A rocket experiment set to launch Tuesday aims to create artificial clouds at the outermost layers of Earth's atmosphere.

The project, called the Charged Aerosol Release Experiment (CARE), plans to trigger cloud formation around the rocket's exhaust particles. The clouds are intended to simulate naturally-occurring phenomena called noctilucent clouds, which are the highest clouds in the atmosphere.

"This is really essentially at the boundary of space," said Wayne Scales, a scientist at Virginia Tech who will use computer models to study the physics of the artificial dust cloud as it's released. "Nothing like this has been done before and that's why everybody's really excited about it."

Archaeologists have unearthed a mass cemetery carved in rocks near al-Basel Hospital in Syria.

According to the Global Arab Network, archaeologists at the Syrian Department of Antiquities in Tartous discovered the graveyard.

The cemetery consists of 7 rooms including burial chambers with some bodies inside. There were no findings or any clay or bone fragments in those chambers, said Marwan Hassan, Director of the Department.

A hole discovered in the western wall of the cemetery, was thought to be a passage to a small hall.

Another hole, opposite to this one, was found in the eastern wall leading to another hall which includes two rooms and a solo tomb.

Three vessels, two small golden pieces and clay lamp were also discovered inside the tomb.

New studies of mixotrophic algae have shown how such organisms could survive the darkened skies that follow a major asteroid impact. Such studies indicate how life manages to survive after a mass extinction event.

A dinosaur-killing asteroid may have wiped out much of life on Earth 65 million years ago, but now scientists have discovered how smaller organisms might have survived in the darkness following such a catastrophic impact.

Survival may have depended upon jack-of-all-trades organisms called mixotrophs that can consume organic matter in the absence of sunlight. That would have proved crucial during the long months of dust and debris blotting out the sun, when plenty of dead or dying organic matter filled the Earth's oceans and lakes.

"Mixotrophs are very good at stabilizing situations by using whatever resources are there, and can often provide what resources there aren't," said Harriet Jones, a biologist at the University of East Anglia in the UK. "They're very good at coping in extreme environments, and enabling other organisms to live."

Jupiter's gravity well has been known to capture objects - evidenced by the recent impact on the gas giant discovered by amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley. But one object captured by Jupiter in the mid 1900's was later able to escape from the planet's clutches.

Researchers have found comet 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu was captured as a temporary moon of Jupiter, and remained trapped in an irregular orbit for about twelve years. "Our results demonstrate some of the routes taken by cometary bodies through interplanetary space that can allow them either to enter or to escape situations where they are in orbit around the planet Jupiter," said team member Dr. David Archer.

With this discovery, five such objects have now been discovered where the phenomenon of temporary satellite capture (TSC) has occurred, but this new research suggests it might happen more frequently than was expected. Kushida-Muramatsu orbited Jupiter between 1949 and 1961, the third longest capture period of the five objects.

Discovery of the master gene behind the front-line troops of the body's immune system could promise a host of new treatments for disease. Called E4BP4, the gene kick-starts production of natural killer (NK) cells in the bone marrow.

Mice genetically engineered to lack the gene were able to make all other components of the immune system - such as B cells which produce antibodies and T cells which attack pre-selected targets - but not NK cells. This suggests that E4BP4 is indispensable for their production. "Now we know which gene is at the top of the hierarchy, it opens the door to the whole machinery for making them," says Hugh Brady of Imperial College London.

Brady and colleagues hope it may now be possible to develop drugs that artificially boost production of NK cells, helping patients to combat infections or cancer. Patrolling the bloodstream, the spleen and the lymph nodes, NK cells are the body's first line of defence against disease, rapidly identifying and destroying cells that have turned cancerous or been invaded by viruses.

Predicting how rumours and epidemics percolate through populations, or how traffic jams spread through city streets, are network analyst Jian-Wei Wang's bread and butter. But his latest findings are likely to spark worries in the US: he's worked out how attackers could cause a cascade of network failures in the US's west-coast electricity grid - cutting power to economic powerhouses Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Wang and colleagues at Dalian University of Technology in the Chinese province of Liaoning modelled the US's west-coast grid using publicly available data on how it, and its subnetworks, are connected (Safety Science, DOI: link).

Their aim was to examine the potential for cascade failures, where a major power outage in a subnetwork results in power being dumped into an adjacent subnetwork, causing a chain reaction of failures. Where, they wondered, were the weak spots? Common sense suggests they should be the most highly loaded networks, since pulling them offline would dump more energy into smaller networks.

Archaeologists from Glasgow University yesterday began digging in the grounds of Paisley Abbey, hoping to shed light on life in a medieval Scottish monastery.

The team, backed by volunteers from Renfrewshire Local History Forum, is carrying out a 12-day excavation of an ancient drain that lay undisturbed until its discovery in 1990.

An initial excavation revealed an arched corridor almost 6ft high, and uncovered pottery fragments and gaming pieces, a complete chamber pot, and other artefacts.

How do we discover new things? For scientists, observation and measurement are the main ways to extract information from Nature. Based on observations, scientists build models that, in turn, are used to make predictions about the future or the past. To the extent that the predictions are successful, scientists conclude that their models capture Nature's organization. However, Nature does not reveal secrets easily - there is no way for observers to learn everything about a process, so some information always remains hidden from view; other kinds of information are present, but difficult to extract. In a recent study, researchers have investigated how to measure the degree of hidden information in a process (its "crypticity") and, along the way, solved several puzzles involved in extracting, storing, and communicating information.

In their study, James Crutchfield, Physics Professor at the University of California at Davis, and graduate students Christopher Ellison and John Mahoney, have developed the analogy of scientists as cryptologists who are trying to glean hidden information from Nature. As they explain, "Nature speaks for herself only through the data she willingly gives up." To build good models, scientists must use the correct "codebook" in order to decrypt the information hidden in observations and so decode the structure embedded in Nature's processes.

In their recent work, the researchers adopt a thorough-going informational view: All of Nature is a communication channel that transmits the past to the future by storing information in the present. The information that the past and future share can be quantified using the "excess entropy" - the mutual information between the past and the future.

Spacecraft 'could surf gravitational tubes' to make solar travel more efficient

Gravitational corridors could help spacecraft travel the solar system like ships carried on ocean currents, making longer and cheaper journeys possible, it has been claimed.

Scientists in the US are trying to map the twisting "tubes" so they can be used to cut the cost of space travel.

Each one acts like a gravitational version of the Gulf Stream, created from the complex interplay of forces between planets and moons.

The moon is at new phase on Sept. 18 and during this upcoming week will appear as a gradually diminishing crescent of light in the after midnight-hours, and won't be much of a hindrance to stargazing. This combined with the fact that at this particular time of the year the hazy skies of summer are giving way to clearer skies and cooler overnight temperatures means that this is an optimum week to check out the beautiful summer Milky Way.

As soon as darkness falls, it becomes evident as a wide glowing arch of variety and beauty, stretching across the sky from the northeast to southwest. Sweep with binoculars from the Scorpion's tail, through the Summer Triangle, and then down to Cassiopeia and Perseus. You'll find concentrations of stars, clusters, large apparent gaps (such as the "Great Rift" in Cygnus), and more stars than you probably thought existed.