Have you been keeping an eye on Sol lately? One of the top astronomy stories for 2018 may be what's not happening, and how inactive our host star has become.

The strange tale of Solar Cycle #24 is ending with an expected whimper: as of May 8^th, the Earthward face of the Sun had been spotless for 73 out of 128 days thus far for 2018, or more than 57% of the time. This wasn't entirely unexpected, as the solar minimum between solar cycle #23 and #24 saw 260 spotless days in 2009 - the most recorded in a single year since 1913.

Cycle #24 got off to a late and sputtering start, and though it produced some whopper sunspots reminiscent of the Sol we knew and loved on 20^th century cycles past, it was a chronic under-performer overall. Mid-2018 may see the end of cycle #24 and the start of Cycle #25... or will it?

Parts of the brain not traditionally associated with learning science become active when people are confronted with solving physics problems, a new study shows.
The researchers, led by Eric Brewe, PhD,an associate professor in Drexel University's College of Arts and Sciences, say this shows that the brain's activity can be modified by different forms of instruction.

Using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to measure blood flow in the brain, the researchers looked to map what areas become active when completing a physics reasoning task, both before a course on the concepts and after.

A brainwave abnormality could be a common link between Parkinson's disease, neuropathic pain, tinnitus and depression - a link that authors of a new study suggest could lead to treatment for all four conditions.

Dr. Sven Vanneste, an associate professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas, is one of three authors of a paper in the journal Nature Communications regarding thalamocortical dysrhythmia (TCD), a theory that ties a disruption of brainwave activity to the symptoms of a wide range of neurological disorders.

Vanneste and his colleagues - Dr. Jae-Jin Song of South Korea's Seoul National University and Dr. Dirk De Ridder of New Zealand's University of Otago - analyzed electroencephalograph (EEG) and functional brain mapping data from more than 500 people to create what Vanneste believes is the largest experimental evaluation of TCD, which was first proposed in a paper published in 1996.

A new set of health guidelines, released by the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) says that people can reduce their risk of cancer about 40% by completely eliminating alcohol, bacon, sausage, fatty meats, and beer from their diets.


The recommendations are part of a "ten point plan" that the WCRF says can help nearly halve your chances of getting cancer - though their guidelines may put a significant dent in your quality of life.

The most dangerous meats include any rare or raw red meat (pork, beef, and lamb, specifically), hamburgers and hot dogs, but the WCRF and their European Union colleagues say if you want to stay cancer-free (at least, when it comes to those cancers where genetic disposition isn't a risk factor), you should avoid all but the "occasional" bacon sandwich or sip of beer.

"Color has always been there," says Narayan Khandekar. "It's fundamental to how we are as people." Reds, browns and oranges from earthy ochre minerals and black from charcoal appeared on rocks, shells and cave walls as dawn broke on humanity's artistic temperament.

Later came pigments and dyes derived from plants and animals, and a love affair with owning and mastering colour - in art, clothing and other possessions - that continues to this day.

That long-term relationship is documented by the Forbes Pigment Collection. Curated by Khandekar, it contains some 3000 pigments, housed mainly at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum. Together with its associated database, it is a unique reference work spanning 5000 years of human history.

Russian police plan to employ 'Taser shields' in raids against crime. The 'shocking' new device was unveiled during the Advanced Technologies in Law Enforcement Expo near Moscow.

"Its whole surface holds an electrical charge. So, if someone charges at me, I can electrocute him," an officer at the booth told a reporter from Lenta.ru, adding that the shield might also help to deter possible offenders and discourage them from dangerous behavior.

Different types of 'Taser shields,' also known as 'stun shields,' are already in use in some US police and sheriffs' departments, as well as in correctional facilities.

The sky sometimes has its limits, according to new research from two University of Chicago atmospheric scientists.

A study published May 24 in Science offers an explanation for a mysterious and sometimes deadly weather pattern in which the jet stream, the global air currents that circle the Earth, stalls out over a region. Much like highways, the jet stream has a capacity, researchers said, and when it's exceeded, blockages form that are remarkably similar to traffic jams-and climate forecasters can use the same math to model them both.

The deadly 2003 European heat wave, California's 2014 drought and the swing of Superstorm Sandy in 2012 that surprised forecasters-all of these were caused by a weather phenomenon known as "blocking," in which the jet stream meanders, stopping weather systems from moving eastward. Scientists have known about it for decades, almost as long as they've known about the jet stream-first discovered by pioneering University of Chicago meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby, in fact-but no one had a good explanation for why it happens.

A fascinating paper about sex differences in the human brain was published last week in the scientific journal Cerebral Cortex. It's the largest single-sample study of structural and functional sex differences in the human brain ever undertaken, involving over 5,000 participants (2,466 male and 2,750 female). The study has been attracting attention for more than a year (see this preview in Science, for instance), but only now has it been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

For those who believe that gender is a social construct, and there are no differences between men and women's brains, this paper is something of a reality check. The team of researchers from Edinburgh University, led by Stuart Ritchie, author of Intelligence: All That Matters, found that men's brains are generally larger in volume and surface area, while women's brains, on average, have thicker cortices. 'The differences were substantial: in some cases, such as total brain volume, more than a standard deviation,' they write. This is not a new finding - it has been known for some time that the total volume of men's brains is, in general, larger than that of women's, even when adjusted for men's larger average body size - but all the studies before now have involved much smaller sample sizes.

Does this paper have any implications when it comes to men and women's intellectual abilities? The answer is yes, but they're not clear cut.

On the one hand, feminists won't like this confirmation that men, on average, have bigger brains than women because there's a well-established connection between total brain volume and IQ. That was the conclusion of the authors of a 2015 meta-analysis that looked at 88 studies involving 148 mixed sex samples comparing magnetic resonance images of people's brains with their cognitive test scores. They found that the association between brain volume and cognitive ability was positive in children and adults, applied across a range of different IQ domains (full-scale, performance and verbal IQ) and was true of both men and women. According to another study led by Richard Haier, author of The Neuroscience of Intelligence, total brain volume accounts for about 16 per cent of the variance in IQ.

Until now, scientists have been unable to answer how certain cells in a developing embryo decide to become muscles or limbs, while others become bones and nerves.

But now researchers led by Dr Ali Brivanlou, from Rockefeller University in New York, have achieved the unimaginable in a shock experiment.

By grafting petri dish-grown human cells onto the embryo of a chicken the scientists were for the first time ever able to observe how cells organise themselves.

The study was published this week in the science journal Nature where the scientists unveiled the inner machinations of so-called 'organiser cells'.

The history of Earth isn't written in ink, but in ancient ice - buried under places so unforgivingly frozen, they're usually mistaken for wastelands.

And if you extract deep, concealed cores of ice from within these extreme latitudes, you can learn almost anything: about metal workers vanquished by the Black Death, or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, or even our planet's leaking oxygen supply.

Now, scientists say they have likely found an ice core that's unlike any of these frozen history lessons.

Until now, the oldest continuous core that we knew about is one that stretches back in time some 800,000 years from the present day in an unbroken flow of ice and trapped chemicals, which tell us things about the environmental and atmospheric conditions when the ice formed.