The aptly named mousear cress may respond to caterpillar munching sounds. Plants have long been known to react to changes in their environment, and may respond to light, temperature, and touch.

But are they listening too?

For the Arabidopsis plant, the answer is a loud and clear "yes."

The distinct, high-amplitude vibrations produced by a cabbage butterfly caterpillar munching on a leaf of this flowering mustard plant, commonly called mousear cress, throws its defenses into high gear, according to a study published in Oecologia this month by two researchers at the University of Missouri.

The study, which combined audio and chemical analysis, is the first to find evidence that plants respond to an ecologically relevant sound in the environment, said Heidi Appel, a senior research scientist in the Division of Plant Sciences at Missouri.

The Arecibo Observatory has captured one of the most fleeting, mysterious and rare deep-space events - a so-called "fast radio burst" (FRB) that lasted a mere three one-thousandths of a second. Cornell, McGill University and other astronomers report this peculiar event today (July 10) in the Astrophysical Journal.

Until now, the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, had discovered all five previously known FRBs. This breakneck burst was found Nov. 2, 2012, and not formally reported until this paper, as astronomers needed to verify its authenticity and to rule out cosmic noise.

"It was a single pulse - additional observations of the same direction on the sky have shown nothing," said James Cordes, Cornell professor of astronomy and an author on the paper. "The nature of these bursts had been in doubt until recently, and the discovery at Arecibo cements the case that they are astrophysical, rather than some unique form of radio interference at Parkes."

Every now and then a scholarly journal retracts an article because of errors or outright fraud. In academic circles, and sometimes beyond, each retraction is a big deal.

Now comes word of a journal retracting 60 articles at once.

The reason for the mass retraction is mind-blowing: A "peer review and citation ring" was apparently rigging the review process to get articles published.

You've heard of prostitution rings, gambling rings and extortion rings. Now there's a "peer review ring."

The publication is the Journal of Vibration and Control (JVC). It publishes papers with names like "Hydraulic engine mounts: a survey" and "Reduction of wheel force variations with magnetorheological devices."

The field of acoustics covered by the journal is highly technical:

Analytical, computational and experimental studies of vibration phenomena and their control. The scope encompasses all linear and nonlinear vibration phenomena and covers topics such as: vibration and control of structures and machinery, signal analysis, aeroelasticity, neural networks, structural control and acoustics, noise and noise control, waves in solids and fluids and shock waves.

JVC is part of the SAGE group of academic publications.

One of the world's deepest earthquakes was also a rare supersonic quake, upending ideas about where these unusual earthquakes strike.

Only six supersonic (or supershear) earthquakes have ever been identified, all in the last 15 years. Until now, they all showed similar features, occurring relatively near the Earth's surface and on the same kind of fault. But last year, a remarkably super-fast and super-deep earthquake hit below Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, breaking the pattern.

"This was very surprising," said Zhongwen Zhan, lead author of the study, published today (July 10) in the journal Science. "It's not only deep, it's supershear, and it's also quite small."

The weird earthquake struck May 24, 2013, about 398 miles (642 kilometers) beneath the Sea of Okhotsk offshore of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The magnitude-6.7 quake was an aftershock to the largest deep earthquake on record, a magnitude 8.3 that also hit May 24.

Scientists using data from NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft have discovered part of the outer layer of the Sun that is sending out modestly energetic subatomic particles called fast neutrons.

MESSENGER's close proximity to the Sun - the spacecraft orbits Mercury at a distance as close as 28 million miles from the Sun, compared to Earth's 93 million miles - allowed instruments to detect solar neutrons as they flowed past Mercury into space, according to a paper in Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

"To understand all the processes on the Sun we look at as many different particles coming from the Sun as we can - photons, electrons, protons, neutrons, gamma rays - to gather different kinds of information," said David Lawrence of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, the first author on the paper. "Closer to Earth we can observe charged particles from the Sun, but analyzing them can be a challenge as their journey is affected by magnetic fields."

Working with a gene that plays a critical role in HIV infection, University of Maryland researchers have discovered that some human genes have an alternate set of operating instructions written into their protein-making machinery. The alternate instructions can quickly alter the proteins' contents, functions and ability to survive.

This phenomenon, known as programmed ribosomal frameshifting, was discovered in viruses in 1985. But the UMD study, published online July 9, 2014 in the journal Nature, is the first to show that a human gene uses programmed ribosomal frameshifting to change how it assembles proteins, said senior author Jonathan Dinman, UMD professor of cell biology and molecular genetics.

In the immune system-related gene that Dinman and his colleagues studied, programmed ribosomal frameshifting triggers a process the body can use to eliminate some immune system molecules, thereby reining in potentially harmful side effects such as fever, inflammation and organ failure. The discovery could lead to better treatments for AIDS, allergies and rejection of transplanted organs, Dinman said.

"This has useful implications in situations where you want to shut down the immune response in one part of the body but not in another, or shut down one facet of the immune response," Dinman said. "It could lead to very specific therapies without side effects."

The ribosome, the protein factory in every living cell, gathers amino acids and assembles them into protein chains to make almost anything the cell needs. A strand of ribonucleic acid, or messenger RNA, is the template.

Each amino acid is represented by a group of three molecules called nucleotides; each triad is called a codon.

Specialized molecules called transfer RNAs "read" each codon and deliver the matching amino acids to the ribosome for assembly. Some codons act as stop signs, instructing the ribosome to release the finished protein chain.

Russia has launched the ecologically clean Angara rocket from the Plesetsk military сosmodrome in Russia's north on the second try. It is the first space booster designed in Russia from a scratch since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A Ministry of Defense statement says that the launch of Angara 1.2PP conducted by Russia's Airspace Defense troops has been a success.

"After the 21st minute from launch the second stage of the rocket with a full-scale mock-up payload has arrived to Kura range in the Kamchatka Peninsula, some 5,700km from the point of launch," Colonel Aleksey Zolotukhin, an official representative of Aerospace Defense command, told ITAR-TASS.

The asteroid 2014 MF6 was discovered (at magnitude ~17.0) on 2014, June 23.3 by Catalina Sky Survey (MPC code 703) with a 0.68-m Schmidt + CCD.

According to the preliminay orbit, 2014 MF6 is an Apollo type asteroid. This class of asteroids are defined by having semi-major axes greater than that of the Earth (> 1 AU) but perihelion distances less than the Earth's aphelion distance (q < 1.017 AU). It is also flagged as a "Potentially Hazardous Asteroid". PHA are asteroids larger than approximately 100m that might have threatening close approaches to the Earth (they can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU).

2014 MF6 has an estimated size of 190 m - 420 m (based on the object's absolute magnitude H=20.7) and it will have a close approach with Earth at about 9.1 LD (Lunar Distances = ~384,000 kilometers) or 0.0233 AU (1 AU = ~150 million kilometers) at 1939 UT on 2014, July 09. This asteroid will reach the peak magnitude ~15.3 on the period from 06 to 09 July 2014.

We performed some follow-up measurements of this object on 2014, July 09.4, remotely from the Q62 iTelescope network (Siding Spring, AU) through a 0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD + focal reducer). Below you can see our image taken with the asteroid at magnitude ~15.3 and moving at ~ 40.43 "/min. Click on the image below to see a bigger version. North is up, East is to the left (the asteroid is trailed in the image due to its fast speed).
Here you can see a short animation showing the movement of 2014 MF6 (three consecutive 60-second exposure). East is up, North is to the right.

Behind the Big Dipper is something pumping out a lot of extremely high-energy cosmic rays, a new study says. And as astronomers try to learn more about the nature of these emanations - maybe black holes, maybe supernovas - newer work hints that it could be related to how the universe is structured.

It appears that the particles come from spots in the cosmos where matter is densely packed, such as in "superclusters" of galaxies, the researchers stated, adding this is promising progress for tracking down the source of the cosmic rays.

"This puts us closer to finding out the sources - but no cigar yet," stated University of Utah physicist Gordon Thomson, co-principal investigator for the Telescope Array that performed the observations. "All we see is a blob in the sky, and inside this blob there is all sorts of stuff - various types of objects - that could be the source," he added. "Now we know where to look."

Streaking across the sky at more than 50 kilometers per second at atmospheric heights of more than a 90 kilometers high, researchers using the first station of University of New Mexico's Long Wavelength Array (LWA) saw something new that had never been seen before; something that could hold a treasure trove of new information in the world of physics.

The first station of the LWA, known as LWA1, is a unique telescope that consists of a collection of 256 dipoles combined into one massive array with a collective-area of a 100-meter dish. The LWA1, is a highly sensitive telescope that can create images of the entire sky. It allows researchers to keep eyes on the whole sky day and night, probing a relatively unexplored region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Within six months of turning LWA1 on, UNM Department of Physics Professor Greg Taylor and his team got the all sky imaging up and running. Shortly thereafter, they started to search for transients, brief pulses of radio waves coming from the sky. Ken Obenberger, a UNM graduate student, and colleagues searched for transients in more than 11,000 hours of all-sky images from the LWA at frequencies between 25 and 75 MHz. In this data he identified 49 long (30 seconds or longer) transients.