Our weekly review of the Thunderbolts Picture of the Day, with new articles every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and "best of" every Tuesday and Thursday.


Monday: Touching Ground, by Rens van der Sluijs

Wednesday: Star Forces, by Stephen Smith

Friday: Why the Lower Corona of the Sun is Hotter than the Photosphere, by Dr. Donald E. Scott

Stephen Hawking might have just lost himself a bet. Again.

The famed physicist has written in a new paper that "there are no black holes" - despite being one of the minds behind modern black hole theory.

Hawking writes in his paper that the notion of an event horizon - a gravitational boundary beyond which no information about a black hole, or even light, can escape - doesn't actually exist.

Instead he writes that a black hole is instead marked by an "apparent horizon" - from which matter and energy can escape, though in a confused form compared to when they entered.

It has been around 30,000 years since the ancestors of modern-day humans are thought to have wiped out the ancient Neanderthals.

But new research shows that the extinct species could be taking revenge on us from beyond the grave by making us more vulnerable to potentially killer diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

Neanderthals and modern humans are thought to have co-existed for thousands of years and interbred, meaning Europeans now have roughly 2 per cent Neanderthal DNA.

The first whole human genome from the bones of a southern European who lived before farming shows he was blue-eyed, dark skinned, lactose-intolerant, and well equipped to fight diseases.

The discoveries about the 7,000-year-old Mesolithic ancestral European suggest the young man represents a transition that was still underway to create the lighter-skinned, milk-drinking people of more recent millenniums.

The genome of what's called the La Braña individual appears to have already acquired immunities to diseases that were thought to have been introduced to humans later, at the time when Europeans domesticated animals, which are thought to have transmitted the diseases to humans. The results were a surprise to the researchers who fully expected the man would have lighter skin and a more ancient set of immunity alleles, or groups of genes.

The cancer, which causes genital tumors in dogs and is spread by sexual contact, is 11,000 years old.

Canines are in a rare category when it comes to cancer: They and Tasmanian devils are the only two animals that can transmit it from one individual to another.

A new genetic study reveals that the dog form of the cancer, which causes genital tumors, is 11,000 years old - making it the oldest continuously living cancer.

Canines can also develop cancers that are akin to human cancers, but their transmissible cancer spreads when cells from one dog's tumor rub off during sexual contact and grow into a new tumor on the other animal. The study notes that the cancer originated in an ancient dog closest to the modern-day breeds of Alaskan malamutes and huskies.

We spoke with Elizabeth Murchison, the study's first author. She's a cancer geneticist at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the U.K. (This interview has been edited and condensed).

The story behind what may have been the biggest Internet failure in history involves an unlikely cast of characters, including a little-known company in a drab building in Wyoming and the world's most elite army of Internet censors a continent away in China.

On Tuesday, most of China's 500 million Internet users were unable to load websites for up to eight hours. Nearly every Chinese user and Internet company, including major services like Baidu and Sina.com, was affected.

Technology experts say China's own Great Firewall - the country's vast collection of censors and snooping technology used to control Internet traffic in and out of China - was most likely to blame, mistakenly redirecting the country's traffic to several sites normally blocked inside China, some connected to a company based in the Wyoming building.

The Chinese authorities put a premium on control. Using the Great Firewall, they police the Internet to smother any hint of antigovernment sentiment, sometimes jailing dissidents and journalists; they blacklist major websites like Facebook and Twitter; and they block access to media outlets like The New York Times and Bloomberg News for unfavorable coverage of the country's leaders.

Executive chairman says search company has 'complained at great length' to the US government over intrusion

Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has insisted he had no knowledge of the US National Security Agency's tapping of the company's data, despite having a sufficiently high security clearance to have been told.

He said that he and other members of the search company were outraged by the tapping carried out by the NSA and the UK's GCHQ - first revealed in the Guardian in June - and that they had "complained at great length" to the US government over the intrusion. Google had since begun encrypting internal traffic to prevent further spying, he said.

Speaking in a private session at the Guardian, Schmidt, 58, said: "I have the necessary clearances to have been told, as do other executives in the company, but none of us were briefed.

"Had we been briefed, we probably couldn't have acted on it, because we'd have known about it. I've declined briefings [from the US government] about this because I don't want to be constrained."

Stephen Hawking has produced a "mind-bending" new theory that argues black holes do not actually exist - at least not in the way we currently perceive them.

Instead, in his paper, Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes, Hawking proposes that black holes can exist without 'event horizons', the invisible cover believed to surround every black hole.

During a previous lecture, 'Into the Black Hole', Hawkins described an event horizon as the boundary of a black hole, "where gravity is just strong enough to drag light back, and prevent it escaping".

"Falling through the event horizon, is a bit like going over Niagara Falls in a canoe", he said. "If you are above the falls, you can get away if you paddle fast enough, but once you are over the edge, you are lost. There's no way back.

"As you get nearer the falls, the current gets faster. This means it pulls harder on the front of the canoe, than the back. There's a danger that the canoe will be pulled apart. It is the same with black holes."

But now, Hawking is proposing 'apparent horizons' could exist instead, which would only hold light and information temporarily before releasing them back into space in 'garbled form', Nature has reported.

The internationally-renowned theoretical physicist suggests that quantum mechanics and general relativity remain intact, but black holes do not have an event horizon to catch fire.

For the foreseeable future, humans in space still means human bodies in space. And human bodies are crappy, ungainly skin bags prone to self-destruct mechanisms like cancer, heart disease, and depression. Sci-fi often suggests ways around this, usually involving some flawless robot doctor or health fixit pod ready to diagnose and repair just like that. In the real world, however, we aren't much better up there than we are down here, perhaps worse. During 1968's Apollo VII mission, for example, all three astronauts came down with fierce head colds, forcing a dangerous helmetless reentry and effectively ending the astronaut careers of all three.

A 2012 study found that of 106 flights and 742 crewmembers, there were 29 cases of infectious diseases being transmitted aboard spacecraft. The illnesses ranged from head colds to fungal infections to gastroenteritis. Note that there is no bedrest with chicken noodle soup and Netflix available on a multi-million dollar space mission.

As far as space dangers go, illness doesn't get much attention, which is kinda strange given that one of the most distinct effects of microgravity on the human body are tanking immune systems. A 2012 piece in Time reports, "the immune system can go on the fritz in space: wounds heal more slowly; infection-fighting T-cells send signals less efficiently; bone marrow replenishes itself less effectively; killer cells - another key immune system player - fight less energetically." Meanwhile, many pathogens have an awesome time in space, growing stronger and increasing their resistance to antimicrobials. In particular, both herpes and staph have been shown to thrive in the gravity-free, hyper-sterile environment of a space vessel.

Cosmos. Earth. Man.

Four weeks ago I ordered the book "Cosmos. Earth. Man" by A. G. Parkhomov[1]. Two days ago it arrived from Moscow.

I was excited. I started reading it right away.... the last chapter first. Actually, I read the back cover first, so let me quote from that so you'll have an idea of where we might be going today.

Aleksandr Georgievich Parkhomov (Александр Георгиевич Пархомов) completed his education at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. He then worked at the Division of Radiation Physics of this institute. He directed the research group investigating of the properties of ultra-weak neutrinos at the Moscow Aviation Institute. He is Professor of the International Slavic Academy, Head of the Laboratory ''Rhythms and Fluctuations" of the Institute for Time Nature Explorations and author or co-author of more than 130 scientific publications.

Parkhomov's scientific career is very different from my own. He is mainly an experimental physicist, dealing first of all with facts and data and trying to understand them using the simplest possible explanations. Only when they fail would he then look for more sophisticated explanations. He has almost twice as many scientific publications as I do! And yet, in spite of these differences there is something that we both share: scientific curiosity that drives one to seek scientific explanations of the unexplained. That is what I was always looking for: the high-level scientific research into "paranormal" stuff. That is why I started reading his book from the last chapter, Ch. 4, entitled "Where physics is powerless". He has done what I always wanted to do (but never did): real, first-hand research, rather than just speculations.

The first three chapters of the book deal with those phenomena where physics still has something to say, some explanatory ability: all kinds of radiations and their strange properties, radioactivity, electronics, physical and chemical reactions of biological systems, noise, information, dark matter and dark energy, neutrinos etc.; all relatively normal. But the last chapter describes his experimental research into "psychic" phenomena. It also describes his conclusions.

So, let me start with a description of just one type of experiment that needed to be done at the early stage of this research, probably the least spectacular.