The shock waves caused as comets hit the early Earth could have helped promote the formation of amino acids and the early building blocks of life, say US researchers.

It is thought that amino acids and short peptides played a significant role in the chemical evolution that resulted in life on Earth, but researchers have historically disagreed on how these chemicals got here in the first place.

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Stanford University have now run theoretical simulations of shock compressions that mimic the conditions created when a comet hits the Earth, which suggest that the ingredients for life on Earth could have been delivered from space.

Comets are made of dust, ice and compressed gases. The ice is predominantly water, but is also known to contain small molecules that promote bacterial growth - prebiotic molecules - such as carbon dioxide, ammonia and methanol.

Side-by-side comparisons of organic and conventional strawberry farms and their fruit found the organic farms produced more flavorful and nutritious berries while leaving the soil healthier and more genetically diverse.

"Our findings have global implications and advance what we know about the sustainability benefits of organic farming systems," said John Reganold, Washington State University Regents professor of soil science and lead author of a paper published in the peer-reviewed online journal, PLoS ONE.

"We also show you can have high quality, healthy produce without resorting to an arsenal of pesticides."

Around the world on Sept. 11th, sky watchers marveled as Venus and the Moon converged for a beautiful close encounter. In South Africa, it was a full-fledged occultation. "The Moon passed directly in front of Venus, completely covering the planet," reports Kerneels Mulder. "I was lucky enough to capture a series of images as Venus re-appeared from behind the Moon in broad daylight."

Going boldly where no scientists have gone before, a group of Australian researchers have developed a working model of a tractor beam like Star Trek's fictional mass mover.

The tractor beam prototype developed by a team at Australian National University is so far able to move only tiny glass particles about 1.5 metres, but the researchers expect to soon stretch that distance to about 10 metres.

After that, the sky's the limit.

The tractor effect is created when a hollow laser beam is directed at a particle. The laser heats up the area around the particle, but the particle itself stays cool and starts drifting inside the hollow beam.

As more heat is introduced under and to the sides of the subject, the glass particle is forced up the hollow laser tube. Speed and direction can be changed by altering the intensity of beam's brightness.

Using computer simulations of brain-like networks, researchers from Germany and Japan have discovered why nerve cells transmit information through small electrical pulses. The process not only allows the brain to process information much faster than previously thought, but also single neurons are already able to multiply, opening the door to more complex forms of computing.

When nerve cells communicate with each other, they do so through electrical pulses -- so-called action potentials. For decades, the accepted idea was that they simply sum up the tiny potentials generated by the incoming pulses and emit an action potential themselves when a threshold is reached. For the first time, Moritz Helias and Markus Diesmann from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (Japan) and Moritz Deger and Stefan Rotter from the Bernstein Center Freiburg (Germany) now explain what exactly happens right before a nerve cell emits a pulse.

The research appears online in PLoS Computational Biology, published by the Public Library of Science.

WAPA - Russia has launched a program to build a powerful, multi-purpose airship that will certainly cause many UFO reports. This time, though, the words "Flying saucer" are not inappropriate at all.

The first such aerostate is officially named "Aerostatic thermoballasted vehicle": simply "Locomoskyner", after its manufacturer LocomoSky. A prototype flying saucer (presented at "MAKS 2009 air show") was seven meters (23 feet) in diameter and was able to transport 20 kg (44.4 lbs) of cargo. The company, however, plans to produce aircraft with a cargo-carrying a passenger capacity of up to 11,000 people and up to 600 tons of cargo. It will be able to hover, perform a vertical landing, move in a straight line with speeds close to 100 kmph, turn around and will need no special ground-based facilities to land.

Washington - Students who cheat in high school and college are highly likely to fit the profile for subclinical psychopathy - a personality disorder defined by erratic lifestyle, manipulation, callousness and antisocial tendencies, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. These problematic students cheat because they feel entitled and disregard morality, the study found.

Cheating, a perennial concern for educators, "has been facilitated by new technologies," said Delroy Paulhus, PhD, who led the research. "At the same time, cheating may seem more apparent because we can more effectively detect it." Because it's hard or even dangerous to try to reform a psychopathic person, he recommends blocking cheating using other means.

College students who admitted to cheating in high school or turned in plagiarized papers ranked high on personality tests of the so-called Dark Triad: psychopathy, Machiavellianism (cynicism, amorality, manipulativeness), and narcissism (arrogance and self-centeredness, with a strong sense of entitlement). Of the three dark personality types, psychopathy was most strongly linked to cheating. These findings appear in the September Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

Students were spurred to cheat by two motivations, the research found: First, they sought to get the grades to which they felt entitled; second, they either didn't think cheating was wrong or didn't care.

The first of three studies at the University of British Columbia surveyed 249 second-year college students who, without having to share their identities, filled out take-home personality tests that looked at the Dark Triad and psychology's "Big Five" core traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, stability and openness.

Also anonymously, students were asked whether they had cheated on high-school tests or handed in essays copied from someone else. (Questions specifically referred to high school to allay concerns about admitting to cheating at the university.)

Each of the Dark Triad variables went hand in hand with cheating at a high level of statistical significance. The more likely students were to have cheated, the higher they ranked on the psychopathy scale, followed by Machiavellianism and narcissism.

In a paper published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a group of professional and amateur astronomers announced that Jupiter is getting hit surprisingly often by small asteroids, lighting up the giant planet's atmosphere with frequent fireballs.

"Jupiter is a big gravitational vacuum cleaner," says co-author and JPL astronomer Glenn Orton. "It is clear now that relatively small objects left over from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago still hit Jupiter frequently."

The impacts are bright enough to see through backyard telescopes on Earth. Indeed, amateur astronomers were the first to detect them, recording two fireballs in 2010 alone - one on June 3rd and another on August 20th.

Professional astronomers at NASA and elsewhere have followed up on the amateur observations, hoping to learn more about the impacting bodies. According to today's Letter, first-authored by Ricardo Hueso of the Universidad del País Vasco in Spain, the June 3rd fireball was caused by an object some 10 meters in diameter. When it hit Jupiter, the impact released about one thousand million million (10^15) Joules of energy. For comparison, that's five to ten times less energy than the "Tunguska event" of 1908, when a meteoroid exploded in Earth's atmosphere and leveled millions of trees in a remote area of Russia. Scientists continue to analyze the Aug. 20th fireball, but think it was comparable in scale to the June 3rd event.

Which is higher, the contrail or the fluffy clouds? Inspect the shadows, then scroll down for the answer:

Reading a person's mind may soon be following in the footsteps of so many ideas which have made their way out of science fiction and into reality. Scientists at the University of Utah have been working on a way to read the brain activity of a person in order to translate those signals into words, and thus, reading the mind.

These doctors implanted small electrodes on to the brain of a man who suffered from severe epileptic seizures. A statement released by the University said, "Scientists recorded brain signals as the patient repeatedly read each of 10 words that might be useful to a paralyzed person: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more and less."