"It could happen in a matter of months," says Martin Mlynczak of NASA's Langley Research Center

"The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age," wrote Dr Tony Phillips just six weeks ago, on 27 Sep 2018.

Sunspots have been absent for most of 2018 and Earth's upper atmosphere is responding, says Phillips, editor of spaceweather.com.

Data from NASA's TIMED satellite show that the thermosphere (the uppermost layer of air around our planet) is cooling and shrinking, literally decreasing the radius of the atmosphere.

To help track the latest developments, Martin Mlynczak of NASA's Langley Research Center and his colleagues recently introduced the "Thermosphere Climate Index."

Whether in villages on the coast of Ghana or in the mountains of Rwanda, asking for people's poop is a good icebreaker, Mathieu Groussin says. "Everybody laughs," says Groussin, a microbiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. "Especially when we stress that we need the whole fecal sample and show them the big bowl."

He's asking on behalf of the Global Microbiome Conservancy (GMC), an effort to identify and preserve gut bacteria from different peoples around the world. Most microbiome research has focused on Western, urban populations, which typically eat processed foods and use antibiotics. The few studies of traditional peoples have found a far more diverse gut microbiome that appears to be linked to the absence of certain diseases.

Electrons within the structure behave as if they live in a fractional number of dimensions

Physicists have created an oddity known as a quantum fractal, a structure that could reveal new and strange types of electron behaviors.

Fractals are patterns that repeat themselves on different length scales: Zoom in and the structure looks the same as it does from afar. They're common in the natural world. For instance, a cauliflower stalk looks like a miniature version of the full head. A lightning stroke splits into many branches, each of which has the same forked structure as the whole bolt.

CBET 4569 (issued on 2018, November 08) and MPEC 2018-V151 (2018, November 11), announce the discovery of a 10th-magnitude comet by Donald E. Machholz (Colfax, CA, U.S.A) and independently by Shigehisa Fujikawa (Kan'onji, Kagawa, Japan) and Masayuki Iwamoto(Awa, Tokushima, Japan).

The new comet has been designated C/2018 V1 (Machholz-Fujikawa-Iwamoto).

- D. Machholz reported his VISUAL DISCOVERY on Nov. 7.531 UT with a 0.47-m reflector (113x). He also observed the comet with similar appearance on Nov. 8.533

- Shigehisa Fujikawa found the object (with no description provided) on Nov. 7.82 UT on a CCD image obtained with a 120-mm-f.l. f/3.5 lens. His discovery was reported to the Central Bureau's TOCP webpage, which produced the provisional designation TCP J12192806-0211143.

- Masayuki Iwamoto discovered the new object on images obtained on Nov. 7.841 with a 10-cm f/4.0 Pentax SDUF II telephoto lens and a Canon EOS 6D camera; Iwamoto called it a possible comet of mag 10 with approximate position R.A. = 12h19m30s, Decl. = -2d11' (equinox 2000.0) and his observations was reported on TCP J12192806-0211143 TOCP webpage. He added that he also observed it one minute later and detected no movement.

Prompted by the Iwamoto's remark in the TOCP webpage about the possible cometary nature of this transient I decided to perform follow-up measurements of this object. The telescope I chose was T14 astrograph in New Mexico due to its wide field FOV (155.8 x 233.7 arc-mins). In fact as only 1 astrometric position was available at that time and my observation was scheduled 16 hours after it was taken, in case of a comet it was important to have as much field as possible around that only reported astrometry point.

As it happens, it was a comet and I found it about 51 arcmin from the reported astrometry available (60 arcmin is 1 degree). Single unfiltered 60 second exposure, obtained remotely on 2018, November 08.5 from H06 (iTelescope network) through a 0.10-m f/5 reflector + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a diffuse coma about 2 arcmin in diameter.

Mouse studies show tiny intercellular pods convey to sperm a legacy of a father's hard knocks in life

A stressed-out and traumatized father can leave scars in his children. New research suggests this happens because sperm "learn" paternal experiences via a mysterious mode of intercellular communication in which small blebs break off one cell and fuse with another.

Carrying proteins, lipids and nucleic acids, these particles ejected from a cell act like a postal system that extends to all parts of the body, releasing little packages known as extracellular vesicles. Their contents seem carefully chosen. "The cargo inside the vesicle determines not just where it came from but where it's going and what it's doing when it gets there," says Tracy Bale, a neurobiologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Preliminary research Bale and others, announced this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, shows how extracellular vesicles can regulate brain circuits and help diagnose neurodegenerative diseases - in addition to altering sperm to disrupt the brain health of resulting offspring.

Despite the fact that universal quantum computers have not yet been realized, the principle of calculation upon which it is based allows researchers to solve highly complex problems.

In quantum computing, a qubit or quantum bit is the basic unit of quantum information - equivalent to the binary bit (the smallest unit of data in a digital computer) within a two-state device. In such networks, qubits are transported using light (as single photons of light can carry a qubit).

However, these photons, which move at the speed of light, nonetheless need to be stored. A qubit can be stored in a quantum state of extremely cold gas as long as the qubit can be emitted as a photon. However, new research reveals that physicists can also store quantum information in a gas using what is called the 'hammer' approach, ArsTechnica reported Friday.

An atom can be in one of three states. Two of those states, almost at the same energy level, are known as the 'ground' and 'storage' states. A ground state is ordinarily where an atom exists, while a storage stage is where an atom finds itself after absorbing a photonic qubit.

There was a huge amount of excitement when the Higgs boson was first spotted back in 2012 - a discovery that bagged the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013. The particle completed the so-called standard model, our current best theory of understanding nature at the level of particles.

Now scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern think they may have seen another particle, detected as a peak at a certain energy in the data, although the finding is yet to be confirmed. Again there's a lot of excitement among particle physicists, but this time it is mixed with a sense of anxiety. Unlike the Higgs particle, which confirmed our understanding of physical reality, this new particle seems to threaten it.

The new result - consisting of a mysterious bump in the data at 28 GeV (a unit of energy) - has been published as a preprint on ArXiv. It is not yet in a peer-reviewed journal - but that's not a big issue. The LHC collaborations have very tight internal review procedures, and we can be confident that the authors have done the sums correctly when they report a "4.2 standard deviation significance". That means that the probability of getting a peak this big by chance - created by random noise in the data rather than a real particle - is only 0.0013%. That's tiny - 13 in a million. So it seems like it must a real event rather than random noise - but nobody's opening the champagne yet.

The dynamo effect that generates Earth's magnetic pull could also occur in Weyl metals

Weird materials called Weyl metals might reveal the secrets of how Earth gets its magnetic field.

The substances could generate a dynamo effect, the process by which a swirling, electrically conductive material creates a magnetic field, a team of scientists reports in the Oct. 26 Physical Review Letters.

Dynamos are common in the universe, producing the magnetic fields of the Earth, the sun and other stars and galaxies. But scientists still don't fully understand the details of how dynamos create magnetic fields. And, unfortunately, making a dynamo in the lab is no easy task, requiring researchers to rapidly spin giant tanks of a liquefied metal, such as sodium (SN: 5/18/13, p. 26).

First discovered in 2015, Weyl metals are topological materials, meaning that their behavior is governed by a branch of mathematics called topology, the study of shapes like doughnuts and knots (SN: 8/22/15, p. 11). Electrons in Weyl metals move around in bizarre ways, behaving as if they are massless.

In addition to the standard aggregate states of solid, liquid, and gas, matter can also have other states. A gas, for example, can be ionised at high temperatures to form a plasma.

In 1995, researchers were able to prove that a fifth state of matter could be created at very low temperatures - the Bose-Einstein condensate.

In quantum mechanics, the Bose-Einstein condensate is used to conduct quantum experiments. For example, it can be used to study gravitational waves or the Earth's gravitational field.

Until now, however, this special state of aggregation could only be generated using high-vacuum apparatus on Earth and the state was extremely short-lived due to gravity.

A German research team has now succeeded for the first time in generating and studying the Bose-Einstein condensate on board an unmanned space rocket - they published the results of their researched in journal Nature.

The Russian fisherman who has built a zealous fanbase with horrifying photographs of the terrifying monsters that get caught in his net is back on dry land with a fresh haul of bizarre creatures from the deep.

Roman Fedortsov, who works on a trawler based out of Murmansk in northwest Russia, has racked up hundreds of thousands of social media followers with his enlightening posts featuring some of the most peculiar beings on the planet.