SPEAR is a revolutionary new high power radar system which is designed to carry out research into the Earth's upper atmosphere and magnetosphere, in the vicinity of the polar cap. This research will help us answer some key questions about our aerospace environment, particularly the interaction of the solar wind and the upper atmosphere as well as help work out whether solar cycle effects do contribute to climate change on Earth.

Currently, scientists know that energy and particles which are constantly emitted by the Sun affect the Earth. This energy is primarily deposited over several different altitudes extending from the upper atmosphere to the outer reaches of the Earth's magnetic field (called the magnetosphere), which encompasses an altitude range of 10's of km to several thousand km. The energy affects the Earth in many different ways from inducing huge magnetic storms (which produce the aurora) to electrical currents (which can affect power grids which provide us with electricity). However, the unpredictability and the type of processes makes it very difficult for scientists to study them in detail.

SPEAR (Space Plasma Exploration by Active Radar) is located on Svalbard above the arctic circle at 78.15°N and has been in operation since 2004. The system was designed and built by the Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group at the University of Leicester, UK. UNIS took over ownership of the facility in October 2008.

On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects' psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly's Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company's top-selling drug.

But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren't any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. "In fact, sometimes they now look even worse," John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.

Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it's known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It's a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

For the second day in a row, an active region on the far side of the sun is exploding and hurling CMEs into space. Watch the video below:


Today's eruption was almost as dramatic as yesterday's, and suggests that more eruptions are in the offing.

The woolly mammoth, extinct for thousands of years, could be brought back to life in as little as four years thanks to a breakthrough in cloning technology.

Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold.

But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.

Now that hurdle has been overcome, Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, is reactivating his campaign to resurrect the species that died out 5,000 years ago.

"Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth," he told The Daily Telegraph.

He intends to use Dr Wakayama's technique to identify the nuclei of viable mammoth cells before extracting the healthy ones.

The unusually cold weather this winter has been caused by a change in the winds. Instead of the typical westerly winds warmed by Atlantic surface ocean currents, cold northerly Arctic winds are influencing much of Europe.

However, scientists have long suspected that far more severe and longer-lasting cold intervals have been caused by changes to the circulation of the warm Atlantic ocean currents themselves.

Now new research led by Cardiff University, with scientists in the UK and US, reveals that these ocean circulation changes may have been more dramatic than previously thought.

The findings, published today (14 January 2011) in the journal Science, show that as the last Ice Age came to an end (10,000 - 20,000 years ago) the formation of deep water in the North-East Atlantic repeatedly switched on and off. This caused the climate to warm and cool for centuries at a time.

The circulation of the world's ocean helps to regulate the global climate. One way it does this is through the transport of heat carried by vast ocean currents, which together form the 'Great ocean conveyor'. Key to this conveyor is the sinking of water in the North-East Atlantic, a process that causes warm tropical waters to flow northwards in order to replace the sinking water. Europe is kept warmer by this circulation, so that a strong reduction in the rate at which deep water forms can cause widespread cooling of up to 10 degrees Celsius.

Lead author Dr David Thornalley, Cardiff School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, explains how the scientists studied changes in ocean circulation: "We retrieved ocean sediment cores from the seafloor of the Northeast Atlantic which contained the shells of small organisms. We used these shells to examine the past distribution of radiocarbon in the ocean. Radiocarbon is a radioactive form of carbon that acts like a natural stopwatch, timing how long it has been since water was last at the sea surface. This allows us to determine how quickly deep water was forming in the Northeast Atlantic at different times in the past."

In the outer reaches of our solar system lies a mysterious region far more remote and difficult to explore than the Australian outback. It remains the only part of our solar system not visited by spacecraft. Called the Kuiper Belt, this area beyond Neptune is home to the dwarf planets Pluto, Eris, Makemake, and Haumea. It also harbors thousands of smaller objects that form a second, icy asteroid belt (or more appropriately, comet belt). In this realm of perpetual twilight, the distant sun looks like just another bright star

Astronomers have discovered a new kind of asteroid - a strange mini-world with a unique and violent history that could reveal more clues about the early solar system.

The asteroid, called 1999 AT10, is a miniature space rock born when a collision blasted it out of its rocky parent Vesta, which is the second-largest asteroid in the solar system. The mineralogical composition of 1999 AT10 suggests that unlike many other asteroids, it did not originate from the outer rocky crust of its parent asteroid Vesta, but from the deeper layers underneath. Until now, no asteroid like it has ever been seen.

Vesta is of particular interest because this summer it will be the first destination of NASA's Dawn spacecraft.

The discovery of 1999 AT10could help determine the thickness of Vesta's crust, and reveal details about its internal structure, scientists say. With a body approximately 326 miles (525 kilometers) wide, Vesta is believed to be the only remaining protoplanet from the early phase of our solar system.

(It was only a matter of time)

It's a device that would be more at home on the set of a Star Wars movie than the streets of Britain.

But an iPhone application has been developed that can read minds.

The XWave allows users to control on-screen objects with their minds as well as train their brains to control attention spans and relaxation levels.

The device - that could confuse Luke Skywalker himself - is the latest in the field of emerging mind-controlled games and devices and works via a headset strapped around the user's forehead, plugging into the iPhone jack.

A state-of-the-art sensor within the device can then read the user's brainwaves through the skull, converting them into digital signals before displaying them in various colours on the iPhone screen.

And as the mind focuses on a particular task the graphics change, indicating the user's level of concentration or relaxation.

The high-tech sensor was developed by innovations giant PLX Devices using technology that has for years been used by doctors to treat epilepsy and seizures in patients.

It was so dry and so cold yesterday with a prediction of no precipitation for the next 7 days - I just had to find something good to put in a column.

The best I could come up with at the drop of a hat was the fact fire ant numbers and activity appears to be declining. But let's face it no one is keeping count!

Glass stronger and tougher than steel? A new type of damage-tolerant metallic glass, demonstrating a strength and toughness beyond that of any known material, has been developed and tested by a collaboration of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the California Institute of Technology. What's more, even better versions of this new glass may be on the way.

"These results mark the first use of a new strategy for metallic glass fabrication, and we believe we can use it to make glass that will be even stronger and more tough," says Robert Ritchie, a materials scientist who led the Berkeley contribution to the research.

The new metallic glass is a microalloy featuring palladium, a metal with a high "bulk-to-shear" stiffness ratio that counteracts the intrinsic brittleness of glassy materials.