Facebook's new unified e-mail and its implementation is causing unwanted changes to users' address books; worse, the changes have gone unnoticed by users and vital communication is being lost.

An alarming number of people are reporting that the new e-mail address Facebook forced on users this week is changing their address books while intercepting and losing unknown amounts of e-mail.

Facebook users say contacts' e-mail addresses on phones and personal devices have been altered without their consent -- and their e-mail communication is being redirected elsewhere, and lost.

Obviously frustrated by the headline-grabbing news of a quasi-potential Higgs boson discovery, the sun exploded with a headline-grabber of its own this morning.

At 10:52 UT, active region 1515 (AR1515) unleashed a M5.6-class solar flare bathing the Earth's atmosphere with X-ray and extreme ultraviolet radiation. At that energy, the flare wasn't that far from becoming an X-class flare -- the most powerful variety of solar eruption.

The flare's radiation isn't harmful to us on the ground, but it did have a dramatic impact on the upper atmosphere, sending waves of ionization through the ionosphere, over 60 kilometers (37 miles) above the surface. This ionization can trigger sudden ionospheric disturbances (or SIDs for short) that can severely impact global communications.

Perhaps the greatest and most fiercely contested race in modern science is the search for dark matter.

Physicists cannot see this stuff, hence the name. However, they infer its existence because they can see its gravitational influence on the structure of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. It implies that the universe is filled with dark matter, much more of it than the visible matter we can see

If they're right, dark matter must fill our galaxy and our Solar System. At this very instant, we ought to be ploughing our way through a dense sea of dark matter as the Sun moves towards the constellation of Cygnus as it orbits the galactic centre.

That's why various groups are racing to detect this stuff using expensive detectors in deep underground caverns, which shield them from radiation that would otherwise swamp the signal.

These experiments are looking for the unique signature that dark matter is thought to produce as a result of the Earth's passage around the Sun. During one half of the year, the dark matter forms headwind as the Earth ploughs into it; for the other half of the year, it forms a tailwind.

Indeed, a couple of groups claim to have found exactly this diurnal signature, although the results are highly controversial and seem to be in direct conflict with other groups who say they have not seen it.

There's a a straightforward way to make better observations that should solve this conundrum. The dark matter signal should vary, not just over the course of a year, but throughout the day as the Earth rotates.

The dark matter headwind should be coming from the direction of Cygnus, so a suitable detector should see the direction change as the Earth rotates each day.

There's a problem, however: nobody has built a directional dark matter detector.

Big sunspot AR1515 erupted on July 2nd at 10:52 UT, producing an M5.6-class solar flare that almost crossed the threshold into X-territory. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash. A pulse of x-rays and UV radiation from the flare illuminated Earth's upper atmosphere, producing waves of ionization over Europe. Such waves alter the propagation of low-frequency radio transmissions. In Lofoten, Norway, Rob Stammes recorded the ionospheric disturbance using a 60 kHz receiver: data.

Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have gathered enough evidence to show that the long-sought "God Particle" answering fundamental questions about the universe almost certainly does exist.

But after decades of work and billions of dollars spent, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, aren't quite ready to say they've "discovered" the particle.

Instead, experts familiar with the research at CERN's vast complex on the Swiss-French border say that the massive data they have obtained will essentially show the footprint of the key particle known as the Higgs boson - all but proving it exists - but doesn't allow them to say it has actually been glimpsed.

It appears to be a fine distinction.

It is the baffling question which has perplexed the world's greatest scientific minds and even eluded great thinkers like Aristotle.

But now scientists have become so infuriated about the mystery of why hot water freezes faster than cold, that they have put up a cash reward to find the answer.

The Royal Society of Chemistry has offered £1,000 for a member of the public to come up with a convincing explanation for the phenomenon, which has mystified humankind.

The scientific problem, which has become known as the Mpemba effect, has also defeated Francis Bacon and René Descartes.

The problem got its modern name in 1968, when Tanzanian student Erasto Mpemba posed the question to professors visiting his school.

Mr Mpemba, who had been studying the problem for five years, had asked Professor Denis Osborne, of Dar es Salaam University: 'If you take two similar containers with equal volumes of water, one at 35C and the other at 100C, and put them in a refrigerator, the one that started at 100C freezes first. Why?'

Analytical results from the longest sediment core that has ever been drilled in the terrestrial areas of the Arctic have shown temperatures that were previously considered impossible for the Arctic Circle. In addition, a notable correlation of the warm periods in the Arctic with large melting events in Antarctica points to previously unknown interactions between the Polar Regions.

The results come from a sediment core that was drilled in 2009 from the lake El'gygytgyn in the extreme northeastern of Siberia as part of an elaborate winter expedition. The lake was formed 3.6 million years ago when a meteorite impact created a crater 18 kilometers in diameter. The meteorite crashed into one of the few regions in the Arctic, which were not reached by glaciation during the ice ages. As a consequence, the sedimentary sequence is gapless and almost completely undisturbed. During the past 2.8 million years extreme warm periods occurred in the Arctic at irregular intervals.

Poisonous seawater probably may have driven two of the earth's best-known mass extinctions. The origins of the two toxins are worlds apart, but one of them is making a comeback.

We all know that an asteroid the size of Mt. Everest ended the reign of the dinosaurs when it struck Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago. And we've heard all about the resulting firestorms, darkness and deadly gases that made trouble for life on land.

Geochemist Lee Kump of Penn State University says something more was going on in the oceans, where 93 percent of nannoplankton - the base of the marine food web - went extinct. Dust and smoke kicked up by the asteroid would have throttled photosynthesis for several months, but it took some 270,000 years for plankton populations to bounce back.

Even in the Northern Hemisphere, which suffered a direct hit, recovery should have been much faster. In 2010 Kump and some of his Penn State colleagues explained this lag by proposing that toxic metals from the asteroid contaminated the oceans. When the super-heated debris from the disintegrating space rock hit the ocean, metals such as copper, chromium, aluminum, mercury and lead would have dissolved into the seawater at plankton-lethal levels, the team asserted. It wouldn't take trace metal concentrations higher than a few parts per billion to inhibit plankton recovery.

Kump is quick to point out that errant asteroids aren't the only way to poison the oceans. As he reminded the audience at his plenary talk Thursday at the 2012 Goldschmidt Conference in Montréal, Earth is perfectly capable of concocting a toxic brew all on its own.

Last time I said I was going to talk about how much your "glorious leaders" really hate and despise you and how they are plotting your deaths while most of you are so screwed up that you not only do not see this, you actually dance blithely toward disaster for yourselves and your children. Well, I'm going to get there, but first, I want to tie up a few loose ends and reiterate a couple of points.

As I mentioned in my previous article on this topic, the Discovery Channel special Super Comet - After the Impact, places the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs in a modern setting, using the same type of cometary body assumed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, the same size, same impact location, and utilized all the computer modeling they have done on this past event to try to show what might happen (and to show what they think happened then).

Studies of the history of the Earth via various scientific methods show us that there are relatively long periods of "evolution" punctuated by rapid, overwhelming changes we call catastrophes. Many scientists have noted the periodicity of these punctuational events. What no one seems to know for sure is the mechanism that induces these definitely periodic catastrophes.

It is suggested that the periodicity of these events relates to galactic cycles and there is good evidence for this view presented by Victor Clube in his book The Cosmic Winter. (You can really forget the nonsense going around about "Planet Nibiru" and "Project Camelot"). He suggests that galactic tides induct giant comets into our Solar system and it is their disintegration products which interact strongly and directly with the Earth with variable results at different (and very frequent!) periods which results in the variations in the geological record. Clube demonstrates that the breaking up of a giant comet produces a wide range of debris from objects 10 km across, to hundreds or thousands of 1 km sized bodies, to multiple swarms of sub-kilometer sized bodies. Many of these bodies have sooty, black surfaces making them almost impossible to see and many of them are in an orbit very similar to the Taurid meteor streams, though a few may be in an orbit rotated about 90 degrees. Clube posits that many (if not most or all) of the asteroids in the Solar system split from a giant comet (or many of them) thousands or tens of thousands of years ago, and it is the streams of debris that pose the most serious and immediate threats to our planet.

A mission to a Martian moon could return with alien life, according to experts at Purdue University, but don't expect the invasion scenario presented by summer blockbusters like "Men in Black 3" or "Prometheus."

"We are talking little green microbes, not little green men," said Jay Melosh, a distinguished professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences and physics and aerospace engineering at Purdue. "A sample from the moon Phobos, which is much easier to reach than the Red Planet itself, would almost surely contain Martian material blasted off from large asteroid impacts. If life on Mars exists or existed within the last 10 million years, a mission to Phobos could yield our first evidence of life beyond Earth."

Melosh led a team chosen by NASA's Planetary Protection Office to evaluate if a sample from Phobos could contain enough recent material from Mars to include viable Martian organisms. The study was commissioned to prepare for the failed 2011 Russian Phobos-Grunt mission, but there is continued international interest in a Phobos mission, he said. It will likely be a recurring topic as NASA reformulates its Mars Exploration Program.