Nasa said in a bulletin on its website that while the rate of ammonia leaking from the section of the cooling system has increased the crew were in no danger.

Nasa has insisted that the crew of the International Space Station are safe despite a radiator leak in its power system.

The six-member crew of the space station, which is in orbit 370 km above the earth, reported seeing small white flakes floating away from an area outside the craft yesterday.

Mission Control used external cameras along with images captured by crew members to narrow down the leak's location.

Nasa said in a bulletin on its website that while the rate of ammonia leaking from the section of the cooling system has increased the crew were in no danger.

Ammonia runs through multiple radiator loops to cool the station's power system.

NASA said the leak is increasing from one previously leaking loop that can be bypassed if needed.

The water found on the moon, like that on Earth, came from small meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites in the first 100 million years or so after the solar system formed, researchers from Brown and Case Western Reserve universities and Carnegie Institution of Washington have found.

Evidence discovered within samples of moon dust returned by lunar crews of Apollo 15 and 17 dispels the theory that comets delivered the molecules.

The research is published online in Science Express today.

The discovery's telltale sign is found in the ratio of an isotopic form of hydrogen, called deuterium, to standard hydrogen. The ratio in the Earth's water and in water from specks of volcanic glass trapped in crystals within moon dust match the ratio found in the chondrites. The proportions are far different from those in comet water.

The moon is thought to have formed from a disc of debris left when a giant object hit the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, very early in Earth's history. Scientists have long assumed that the heat from an impact of that size would cause hydrogen and other volatile elements to boil off into space, meaning the moon must have started off completely dry. But recently, NASA spacecraft and new research on samples from the Apollo missions have shown that the moon actually has water, both on and beneath its surface.

As the sun rose over Australia on Friday morning, May 10th, the solar disk turned into a ring of fire. The day began with an annular solar eclipse:
Nicole Hollenbeck took the picture from inside the narrow path of annularity about 70km south of Newman, Australia. At the time, more than 95% of the sun's diameter was covered by the Moon.

In an annular eclipse the Moon is not quite big enough to cover the entire solar disk. A blinding ring of solar fire juts out around the Moon, overwhelming the sun's delicate corona. It may not be the same as totality, but annularity has a charm and beauty all its own. Browse the gallery for more images from the eclipse zone.

Brevard County - Kennedy Space Center, Florida - NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft has discovered a pair of stars that have taken over the title for the third-closest star system to the sun. The duo is the closest star system discovered since 1916.

Both stars in the new binary system are "brown dwarfs," which are stars that are too small in mass to ever become hot enough to ignite hydrogen fusion. As a result, they are very cool and dim, resembling a giant planet like Jupiter more than a bright star like the sun.

"The distance to this brown dwarf pair is 6.5 light-years - so close that Earth's television transmissions from 2006 are now arriving there," said Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a researcher in Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.

"It will be an excellent hunting ground for planets because the system is very close to Earth, which makes it a lot easier to see any planets orbiting either of the brown dwarfs."

The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

In fossil remnants of iron-loving bacteria, researchers of the Cluster of Excellence Origin and Structure of the Universe at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), found a radioactive iron isotope that they trace back to a supernova in our cosmic neighborhood. This is the first proven biological signature of a starburst on our Earth. The age determination of the deep-drill core from the Pacific Ocean showed that the supernova must have occurred about 2.2 million years ago, roughly around the time when the modern human developed.

Most of the chemical elements have their origin in core collapse supernovae. When a star ends its life in a gigantic starburst, it throws most of its mass into space. The radioactive iron isotope Fe-60 is produced almost exclusively in such supernovae. Because its half-life of 2.62 million years is short compared to the age of our solar system, no supernova iron should be present on Earth. Therefore, any discovery of Fe-60 on Earth would indicate a supernova in our cosmic neighborhood. In the year 2004, Fe-60 was discovered on Earth for the first time in a ferromanganese crust obtained from the floor of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Its geological dating puts the event around 2.2 million years ago.

So-called magnetotactic bacteria live within the sediments of Earth's oceans, close to the water-sediment interface. They make within their cells hundreds of tiny crystals of magnetite (Fe3O4), each approximately 80 nanometers in diameter. The magnetotactic bacteria obtain the iron from atmospheric dust that enters the ocean. Nuclear astrophysicist Shawn Bishop from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen conjectured, therefore, that Fe-60 should also reside within those magnetite crystals produced by magnetotactic bacteria extant at the time of the supernova interaction with our planet. These bacterially produced crystals, when found in sediments long after their host bacteria have died, are called "magnetofossils."

A few heavy, unstable atoms have pear-shaped nuclei, research suggests.

The lopsided nuclei, described today (May 8) in the journal Nature, could be good candidates for researchers looking for new types of physics beyond the reigning explanation for the bits of matter that make up the universe (called the Standard Model), said study author Peter Butler, a physicist at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom.

Odd shapes

Whereas most atoms have spherical or football-shaped nuclei, atoms with pear-shaped nuclei at their centers have been predicted to exist. But finding them proved difficult. [See Video of the Strange Pear-Shaped Nuclei]

To find them, Butler and his colleagues used a particle accelerator called REX-ISOLDE at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, or CERN, in Switzerland to accelerate radioactive ions of radon-220 and radium-224 until they reached about 10 percent of the speed of light.

"The [Large Hadron Collider] LHC makes all the big news, but in order to get the particles to high energy it uses a whole chain of low accelerators. What we use is one that is pretty ancient by accelerator standards," Butler said.

Having a neighborly chat improves seed germination, finds research in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Ecology. Even when other known means of communication, such as contact, chemical and light-mediated signals, are blocked, chilli seeds grow better when grown with basil plants. This suggests that plants are talking via nanomechanical vibrations.Monica Gagliano and Michael Renton from the University of Western Australia attempted to grow chilli seeds (Capsicum annuum) in the presence or absence of other chilli plants, or basil (Ocimum basilicum). In the absence of a neighboring plant, germination rates were very low, but when the plants were able to openly communicate with the seeds more seedlings grew.

However when the seeds were separated from the basil plants with black plastic, so that they could not be influenced by either light or chemical signals, they germinated as though they could still communicate with the basil. A partial response was seen for fully grown chilli plants blocked from known communication with the seeds.

Dr Gagliano explained, "Our results show that plants are able to positively influence growth of seeds by some as yet unknown mechanism. Bad neighbors, such as fennel, prevent chilli seed germination in the same way. We believe that the answer may involve acoustic signals generated using nanomechanical oscillations from inside the cell which allow rapid communication between nearby plants."

As concerns over cyber security grow with each newly publicized attack, computer scientists have been pursuing quantum technology as a silver bullet against would-be hackers.

According to a groundbreaking announcement, scientists at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico have been utilizing a small-scale "quantum internet" for the past two years.

Quantum cryptography is possible because of the phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. When two photons become 'entangled,' changing the spin of one of the photons will alter the spin of the other photon almost instantaneously.

These entangled photons can be used to create an encryption key that cannot be secretly deciphered, as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle dictates that simply trying to measure the characteristics of a photon will alter it.

For all its promise, computer scientists have only been able to use secure quantum communications with point-to-point communications. This means that messages can only be sent between two parties that each have one of the two entangled photons. Even this type of communication has only been demonstrated over relatively short distances of less than 70 miles.

All lightning on Earth may have its roots in space, new research suggests.

Lightning flashes on Earth about 100 times per second, but what triggers lightning in thunderstorms remains mostly unknown. Especially odd is the fact that decades of analysis suggest electrical fields within thunderclouds have only a tenth or so of the strength needed to spark a lightning bolt.

More than 20 years ago, physicist Alex Gurevich at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow suggested lightning might be initiated by cosmic rays from outer space. These particles strike Earth with gargantuan amounts of energy surpassing anything the most powerful atom smashers on the planet are capable of.

When cosmic rays slam into air molecules, they can make them spit out huge numbers of electrons. This shower of electrons would collide into still more air molecules, generating more electrons. All in all, cosmic rays could each set off an avalanche of electrons, a chain reaction Gurevich calls a runaway breakdown.

Are you prepared to meet your robot overlords?

The idea of superintelligent machines may sound like the plot of The Terminator or The Matrix, but many experts say the idea isn't far-fetched. Some even think the singularity - the point at which artificial intelligence can match, and then overtake, human smarts - might happen in just 16 years.

But nearly every computer scientist will have a different prediction for when and how the singularity will happen.

Some believe in a utopian future, in which humans can transcend their physical limitations with the aid of machines. But others think humans will eventually relinquish most of their abilities and gradually become absorbed into artificial intelligence (AI)-based organisms, much like the energy making machinery in our own cells.