As expected, a giant sunspot AR1515 unleashed a strong X1.1 solar flare on July 6th at 23:08 UTC. This event triggered a 10cm Radio Burst and a Type IV Sweep Frequency Event. Preliminary analysis indicates the Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) associated with this event is not headed directly at Earth, it looks to be headed south and to the west. This should have little impact on Earth. The protons blasted away from the flare site are currently streaming past Earth and a S1 Minor Radiation Storm is in progress.

It's a project 500 million years in the making. Only this time, instead of playing on a movie screen in Jurassic Park, it's happening in a lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Using a process called paleo-experimental evolution, Georgia Tech researchers have resurrected a 500-million-year-old gene from bacteria and inserted it into modern-day Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. This bacterium has now been growing for more than 1,000 generations, giving the scientists a front row seat to observe evolution in action.

"This is as close as we can get to rewinding and replaying the molecular tape of life," said scientist Betül Kaçar, a NASA astrobiology postdoctoral fellow in Georgia Tech's NASA Center for Ribosomal Origins and Evolution. "The ability to observe an ancient gene in a modern organism as it evolves within a modern cell allows us to see whether the evolutionary trajectory once taken will repeat itself or whether a life will adapt following a different path."

A NASA spacecraft has spied a vortex swirling in the atmosphere high above the south pole of the Saturn moon Titan, hinting that winter may be coming to the huge body's southern reaches. NASA's Cassini probe photographed the polar vortex - or mass of swirling gas - during a flyby of Titan on June 27. The vortex appears to complete one full rotation in nine hours, while it takes Titan about 16 days to spin once around its axis.

"The structure inside the vortex is reminiscent of the open cellular convection that is often seen over Earth's oceans," Tony Del Genio, a Cassini team member at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said in a statement.

The last time the Seattle fault ripped, it jolted shorelines and unleashed a tsunami. Now a new study suggests that quake might have rocked an even bigger area than anyone thought.

Bremerton, Washington, US - Beth Arcos picked her way through muck and pickleweed just west of the Bremerton waterfront, on the trail of an ancient earthquake and tsunami.

"Here's the first evidence," the former University of Washington doctoral student said, kneeling to pluck clam shells from what used to be a tidal mud flat - but now sits well above the waterline. More than 1,000 years ago, Arcos explained, the Seattle fault let loose, lifting the ground here nearly 10 feet.

In this quiet bay, Arcos also confirmed what scientists long have suspected: The tsunami triggered by that quake walloped the coastline that is now home to Naval Base Kitsap, with its shipyards and aircraft carriers, as well as hundreds of waterfront houses and businesses.

The ground warping that Arcos measured around Bremerton was bigger than expected. That means the earthquake probably affected a wider swath of Western Washington than previously thought - which, in turn, nudges it toward the upper end of its estimated magnitude 7-7.5 range.

"It's a reminder that this is a location where we can get these big earthquakes, and that we need to plan and prepare for them," Arcos said. The results from her research were published in the June issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

The Seattle fault isn't a single strand, but a zone of subterranean fractures that extends across Puget Sound, passing under Seattle and reaching as far east as Issaquah. Arcos' work suggests the fault may extend farther west than previously thought, said Tim Walsh, chief hazards geologist for the Washington Department of Natural Resources.

This just in! Astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a new moon around distant Pluto, bringing the known count up to 5. The image above was released by NASA just minutes ago, showing the Pluto system with its newest member, P5.

This news comes just a couple of weeks shy of the one-year anniversary of the announcement of Pluto's 4th known moon, still currently named "P4″.

The news was shared this morning by an undoubtedly excited Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) on Twitter.

Astronomers estimate P5 to be between 6 and 15 miles (9.6 to 24 km) in diameter. It orbits Pluto in the same plane as the other moons - Charon, Nix, Hydra and P4.

"The moons form a series of neatly nested orbits, a bit like Russian dolls," said team lead Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute.

An international team of astronomers has announced a baffling discovery never seen before: an extraordinary amount of dust around a nearby star mysteriously disappeared. This cosmic vanishing act occurred around a star some 450 light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Centaurus.
"It's like the classic magician's trick - now you see it, now you don't," said Dr Carl Melis, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California in San Diego and lead author of a paper describing the discovery in the journal Nature. "Only in this case, we're talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is gone!"

A team of scientists from the Aalto University in Finland has located where the sounds associated with the northern lights, or aurora borealis, are created. The auroral sounds that have been described in folktales and by wilderness wanderers are formed about 70 meters above the ground level in the measured case. The team located the sound sources by installing three separate microphones in an observation site where the auroral sounds were recorded. They then compared sounds captured by the microphones and determined the location of the sound source.


The aurora borealis was seen at the observation site. The simultaneous measurements of the geomagnetic disturbances, made by the Finnish Meteorological Institute, showed a typical pattern of the northern lights episodes.

«Our research proved that, during the occurrence of the northern lights, people could hear natural auroral sounds related to what they see," said Prof Unto Laine of the Aalto University. "In the past, researchers thought that the aurora borealis was too far away for people to hear the sounds it made. This is true."

© NASA/SDO
An M-class solar flare from April 2012.

Could wild electromagnetic activity hold the key to the madness that is war and revolution?You lie strapped to a bed as 800 Milliamps of electrical current pounds through your brain. Your depressive numbness is slowly replaced with elation. Miraculously your suicidal brain has reprogrammed. But no one understands why!

Electro convulsive therapy (ECT) is still used in severely depressed patients with predictable, if cloudy, results. In Royal Hobart hospital a new electromagnetic therapy, rTMS, uses pulsating magnets of 1.5 Tesla in strength to achieve relief from intractable depression. This spectacular new therapy changes the brain's mood and drive. How can electromagnetism do this? Can a changing electromagnetic environment affect everyday life?

The brain's electrical nature was first measured in the 1924 by the Swiss eccentric Hans Berger with his invention of the EEG machine. The brain produces microvolt discharges of incredible complexity. The whole body is a vast electromagnetic synchronized labyrinth. Even neurohormones rely on ionic connection, or electrical polarity, to function.

But this steady purr can go haywire! As we are electrical beings, we must hum to the oscillating electromagnetic forces of the Telluric currents within our Earth, the magnetosphere, the Sun and other cosmic influences. The medical magnetic resonance imager (MRI) device demonstrates that magnetic fields can polarise every atom within the body and cause them to release energy. What other effects could a powerful magnetic field have on our behaviour?

The Habsburgs learned about inbreeding the hard way. Centuries of marriages between close relatives in this Austrian-Spanish royal family led to mental illness, infertility, and the eventual extinction of the entire bloodline. For more than a hundred years, scientists have chalked up such problems to rare genetic mutations, which come to the fore only when related individuals breed. But a new study in plants indicates that it's not just genes that lead to this so-called inbreeding depression; it's also how these genes are switched on and off.

Philippine Vergeer happened upon the discovery while working with the Scabiosa columbaria plant. Vergeer, currently a postdoc at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, noticed that inbred members of the species - which is native to Europe and Asia and has dark green leaves topped with small, delicate purple flowers - had very different responses to environmental conditions than plants that had not been crossed with close relatives. Drought and poor soil tended to kill the inbred plants quickly, for example, whereas the outbred plants were hardier.

Vergeer could have chalked it all up to harmful rare genes. But then she thought more about the environmental conditions. Drought and poor nutrition are known to cause so-called epigenetic changes to DNA, the addition or removal of small chemical tags known as methyl groups that effectively turn genes on or off. Could such modifications be causing inbreeding depression?

To find out, Vergeer and colleagues counted the methyl groups in the genomes of inbred and outbred S. columbaria. The inbred plants showed a variety of health problems, including difficulty photosynthesizing and slow maturation. They also had 10% more methyl groups in their genomes than did outbred plants, indicating significant epigenetic changes.

When it comes to predicting risk of disease, Alzheimer's genes - and others - strike out.

When James Watson, codiscoverer of the double helix, had his genome fully sequenced in 2008, there was one piece of DNA he insisted the lab not tell him about: whether he had a genetic variant that significantly increases the chance of developing Alzheimer's disease. Called apoE, the gene comes in three variants, of which APOE4 increases the risk of Alzheimer's between 10- and 30-fold. Different people have different feelings about learning what lies in their medical future, especially if it is something for which there is neither cure nor treatment. (House got good mileage out of this dilemma when Thirteen, played by Olivia Wilde, decided to find out whether she carries the gene for the inevitably fatal, incurable Huntington's disease. She does.) If studies coming out over the last few months are any indication, however, most of us can postpone making this difficult decision: the revolution in using DNA to read people's medical future is turning out to be more hype than hope.