The nearby star Fomalhaut A hosts the most famous planetary system outside our own Solar System, containing both an exoplanet and a spectacular ring of comets. Today, an international team of astronomers announced a new discovery with the Herschel Space Observatory that has made this system even more intriguing; the least massive star of the three in the Fomalhaut system, Fomalhaut C, has now been found to host its own comet belt. The researchers published their results today in a letter to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Fomalhaut A is one of the brightest stars in the sky. Located 25 light years away in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus, it shines with a blue-white colour and is prominent from the southern hemisphere. From northern latitudes it appears low down in the south during autumn evenings. In contrast, Fomalhaut C, also named LP 876-10, is a dim red dwarf star invisible without a telescope, and was only found to be part of the Fomalhaut system in October this year.

Fomalhaut A's prominence made it a key target for the Hubble Space Telescope, which astronomers used to find the ring of comets, hints of and then a direct image of the planet, Fomalhaut b, in 2008 (astronomers use uppercase letters for stars, and lowercase letters are used for planets, so 'Fomalhaut b' is a planet, and 'Fomalhaut B' is the second star in the system).

The new discovery might hold the key to some of the mysteries of the Fomalhaut system. The lead author, Grant Kennedy, an astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, said, "It's very rare to find two comet belts in one system, and with the two stars 2.5 light years apart this is one of the most widely separated star systems we know of. It made us wonder why both Fomalhaut A and C have comet belts, and whether the belts are related in some way." To get a feeling for how far 2.5 light years is, light from the Sun takes only 8 minutes to get to the Earth, and 5.5 hours to get to Pluto, and the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is only 4 light years away.

Ripped from the pages of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, scientists have discovered a smoking caterpillar of sorts.

While this find may not push Alice's hookah-smoking insect from its psychedelic pedestal, this caterpillar is pretty snazzy, as it can use nicotine to ward off hungry wolf spiders.

The researchers found a gene in hornworm caterpillars that allows them to puff nicotine out through their spiracles (tiny holes in their sides), from the tobacco they consume, as a warning to their would-be predators. Researchers called this tactic "defensive halitosis." [Video - See the Smoking Caterpillars in Action]

"It's really a story about how an insect that eats a plant co-opts the plant for its own defense," said study researcher Ian Baldwin, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany.

But, said Baldwin, it's also an example of the importance of studying animals in a natural habitat rather than just in the lab.

The sun's magnetic field has fully reversed its polarity, marking the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24, which will be completed in 11 years time

The sun has "flipped upside down", with its north and south poles reversed to reach the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24, Nasa has said.

Now, the magnetic fields will once again started moving in opposite directions to begin the completion of the 22 year long process which will culminate in the poles switching once again.

Could television sets and computer monitors one day be replaced by visual displays created using mist? That's the goal of one Russian firm that has dubbed their unique displays "the next step in visual technology," according to CNN.

The company, Displair, and its creator, Max Kamanin, are working on next-gen visual displays that will feature "interactive images floating in mid-air," CNN's Arion McNicoll and Monique Rivalland wrote. Having grown weary of "electronic junk" such as TVs and monitors, Kamanin said that he wanted to create a way for users to view and interact with visual data without having to use actual physical objects.

To accomplish this, Displair is developing a method that essentially projects three-dimensional images onto sheets of mist, effectively creating what appears to be a hologram, McNicoll and Rivalland said. Tiny, moisture-less water drops are used to create an airstream, and the images will be projected onto those droplets, Kamanin explained.

Virginia, long known as tobacco country, has a new title: Corn king.

A farmer from near Richmond broke the 12-year-old Iowa record of 442 bushels of corn per acre with 454 bushels, nearly three times the average of 160 bushels nationally. It was declared the world record by the National Corn Growers Association.

"That kind of gets your heart," said Charles City grain farmer David Hula. "When you think of growing corn you sure don't think of Virginia," he added.

In a video about his new world record, Hula described how his combine yield calculator once hit 500 bushels per acre before averaging out at 454.

Even more shocking than his production is that it was all done organically and with special organic soil treatments to the farm that used to house a sand and gravel mine.

NASA reports that rare, electric blue noctilucent clouds have reappeared over the South Pole, where the clouds are often spotted for five to ten days every year. NASA calls the clouds "a great geophysical light bulb" that are visible during the darkest nights.

The clouds were spotted by NASA's AIM spacecraft, which observed a "vast bank" of the clouds that began on November 20 and has expanded to blanket the entire continent, creating a rippling mass of particles that represent the highest clouds formed on earth. The clouds "glow" because of their altitude - they reflect light cast from a horizon we can't see from the ground. But what causes these clouds to form so high above the surface of the earth?

Last year, atmospheric scientists from Hampton University published a study revealing the discovery of "meteor smoke" in the clouds. When meteors get pulverized in the atmosphere, they leave behind a trail of tiny bits floating in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. It turns out that these microscopic "meteor clouds" provide the building blocks for noctilucent clouds - water molecules gather on the specs of dust, creating ice crystals.

Palo Alto, California - Computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head.

The first commercial version of the new kind of computer chip is scheduled to be released in 2014. Not only can it automate tasks that now require painstaking programming - for example, moving a robot's arm smoothly and efficiently - but it can also sidestep and even tolerate errors, potentially making the term "computer crash" obsolete.

The new computing approach, already in use by some large technology companies, is based on the biological nervous system, specifically on how neurons react to stimuli and connect with other neurons to interpret information. It allows computers to absorb new information while carrying out a task, and adjust what they do based on the changing signals.

In coming years, the approach will make possible a new generation of artificial intelligence systems that will perform some functions that humans do with ease: see, speak, listen, navigate, manipulate and control. That can hold enormous consequences for tasks like facial and speech recognition, navigation and planning, which are still in elementary stages and rely heavily on human programming.

Designers say the computing style can clear the way for robots that can safely walk and drive in the physical world, though a thinking or conscious computer, a staple of science fiction, is still far off on the digital horizon.

"We're moving from engineering computing systems to something that has many of the characteristics of biological computing," said Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who directs the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, one of many research centers devoted to developing these new kinds of computer circuits.

Can the eyes of photographed crime victims help authorities spot their victimizers?

According to new research published Thursday in the journal PLOS One, high-resolution photographs can be "mined" for hidden information. Specifically, the authors said that photographs of faces can reveal enough visual information on bystanders to identify them.

In a small sampling of 32 study participants, test subjects were able to spot familiar faces reflected in the pupils of someone who was photographed 84% of the time, researchers said. When the reflected images were of unfamiliar people, observers were able to match the person to a second mug shot with 71% accuracy.

"Criminal investigations often use photographic evidence to identify subjects," wrote study authors Rob Jenkins, a psychologist at the University of York in England, and Christie Kerr of the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

"By zooming in on high-resolution face photographs, were were able to recover images of unseen bystanders from reflections in the subject's eyes.... For crimes in which the victims are photographed (e.g. hostage taking, child sex abuse), reflections in the eyes of the photographic subject could help to identify perpetrators," the authors wrote.

Randy Schekman says his lab will no longer send papers to Nature, Cell and Science as they distort scientific process

Leading academic journals are distorting the scientific process and represent a "tyranny" that must be broken, according to a Nobel prize winner who has declared a boycott on the publications.

Randy Schekman, a US biologist who won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine this year and receives his prize in Stockholm on Tuesday, said his lab would no longer send research papers to the top-tier journals, Nature, Cell and Science.

Schekman said pressure to publish in "luxury" journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.

The prestige of appearing in the major journals has led the Chinese Academy of Sciences to pay successful authors the equivalent of $30,000 (£18,000). Some researchers made half of their income through such "bribes", Schekman said in an interview.

• Scientists at South China Agricultural University in Guangdong Province say that the 10 piglets could help them develop cheaper drugs for humans

• Same technique used to create glow-in-the-dark rabbits in Turkey earlier this year, where they are now working to produce fluorescent sheep

Chinese scientists have created the world's first glow-in-the-dark pigs that emit a fluorescent green light.

The piglets acquired their bizarre ability to glow under 'black' or UVA light after their embryos were injected with DNA from a jellyfish.

Experts claim that the 10 young animals should live as long as any other pig and that the findings could help develop cheaper drugs for humans.