Since 1927, when Werner Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle, it has stood as one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics. In a simplified form, the uncertainty principle states that it is impossible to measure anything without disturbing it. For example, any attempt to measure a particle's position must randomly change its speed.

For clarity's sake, one should be aware that the uncertainty principle is not the same as the observer effect, which states that the act of observing a phenomenon will change the phenomenon itself. The uncertainty principle is more about how precisely something can be measured in two dimensions such as position and momentum, simultaneously. In common parlance, the two theories are often conflated.

This principle has driven quantum physicists crazy for nearly a century. That is, it drove them crazy until recently, when researchers at the University of Toronto demonstrated the ability to directly measure the disturbance and confirm that Heisenberg was too pessimistic.

"We designed an apparatus to measure a property - the polarization - of a single photon. We then needed to measure how much that apparatus disturbed that photon," says Lee Rozema, a PhD. candidate in Professor Aephraim Steinberg's quantum optics research group at U of T.

"To do this, we would need to measure the photon before the apparatus but that measurement would also disturb the photon," Rozema says.

To overcome this challenge, the team employed a technique known as weak measurement wherein the action of a measuring device is weak enough to have an imperceptible impact on what is being measured. Prior to sending each photon to the measurement apparatus, the physicists measured it weakly and then measured it again afterwards. They then compared the results and found that the disturbance induced by the measurement is less than Heisenberg's precision-disturbance relation would require.

On Mars's poles there are ice caps of ice and dust with layers that reflect to past climate variations on Mars. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have related the layers in the ice cap on Mars's north pole to variations in solar insolation on Mars, thus established the first dated climate history for Mars, where ice and dust accumulation has been driven by variations in insolation. The results are published in the scientific journal, Icarus.
The ice caps on Mars's poles are kilometres thick and composed of ice and dust. There are layers in the ice caps, which can be seen in cliffs and valley slopes and we have known about these layers for decades, since the first satellite images came back from Mars. The layers are believed to reflect past climate on Mars, in the same way that the Earth's climate history can be read by analysing ice cores from the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica.

Solar insolation on Mars has varied dramatically over time, mainly due to large variations in the tilt of Mars's rotational axis (obliquity) and this led to dramatic climate variations on Mars. For years people have tried to link the solar insolation and layer formation by looking for signs of periodic sequences in the visible layers, which can be seen in the upper 500 meters. Periodic signals might be traceable back to known variations in the solar insolation on Mars, but so far it has been unclear whether one could find a correlation between variations in insolation and the layers.

The mass extinction that took out the dinosaurs was already well underway by the time a six-mile asteroid slammed into Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula 65 million years ago, it appears.

New University of Washington research indicates that life on the sea floor was already dying, thanks to volcanic eruptions on India's Deccan Plateau that warmed the planet and killed life on the ocean floor.

"The eruptions started 300,000 to 200,000 years before the impact, and they may have lasted 100,000 years," says doctoral student Thomas Tobin.

The eruptions would have filled the atmosphere with fine particles, or aerosols, that initially cooled the planet. As time passed, though, they would have spewed out carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Finding alien life beyond our solar system would be the most profound discovery in all of humanity, and a royal astronomer for the Queen of England believes it could happen within the next 40 years.

Former Royal Society president, Lord Martin Rees, speaking at the launch of Professor Stephen Hawking's new series Grand Design, said evidence of whether alien life exists elsewhere in the universe could be answered in that timeframe. He said he believes that astro-physicists could be able to view images of distant planets outside the solar system as early as 2025, potentially leading to the discovery of some form of life, the Telegraph reported.

"We know now that stars are orbited by retinues of planets just as our sun is. We have learned this in just the last decade, essentially," Rees said. "Within 10 or 20 years we will be able to image other planets like the earth, orbiting other stars. That will be a really exciting subject to see if there is evidence for [extra-terrestrial] life or not."

Hawking's series, which will air on Discovery Channel beginning next Thursday, will be based on his best-selling book by the same name. It will study everything from Isaac Newton's theories on gravity to the recent Higgs boson findings, and everything in between. He will also air his take on the relationship between God and science, and what the meaning of life is for humans, reports Mail Online's Liz Thomas.

We should all be pretty well aware at this point that the robot apocalypse (or "robopocalypse," if you will) is on its way. Our most gifted storytellers have been warning us about it for years, from the legend of the golem to James Cameron's Skynet. In their latest volley against an unsuspecting human race, our metallic overlords-to-be have conscripted MIT researcher Kate Darling to draft a new research paper that suggests humans grant rights to robots. According to Darling, robots don't need rights on par with humans (yet), but due to the emotional connections humans can create with them, we may find it beneficial to ascribe them similar rights to our pets.

All right, calling Darling a pawn of the robots may be going too far, considering that her 18-page paper lays out a digestible, cogent argument for robot rights sooner rather than later. "The typical debate surrounding 'rights for robots' assumes a futuristic world of fully autonomous and highly sophisticated androids that are nearly indistinguishable from humans," she writes. "While technological development may someday lead to such a Blade Runner-esque scenario, the future relevant legal issues are currently shrouded by unforeseeable factors." Darling describes the robots of today, from Sony's robotic dogs, to Paro the seal (who has seen proven success in geriatric therapeutics), and even Roomba vacuum cleaners, explaining that each one can generate a companionate, emotional reaction in humans, especially in small children. This interaction, she argues, is not the same as an interaction with nonresponsive toys. "While a child is aware of the projection onto an inanimate toy and can engage or not engage in it at will, a robot that demands attention by playing off of our natural responses may cause a subconscious engagement that is less voluntary."

Triton was discovered in 1846 by the British astronomer William Lassell, but much about Neptune's largest moon still remains a mystery. A Voyager 2 flyby in 1989 offered a quick peak at the satellite, and revealed a surface composition comprised mainly of water ice. The moon's surface also had nitrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide. As Triton's density is quite high, it is suspected that it has a large core of silicate rock. It is possible that a liquid ocean could have formed between the rocky core and icy surface shell, and scientists have investigated if this ocean could have survived until now.

An international team of researchers, including physicists from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, has achieved quantum teleportation over a record distance of 143 kilometers. The experiment marks a major step towards satellite-based quantum communication.

The team transmitted quantum states between the two Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife over a distance of 143 kilometers, beating the previous record of 97 kilometers set by researchers in China just a few months ago. The results of this experiment were published online in Nature.

The purpose of the experiment was not to break the distance record, but to provide the basis for a worldwide information network in which quantum mechanical effects enable the exchange of messages with greater security, and allow certain calculations to be performed more efficiently than with conventional technologies. "In such a (theoretical) future, a "quantum Internet" - facilitated by quantum teleportation - will be a key protocol for the transmission of information between quantum computers."

Quantum states, but not matter, are exchanged between two parties over distances that can be, in theory, arbitrarily long. This process works even if the recipient is unknown. Exchanges such at this can be used for the transmission of messages, or as an operation in future quantum computers.

In quantum computer applications, the photons that encode the quantum states have to be transported reliably over long distances without compromising the fragile quantum state. This experiment, which sets up a quantum connection suitable for quantum teleportation over distances of more than 100 kilometers, opens up new horizons.

Xiao-song Ma, one of the scientists involved in the experiment, says, "The realization of quantum teleportation over a distance of 143 km has been a huge technological challenge."

Early next year, a comet will come fairly close to Earth and the Sun - traveling within the orbit of Mercury - and it has the potential to be visible to the naked eye. Amateur and professional astronomers alike have been keeping watch on Comet C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS (or PANSTARRS for short), trying to ascertain just how bright this comet may become. It will come within 45 million kilometers (28 million miles) of the Sun on March 9, 2013, which is close enough for quite a bit of cometary ice to vaporize and form a bright coma and tail.
But just how bright, no one can say for sure. Comets have been known to be very unpredictable (remember the breakup of Comet Elenin?) but some estimates have said this comet could become a naked-eye object, as bright as Vega or Arcturus next March. Right now it is at about Magnitude 12, and skywatchers in the southern hemisphere observers will have a great view as this comet gets closer and brighter, as it will remain high in the sky. But right now, skywatchers in the northern latitudes are saying farewell to Comet PANSTARRS, as it becomes low on the horizon. Astrophotographer Efrain Morales from Puerto Rico took the image above on September 4th, 2012 at 00:31 UTC. "It was very difficult to image due to the forest tree tops and sunset light but I was able to capture it at high magnification," Efrain told us. (He used an LX200ACF 12 inch, OTA, CGE mount, F10, ST402xmi Ccd, Astronomik Ir/UV filter at 2 minutes. )

They were the subject of perhaps the first scientific discovery of the Space Age, and yet we still don't know much about them. The radiation belts that surround Earth are home to killer electrons, plasma waves, and intense electrical currents that can disrupt and destroy the electronics on satellites. But the behavior of the Van Allen Belts - named for James Van Allen, who led the team that discovered them in 1958 - is wildly unpredictable.

This artist's conception shows the radiation belts (green), which are two doughnut-shaped (torus) regions full of high-energy particles that fill the near-space around Earth. The blue and red lines between and around the belts depict the north and south polarity of the planet's magnetic field. The inner belt, a blend of protons and electrons, can reach down as low as 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) in altitude. The outer belt, comprised mainly of energetic electrons, can swell to as much as 60,000 kilometers (37,000 miles) above Earth's surface. Both rings extend to roughly 65 degrees north and south latitude.

The human genome - the sum total of hereditary information in a person - contains a lot more than the protein-coding genes teenagers learn about in school, a massive international project has found. When researchers decided to sequence the human genome in the late 1990s, they were focused on finding those traditional genes so as to identify all the proteins necessary for life. Each gene was thought to be a discrete piece of DNA; the order of its DNA bases - the well-known "letter" molecules that are the building blocks of DNA - were thought to code for a particular protein. But scientists deciphering the human genome found, to their surprise, that these protein-coding genes took up less than 3% of the genome. In between were billions of other bases that seemed to have no purpose.

Now a U.S.-funded project, called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), has found that many of these bases do, nevertheless, play a role in human biology: They help determine when a gene is turned on or off, for example. This regulation is what makes one cell a kidney cell, for instance, and another a brain cell. "There's a lot more to the genome than genes," says Mark Gerstein, a bioinformatician at Yale University.

The insights from this project are helping researchers understand the links between genetics and disease. "We are informing disease studies in a way that would be very hard to do otherwise," says Ewan Birney, a bioinformatician at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, U.K., who led the ENCODE analysis.

As part of ENCODE, 32 institutions did computer analyses, biochemical tests, and sequencing studies on 147 cell types - six fairly extensively - to find out what each of the genome's 3 billion bases does. About 80% of the genome is biochemically active, ENCODE's 442 researchers report today in Nature. Some of these DNA bases serve as landing spots for proteins that influence gene activity. Others are converted into strands of RNA that perform functions themselves, such as gene regulation. (RNA is typically thought of as the intermediary messenger molecule that helps make proteins, but ENCODE showed that much of RNA is an end product and is not used to make proteins.) And many bases are simply places where chemical modifications serve to silence stretches of our chromosomes.