A sample of a bizarre crystal once considered unnatural may have arrived on Earth 15,000 years ago, having hitched a ride on a meteorite, a new study suggests.

The research strengthens the evidence that this strange "quasicrystal" is extraterrestrial in origin.

The pattern of atoms in a quasicrystal falls short of the perfectly regular arrangement found in crystals. Until January, all known quasicrystals were man-made.

"Many thought it had to be that way, because they thought quasicrystals are too delicate, too prone to crystallization, to form naturally," study researcher Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University told LiveScience at the time.

Then researchers announced the presence of a natural quasicrystal in a meteorite found in the Koryak Mountains of Russia. That meteorite was being kept in a museum in Italy. Now, on an expedition to the site where it was found in Russia, Steinhardt and his colleagues now have found more natural samples of quasicrystals for analysis.

An international team of scientists working with Disney have figured out how twin rainbows form while trying to enhance rainbow images in computer graphics.
Twin rainbows are rarer than double-rainbows - separate concentric arcs - instead appearing as two arcs splitting from a single origin.

"Initially the goal was to better depict rainbows for animated movies and video games and we thought rainbows were pretty well understood," said study co-author Wojciech Jarosz at Disney Research, Zürich, in a press release.

"Along the way we discovered that science and current simulation methods simply could not explain some types of rainbows," he added. "This mystery really fueled our investigations."

The researchers simulated rainbows, while looking at the effect of drop shape, and interactions with light both as a particle and a wave. They found that this rare optical phenomenon arises due to different-sized raindrops, and were also able to create others like supernumerary bows.

"Previous simulations have assumed that raindrops are spherical," Jarosz explained. "While this can easily explain the rainbow and even the double rainbow, it cannot explain the twinned rainbow."

As rain falls, air resistance causes the droplets to flatten, especially if they are large, producing hamburger-shaped drops known as "burgeroids."

Microbes used to treat human waste might also generate enough electricity to power whole sewage plants, scientists hope.

The technology is based on the relatively new science of electro-microbiology that is finding uses for the discovery that certain microbes can generate an electrical current outside their own cells.

In the context of sewage treatment, they would purify waste water by consuming the organic matter in it and use that energy to generate a current that can be harvested and stored.

Co-author of the research, published in the U.S. journal Science, Bruce Logan of Pennsylvania State University, compared the process he is developing to the movie The Matrix, where humans are hooked up to machines to provide electrical power.

"In our article we describe a process which is somewhat like that but what we do is use certain micro-organisms which can be connected to devices to generate an electrical current that can be used to generate power," Logan said.

High, cold cloud tops with bitter cold temperatures are indicators that there's a lot of strength in the uplift of air within a tropical cyclone. NASA's Aqua satellite passed by Hurricane Gilma and saw a concentrated area of very cold cloud tops.
NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Hurricane Gilma on August 9 at 5:53 a.m. EDT. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured an infrared image of the cloud temperatures that showed the strongest storms and heaviest rainfall were wrapped around the storm's center. Cloud top temperatures in that area were as cold as -63 Fahrenheit (-52 Celsius), indicating very strong thunderstorms (a tropical cyclone is made up of hundreds of thunderstorms), with potentially heavy rainfall. The higher a cloud top extends into the atmosphere, the colder it is, and that data is picked up by the AIRS instrument onboard the Aqua satellite.

On August 9, 2012 at 11 a.m. EDT (8 a.m. PDT) Gilma's maximum sustained winds are near 75 mph (120 kmh), down from 80 mph (130 kmh) which makes Gilma a category one hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane wind scale. Gilma was far from land and its center was about 715 miles (1,155 km) southwest of the southern tip of Baja California, near latitude 16.2 north and longitude 118.6 west. Gilma is moving toward the west-northwest near 7 mph (11 kmh). Forecasters expect Gilma to turn to the northwest because a ridge of high pressure that has been guiding it is now weakening.

NASA'S Project Morpheus lander, an experimental vehicle designed with a view toward future U.S. space missions beyond Earth's orbit, crashed and burst into flames at the Kennedy Space Center in central Florida on Thursday.

During a so-called autonomous free-flight test, NASA said the vehicle lifted off the ground successfully but "then experienced a hardware component failure, which prevented it from maintaining stable flight."

No one was injured in the accident, which followed nearly a year of testing on Morpheus at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. But NASA TV footage showed the space capsule engulfed almost totally in flames after the crash, with little left to salvage.

Astronomers at the University of Zürich and the ETH Zürich, together with other international researchers, have found large amounts of invisible "dark matter" near the Sun. Their results are inconsistent with the theory that the Milky Way Galaxy is surrounded by a massive "halo" of dark matter, but this is the first study of its kind to use a method rigorously tested against mock data from high quality simulations. The authors also find tantalizing hints of a new dark matter component in our Galaxy.

Dark matter was first proposed by the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s. He found that clusters of galaxies were filled with a mysterious dark matter that kept them from flying apart. At nearly the same time, Jan Oort in the Netherlands discovered that the density of matter near the Sun was nearly twice what could be explained by the presence of stars and gas alone. In the intervening decades, astronomers developed a theory of dark matter and structure formation that explains the properties of clusters and galaxies in the Universe, but the amount of dark matter in the solar neighbourhood has remained more mysterious. For decades after Oort's measurement, studies found 3-6 times more dark matter than expected. Then last year new data and a new method claimed far less than expected. The community was left puzzled, generally believing that the observations and analyses simply weren't sensitive enough to perform a reliable measurement.

For years, many scientists had thought that plate tectonics existed nowhere in our solar system but on Earth. Now, a UCLA scientist has discovered that the geological phenomenon, which involves the movement of huge crustal plates beneath a planet's surface, also exists on Mars.

"Mars is at a primitive stage of plate tectonics. It gives us a glimpse of how the early Earth may have looked and may help us understand how plate tectonics began on Earth," said An Yin, a UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences and the sole author of the new research.

Yin made the discovery during his analysis of satellite images from a NASA spacecraft known as THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) and from the HIRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. He analyzed about 100 satellite images -- approximately a dozen were revealing of plate tectonics.

Yin has conducted geologic research in the Himalayas and Tibet, where two of Earth's seven major plates divide.

The ancient Martian crater where the Curiosity rover landed looks strikingly similar to the Mojave Desert in California with its looming mountains and hanging haze, scientists said Wednesday.

"The first impression that you get is how Earth-like this seems looking at that landscape," said chief scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology.

Overnight, the car-size rover poked its head out for the first time since settling in Gale Crater, peered around and returned a flood of black-and-white pictures that will be stitched into a panorama.

It provided the best view so far of its destination since touching down Sunday night after nailing an intricate choreography. During the last few seconds, a rocket-powered spacecraft hovered as cables lowered Curiosity to the ground.

The cameras recorded the cats' outdoor activities and showed that they are hunting down more critters than expected

A new report gives new meaning to the old phrase, "Look what the cat dragged in."

Researchers from the University of Georgia recently took a deeper look into the predatory lives of house cats by putting cameras around their necks. About 60 cat owners in Athens, Georgia enlisted their pet cats for the study.

For about four to six hours per day for seven to 10 days, pet owners would place kitty cameras, which were made by the National Geographic CritterCam team, around their cats' necks and let them free outside. During that period of time outdoors, the camera would record all of the cats' activities. Later, the cats would be let back in and owners would download the footage.

According to the National Geographic CritterCam team, which makes mobile data gathering systems to record animal behavior, these kitty cameras were the smallest they've created to date.

The study found that only 30 percent of the 74 million U.S. house cats prey on smaller animals, but this 30 percent is taking part in much more outdoor hunting than previously thought. According to study leader Kerrie Anne Loyd, previous numbers were likely lower because "they didn't include the animals that cats ate or left behind."

While the study didn't give a total number of prey killed by the house cats, about 49 percent of critters killed by house cats were left for dead, 30 percent were eaten and just under 25 percent were brought home.

Of the total critters killed, 41 percent were lizards, snakes, and frogs; 25 percent were mammals like chipmunks; 20 percent were insects and worms, and 12 percent were birds. In fact, house cats are one of the reasons that one in three American bird species are becoming endangered.

In addition to killing prey, the house cats were taking part in dangerous activities like crossing roads, playing in storm drains, entering crawl spaces and eating/drinking things they found.

This weekend, the Perseid meteor shower will be at its peak. While this year's light show probably won't match the 2009 shower, when watchers could see up to 173 shooting stars an hour, the Perseids are a celestial spectacle well worth packing off to somewhere away from the glare of city lights.

The Perseids take their name from Perseus, the constellation nestled between Cassiopeia and Taurus. The meteors appear to originate from a point within Perseus, but they are actually dust shaken off from the tail of the comet Swift-Tuttle.

Swift-Tuttle makes a complete pass within its orbit every 133 years, but its dust trail hangs around for much longer. As Earth passes through the residual dust cloud, the tiny particles that hit our atmosphere streak across the sky. Usually these meteors burn up, but some make it to the ground as meteorites.