After many delays that disappointed space fans around the U.S., NASA finally managed to launch its mission early Thursday to, for the first time, create ephemeral, glowing clouds.

In other words, NASA created human-caused auroras, of sorts.

The suborbital sounding rocket took flight at 4:25 a.m. ET Thursday from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia and released its payload — which consisted of 10 vapor-filled canisters — shortly afterwards.

Once at altitude, those canisters produced green-blue and red artificial clouds that should allow scientists to learn more about how particles move through space.

An international group of researchers has dated a large volcanic eruption in Iceland to within a few months. The eruption, which is the oldest volcanic eruption to be precisely dated at high northern latitudes, occurred shortly before the first permanent human settlements were established, when parts of the now mostly treeless island were still covered with forest.

The team, which included volcanologists, climatologists, geographers and historians among others, used a combination of scientific and historical evidence to pinpoint the eruption date of the Katla volcano between late 822 CE and early 823 CE, decades before the earliest settlers arrived. Their results are reported in the journal Geology.

In a similar way to how fossils can be used to understand the development and evolution of life on Earth, different types of environmental evidence can be used to understand what the Earth's climate was like in the past and why. The 'fingerprints' contained in tree rings and ice cores help scientists to estimate past climatic conditions and extend our understanding of the interaction between humans and the environment hundreds and thousands of years back in time.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently completed a comprehensive study illustrating the effects of smartphones on the human brain. What they found was that 'smart' phones actually make us dumb.

According to the study, Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity, having a smartphone around is a definitive way to lower our cognitive ability.

According to the study's authors, Adrian F. Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten W. Bos, results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity. Moreover, these cognitive costs are highest for those highest in smartphone dependence. We conclude by discussing the practical implications of this smartphone-induced brain drain for consumer decision-making and consumer welfare.

High up in the clear blue noontime sky, the sun appears to be much the same day-in, day-out, year after year.

But astronomers have long known that this is not true. The sun does change. Properly-filtered telescopes reveal a fiery disk often speckled with dark sunspots. Sunspots are strongly magnetized, and they crackle with solar flares—magnetic explosions that illuminate Earth with flashes of X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation. The sun is a seething mass of activity.

Until it's not. Every 11 years or so, sunspots fade away, bringing a period of relative calm.

"This is called solar minimum," says Dean Pesnell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. "And it's a regular part of the sunspot cycle."

The sun is heading toward solar minimum now. Sunspot counts were relatively high in 2014, and now they are sliding toward a low point expected in 2019-2020.

Dating back to the first century, scientists, philosophers and reporters have noted the occasional occurrence of "bright nights," when an unexplained glow in the night sky lets observers see distant mountains, read a newspaper or check their watch.

A new study accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, uses satellite data to present a possible explanation for these puzzling historical phenomena.

The authors suggest that when waves in the upper atmosphere converge over specific locations on Earth, it amplifies naturally occurring airglow, a faint light in the night sky that often appears green due to the activities of atoms of oxygen in the high atmosphere. Normally, people don't notice airglow, but on bright nights it can become visible to the naked eye, producing the unexplained glow detailed in historical observations.

Few, if any, people observe bright nights anymore due to widespread light pollution, but the new findings show that they can be detected by scientists and may still be noticeable in remote areas. Bright airglow can be a concern for astronomers, who must contend with the extra light while making observations with telescopes.

"Bright nights do exist, and they're part of the variability of airglow that can be observed with satellite instruments," said Gordon Shepherd, an aeronomer at York University in Toronto, Canada, and lead author of the new study.

A historical mystery

Historical accounts of bright nights go back centuries. Pliny the Elder described bright nights, saying, "The phenomenon commonly called 'nocturnal sun', i.e. a light emanating from the sky during the night, has been seen during the consulate of C. Caecilius and Cn. Papirius (~ 113 BCE), and many other times, giving an appearance of day during the night."

It's a classic conundrum: while rushing to get to an important meeting or appointment on time, you spot a stranger in distress. How do you decide whether to stop and help, or continue on your way?

A new study by neuroscientists at Duke and Stanford University sheds light on how the brain coordinates these complex decisions involving altruism and empathy. The answer lies in the way multiple areas of the brain collaborate to produce the decision, rather than just one area or another making the call.

"The brain is more than just the sum of its individual parts," said Jana Schaich Borg, assistant research professor in the Social Science Research Institute and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke.

Using a technique that combines electrical monitoring of brain activity with machine learning, the team was able to tune into the brain chatter of rats engaged in helping other rats.

Throughout its 4.5-billion-year history, Earth has been repeatedly pummelled by space rocks that have caused anything from an innocuous splash in the ocean to species annihilation.

When the next big impact will be, nobody knows.

But the pressure is on to predict—and intercept—its arrival.

"Sooner or later we will get... a minor or major impact," Rolf Densing, who heads the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, told AFP ahead of International Asteroid Day on Friday.

It may not happen in our lifetime, he said, but "the risk that Earth will get hit in a devastating event one day is very high."

This is new to me. Brian Josephson is a Welsh physicist and 1973 Nobel laureate who estimates his confidence in intelligent design at about 80 percent. It comes up on in an interview with host Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the PBS series Closer to Truth. Click [here] to go there.

Given the choice between ID, theistic evolution, and unguided or "random" evolution, Dr. Josephson opts for intelligent design:

I believe that intelligence may play a role in how evolution has occurred. One of the big mistakes of those who attack intelligent design is to regard evolution and God as mutually exclusive, so they say that someone who believes in intelligent design doesn't believe in evolution, but that's not the case. Also, I'd say science has disappeared into something political, really, as the statement that "creationism disguised as science" is a totally false view of what's happened.

He distinguishes between ID and Young Earth Creationism, saying that while ID proponents may hold religious beliefs, those do not determine their scientific conclusions:

We may have these [religious] beliefs but let's see what science can tell us, and that's what intelligent design is, it isn't "creationism in disguise" at all.

Physicists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are seeing an everyday phenomenon in a new light.

By focusing laser light to a brightness one billion times greater than the surface of the sun - the brightest light ever produced on Earth - the physicists have observed changes in a vision-enabling interaction between light and matter.

Those changes yielded unique X-ray pulses with the potential to generate extremely high-resolution imagery useful for medical, engineering, scientific and security purposes. The team's findings, detailed June 26 in the journal Nature Photonics, should also help inform future experiments involving high-intensity lasers.

Donald Umstadter and colleagues at the university's Extreme Light Laboratory fired their Diocles Laser at helium-suspended electrons to measure how the laser's photons - considered both particles and waves of light - scattered from a single electron after striking it.

Under typical conditions, as when light from a bulb or the sun strikes a surface, that scattering phenomenon makes vision possible. But an electron - the negatively charged particle present in matter-forming atoms - normally scatters just one photon of light at a time. And the average electron rarely enjoys even that privilege, Umstadter said, getting struck only once every four months or so.

Though previous laser-based experiments had scattered a few photons from the same electron, Umstadter's team managed to scatter nearly 1,000 photons at a time. At the ultra-high intensities produced by the laser, both the photons and electron behaved much differently than usual.

"When we have this unimaginably bright light, it turns out that the scattering - this fundamental thing that makes everything visible - fundamentally changes in nature," said Umstadter, the Leland and Dorothy Olson Professor of physics and astronomy.

NASA's Opportunity rover has been busy examining the edge of a crater on the desolate Red Planet that scientists think may have once been the site of an ancient lake.

Opportunity landed on Earth's nearest neighbor 13 years ago and has been scouring the planet for signs of life ever since, despite being hampered by numerous technical problems.

Since 2011, the rover has been investigating sites near a large crater, some 22 kilometers (13.6 miles) across, known as Endeavour. Earlier in June, Opportunity found rocks at the edge of the crater's rim crest above Perseverance Valley.