NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory released dramatic video this week showing a very active sun sporting an enormous coronal hole along with a mass of solar material lifting off the sun's surface and swirling about.

According to NASA, the coronal hole is larger than 50 Earths and covers almost the entire northern hemisphere of the sun, an estimated 8 to 10 percent of the total solar surface, making it one of the largest polar holes scientists have observed in decades.

Scientists explain that coronal holes spew out fast solar wind — traveling an estimated 400-500 miles per second — roughly twice the speed of the normal solar wind causing material to stream off the sun and into the solar system.

Although a bit of a misnomer, vestigial organs are those that have supposedly become functionless through the course of evolution. There are many body parts which doctors consider useless, but are they? Now, a psychologist at the University of Missouri studying vestigial muscles behind the ears in humans has determined that ancient neural circuits responsible for moving the ears, still may be responsive to sounds that attract our attention. Neuroscientists studying auditory function could use these ancient muscles to study positive emotions and infant hearing deficits.

"Everyone has noticed cats or dogs orienting their ears toward a surprising or otherwise interesting sound; we as humans, of course, don't make ear movements when we focus our attention" said Steven Hackley, an associate professor of psychological sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. "However, there is a 'cognitive fossil' that lies more or less intact in the human brain and could be more than 25 million years old. Significant changes in the human auditory system began soon after the evolution of dry-nosed primates more than 30 million years ago. Ear size decreased and the associated musculature changed."

Hackley reviewed more than 60 published studies on vestigial ear muscles and noted that research on the muscles dates back more than a century. Scientists discovered that human subjects who shifted their gaze to the left or right weakly activated a muscle within the posterior wall of the outer ear, or pinna. Later studies measured the weak electrical activity triggered within vestigial muscles when either interesting or intense sounds were introduced.

Judgment day and the rise of the machines just took an almighty step closer after an English university announced it is spending £4.2 million on a project to create "self-repairing cities" that employs robots to fix infrastructure problems.

Although not quite on the scale of Skynet and Terminator cyborgs, a team of University of Leeds researchers will create small robots that can identify and fix a number of problems including broken street lights and potholes, which will mean repair work is less disruptive to the public.

Tick species not normally present in the United States are arriving here on migratory birds. Some of these ticks carry disease-causing Ricksettia species, and some of those species are exotic to the US. The research is published on October 2nd in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

In the study, the investigators examined thousands of migratory birds that had just arrived in the US, after having flown from Central or South America. Three percent of the birds carried exotic ticks. Based on the total number of migratory birds arriving in the US each spring--in the billions--the investigators estimated that more than 19 million exotic ticks are introduced into the US each spring, said Emily B. Cohen, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Migratory Bird Center, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, National Zoological Park, Washington, DC.

Living organisms may have existed on Earth as long as 4.1bn years ago - 300m years earlier than was previously thought, new research has shown.

If confirmed, the discovery means life emerged a remarkably short time after the Earth was formed from a primordial disc of dust and gas surrounding the sun 4.6bn years ago.

Researchers discovered the evidence in specks of graphite trapped within immensely old zircon crystals from Jack Hills, Western Australia.

An unusual discovery 1,500 light-years from Earth has scientists (reservedly) crossing their fingers that we may have found signs of alien architecture circling a distant star. On Monday, the investigation began.

In the search for distant planets, NASA's Kepler telescope scans the sky, looking for faint dips in starlight. Those dips are usually caused by planets passing between our view and the planet's host star. By analyzing that slight dimming of the light, we can estimate the size of the planet.

But last week, reports surfaced that the telescope found something odd is orbiting around KIC 8462852. It is, by all measurements, far too large to be a planet. The effect is also irregular. If looking at our sun from a distance, one could expect to see the Earth pass every 365 days. Comets are one leading theory, but that explanation isn't perfect, either.

Whatever is moving around KIC 8462852, it's something humanity can't explain.

There is no such thing as a typical firstborn, middle child or baby of the family according to a study that debunks the idea that personality is determined by birth order.

German researchers analysed data from 20,000 people from three nations in the most comprehensive and largest study to date on the issue.

They found that birth order had no effect on five key personality traits: extroversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness and imagination.

However, the paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supported earlier findings that the first child in a family was likely to be more intelligent.

Co-author Julia Rohrer, from the University of Leipzig, said the link between birth order and personality was first mooted in the early 1900s by psychiatrist and philosopher Alfred Adler — the second of six children.

He claimed firstborns were privileged, but also burdened by feelings of excessive responsibility and a fear of dethronement and were more likely to score high on neuroticism.

However, the idea became firmly entrenched in the modern era when United States academic, Professor Frank Sullaway, developed the Family Niche Theory of birth-order effects in 1996. Based on Darwin's theories of evolution, he argued that siblings adapted to certain roles within the family to reduce competition and enhanced the family unit's "fitness".

According to Professor Sulloway's theory, because firstborns were physically superior to their siblings at a young age, they were more likely to show dominant behaviour and become less agreeable.

Laterborns, searching for other ways to assert themselves, tended to rely on social support and become more sociable and thus more extroverted.

A new discovery regarding anomalous brightness frequencies in KIC 8462852 has scientists cautiously declaring they may have found a star system that harbors advanced extraterrestrial life forms. These life forms may have built megastructures, ostensibly to harness solar energy.

Lead author of the study, Tabetha Boyajian, says his group has been looking for alternate explanations since 2011, when "citizen scientists" flagged the star as exceedingly bizarre. Currently, it experiences dips in brightness up to 22%, which could not be the result of a passing exoplanet. Usually, this kind of unexplained activity is the result of a displaced mass of detritus formed within a new star system before gravity has had time to condense or absorb it. But, KIC 8462852, located between between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, is not a new star.

Scientists have also considered that the dips may be caused by debris from a planetary collision. However, they would also expect this kind of collision to produce excess infrared light, which hasn't been detected. Another explanation involves orbiting comets, but comets virtually never create such drastic changes in light emission.

An asteroid designated 2015 TB145 will pass by the Earth at around 1.3 lunar distances (approximately 310,000 miles or about 499,000 km) on October 31 this year. Estimated to be anywhere between 280 to 620 m (918 to 2,034 ft) in diameter and traveling in excess of 126,000 km/h (78,293 mph), the asteroid was discovered less than two weeks ago using the Pan-STARRS array in Hawaii and is the largest object to so closely approach our planet in recent times.

Before you start panicking, NASA says that the object is expected to safely pass by the Earth and is following an eccentric and high-inclination orbit, which may help explain why it was not discovered until October 10 of this year.

Much closer than a "near miss" of 3.1 lunar distances by another recent asteroid, 2004 BL86, 2015 TB145 is of a similar size or greater than that object, but without an accompanying moon. Nevertheless, this now qualifies as the latest known close encounter, after 2004 XP14 in July 2006 at 1.1 lunar distances, and until the asteroid 1999 AN10 swings by Earth at less than one lunar distance sometime in August 2027.

I knew we'd bought walnuts at the store that week, and I wanted to add some to my oatmeal. I called to my wife and asked her where she'd put them. She was washing her face in the bathroom, running the faucet, and must not have heard me—she didn't answer. I found the bag of nuts without her help and stirred a handful into my bowl. My phone was charging on the counter. Bored, I picked it up to check the app that wirelessly grabs data from the fitness band I'd started wearing a month earlier. I saw that I'd slept for almost eight hours the night before but had gotten a mere two hours of "deep sleep." I saw that I'd reached exactly 30 percent of my day's goal of 13,000 steps. And then I noticed a message in a small window reserved for miscellaneous health tips. "Walnuts," it read. It told me to eat more walnuts.

It was probably a coincidence, a fluke. Still, it caused me to glance down at my wristband and then at my phone, a brand-new model with many unknown, untested capabilities. Had my phone picked up my words through its mic and somehow relayed them to my wristband, which then signaled the app?

The devices spoke to each other behind my back—I'd known they would when I "paired" them—but suddenly I was wary of their relationship. Who else did they talk to, and about what? And what happened to their conversations? Were they temporarily archived, promptly scrubbed, or forever incorporated into the "cloud," that ghostly entity with the too-disarming name?

It was the winter of 2013, and these "walnut moments" had been multiplying—jarring little nudges from beyond that occurred whenever I went online. One night the previous summer, I'd driven to meet a friend at an art gallery in Hollywood, my first visit to a gallery in years. The next morning, in my inbox, several spam e-mails urged me to invest in art. That was an easy one to figure out: I'd typed the name of the gallery into Google Maps. Another simple one to trace was the stream of invitations to drug and alcohol rehab centers that I'd been getting ever since I'd consulted an online calendar of Los Angeles - area Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Since membership in AA is supposed to be confidential, these e‑mails irked me. Their presumptuous, heart-to-heart tone bugged me too. Was I tired of my misery and hopelessness? Hadn't I caused my loved ones enough pain?