An interstellar comet visiting our solar system is like nothing ever seen before, scientists have confirmed - but looks strangely familiar.

The object, known as 2I/Borisov, has been examined by researchers who say that it has the potential to transform our understanding of the universe that surrounds us.

Scientists have long thought that the gaps between the stars could be home to various comets and asteroids that have been thrown out of their home planetary systems. As they make their way through the universe, they would pass through our solar system and give us the opportunity to spot them, astronomers speculated.

The first of those objects was seen two years ago, when scientists saw 'Oumuamua, and confirmed that such interstellar objects exist. Since then, they have been watching in hope of seeing another interstellar visitor.

NASA's venerable Hubble Space Telescope recently turned its eyes to interstellar visitor Comet 2I/Borisov and caught a surprise: The interloper looks a lot like comets from our own solar system.

Hubble's observations from earlier this month show that the dust, structure and chemical composition of the interstellar comet look a lot like those of the comets from our own cosmic neighborhood. Among the observed features was the classic halo of dust that comets usually have around their nuclei, or hearts.

"Though another star system could be quite different from our own, the fact that the comet's properties appear to be very similar to those of the solar system's building blocks is very remarkable," Amaya Moro-Martin, an assistant astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which manages Hubble operations, said in a statement from NASA.

Until Comet 2I/Borisov appeared, all cataloged comets came from two locations: the Kuiper Belt — an area near the edge of our solar system where larger objects, such as Pluto and MU69, reside — and the Oort Cloud of icy objects located about 1 light-year from our sun. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, which is roughly 6 trillion miles, or 10 trillion kilometers.)

Scientists have discovered that the sea floor shakes during hurricanes and nor'easters, with a rumbling as strong as a magnitude 3.5 earthquake.

They've dubbed the phenomenon "stormquakes."

The scary sounding mash-up was detailed in research by Florida State University scientists published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The shaking of the sea floor during hurricanes and nor'easters can last for days, according to the study. While fairly common, the quakes weren't noticed before because they were considered seismic background noise.

A stormquake is more an oddity than something that can hurt you, because no one is standing on the sea floor during a hurricane, said Wenyuan Fan, a Florida State University seismologist who was the study's lead author.

The combination of two frightening natural phenomena might bring to mind "Sharknado," but stormquakes are real and not dangerous.

For every action, there is a reaction: that is the principle on which all space rockets operate, blasting propellant in one direction to travel in the other. But one NASA engineer believes he could take us to the stars without any propellant at all.

Designed by David Burns at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, the "helical engine" exploits mass-altering effects known to occur at near-light speed. Burns has posted a paper describing the concept to NASA's technical reports server.

It has been met with scepticism from some quarters, but Burns believes his concept is worth pursuing. "I'm comfortable with throwing it out there," he says. "If someone says it doesn't work, I'll be the first to say, it was worth a shot."

To get to grips with the principle of Burns's engine, picture a box on a frictionless surface. Inside that box is a rod, along which a ring can slide. If a spring inside the box gives the ring a push, the ring will slide along the rod one way while the box will recoil in the other. When the ring reaches the end of the box, it will bounce backwards, and the box's recoil direction will switch too. This is action-reaction - also known as Newton's third law of motion - and in normal circumstances, it restricts the box to wiggling back and forth (watch video).

A team led by genetics researchers from Harvard Medical School has discovered that a protein named REST helps you live longer by damping down activity in the brain.

The finding, published in the journal Nature, shows for the first time how the brain regulates ageing and could herald new treatments for age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's.

The researchers, led by Bruce Yankner from the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, examined hundreds of post mortem brain specimens from three separate studies of older people who were free of dementia.

When they compared the brains of people over 85 to those of people who died younger - between 65 and 80 - they found something curious; in those older brains the genes that fire up brain cell activity were turned right down.

Something was dialling down neural activity in the longer-lived bunch and Yankner's team had a prime suspect.

It was a protein called REST.

The asteroid, dubbed 2019 SR8, is estimated by NASA to measure between 20 metres and 44 metres in diameter

An asteroid the size of Nelson's Column skimmed past Earth this morning, NASA has revealed.

The asteroid, dubbed 2019 SR8, is estimated to measure between 20 metres and 44 metres in diameter.

At the higher end of that estimate, it would mean the space rock is roughly the same size as London's iconic Nelson's Column.

Where armies of trees once stretched skywards, seemingly escaping from the thickets of ferns and shrubs that clawed at their roots, only scorched trunks remain. Instead of the incessant hum of insect chatter blotting out the sound of ponderous giant dinosaurs, only the occasional flurry of wind pierces the silence. Darkness rules: the rich blues and greens, and occasional yellows and reds that danced in the Sun's rays have all been wiped out.

This is Earth after a six-mile-wide asteroid smashed into it 66 million years ago.

"In the course of minutes to hours it went from this lush, vibrant world to just absolute silence and nothing," says Daniel Durda, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. "Especially in the thousands of square miles around the impact site, the slate was just wiped clean."

Just four numbers underpin the laws of physics. That's why scientists have for decades looked for any discrepancies in these so-called fundamental constants. Finding such a variation would rock the very foundations of modern science.

Not to mention, it would guarantee at least one lucky researcher a free trip to Stockholm, a shiny new gold medal and a million bucks.

Recently, a pair of astronomers turned to one of the oldest stars in the universe to test the constancy of one of the superstars of the four fundamental forces of nature — gravity. They looked back in time over the past few billion years for any inconsistencies.

Not to give away the full story, but no Nobel Prizes will be awarded just yet.

The G-man

We take Newton's gravitational constant (denoted simply by "G") for granted, probably because gravity is pretty predictable. We call it Newton's gravitational constant because Newton was the first person to really need it to help describe his famous laws of motion. Using his newly invented calculus, he was able to extend his laws of motion to explain the behavior of everything from apples falling from a tree to the orbits of the planets around the sun. But nothing in his math told him just how strong gravity ought to be — that had to be experimentally measured and slipped in to make the laws work.

And a bad year for a 19th-century creation myth.

After more than a century of shut-outs at the Nobel Prizes, it's understandable that Darwinists are a bit dejected. It's embarrassing that the "greatest idea anyone ever had" and the "theory that explains all of biology" can't in a century garner even one of science's most distinguished awards. Instead, it must make do with wordplay, as we saw with last year's Prize in Chemistry for "directed evolution." (See Ann Gauger's post, "It's Not 'Evolution' — A Nobel Prize for Engineering Enzymes.")

It's understandable why Darwinian scientists spend so much time in court silencing scientists and teachers who question their theory. In the arena of world-class science, Darwinism is a joke, and it wouldn't last a day unless challenges to it were silenced by force.

Let's consider the following scenario - the Earth is at risk for a disruptive event. This event has, conservatively, about a 0.2% chance of happening on any given year. But that is the most conservative estimate, at the high end it could be more like 12% over the next decade. Either way the chance of this type of event happening in the 21st century is quite high, and no matter what it is inevitable.

The result will likely be taking out power grids, possibly world wide in a worst-case scenario. Reasonable recovery will take about a year, with full recovery taking about a decade. Just imagine what would happen if we lost our power grid for a year. No digital banking, no internet, no household power. The most conservative estimate of how much such an event would cost is $2 trillion dollars, but experts are increasingly leaning toward $20 trillion as being a closer estimate (and this figure will only go up in the future).

So here's my question - what do you think we should spend now to avoid a high probability of civilization collapse over the next century costing tens of trillions of dollars and growing? I am not talking about global warming, or environmental degradation, the death of the bees, an asteroid strike, or massive crop failure. I am talking about a coronal mass ejection (CME) - a solar storm.

A CME is actually the greatest threat to civilization that we face, in terms of probability and effect. In fact I think we are underestimating the chaos that a worst-case scenario would cause. Imagine going without power for a year. I know, there are people around the world who live without power, and the residents of Peurto Rico recently experienced something similar. But if this happened on a global scale, there's no one coming with aid. Global infrastructures on which we all depend would collapse. How many people would starve or freeze? How much wood would be burned to keep warm or cook until the power comes back on? There are so many downstream effects that we cannot anticipate.