A 16-member international team of researchers that includes James Kennett, professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara, has identified a nearly 13,000-year-old layer of thin, dark sediment buried in the floor of Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico. The sediment layer contains an exotic assemblage of materials, including nanodiamonds, impact spherules, and more, which, according to the researchers, are the result of a cosmic body impacting Earth.

These new data are the latest to strongly support of a controversial hypothesis proposing that a major cosmic impact with Earth occurred 12,900 years ago at the onset of an unusual cold climatic period called the Younger Dryas. The researchers' findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Conducting a wide range of exhaustive tests, the researchers conclusively identified a family of nanodiamonds, including the impact form of nanodiamonds called lonsdaleite, which is unique to cosmic impact. The researchers also found spherules that had collided at high velocities with other spherules during the chaos of impact. Such features, Kennett noted, could not have formed through anthropogenic, volcanic, or other natural terrestrial processes. "These materials form only through cosmic impact," he said.

The data suggest that a comet or asteroid -- likely a large, previously fragmented body, greater than several hundred meters in diameter -- entered the atmosphere at a relatively shallow angle. The heat at impact burned biomass, melted surface rocks, and caused major environmental disruption. "These results are consistent with earlier reported discoveries throughout North America of abrupt ecosystem change, megafaunal extinction, and human cultural change and population reduction," Kennett explained.

In the grand scheme of the solar system, Venus and Earth are almost the same distance from the sun. Yet the planets differ dramatically: Venus is some 100 times hotter than Earth and its days more than 200 times longer. The atmosphere on Venus is so thick that the longest any spacecraft has survived on its surface before being crushed is a little over two hours. There's another difference, too. Earth has a magnetic field and Venus does not -- a crucial distinction when assessing the effects of the sun on each planet.

As the solar wind rushes outward from the sun at nearly a million miles per hour, it is stopped about 44,000 miles away from Earth when it collides with the giant magnetic envelope that surrounds the planet called the magnetosphere. Most of the solar wind flows around the magnetosphere, but in certain circumstances it can enter the magnetosphere to create a variety of dynamic space weather effects on Earth. Venus has no such protective shield, but it is still an immovable rock surrounded by an atmosphere that disrupts and interacts with the solar wind, causing interesting space weather effects.

A recent study, appearing online in the Journal of Geophysical Research on February 29, 2012, has found clear evidence on Venus for a type of space weather outburst quite common at Earth, called a hot flow anomaly. These anomalies, also known as HFAs, cause a temporary reversal of the solar wind that normally moves past a planet. An HFA surge causes the material to flood backward, says David Sibeck, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who studies HFAs at Earth and is a co-author on the paper.

Geomagnetic storms expected to sweep past our planet, sparking auroras

A major solar flare erupted from the sun late Sunday, sending out an explosion of plasma and charged particles.

The X1.1-class solar flare exploded from the surface of the sun at 11:13 p.m. ET, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center, operated by the National Weather Service.

X-class flares are the most powerful type of solar storm, with M-class eruptions falling within the midrange and C-class flares being the weakest.

The X-class flare unleashed a wave of plasma and charged particles, called a coronal mass ejection, or CME. Experts at the Space Weather Prediction Center said the CME will likely miss Earth, but they remain alert for minor geomagnetic storms beginning late Tuesday and lasting through Wednesday.

"According to analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab, the CME will probably miss Earth, although it will hit Mercury and Venus." Spaceweather.com reported in an alert. "Even if this CME misses, high-latitude sky watchers should still be alert for auroras in the nights ahead."

The ocean underneath the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa might be too acidic to support life, due to compounds that may regularly migrate downward from its surface, researchers say.

Scientists believe that Europa, which is roughly the size of Earth's moon, possesses an ocean perhaps 100 miles deep (160 kilometers). This ocean is overlain by an icy crust of unknown thickness, although some estimates are that it could be only a few miles thick.

Since there is life virtually wherever there is liquid water on Earth, for many years scientists have entertained the notion that this Jovian moon could support extraterrestrials. Recent findings even suggest its ocean could be loaded with oxygen, enough to support millions of tons worth of marine life like the kinds that exist on Earth.

Researchers have proposed missions to penetrate Europa's outer shellto look for life in its ocean, although others have suggested that Europa could harbor fossils of marine life right on the surface for prospectors to find, given how water apparently regularly gets pushed up from below.

However, chemicals found on the surface of Europa might jeopardize any chances of life evolving there, scientists find. The resulting level of acidity in its ocean "is probably not friendly to life - it ends up messing with things like membrane development, and it could be hard building the large-scale organic polymers," said Matthew Pasek, an astrobiologist at the University of South Florida.

When Steve Jobs passed away last year, a joke bounced around--not that there was anything particularly funny about it--that the man who had done so much to shape modern technology hadn't really died at all, but rather had figured out how to upload himself into the Mac OS so he could live on with us, and with his products, forever. The notion was ostensibly so far out as to be ridiculous. But not everyone sees it that way.

At the recent Global Future 2045 International Congress held in Moscow, 31-year-old media mogul Dmitry Itskov told attendees how he plans to create exactly that kind of immortality, first by creating a robot controlled by the human brain, then by actually transplanting a human brain into a humanoid robot, and then by replacing the surgical transplant with a method for simply uploading a person's consciousness into a surrogate 'bot. He thinks he can get beyond the first phase--to transplanting a working brain into a robot--in just ten years, putting him on course to achieve his ultimate goal--human consciousness completely disembodied and placed within a holographic host--within 30 years time.

Pushing aside all the extremely difficult technological challenges for a moment, there are a couple of important to considerations tied up in Itskov's vision. First, while the later phases of his project are so far out as to seem ridiculous, phase one is totally feasible (in fact it's already being done). From there, the leap to phase two--human brainpower transplanted into a mechanical robot--is a quite a leap. But if we are willing to allow that it might be possible even within the next 30 years, then we have to consider a further possibility: that many people alive today--like the twenty-something author of this piece--could be confronted with this kind of technology in their lifetimes.

Which is terrifying and amazing and disconcerting all at the same time.

Watch all of the videos, please, for some rather frightening predictions.

Energy Department Announces Small Modular Reactor Technology Partnerships at Savannah River Site

Washington, D.C. -- The U.S. Energy Department and its Savannah River Site (SRS) announced today three public-private partnerships to develop deployment plans for small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) technologies at SRS facilities, near Aiken, South Carolina. As part of the Energy Department's commitment to advancing the next generation of nuclear reactor technologies and breaking down the technical and economic barriers to deployment, these Memorandums of Agreement (MOA) will help leverage Savannah River's land assets, energy facilities and nuclear expertise to support potential private sector development, testing and licensing of prototype SMR technologies.

The Energy Department, Savannah River Site and Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) have entered into three separate agreements with Hyperion Power Generation Inc.; SMR, LLC, a subsidiary of Holtec International; and NuScale Power, LLC. The agreements will help these private companies obtain information on potential SMR reactor siting at Savannah River and provide a framework for developing land use and site services agreements to further these efforts.

"The Obama Administration continues to believe that low-carbon nuclear energy has an important role to play in America's energy future," said Secretary Chu. "We are committed to restarting the nation's nuclear industry and advancing the next generation of these technologies, helping to create new jobs and export opportunities for American workers and businesses."

Roughly 2.4 billion light years from Earth, a massive blob of a mysterious, invisible substance known as dark matter is threatening to rewrite how scientists on this planet understand galaxies.

Dark matter - which accounts for more than 80 per cent of all matter in the universe - has been described as the glue that holds galaxies together through gravity.

It's invisible, but it surrounds galaxies and larger clusters of galaxies. To detect it, scientists study how the gravity from dark matter bends and distorts light passing through it.

Currently, scientists believe that dark matter doesn't have much effect on the surrounding environment other than through its gravitational pull. In other words, if two galaxies collide, the dark matter from one galaxy would pass right through the dark matter from the other, as it if didn't exist.

But researchers in Canada and the United States have detected what they are describing as a "dark core" - a large clump of dark matter that appears to have collided and stuck together, even as the galaxies the dark matter was attached to continued to move on.

"It challenges conventional understanding of dark matter and how dark matter should behave," said Arif Babul of the University of Victoria.

"It's potentially suggesting dark matter has a bit of stickiness to it that we hadn't expected before, and that stickiness could then change how galaxies like our own Milky Way come together."

A "human error" carried out by the police resulted in thousands of websites being completely blocked at the DNS level yesterday. Danish visitors to around 8,000 sites including Google and Facebook were informed that the sites were being blocked by the country's High Tech Crime Unit due to them offering child pornography, a situation which persisted for several hours.

Censorship online is an emotive issue.

Some people believe that all information should be free and as adults it should be our right to be able to make our own choices in deciding what to view. In other countries that is not an option since oppressive regimes take control in order to maintain their power base.

In the West, online censorship takes different forms. In addition to censorship aimed at tackling serious criminality, increasingly entertainment companies are pushing to have sites blocked to protect their corporate interests. Opponents argue that a free and open Internet overrides the need to protect a rightsholder every time, and that mechanisms such as DNS blockades could break the Internet.

In Denmark yesterday the Internet didn't exactly collapse, but for thousands of businesses it was hardly service as usual.

This week EFF released a new version its HTTPS Everywhere extension for the Firefox browser and debuted a beta version of the extension for Chrome. EFF frequently recommends that Internet users who are concerned about protecting their anonymity and security online use HTTPS Everywhere, which encrypts your communications with many websites, in conjunction with Tor, which helps to protect your anonymity online. But the best security comes from being an informed user who understands how these tools work together to protect your privacy against potential eavesdroppers.

Whenever you read your email, or update your Facebook page, or check your bank statement, there are dozens of points at which potential adversaries can intercept your Internet traffic. By using Tor to anonymize your traffic and HTTPS to encrypt it, you gain considerable protection, most notably against eavesdroppers on your wifi network and eavesdroppers on the network between you and the site you are accessing. But these tools have important limitations: your ISP and the website you are visiting still see some identifying information about you, which could be made available to a lawyer with a subpoena or a policeman with a warrant.