Surgeons made cadavers blink with artificial muscles, experiments that could in the future help restore the ability of thousands of patients with facial paralysis to open and close their eyes on their own.

Some people can't blink their eyes. In most patients with so-called permanent eyelid paralysis, the cranial nerve that controls involuntary eye blinking has been damaged by an accident, stroke, injury or surgery to remove a facial tumor. Many of these patients have no functioning nerves nearby that can be rerouted to close the eyelid. Others are born with Mobius syndrome, which is characterized by underdeveloped facial nerves. These people are expressionless and can neither blink nor smile.

Without lubrication from the blinking lid, the eye can develop ulcers and the person can eventually go blind. Currently, eyelid paralysis is treated by one of two approaches. One is to transfer a muscle from the leg into face. However, this option requires six to 10 hours of surgery, creates a wound that can impair the body elsewhere, and is not always suitable for elderly or medically fragile patients.

"I would estimate under 100 of those are done in the United States every year," said researcher Craig Senders, an otolaryngologist at the University of California at Davis.

The other treatment involves suturing a small gold weight inside the eyelid, which helps close the eye with the aid of gravity. Although such therapy is successful in more than 90 percent of patients, the resulting blink is slower than normal and cannot be synchronized with the opposite eye, and some patients also have a hard time keeping the weighted lid closed when lying down to sleep. In the United States, roughly 3,000 to 5,000 patients undergo this surgery every year.

New photographs taken by a satellite in orbit around the moon have revealed one of its most prominent craters in a whole new light.

The moon's Tycho Crater, though average in size, is special because it appears to have formed relatively recently. The vast crater still looks pristine in the new images, while older craters are slowly covered by newer impacts as their features are obscured over the years.

Like all the moon's craters, Tycho is thought to have formed when a space rock slammed into the surface. Since the moon lacks Earth's protective atmosphere, which vaporizes small asteroids on collision courses, even tiny rocks can make a dent on the lunar surface.

ESO has just released a stunning new image of the vast cloud known as the Cat's Paw Nebula or NGC 6334. This complex region of gas and dust, where numerous massive stars are born, lies near the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, and is heavily obscured by intervening dust clouds.

Few objects in the sky have been as well named as the Cat's Paw Nebula, a glowing gas cloud resembling the gigantic pawprint of a celestial cat out on an errand across the Universe. British astronomer John Herschel first recorded NGC 6334 in 1837 during his stay in South Africa. Despite using one of the largest telescopes in the world at the time, Herschel seems to have only noted the brightest part of the cloud, seen here towards the lower left.

NGC 6334 lies about 5500 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion) and covers an area on the sky slightly larger than the full Moon. The whole gas cloud is about 50 light-years across. The nebula appears red because its blue and green light are scattered and absorbed more efficiently by material between the nebula and Earth. The red light comes predominantly from hydrogen gas glowing under the intense glare of hot young stars.

While nothing with mass can move faster than the speed of light, scientists now think some weird, faster-than-light currents may be the powerhouse for fast-spinning stars.

The idea may sound heretical to one of most deeply held tenets in physics, which states that the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit.

But the new proposal squeaks by on a loophole in that rule, which insists only that no mass or information exceeds the speed limit.

In this case, a faster-than-light current would pass through certain rapidly spinning stars. This would cause positively charged atoms in the star to move in one direction and negatively charged atoms would move in another. Each individual particle would move slower than the speed of light, but the wave of movement would pass through the star at a rate more rapid than light speed.

A one-minute test appears to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder with an accuracy of 90%.

The test measures the tiny magnetic fluctuations that occur as groups of neurons fire in synchrony, even when subjects are not thinking of anything.

These "synchronous neural interactions" have already been shown to distinguish signals from subjects with a range of disorders including Alzheimer's.

The latest work is reported in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

The brain's signals are effectively a symphony of electrical impulses, which in turn drive tiny magnetic fields.

Researchers have measured and mapped these fields, in a pursuit known as magnetoencephalography, since the late 1960s. It has already been used to diagnose tinnitus, and can even predict when people will make mistakes.

Sunspot 1041 (a.k.a. "old sunspot 1039") is crackling with solar flares. Over the past few days, it has produced five M-class eruptions. Click here to play a movie of the latest, an M2-flare recorded by STEREO-B at 1756 GMT on Jan. 20th.

The ongoing sequence of flares signals a sharp upturn in solar activity. Before this week, the last time the sun produced even a single M-class solar flare was in March 2008--almost two years ago. M-class solar flares have a moderate effect on Earth. Mainly, they boost the ionization of Earth's upper atmosphere and disturb the propagation of terrestrial radio signals.

Scientists have developed a sound generator so powerful its shock waves can stun, and even kill people.

Another group of researchers have developed another unusual application for sound: a method of "acoustic levitation" that could help maintain colonies on Mars or the moon by using high-pitched sound waves to remove alien dust.

Wired explains,

Blasting a high-pitched noise from a tweeter into a pipe that focuses the sound waves can create enough pressure to lift troublesome alien dust off surfaces, according to a study published January in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Cambridge, Massachusetts - For decades, astronomers have analyzed the impact that asteroids could have on Earth. New research by MIT Professor of Planetary Science Richard Binzel examines the opposite scenario: that Earth has considerable influence on asteroids - and from a distance much larger than previously thought. The finding helps answer an elusive, decades-long question about where most meteorites come from before they fall to Earth and also opens the door to a new field study of asteroid seismology.

By analyzing telescopic measurements of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), or asteroids that come within 30 million miles of Earth, Binzel has determined that if an NEA travels within a certain range of Earth, roughly one-quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon, it can experience a "seismic shake" strong enough to bring fresh material called "regolith" to its surface. These rarely seen "fresh asteroids" have long interested astronomers because their spectral fingerprints, or how they reflect different wavelengths of light, match 80 percent of all meteorites that fall to Earth, according to a paper by Binzel appearing in the Jan. 21 issue of Nature. The paper suggests that Earth's gravitational pull and tidal forces create these seismic tremors.

Ice Age climate records from an Arizona stalagmite link the Southwest's winter precipitation to temperatures in the North Atlantic, according to new research.

The finding is the first to document that the abrupt changes in Ice Age climate known from Greenland also occurred in the southwestern U.S., said co-author Julia E. Cole of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"It's a new picture of the climate in the Southwest during the last Ice Age," said Cole, a UA professor of geosciences. "When it was cold in Greenland, it was wet here, and when it was warm in Greenland, it was dry here."

Although gravity has been successfully described with laws devised by Isaac Newton and later Albert Einstein, we still don't know how the fundamental properties of the universe combine to create the phenomenon.

Now one theoretical physicist is proposing a radical new way to look at gravity. Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, a prominent and internationally respected string theorist, argues that gravitational attraction could be the result of the way information about material objects is organised in space. If true, it could provide the fundamental explanation we have been seeking for decades.

Verlinde posted his paper to the pre-print physics archive earlier this month, and since then many physicists have greeted the proposal as promising. Nobel laureate and theoretical physicist Gerard 't Hooft of Utrecht University in the Netherlands stresses the ideas need development, but is impressed by Verlinde's approach. "[Unlike] many string theorists Erik is stressing real physical concepts like mass and force, not just fancy abstract mathematics," he says. "That's encouraging from my perspective as a physicist."