What do Mary Poppins and neonatal doctors have in common? Both use sugar to ease medical unpleasantries.

Sucrose has long been used as an analgesic for newborns; but now a study published online today in the Lancet says that the sweetener has no effect on pain levels in the babies' brains.

"Sucrose seems to blunt facial expression activity after painful procedures, but our data suggest that it ... might not be an effective analgesic drug," they wrote.

Newborns can't really tell you exactly how much something hurts, so doctors have to judge by the babies' facial contortions. When babies are given sugar right before a procedure, their faces don't show the same anguished expression as they would otherwise.

Pity poor Mercury. The tiny planet endures endless assaults by intense sunlight, powerful solar wind and high-speed miniature meteoroids called micrometeoroids. The planet's flimsy covering, the exosphere, nearly blends in with the vacuum of space, making it too thin to offer protection. Because of this, it's tempting to think of Mercury's exosphere as just the battered remains of ancient atmosphere.

Really, though, the exosphere is constantly changing and being renewed with sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium and other species that are liberated from Mercury's soil by barrages of particles. Because both these particles and Mercury's surface materials respond to sunlight, the solar wind, Mercury's own magnetic sheath (the magnetosphere) and other dynamic forces, the exosphere may not look the same from one observation to the next. Far from being dead, Mercury's exosphere is a place of amazing activity that can tell astronomers a lot about the planet's surface and environment.

Three related papers written by scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and their colleagues offer insight into the details of how the exosphere gets replenished and show that new modeling of the magnetosphere and exosphere can explain some intriguing observations of the planet. These papers are published as part of Icarus's September 2010 special issue devoted to observations of Mercury during the first and second flybys of the MESSENGER (short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) spacecraft.

ESA's (European Space Agency) Herschel infrared space observatory has discovered that ultraviolet starlight is a key ingredient for making water in the atmosphere of some stars. It is the only explanation for why a dying star is surrounded by a gigantic cloud of hot water vapour. These new results will be published tomorrow in Nature.

Every recipe needs a secret ingredient. When astronomers discovered an unexpected cloud of water vapour around the old star CW Leonis in 2001, they immediately began searching for the source. Water is known to be present around several types of stars, but CW Leonis is a "carbon star" and therefore thought not to produce water. Initially they suspected the star's heat must be evaporating comets or even dwarf planets to produce the water.

Now, Herschel's PACS (Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer) and SPIRE instruments have revealed that the secret ingredient is ultraviolet light, because the water vapour is too hot to have come from the destruction of icy celestial bodies and is distributed throughout the stellar wind, including deep down near the surface of the star itself. This suggests that the water is being created by a previously unsuspected chemical process where ultraviolet radiation from interstellar space is breaking up the carbon monoxide and releasing oxygen atoms that can then react with hydrogen to form water molecules.

New evidence has been discovered that reinforces the panspermia thoery that the red rain which fell in India in 2001, contained cells unlike any found on Earth. Panspermia is the idea championed by physicist Fred Hoyle that life exists throughout the universe in comets, asteroids and interstellar dust clouds and that life of Earth was seeded from one or more of these sources.

In 1903, in the German journal Umschau, Svante Arrhenius removed the meteors from the equation. Instead, he wrote, individual spores wafted throughout space, colonizing any hospitable planet they lit on. Arrhenius named the theory panspermia.

A growing body of evidence suggests that it might be Hoyle and Arrhenius might have been correct.

For example, various insects such as have been shown to survive for months or even years in the harsh conditions of space. the Allen Hills Mars meteorite that some scientists believe holds evidence of life on Mars, is that its interior never rose above 50 degrees centigrade, despite being blasted from the Martian surface by an meteor impact and surviving a fiery a descent through Earth's opaque atmosphere.

"Spores," says Gerda Horneck, of DLR German Aerospace Center in Köln, "can withstand a variety of different hostile conditions: heat, radiation, desiccation, chemical substances, such as alcohol, acetone and others. They have an extremely long shelf life. This is because the sensitive material, the DNA, is especially packed and protected in the spores

In 2001, the inhabitants of Kerala in the southern India observed red rain falling during a two month period. One, Godfrey Louis, a physicist at nearby Cochin University of Science and Technology, intrigued by this phenomena, collected numerous samples of red rain to find out what was causing the contamination, perhaps sand or dust from some distant desert.

After 18 years of excavation, a Yale archaeology team has unearthed a large industrial center in the deserts of Western Egypt, shedding light on a little-known period in Egyptian history, the University announced last week.

Egyptology professor and Department Chair John Darnell and his team worked their way through the previously unearthed site of Umm Mawagir in the western deserts of Egypt and discovered large piles of ash next to clay ovens, buried in the sand. At first, the team wondered why so many ovens were clustered so close together in the northern part of the town, far from areas where people lived. They realized the ovens must have been used for large-scale production, not private use, at the newly discovered site - once an oasis but now a no man's land.

Scientists have found evidence for an ancient sea passage linking currently isolated areas of Antarctica. The evidence comes from a study of tiny marine animals living either side of the 2km thick Western Antarctic ice sheet.

Reseachers think their spread was due to the collapse of the ice sheet as recently as 125,000 years ago allowing water flow between different regions. Their findings are published in the journal, Global Change Biology.

Bryozoans are tiny, filter feeding marine animals which in their adult form are immobile, living glued to the sides of boulders, rocks or other surfaces.

As part of the Census of Antarctic Marine Life scientists from the British Antarctic Survey have revealed striking similarities between the Bryozoans living in the Ross and Weddell seas. These are 1,500 miles apart and separated by the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), the third largest ice mass on the planet.

If Barack Obama were to marshal America's vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.

We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or strategic reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast.

Muddling on with the status quo is not a grown-up policy. The International Energy Agency says the world must invest $26 trillion (£16.7 trillion) over the next 20 years to avert an energy shock. The scramble for scarce fuel is already leading to friction between China, India, and the West.

There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal - named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor's day or Thursday - produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

The creators of the world were closer to men than to gods, argues John Gribbin.

Amateur astronomer Peter Shah who has taken astonishing shots of the universe from his garden shed

The argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history. But amid the raging arguments between believers and skeptics, one possibility has been almost ignored - the idea that the universe around us was created by people very much like ourselves, using devices not too dissimilar to those available to scientists today.

As with much else in modern physics, the idea involves particle acceleration, the kind of thing that goes on in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Before the LHC began operating, a few alarmists worried that it might create a black hole which would destroy the world. That was never on the cards: although it is just possible that the device could generate an artificial black hole, it would be too small to swallow an atom, let alone the Earth.

Communal feasting may have existed prior to farming's invention.

Nacho-fueled Super Bowl bashes and multi-course wedding banquets may hark back to a time when preagricultural people devoured wild animal meat at their comrades' gravesides.

That's what happened 12,000 years ago at Hilazon Tachtit cave in Israel, say zooarchaeologist Natalie Munro of the University of Connecticut in Storrs and archaeologist Leore Grosman of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At least 35 members of the Natufian culture gathered there to chow down on wild tortoise meat at the burial pit of an elderly woman who probably had been a shaman, the researchers report in a paper scheduled to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Computational scientists and geophysicists at the University of Texas at Austin and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed new computer algorithms that for the first time allow for the simultaneous modeling of the earth's Earth's mantle flow, large-scale tectonic plate motions, and the behavior of individual fault zones, to produce an unprecedented view of plate tectonics and the forces that drive it.

A paper describing the whole-earth model and its underlying algorithms will be published in the August 27 issue of the journal Science and also featured on the cover.