Humans and dolphins are inventing a common language together. This is big news!

In all the hoopla over the world ending due to being asteroid-smashed, man becoming immortal thanks to the singularity in 2045, and Watson the trivia-machine winning Jeopardy! the story of budding interspecies communication got under-reported. Denise Herzing and her team with the Wild Dolphin project has begun developing a language to allow humans and dolphins to communicate. If successful, the ability to communicate with dolphins would fundamentally change animal intelligence research, animal rights arguments, and our ability to talk to aliens.

Herzing and her team faced two huge problems when it came to talking to dolphins. The first problem is that the current state of animal language research creates an asymmetrical relationship between humans and the animals with whom they wish to communicate. The second problem is that (save for parrots) animal vocal cords cannot replicate human speech, and visa versa.

Most, if not nearly all, animal language research involves either studying how animals communicate with one another, or teaching them a human language to see if they can communicate with us. There is a problem with both methods-humans don't learn much (if any) animal language in the process. Think of it this way: how many commands does the smartest dog you've met know? Some border collies, like Chaser, can learn upwards of 1000 words. Now how many words do you know in dog? Or parrot? How about gorilla or whale? Know any corvid? I bet you can at least read cuttlefish patterns, right? No? Of course, I'm being facetious, but with a purpose: up to this point, humans have always attempted to understand animal language by teaching animals how to talk to humans. The glaring flaw in this process of teaching animals to use human language is that it is nary impossible to prove the animal is using language, not merely playing a very complex game of repeater.

Forget the "Sputnik moment." If two astrophysicists are correct, we may be having a "Tyche moment" -- a ninth planet to add to our solar system. But that's a big "if."

The two scientists who make the claim, Daniel Whitmire and John Matese from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, say a planet they named Tyche -- that is four times the size of Jupiter -- may be lurking in the outer solar system.

The pair says that the NASA Wise telescope may already have data to prove its existence, but that the planet, if it exists, won't reveal itself for another two years.

That hasn't stopped astronomically high searches on Yahoo! for "tyche planet," which have soared 3,000% in the last day alone.

The researchers have been collecting data for the last 10 years, and though they admit the unusual orbital patterns in a far-out region of the solar system called the Oort Cloud could be explained by a ginormous planet, it also could be a statistical fluke.

A powerful solar flare has ushered in the largest space weather storm in at least four years and has already disrupted some ground communications on Earth, said University of Colorado Boulder Professor Daniel Baker, an internationally known space weather expert.

Classified as a Class X flare, the Feb. 15 event also spewed billions of tons of charged particles toward Earth in what are called coronal mass ejections and ignited a geomagnetic storm in Earth's magnetic field, said Baker, director of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Such powerful ejections can cause a variety of socioeconomic and safety issues ranging from the disruption of airline navigation systems and power grids to the safety of airline crews and astronauts.

Researchers use a ground-breaking technique that reveals a relationship between cooler temperatures and Earth's second largest mass extinction, which occurred about 450 million years ago

In the Late Ordovician Period of Earth's geologic history, about 450 million years ago, more than 75 percent of marine species perished and Earth scientists have been seeking to discover what caused the extinction. It was the second largest in Earth's history.

Now, using a new research method, investigators believe they are closer to finding an answer.

Employing a new way to measure ancient ocean temperatures, a team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) recently discovered a link between ancient climate change and the Late Ordovician mass extinction. The team found the extinction event occurred during a glacial period when global temperatures became cooler and the volume of glacial ice increased.

Both the changes in temperature and the increase of continental ice sheets are factors that could have affected marine life in these ancient waters, said Woodward Fischer, an assistant professor of geobiology at Caltech.

"Our tools are getting better to ask more questions about ancient climate, so we're really shaping our picture of what that world was like," he said.

In the past, measuring ancient ocean temperatures was based on measuring the ratios of oxygen isotopes found in minerals from ocean water. The challenge was knowing the concentration of isotopes in the ocean at that time, which was needed to determine past water temperatures. But, because there is no direct record of the isotopic composition of ancient oceans, it was difficult to determine the water temperature.

Amid two weeks' worth of blather about whether the U.S. should have a kill switch for the Internet just like Egypt does are a few inconsistencies that make it look a lot like there is no actual kill switch, and that what Egypt really did relied more on old-fashioned intimidation than on brilliant control of its networks.

This morning's New York Times lays out the steps in Egypt's emergency response in which "In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet."

Not the story most people believed at the time, but nifty nonetheless.

Hosni Mubarak's government didn't shut off Internet communication altogether; it just shut off links connecting intertubes within Egypt from those outside.

Death Valley National Park contains many mysteries, including one of nature's strangest phenomena: Rocks that seem to move around all on their own.

In the remote, almost totally dry lakebed called Racetrack Playa, some of the rocks move themselves across the desert floor when people aren't watching.

Scientists know the rocks move because they leave narrow tracks trailing behind them, but they haven't actually seen it happen. And although one can't entirely rule out the possibility of some prank being played, at least some of the rocks appear to be moving under natural circumstances.

It doesn't rain often in Racetrack Playa, and when it does the lakebed can flood. The rocks don't float exactly, but the main explanation for their movement is that moisture can make the mud on which the rocks sit more slick, making it easier for high winds to push the rocks along. Another explanation offered is that the temporary deposit of water, chilled to form extensive sheets of ice, might help to reflect and focus the winds, making it easier for the rocks to move.

The winds required to move rocks in this way would seem to be at the level of 100 mph or more. That's why the rocks are sometimes referred to as "sailing stones." They are rare but they have been noticed in Racetrack Playa and a few other arid places around the world subject to occasional floods.

It happened in Turkey, but other destructive temblors have no 'foreshocks'

Bursts of energy rocked the Earth in the hour right before an earthquake devastated Turkey in 1999 - a new finding that might one day help researchers predict major quakes.

Many large earthquakes are preceded by smaller rumbles known as foreshocks. However, there is apparently no way to distinguish these tremors from other small quakes that don't portend a larger temblor. At the same time, many large earthquakes do not seem to have any foreshocks.

The magnitude 7.6 earthquake that hit near Izmit in northwest Turkey in 1999, killing at least 17,000 people and leaving nearly 500,000 homeless, is now helping to shed light on the anatomy of such catastrophes. The calamity was one of the best-recorded large earthquakes to date, since researchers had seismic recording stations very close to the fault, said seismologist Michel Bouchon of the University of Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France.

Now, after analyzing the deluge of information from before, during and after the earthquake, Bouchon and his colleagues have detected repeated, accelerating blips of seismic activity before the Izmit quake, near the point where the rupture began.

A young male American black bear, captured in south-central Alaska as a nuisance animal, is shown having just been placed in an artificial den. The bear is part of the hibernation research conducted by Řivind Tøien, research scientist with the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and first author of the Science paper on bear hibernation, and Brian M. Barnes, senior author on the same paper and IAB director. Credit: Řivind Tøien, Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks

Black bears show surprisingly large and previously unobserved decreases in their metabolism during and after hibernation according to a paper by scientists at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and published in the 18 February issue of the journal Science.

Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, is seeking to block funding for the overhaul of major federal climate change research and monitoring programs.

Hall - who questions climate science - wants to amend House spending legislation to prevent the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from proceeding with creation of a new "Climate Service."

Hall's plan would amend the continuing resolution that's on the House floor this week - it's the bill to fund the federal government through the end of fiscal year 2011. His amendment would prevent any of the money from being used to "implement, establish, or create" the Climate Service.

NOAA is seeking to better integrate its various climate-related functions.

"The proposed Climate Service will bring together NOAA's existing climate research, observations, monitoring, modeling, information product development and delivery, and decision support functions from NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the National Weather Service, and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, which will be renamed the National Environmental Satellite Service," according to NOAA's proposal.

The threat of cyber warfare is greatly exaggerated, according to a leading security expert.

Bruce Schneier claims that emotive rhetoric around the term does not match the reality.

He warned that using sensational phrases such as "cyber armageddon" only inflames the situation.

Mr Schneier, who is chief security officer for BT, is due to address the RSA security conference in San Francisco this week

Speaking ahead of the event, he told BBC News that there was a power struggle going on, involving a "battle of metaphors".

He suggested that the notion of a cyber war was based on several high-profile incidents from recent years.

They include blackouts in Brazil in 1998, attacks by China on Google in 2009 and the Stuxnet virus that attacked Iran's nuclear facilities.

He also pointed to the fallout from Wikileaks and the hacking of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's e-mail.

"What we are seeing is not cyber war but an increasing use of war-like tactics and that is what is confusing us.

"We don't have good definitions of what cyber war is, what it looks like and how to fight it," said Mr Schneier.

His point of view was backed by Howard Schmidt, cyber security co-ordinator for the White House.

"We really need to define this word because words do matter," said Mr Schmidt.