It sounds like science fiction, but it's eminently possible, researchers say: Robotic spacecraft could get to Mars after a journey of just three days.

The key to making this happen is photon propulsion, which would use a powerful laser to accelerate spacecraft to relativistic speeds, said Philip Lubin, a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"There are recent advances which take this from science fiction to science reality," Lubin said at the 2015 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) fall symposium last October. "There's no known reason why we cannot do this."

A new network of video surveillance cameras in New Zealand has detected a surprise meteor shower on New Year's Eve. The shower is called the Volantids, named after the constellation Volans, the flying fish, from which the meteoroids appear to stream towards us.
"In a way, the shower helped chase bad spirits away," says SETI Institute meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens. "Now we have an early warning that we should be looking for a potentially hazardous comet in that orbit."

In September of 2014, Jenniskens teamed up with Professor Jack Baggaley of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, to establish a meteor video surveillance project in the southern hemisphere to find such warning signs of dangerous comets. This project was similar to the existing Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance network (CAMS) in northern California. The CAMS network is sponsored by, and supports the goals of, the NASA Near Earth Object Observation program.

Are humans living in a simulation? Is consciousness nothing more than the firing of neurons in the brain? Or is consciousness a distinct entity that permeates every speck of matter in the universe?

Several experts grappled with those topics at a salon at the Victorian home of Susan MacTavish Best, a lifestyle guru who runs Living MacTavish, here on Feb. 16. The event was organized by "Closer to Truth," a public television series and online resource that features the world's leading thinkers exploring humanity's deepest questions.

The answer to the question "what is consciousness" could have implications for the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and far-out concepts like mind uploading and virtual immortality, said Robert Lawrence Kuhn, the creator, writer and host of "Closer to Truth."

A new analysis of tektites, gravel-sized objects made of natural glass and formed from terrestrial debris ejected when meteorites collide with the Earth's surface, has revealed that multiple cosmic impacts took place in various parts of the world approximately 790,000 years ago.

Dr. Mario Trieloff, a geoscientist at Heidelberg Universityin Germany, and his colleagues used a new, more accurate dating technique based on naturally-occurring isotopes to investigate rock glasses retrieved from various locations in Asia, Australia, Canada, and Central America.

As they report in a paper to be appear in the April 2016 edition of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta the samples are all virtually identical in age, despite the fact that, in some cases, they have significantly different chemistry. This indicates that a series of separate impact events must have occurred at roughly the same time, the study authors explained in a statement.

Tektites are formed when terrestrial material melts following a meteorite impact, is launched into the air and then hardens into glass, and Dr. Trieloff's team said that they can determine when and where projectiles struck the planet's surface, how often, and how large those objects were.

A poor night's sleep is enough to put anyone in a bad mood, and although scientists have long suspected a link between mood and sleep, the molecular basis of this connection remained a mystery. Now, new research has found several rare genetic mutations on the same gene that definitively connect the two.

Sleep goes hand-in-hand with mood. People suffering from depression and mania, for example, frequently have altered sleeping patterns, as do those with seasonal affective disorder (SAD). And although no one knows exactly how these changes come about, in SAD sufferers they are influenced by changes in light exposure, the brain's time-keeping cue. But is mood affecting sleep, is sleep affecting mood, or is there a third factor influencing both? Although a number of tantalizing leads have linked the circadian clock to mood, there is "no definitive factor that proves causality or indicates the direction of the relationship," says Michael McCarthy, a neurobiologist at the San Diego Veterans' Affairs Medical Center and the University of California (UC), San Diego.

To see whether they could establish a link between the circadian clock, sleep, and mood, scientists in the new study looked at the genetics of a family that suffers from abnormal sleep patterns and mood disorders, including SAD and something called advanced sleep phase, a condition in which people wake earlier and sleep earlier than normal. The scientists screened the family for mutations in key genes involved in the circadian clock, and identified two rare variants of the PERIOD3(PER3) gene in members suffering from SAD and advanced sleep phase. "We found a genetic change in people who have both seasonal affective disorder and the morning lark trait" says lead researcher Ying-Hui Fu, a neuroscientist at UC San Francisco. When the team tested for these mutations in DNA samples from the general population, they found that they were extremely rare, appearing in less than 1% of samples.

Giving support to others may have more benefits than receiving support

A new study suggests that giving social support to others may benefit the giver more than the receiver on a neurobiological level. The researchers used fMRI brain imaging to pinpoint three specific brain benefits of giving social support to others.

The February 2016 study, "The Neurobiology of Giving Versus Receiving Support: The Role of Stress-Related and Social Reward-Related Neural Activity," was published in Psychosomatic Medicine: Journal of Biobehavioral Medicine. The lead researchers of this study were Tristen Inagaki , Ph.D., from the University of Pittsburgh and Naomi Eisenberger, Ph.D., of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

NASA's IBEX and Voyager 1 missions have shattered all conventional ideas about the heliospheric boundary, the region separating our solar system from interstellar space. In 2009, the IBEX spacecraft created the first all-sky map of the boundary revealing an astonishing ribbon of energetic neutral atoms. According to scientists, it's still a big mystery.

About thirty kilometres east of the Australian capital Canberra stands a telescope that will soon capture images of the cosmos's most mysterious phenomena. The Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST), nestled in the Molonglo Valley, is the largest radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere and has been scanning the skies for nearly half a century.

Now, the Australian astronomy community have ambitious plans to use this telescope to understand the 'transient' Universe, short-lived phenomena that can only be detected through frequent, regular radiofrequency surveys.

But before this can happen, MOST needed to be brought into the 21st Century. After operating for fifty years — a lifetime for any piece of technology, especially one as complex and sensitive as a giant radio telescope — it desperately needed an upgrade, especially to its digital technology.

While its basic structure would remain the same, the revamp to its operational infrastructure would make it capable of churning through the masses of data generated by these surveys.

It's one of the big mysteries of cell biology. Why do mitochondria—the oval-shaped structures that power our cells—have their own DNA, and why have they kept it when the cell itself has plenty of its own genetic material? A new study may have found an answer.

Scientists think that mitochondria were once independent single-celled organisms until, more than a billion years ago, they were swallowed by larger cells. Instead of being digested, they settled down and developed a mutually beneficial relationship developed with their hosts that eventually enabled the rise of more complex life, like today's plants and animals.

Over the years, the mitochondrial genome has shrunk. The nucleus now harbors the vast majority of the cell's genetic material—even genes that help the mitochondria function. In humans, for instance, the mitochondrial genome contains just 37 genes, versus the nucleus's 20,000-plus. Over time, most mitochondrial genes have jumped into the nucleus. But if those genes are mobile, why have mitochondria retained any genes at all, especially considering that mutations in some of those genes can cause rare but crippling diseases that gradually destroy patients' brains, livers, hearts, and other key organs.

Scientists have tossed around some ideas, but there haven't been hard data to pick one over another.

Rapid reversals of Earth's magnetic field 550 million years ago destroyed a large part of the ozone layer and let in a flood of ultraviolet radiation, devastating the unusual creatures of the so-called Ediacaran Period and triggering an evolutionary flight from light that led to the Cambrian explosion of animal groups. That's the conclusion of a new study, which proposes a connection between hyperactive field reversals and this crucial moment in the evolution of life.

The Kotlinian Crisis, as it is known, saw widespread extinction and put an end to the Ediacaran Period. During this time, large (up to meter-sized) soft-bodied organisms, often shaped like discs or fronds, had lived on or in shallow horizontal burrows beneath thick mats of bacteria which, unlike today, coated the sea floor. The slimy mats acted as a barrier between the water above and the sediments below, preventing oxygen from reaching under the sea floor and making it largely uninhabitable.

The Ediacaran gave way to the Cambrian explosion, 542 million years ago: the rapid emergence of new species with complex body plans, hard parts for defense, and sophisticated eyes. Burrowing also became more common and varied, which broke down the once-widespread bacterial mats, allowing oxygen into the sea floor to form a newly hospitable space for living.