Handicrafts were never my strong point at school. For each project I attempted, I'd struggle with tools and techniques that didn't suit a left-hander like me, which often made me wonder why humans are wired to prefer using one side of the body over the other. Apart from a few wrist aches, though, my handedness hasn't been too much of a burden. Contrast this with the bad luck of a toad that fails to jump away from a snake approaching from its right, just because its right eye is much worse at spotting the danger than its left. Clearly, such asymmetry can have fatal consequences.

A massive blizzard is raging on Saturn - a storm so large and fierce NASA astronomers and amateur skywatchers can see it from Earth.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn has a front row seat to the otherworldly tempest and is recording the most detailed data yet of storms on the ringed planet. But amateur astronomers back on Earth have also managed to chip in on the Saturn blizzard stormwatch.

"We were so excited to get a heads-up from the amateurs," said Cassini scientist Gordon Bjoraker, a composite infrared spectrometer team member based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The data showed a large, turbulent storm, dredging up a lot of material from the deep atmosphere and covering an area at least five times larger than the biggest blizzard that hit Earth so far this year - the "Snowmageddon" storm that blanketed the Washington, D.C. area in snow in February. [Saturn's rings and moons.]

Fifty years into what has become known as the Space Age, the condition of space operations has changed dramatically. Today more than 50 nations own satellites and commercial operators own even more. There are now nearly 1,000 active satellites orbiting the planet, carrying out critical roles in telecommunications, navigation, banking, science, and other civilian and military operations.

Despite the obvious importance of satellite operations the space above Earth has come to resemble what space security expert Laura Grego calls the Wild West. Increasing numbers of satellites are entering the region yet there are few restrictions on their behavior, increasing the risk of accidents and the possibility of misunderstanding that could lead to conflicts on the ground.

Some recent event drive home how the current chaotic conditions are contributing to the danger. For example, In 2007 China intentionally destroyed one of it aging weather satellites with an anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon, adding more than 100,000 pieces of space debris to the already huge and dangerous amount threatening objects in space. Although China, among other countries, has called for discussing a legal framework for space conduct, so far the US has been unwilling to join them. In the absence of any law, the Chinese ASAT action was technically legal.

A year after the Chinese ASAT attack on its own satellite, the US used a sea-level missile defense interceptor to destroy one of its own failed satellites, USA 193. This incident showed how missile defense systems could also be used as ASATs Restrictions on missile defense systems which were ended when the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001. Fortunately, USA 193 was at a low altitude, so that most of the debris created fell out of orbit within a few days.

One of the more interesting results from recent research into climate is that for the past million years or so, the earth's climate has shown a distinct 100,000 cycle of long ice ages punctuated by a brief, warm intergalacials. We are in one of those brief warm periods, an interglacial period that is called the Holocene.

This cycle can be seen in the temperature graph below taken from publicly available Vostok ice core data. The ice cores are very long sections of ice in which ancient climates can be worked out by careful analysis of atomic isotopes of layers of ice, where each wafer thin layer represents a year. Although there are other ways to determine past climatic conditions the Vostok cores (the site is in Antarctica but run by Russian scientists) are remarkable in being a connected track of temperatures of several hundred thousand years.

As you can see climate changes by about 14 degrees C from the top of the interglacial to the bottom of the ice age, but even the 420,000 or so years covered by the Vostok cores is just a moment in earth's geological history. As noted, the 100,000 year cycle has been a feature of climate for about a million years. For two million years before that the cycle was the same except that it was 40,000 years long and temperatures were warmer. The whole three million years, in turn, is part of an ice age phase of the earth in which temperatures have generally been falling. There have also been hot house phases.

Capturing fleeting bits of matter to reveal the nature of the universe is a little like trying to trap incredibly tiny, impossibly speedy mice alive.

A better mousetrap could be at hand, promising new insights that could bring researchers out of the woodwork to conduct cutting-edge experiments at Michigan State University's National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory.

Michigan State scientists landed a $3.28 million federal grant to develop an electromagnetic trap to snag and quickly extract rare isotope ricochets from high-speed particle collisions they create.

"The products we make live for much less than one second before they decay into something else, so speed is very important," explained David Morrissey, a University Distinguished Professor of chemistry and the project's principal investigator.

An asteroid on the list of potentially dangerous space rocks that could endanger the Earth was caught on camera as it zoomed past our planet this month, and found to be larger than astronomers originally thought.

The asteroid buzzed the Earth on April 19 and came within 1.5 million miles (2.4 million km) of the planet. That's about six times the distance between Earth and the moon.

Astronomers used the planetary radar system on the famed Arecibo radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico to spot the asteroid, called 2005 YU55, over four days starting on April 19. The photo revealed the asteroid as a half-lit space rock flying through the solar system.

"This object is on the list of 'potentially hazardous asteroids' maintained by the Minor Planet Center, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.," Arecibo astronomers said in a statement. [More asteroid photos.]

The astronomers found that the asteroid is about 1,300 feet (400 meters) in size - about a quarter-mile (400 meters) long and twice as big as originally thought. The Arecibo telescope's planetary radar system resolved features on the asteroid down to about 25 feet (7.5 meters).

Sophisticated new technologies created by NASA and university scientists are enabling them to build an instrument designed to probe the first moments of the universe's existence.

Former NASA scientist Chuck Bennett, now an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, Md., won a $5-million National Science Foundation grant to build a new ground-based instrument, the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS). Bennett is building CLASS with his collaborators at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Scientists using a NASA funded telescope have detected water-ice and carbon-based organic compounds on the surface of an asteroid. The cold hard facts of the discovery of the frosty mixture on one of the asteroid belt's largest occupants, suggests that some asteroids, along with their celestial brethren, comets, were the water carriers for a primordial Earth. The research is published in today's issue of the journal Nature.

Near-Earth asteroid 2005 YU55 was "imaged" by the Arecibo Radar Telescope in Puerto Rico on April 19. Data collected during Arecibo's observation of 2005 YU55 allowed the Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to refine the space rock's orbit, allowing scientists to rule out any possibility of an Earth impact for the next 100 years.

The space rock was about 2.3 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Earth at the time this image of the radar echo was generated. The ghostly image has a resolution of 7.5 meters (25 feet) per pixel. It reveals 2005 YU55 as a spherical object about 400 meters (1,300 feet) in size.

Of all the ways that professional and amateur astronomers work together, arguably their most successful collaborations involve planetary observations. Amateurs routinely alert their professional counterparts to rapid changes on Mars and Jupiter - and most recently Saturn.

With Saturn now well placed high in the evening sky, it's been getting a lot of scrutiny from high-end observers around the world. On March 13th, Philippine observer Christopher Go recorded a localized brightening in the planet's South Tropical Zone, and soon others were posting images on the website of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers.