square kilometers.

Half a million square kilometers. Yeah: huge.

This long-lasting eruption did ecological damage across the planet, weakening life and killing species. The clock was ticking on the dinosaurs and so many other species. When the impact came, their time was up.

We're not saying it's aliens, but a team of researchers has just discovered a glowing purple orb at the bottom of the ocean, and if you've ever seen The Abyss, I think you know how this will end.

While researching previously unmapped regions of the Channel Islands off the California coast, the research vessel Nautilus came across an unusual purple mass peeking out of a coral crevice. As the scientists zoomed in on the beautiful creature, they began wondering aloud what it could possibly be.

After guesses of everything from a species of plankton to a colorful egg sack, the team decided to use their deep sea rover's vacuum tube to grab the mystery species and bring it to the surface.

"This unidentified purple orb stumped our scientists onboard," Nautilus posted to its website. "After sampling, it began to unfold to reveal two distinct lobes. This could possibly be a new species of nudibranch."

Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope, along with other telescopes on the ground and in space, have discovered a new type of exotic binary star. In the system AR Scorpii a rapidly spinning white dwarf star powers electrons up to almost the speed of light. These high energy particles release blasts of radiation that lash the companion red dwarf star, and cause the entire system to pulse dramatically every 1.97 minutes with radiation ranging from the ultraviolet to radio. The research will be published in the journal Nature on 28 July 2016.
In May 2015, a group of amateur astronomers from Germany, Belgium and the UK came across a star system that was exhibiting behaviour unlike anything they had ever encountered. Follow-up observations led by the University of Warwick and using a multitude of telescopes on the ground and in space [1], have now revealed the true nature of this previously misidentified system.

The star system AR Scorpii, or AR Sco for short, lies in the constellation of Scorpius, 380 light-years from Earth. It comprises a rapidly spinning white dwarf [2], the size of Earth but containing 200 000 times more mass, and a cool red dwarf companion one third the mass of the Sun [3], orbiting one another every 3.6 hours in a cosmic dance as regular as clockwork.

In a unique twist, this binary star system is exhibiting some brutal behaviour. Highly magnetic and spinning rapidly, AR Sco's white dwarf accelerates electrons up to almost the speed of light. As these high energy particles whip through space, they release radiation in a lighthouse-like beam which lashes across the face of the cool red dwarf star, causing the entire system to brighten and fade dramatically every 1.97 minutes. These powerful pulses include radiation at radio frequencies, which has never been detected before from a white dwarf system.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is in the process of making a neural-coding device capable of controlling artificial limbs when seeded in the brain. The device has had success in animal studies and the first human trials are set for 2017. The Pentagon has subsidized the institution $62 million to help foster this mind-control technology. Meanwhile, the mainstream media is pushing for the micochipping of children sooner rather than later.

During a recent televised report by NBC News, the news station purported the micro-chipping of children by the state was as normal as bar codes for consumers: "When barcodes first came out in the late 1960s, people were appalled. They were wary of them and did not understand the concept. Today, it is so commonplace, we don't even notice it. A microchip would work much in the same way."

This declaration is a reflection of the mentality of the mainstream media, which sees people as objects fit for labeling rather than persons with intrinsic moral value. Although DARPA touts the brain chips as a way to protect children, in actuality, this sort of technology has more to do with control than it does public safety.

China is preparing to begin building a super-secure version of the internet that's broadcast from up in SPACE.

Beijing is set to launch the world's first "quantum satellite" which is specifically designed to test out experimental communications technology.

Experts from the People's Republic believe their work will spark a second space race as Russia, Europe and America compete to master the technology.

"Definitely, I think there will be a race," said Chaoyang Lu, a physicist from the University of Science and Technology of China.

"If the first satellite goes well, China will definitely launch more."

The research vessel Nautilus is a floating laboratory equipped with cameras that can peer deep down to the ocean floor. Researchers with the Ocean Exploration Trust posted a video on Monday showing an unusual find. The Nautilus spied a small bright-purple orb underwater in the Channel Islands off the coast of California.

The main focus for the vehicle's Channel Islands mission is to study deep-sea corals, but the odd sphere attracted the scientists' attention. The video includes a soundtrack of the researchers making real-time observations as the camera sweeps along. They call it a "purple blob" and then wonder aloud "What is that?"

The researchers throw out some scientific names as possibilities before deciding to suck it up into a tube for a closer look. They wonder if it might be an egg sac or an embryo of some sort. There's a moment of suspense as a crab closes in on the orb and jars it with its leg, but the Nautilus successfully grabs the sphere using a remote-controlled suction tube.

The Nautilus website offers an update on the oddball discovery: "This unidentified purple orb stumped our scientists onboard. After sampling, it began to unfold to reveal two distinct lobes. This could possibly be a new species of nudibranch."

A young star cluster surrounded by three concentric bubbles was recently found near the M33 galaxy, revealing a cosmic splendor that could be compared to Russian matryoshka nesting dolls.

The concentric bubbles, which comprise what researchers call a triple-bubble, are actually three supernova remnants, shells of gas and dust that form following the explosion of a star. This is the first known case of three supernova remnants nesting one inside the other, said the researchers from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), who made the discovery. The above illustration shows what a cross section of the three rings might look like if scientists could get a closer look.

The shells provide a unique opportunity to study the remains of these stellar explosions, as well as the the interstellar medium, which is the gas and dust that lies between stars, John Beckman, co-author of the new study, said in a news release. Beckman is an astrophysicist with the Spanish National Resource Council and IAC. "We can measure how much matter there is in a shell, approximately a couple of hundred times the mass of the sun in each of the shells," he said.

Using the high-resolution 2D spectrograph GHaFaS (Galaxy Halpha Fabry-Perot System), mounted on the William Herschel Telescope in Spain's Canary Islands, the researchers examined the complex structure of this triple-bubble. The work revealed that the three shells all formed chronologically in the same way, from separate supernova explosions within the same star cluster, Beckman said.

Around 3.8 billion years ago, an asteroid more than 150 miles across, roughly equal to the length of New Jersey, slammed into the Moon and created the Imbrium Basin—the right eye of the fabled Man in the Moon. This new size estimate, published in the journal Nature, suggests an Imbrium impactor that was two times larger in diameter and 10 times more massive than previous estimates.

"We show that Imbrium was likely formed by an absolutely enormous object, large enough to be classified as a protoplanet," said Pete Schultz, professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown University. "This is the first estimate for the Imbrium impactor's size that is based largely on the geological features we see on the Moon." Previous estimates, Schultz said, were based solely on computer models and yielded a size estimate of only about 50 miles in diameter.

These new findings help to explain some of the puzzling geological features that surround the Imbrium Basin. The work also suggests—based on the sizes of other impact basins in the Moon, Mars and Mercury—that the early solar system was likely well stocked with protoplanet-sized asteroids.

Shooting stars may fill you with child-like wonder, but these celestial showstoppers are also reminders that Earth is hardly alone in space, and some of those cosmic objects can be downright dangerous.

The Perseid meteor shower, which appears every year in mid-August, occurs when Earth passes through a trail of debris left by Comet Swift-Tuttle. In 1973, based on calculations about the object's orbit using limited observations, astronomer Brian Marsden at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics predicted that Comet Swift-Tuttle could collide with Earth in 2126. The catastrophic prediction was later retracted, but what would happen if Comet Swift-Tuttle smacked into our planet?

"We have to be clear that it's not going to happen," Donald Yeomans, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and author of "Near-Earth Objects: Finding Them Before They Find Us" (Princeton University Press, 2012), told Live Science.

When Swift-Tuttle was last seen in 1992, Yeomans was among those who produced revised models for the comet's motion, making the complicated calculations to account for the gravitational effects of the sun and planets on the space rock's orbit. The 1992 sighting, along with data from 1862 and 1737, provided astronomers with enough information to rule out the possibility of a collision in 2126.

The sun fired off its strongest solar flare of 2016 during an active weekend that saw three eruptions from the star's surface.

The uptick in solar activity occurred overnight on Friday and Saturday (July 22 and 23) when the sun unleashed three relatively moderate solar flares, all of which were captured on video by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. While all three were somewhat minor, they are the first substantial solar events in months, NASA officials said in a statement.

The first solar flare registered as an M5.0 sun storm and peaked Friday night at 10:11 p.m. EDT (0211 July 23 GMT). It was followed by a second, more-intense flare, which peaked as an M7.5-class solar storm on Saturday at 1:16 a.m. EDT (0516 GMT). A third, M5.5-class flare peaked 15 minutes later, at 1:31 a.m. EDT (0531 GMT).

A closeup of the M7.6-class solar flare that erupted from the sun on July 23, 2016 as seen by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.Credit: NASA

The M7.5 flare was the strongest sun storm of 2016, according to Spaceweather.com, a website that tracks space-weather events. But it was still nowhere near the most powerful types of flares the sun can unleash.