Like the mythical half-human, half-horse creatures, centaurs in the solar system are hybrids between asteroids and comets. Now, astronomers have caught one morphing from one type of space rock to the other, potentially giving scientists an unprecedented chance to watch a comet form in real time in the decades to come.

"We have an opportunity here to see the birth of a comet as it starts to become active," says planetary scientist Kat Volk of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Image copyright Steven Heritage Image caption The animal is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand

A little-known mammal related to an elephant but as small as a mouse has been rediscovered in Africa after 50 years of obscurity.

The last scientific record of the "lost species" of elephant shrew was in the 1970s, despite local sightings.

The creature was found alive and well in Djibouti, a country in the Horn of Africa, during a scientific expedition.

Elephant shrews, or sengis, are neither elephants nor shrews, but related to aardvarks, elephants and manatees.

A recent feature cover photo on Science portrayed a bubble in mid-collapse, based on a study conducted by Alexandros T. Oratis et al. The research team in mechanical engineering, mathematics and aerospace engineering at Boston University, MIT and Princeton University demonstrated the formation of intriguing wave-like patterns when bubbles underwent collapse. Using a complex lighting setup and fast shutter speed in the lab, perfectly aligned to capture a fleeting moment, within one second, they photographed the tiny bubble emerging from the surrounding media of dense silicone oil.

The rupture and collapse of viscous bubbles are widespread in nature and in industrial applications. The phenomenon is accompanied by elastic sheets that develop radial wrinkles. While the weight of the film appeared to play a dominant role during film collapse and wrinkling instability, in this work, gravity appeared to play a surprisingly negligible role. Based on fluid mechanics of the phenomena, Oratis et al. showed surface tension to be the driving factor during collapse to initiate dynamic buckling instability and wrinkling behavior, accompanied with the breakdown of curved viscous and viscoelastic films. The research work is relevant to understand industrial and chemical applications, including aerosol production from exhalation events in the respiratory tract.

Dozens of times over the last decade NASA scientists have launched laser beams at a reflector the size of a paperback novel about 240,000 miles (385,000 kilometers) away from Earth. They announced today, in collaboration with their French colleagues, that they received signal back for the first time, an encouraging result that could enhance laser experiments used to study the physics of the universe.

The reflector NASA scientists aimed for is mounted on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a spacecraft that has been studying the Moon from its orbit since 2009. One reason engineers placed the reflector on LRO was so it could serve as a pristine target to help test the reflecting power of panels left on the Moon's surface about 50 years ago. These older reflectors are returning a weak signal, which is making it harder to use them for science.

Scientists have been using reflectors on the Moon since the Apollo era to learn more about our nearest neighbor. It's a fairly straightforward experiment: Aim a beam of light at the reflector and clock the amount of time it takes for the light to come back. Decades of making this one measurement has led to major discoveries.

One of the biggest revelations is that the Earth and Moon are slowly drifting apart at the rate that fingernails grow, or 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) per year. This widening gap is the result of gravitational interactions between the two bodies.

"Now that we've been collecting data for 50 years, we can see trends that we wouldn't have been able to see otherwise," said Erwan Mazarico, a planetary scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland who coordinated the LRO experiment that was described on August 7 in the journal Earth, Planets and Space.

"Laser-ranging science is a long game," Mazarico said.

But if scientists are to continue using the surface panels far into the future, they need figure out why some of them are returning only a 10th of the expected signal.

Cosmic rays are bad-and they're going to get worse. That's the conclusion of a new study entitled "Galactic Cosmic Radiation in Interplanetary Space Through a Modern Secular Minimum" just published in the journal Space Weather.

"During the next solar cycle, we could see cosmic ray dose rates increase by as much as 75%," says lead author Fatemeh Rahmanifard of the University of New Hampshire's Space Science Center. "This will limit the amount of time astronauts can work safely in interplanetary space."

Cosmic rays are the bane of astronauts. They come from deep space, energetic particles hurled in all directions by supernova explosions and other violent events. No amount of spacecraft shielding can stop the most energetic cosmic rays, leaving astronauts exposed whenever they leave the Earth-Moon system.

Back in the 1990s, astronauts could travel through space for as much as 1000 days before they hit NASA safety limits on radiation exposure. Not anymore. According to the new research, cosmic rays could limit trips to as little as 290 days for 45-year old male astronauts, and 204 days for females. (Men and women have different limits because of unequal dangers to reproductive organs.)

Why are cosmic rays growing stronger? Blame the sun. The sun's magnetic field wraps the entire solar system in a protective bubble, normally shielding us from cosmic rays. In recent decades, however, that shield has been growing weaker-a result of the sputtering solar cycle.

Imagine reading by the light of an exploded star, brighter than a full moon — it might be fun to think about, but this scene is the prelude to a disaster when the radiation devastates life as we know it. Killer cosmic rays from nearby supernovae could be the culprit behind at least one mass extinction event, researchers said, and finding certain radioactive isotopes in Earth's rock record could confirm this scenario.

A new study led by University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign astronomy and physics professor Brian Fields explores the possibility that astronomical events were responsible for an extinction event 359 million years ago, at the boundary between the Devonian and Carboniferous periods.

The paper is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cambridge, MA - A new theory published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by scientists from Harvard University suggests that the Sun may once have had a binary companion of similar mass. If confirmed, the presence of an early stellar companion increases the likelihood that the Oort cloud was formed as observed and that Planet Nine was captured rather than formed within the solar system.

Dr. Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard, and Amir Siraj, a Harvard undergraduate student, have postulated that the existence of a long-lost stellar binary companion in the Sun's birth cluster — the collection of stars that formed together with the Sun from the same dense cloud of molecular gas — could explain the formation of the Oort cloud as we observe it today.

Popular theory associates the formation of the Oort cloud with debris left over from the formation of the solar system and its neighbors, where objects were scattered by the planets to great distances and some were exchanged amongst stars. But a binary model could be the missing piece in the puzzle, and according to Siraj, shouldn't come as a surprise to scientists. "Previous models have had difficulty producing the expected ratio between scattered disk objects and outer Oort cloud objects. The binary capture model offers significant improvement and refinement, which is seemingly obvious in retrospect: most Sun-like stars are born with binary companions."

If the Oort cloud was indeed captured with the help of an early stellar companion, the implications for our understanding of the solar system's formation would be significant. "Binary systems are far more efficient at capturing objects than are single stars," said Loeb. "If the Oort cloud formed as observed, it would imply that the Sun did in fact have a companion of similar mass that was lost before the Sun left its birth cluster."

The U.S. Military-Industrial complex is sprinting on a chariot to shore up the encryption space before the next era of computation upends the entire digital edifice built on semiconductors and transistors. But, the core of the effort is protecting markets for Big Tech and all of its tentacles, which stand to lose years or even decades of profits should the new tech be rolled out too quickly.

DARPA's newest program seeks to create an encryption technology standard across the breadth and scope of the Internet of Things (IoT). The Cryptography for Hyper-scale Architectures in aa Robust Internet Of Things or Project CHARIOT "will prototype low-cost, low-footprint, post-quantum cryptographic techniques with minimal energy use for devices in an IoT" on the 5G network, according to the Pentagon's boutique agency's SBO.

Consumer-side IoT, like smart home devices, had seen considerable growth in 2019 and expectations were high for that trend to continue. The disruption of their supply chains as a result of the outbreak in China hardly slowed down the $52.76 Billion market with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of between 23 and 27 percent. The biggest beneficiaries of the COVID-19 economic reset, however, would turn out to be the telemedicine and medical hardware industry in general, which alone will be worth $332 billion by 2025.

The best guide to whether you've had too much to drink may already be in your pocket.

Medical researchers from Stanford University, US, have trialled using a smartphone to monitor changes in our movements after we've been drinking, then deliver real-time information - which may serve as a warning or a reminder.

"We have powerful sensors we carry around with us wherever we go," says Brian Suffoletto, lead author of a paper in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. "We need to learn how to use them to best serve public health."

Suffoletto and colleagues invited 22 adults aged 21 to 43 to their lab and gave them a mixed drink with enough vodka to produce a breath alcohol level of 0.2%.

They then breath-tested them every hour for seven hours, each time also asking them to "walk the line" (10 steps forward and 10 back) with a smartphone fitted to their lower back.

For the first time ever, scientists have witnessed the interaction of a new phase of matter known as "time crystals".

The discovery, published in Nature Materials, may lead to applications in quantum information processing because time crystals automatically remain intact - coherent - in varying conditions. Protecting coherence is the main difficulty hindering the development of powerful quantum computers.

Dr Samuli Autti, lead author from Lancaster University, said: "Controlling the interaction of two time crystals is a major achievement. Before this, nobody had observed two time crystals in the same system, let alone seen them interact.

"Controlled interactions are the number one item on the wish list of anyone looking to harness a time crystal for practical applications, such as quantum information processing."

Time crystals are different from a standard crystal - like metals or rocks - which is composed of atoms arranged in a regularly repeating pattern in space.