When water transforms into steam, or magnetized iron changes to demagnetized iron, Katsushi Hashimoto explains to PhysOrg.com, a phase transition is taking place: "Classical phase transitions...often share many fundamental characteristics near the critical point. Quantum phase transitions also show universal critical behaviors, which are affected not only by temperature but also by quantum mechanics."

"The real space observation of rather complex phenomena due to quantum mechanics is the key access to a descriptive understanding" of the world that governs quantum physics, Hashimoto continues. Hashimoto currently belongs to Tohoku University and to JST-ERATO in Sendai, Japan, but while he was at Hamburg University in Germany, he started experiments with Markus Morgenstern in a group led by Roland Wiesendanger. Getting support from theoretical groups at Universities of Warwick and Ryukyu, he and his collaborators finally succeeded in showing quantum Hall transition in "real" space. The results of the experiments are reported in Physical Review Letters: "Quantum Hall Transition in Real Space: From Localized to Extended States."

Internet users in the Middle East and India might be glad to see the back of 2008 - it was bookended by cable breaks under the Mediterranean Sea that disrupted access across the region.

Repairs to damage caused in the most recent incident, in December, were completed last week and normal service finally restored. But more incidents are likely in what can arguably be called the internet's Achilles' heel.

The world's oceans are criss-crossed with cables to carry data, but just three span the Mediterranean in a tight bottleneck that links Europe, North Africa and Asia.

Talk about deep, dark secrets. Rare "ultra-deep" diamonds are valuable - not because they look good twinkling on a newlywed's finger - but because of what they can tell us about conditions far below the Earth's crust.

Now a find of these unusual gems in Australia has provided new clues to how they were formed.

The diamonds, which are white and a few millimetres across, were found by a mineral exploration company just outside the small village of Eurelia, some 300 kilometres north of Adelaide, in southern Australia. From there, they were sent to Ralf Tappert, a diamond expert at the University of Adelaide.

Tappert and colleagues say minerals found trapped inside the Eurelia diamonds could only have formed more than 670 kilometres (416 miles) beneath the surface of the Earth - a distance greater than that between Boston and Washington, DC.

Astronomers have turned to an unexpected place to study the evolution of planets - dead stars.

Observations made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveal six dead "white dwarf" stars littered with the remains of shredded asteroids. This might sound pretty bleak, but it turns out the chewed-up asteroids are teaching astronomers about the building materials of planets around other stars.

So far, the results suggest that the same materials that make up Earth and our solar system's other rocky bodies could be common in the universe. If the materials are common, then rocky planets could be, too.

Take that, Andromeda! For decades, astronomers thought when it came to the major galaxies in Earth's cosmic neighborhood, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda. Not anymore.

The Milky Way is considerably larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers once thought - Andromeda's equal.

Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it's 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it's denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society's convention in Long Beach.

Thousands of painstakingly handwritten books produced in medieval Europe still exist today, but scholars have long struggled with questions about when and where the majority of these works originated. Now a researcher from North Carolina State University is using modern advances in genetics to develop techniques that will shed light on the origins of these important cultural artifacts.

Many medieval manuscripts were written on parchment made from animal skin, and NC State Assistant Professor of English Timothy Stinson is working to perfect techniques for extracting and analyzing the DNA contained in these skins with the long-term goal of creating a genetic database that can be used to determine when and where a manuscript was written. "Dating and localizing manuscripts have historically presented persistent problems," Stinson says, "because they have largely been based on the handwriting and dialect of the scribes who created the manuscripts - techniques that have proven unreliable for a number of reasons."

The brightness of white dwarfs may point towards the existence of exotic dark matter particles.

Jordi Isern of the Institute of Space Sciences in Bellaterra, Spain, and colleagues modelled what would happen if white dwarfs - small, dense, dying stars - were emitting axions. These hypothetical particles are a candidate for dark matter, which makes up most of the universe.

Many reports about earthquakes have suggested that the escape of gases was a major effect, both before, during and after the quakes.

The modern theory has it that some subterranean forces, of unknown origin, gradually build up strains in the crustal rocks, up to the breaking point. The earthquake is then supposed to denote the moment of fracture of that rock.

Many features of earthquakes seem to have no explanation in this theory.

Why would there be many occasions of multiple large quakes over a period of a few days to months? Would the rock not break in all the locations in which it is already stressed to near breaking point, at the time it is violently shaken? Why would the ground shake sometimes for periods longer than a minute? Why would quakes cause tsunamis, the massive ocean waves? A brief tremor, however fierce, would not have such an effect. Perhaps the modern earthquake research had omitted the consideration of effects due to the sudden movements and the rapid large changes of volume that gases may cause. We shall therefore discuss the huge eruptions that have brought up diamonds, and we might well ask whether there may not be smaller ones much more frequently. Are they the initiating events for earthquakes as well as for volcanic eruptions?

Eye-witness accounts strongly suggest that gas eruptions are the initiating events, but in modern times not much attention is paid to such information, because it is considered too uncertain. Instead the effects that can be measured with accuracy, such as a gradual increase of the strains in rocks and the relation of this to earthquakes, has now become the main subject of research in this field in the US. The overriding importance of this research would lie in finding a method for the prediction of earthquakes, but no such method has so far been found.

A long-standing astronomical mystery is "What type of star system will explode as a supernova?" It turns out that this question can be resolved by looking at century-old photographs. On studying archival data back to 1890, the result is that recurrent novae are the precursors to supernovae. With this knowledge, astronomical theorists can now perform the calculations to make subtle corrections that allow for the promise of precision-cosmology by upcoming programs involving supernovae. The lesson here is that old astronomical archives are valuable resources that can be used to produce unique and front-line science, in ways that no combination of modern telescopes can provide.

Professor Bradley E. Schaefer of Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, discusses this finding today at a press conference during the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Long Beach, California.

Egypt's antiquities chief unveiled Sunday a bronze statue of what he described as an ancient Mesopotamian goddess that had been looted from Iraq.

Zahi Hawass said an Egyptian man working in Jordan was caught at Nuweiba port trying to smuggle the statue into the country.

In the course of the ceremony, Hawass sliced through the plastic bubble wrap covering the 10 centimeter tall statue and handed it over to the Iraqi Charge d'Affaires, Abdel Hadi Ahmed.

"When the invasion of Iraq began in 2003, we wrote to the British and American governments asking them to protect Iraq's heritage and museums," said Hawass. "But that didn't happen."