All life on Earth - from microbes to elephants and us - is based on a single genetic model that requires the element phosphorus as one of its six essential components. But now researchers have uncovered a bacterium that has five of those essential elements but has, in effect, replaced phosphorus with its look-alike but toxic cousin arsenic. News of the discovery caused a scientific commotion, including calls to NASA from the White House and Congress asking whether a second line of earthly life has been found.

A NASA press conference Thursday and an accompanying article in the journal Science, gave the answer: No, the discovery does not prove the existence of a "second genesis" on Earth. But the discovery very much opens the door to that possibility and to the related existence of a theorized "shadow biosphere" on Earth - life evolved from a different common ancestor than all that we've known so far.

Watch the video: "NASA Alien Life News: The Real Story from Science Magazine"

Seven years after the death of Dolly, a female sheep who was the first to be cloned using an adult somatic cell, four new sheep have been cloned using Dolly's frozen tissue sample that has been sitting in a freezer since her death in 2003.

Professor Keith Campbell, one of the original biologists who cloned Dolly, is keeping the four new quads on his land at the University of Nottingham as pets. They have been nicknamed "the Dollies," since they are exact copies of Dolly genetically.

In 1996, Dolly, who was named after the country singer Dolly Parton, was cloned at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh in Scotland. She was the first mammal to be cloned using an adult cell from a mammary gland, and was praised as a scientific phenomenon in headlines worldwide. But as she aged, Dolly experienced several health complications such as arthritis and advanced lung disease. At the young age of six, Dolly was put down because of her poor health.

But Dolly lives on. Her leftover sample of tissue has remained in the freezer all these years later, and now four exact replicas carry her DNA.

NASA has found DNA with a makeup we never thought possible.

Earlier this week we learned that NASA was gearing up to share some important information relating to an astrobiological discovery. Of course, our minds immediately turned to aliens. Still, deep down, we knew that NASA would not report that it had found Krypton, ALF, ET, or a Cylon war zone. No, though it would likely be something substantial, it would be altogether much more mundane than actual, real life, extraterrestrial aliens.

NASA's event is still a few hours away, but what would embargoed information be if there wasn't someone prepared to leak it a couple of hours in advance? Thanks to Dutch magazine NOS, we know that NASA has indeed found alien life. It's just not extraterrestrial.

Present in the toxic, arsenic-riddled Mono Lake in California is a type of bacteria with a DNA makeup we never thought possible. That is, the building blocks of life -- carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur - are not all present. As opposed to phosphorus, this bacteria's DNA uses arsenic.

If there's one thing critics and proponents of solar power alike can agree upon, it's that solar power, like any commodity, will go down in price when it is produced at a greater volume. Recently announced plants, like a 280 mega-watt (MW) installation in the Arizona desert go a long way towards achieving that sort of volume increase.

As does a new 250 MW installation in San Luis Obispo County, California which was formally announced this week. Construction on the new plant will commence next year and is expected to create 350 construction jobs.

San Luis Obispo is a coastal county that is relatively rural and lightly populated by Californian standards. It's roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, two of the state's biggest cities.

The new plant will be a joint venture between NRG Solar, Inc. and SunPower Corp. -- two veteran solar power firms (SunPower, alone, will have installed over 1.5 GW of solar power by the year's end). NRG Solar is expected to pitch in $450M USD over the four year launch period. NRG will own the plant, it is basically contracting SunPower to design, build, and operate the plant.

As winter arrives with a vengeance, the last of this year's glorious autumn leaves are falling in our parks and woodlands.

But this week came worrying evidence that Mother Nature is not the only force denuding our trees of their foliage.

Research in the Netherlands suggested that outbreaks of bleeding bark and dying leaves which have blighted the country's urban trees may be caused by radiation from the Wi-Fi ­networks now so integral to life in offices, schools and homes.

As a qualified electronics engineer, I am not surprised by such findings. I have long been concerned about the harmful effects of the ­electro-magnetic radiation emitted not only by Wi-Fi devices but many other common modern gadgets, including mobile and cordless phones, wireless games consoles and microwave ovens.

Much though I love trees, and worrying though I find this research, what really unnerves me is the effect these electro-magnetic fields (or EMFs) are having on humans, surrounding us as they do with a constant cloud of 'electrosmog'.

The revival of Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt (SEB), missing for nearly a year, is now well underway. The roiling, turbulent disturbance that heralds the brown stripe's full return stretches almost halfway around the giant planet. "Here is a projection map showing the revival on Nov. 29th," says amateur astronomer Wayne Jaeschke of West Chester, Pennsylvania. Note the region bracketed by arrows:

"I made the map by combining two pictures of Jupiter I took using my 14-inch Celestron telescope," says Jaeschke. "The disturbance has grown dramatically since it first appeared in late October." Indeed, it is now so large that even novice observers are starting to notice it in the eyepieces of backyard telescopes.

The spreading disturbance is not the SEB itself. Instead, it is thought to be a progressive clearing of high clouds that will eventually reveal the brown stripe hiding below. When the SEB finally returns, Jupiter will have two brown stripes again and the planet's appearance will return to normal. Meanwhile, amateur astronomers are encouraged to monitor the revival. Point your optics south after sunset: sky map.

Where did Earth's oceans come from? Astronomers have long contended that icy comets and asteroids delivered the water for them during an epoch of heavy bombardment that ended about 3.9 billion years ago. But a new study suggests that Earth supplied its own water, leaching it from the rocks that formed the planet. The finding may help explain why life on Earth appeared so early, and it may indicate that other rocky worlds are also awash in vast seas.

Our planet has always harbored water. The rubble that coalesced to form Earth contained trace amounts - tens to hundreds of parts per million - of the stuff. But scientists didn't believe that was enough to create today's oceans, and thus they looked to alien origins for our water supply. Geologist Linda Elkins-Tanton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge didn't think researchers needed to look that far.

Russia has announced it will be investing $2 billion in a program to capture some of the thousands of pieces of dangerous debris that threaten the future of space technology. How might it work?

Energia, Russia's space corporation, has revealed plans to build a special space "pod" which will grab around 600 defunct satellites and then safely deorbit them so that they either burn up in the atmosphere or splash down into the ocean. The pod will rely on a nuclear power core, and cost around $2 billion to develop and deploy. Energia plans to complete design and testing by 2020 and have it in service no later than 2023, with an operational lifespan of around 15 years. The company also said it has been working on a space interceptor capable of tackling any dangerous objects from the outer solar system that may be on a collision course with Earth.

If it seems odd to think of Russia as Earth's space junk and comet defender, it's also welcome news. Space debris in the form of defunct or malfunctioning satellites is an increasingly severe problem. Numerous orbits are becoming inaccessible, or at least hopelessly dangerous, because of wandering hulls or showers of shredded metal debris--like the one caused by a collision between a working U.S. Iridium satellite and a dead Russian Cosmos satellite in 2009.

Scientists have discovered how a rare metal is able to absorb sunlight and store it as pure heat until it is needed.

The breakthrough paves the way for the next generation of solar power devices that are able to harness energy and heat collected from the sun and store it indefinitely.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say it could be used to create a 'rechargeable heat battery' that could be used to heat a home.

A recent paradigm-shattering discovery in neuroscience shows how our minds share actions, emotions, and experience - what we commonly call "the monkey see, monkey do" experience. When we see someone laugh, cry, show disgust, or experience pain, in some sense, we share that emotion. When we see someone in distress, we share that distress. When we see a great actor, musician or sportsperson perform at the peak of their abilities, it can feel like we are experiencing just something of what they are experiencing.

Only recently, however, with the discovery of mirror neurons, has it become clear just how this powerful sharing of experience is realized within the human brain. In the early 1990's Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma discovered that some neurons had an amazing property: they responded not only when a subject performed a given action, but also when the subject observed someone else performing that same action.

These results had a deep impact on cognitive neuroscience, leading the the world's leading experts to predict that 'mirror neurons would do for psychology what DNA did for biology'.

Vilayanur Ramachandran is a neurologist at the University of California-San Diego and co-author of Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind writes that "Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma has elegantly explored the properties of neurons - the so-called "mirror" neurons, or "monkey see, monkey do" neurons. His research indicates that any given cell in this region will fire when a test monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand: pulling, pushing, tugging, picking up, grasping, etc. In addition, it appears that different neurons fire in response to different actions."

The astonishing fact is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or even the experimenter) performing the same action. "With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: imitation learning, intentionality, "mind reading," empathy -- even the evolution of language." Ramachandran writes.