This month, planet-watching opportunities will build slowly throughout the night — there won't be much to see at first, but patient skywatchers can end the night with glimpses of five bright planets in the sky.

In early February, there will not be a single bright planet in the sky at dusk, but as the night progresses, dazzling Jupiter becomes more and more apparent, rising in the eastern sky during evening twilight. Next up is Mars, which doesn't arrive until the witching hour of midnight; its steady approach toward Earth causes it to increase noticeably in brightness. Jupiter is high toward the south when Mars emerges above the horizon, and Mars, in turn, is followed 2 to 3 hours later by Saturn. Then, within 2 hours of sunrise, Venus rises. It is followed closely by the innermost planet, Mercury, giving skywatchers an opportunity to see all five planets in the sky at once.

For most of us, the best opportunity to pull off this feat will come during the first week of February. [5 Dawn Planets And A Dusk Comet In Feb. 2016 Skywatching (Video)]

Morocco has officially turned on a massive solar power plant in the Sahara Desert, kicking off the first phase of a planned project to provide renewable energy to more than a million Moroccans.

The Noor I power plant is located near the town of Ouarzazate, on the edge of the Sahara. It's capable of generating up to 160 megawatts of power and covers thousands of acres of desert, making the first stage alone one of the world's biggest solar thermal power plants.

When the next two phases, Noor II and Noor III, are finished, the plant will be the single largest solar power production facility in the world, The Guardian says.

If the biotech industry has its way, 184 million acres of native forests around the world will be bulldozed down and replaced with plantations of genetically engineered (GE) trees.

On these proposed GE tree plantations, there are essentially no other plants, insects, birds, or wildlife — just rows upon rows of cloned Frankentrees growing at accelerated rates on a crust of dead, lifeless soil above dwindling groundwater reserves.

Trees are being genetically engineered with unnatural characteristics, such as the ability to kill insects, tolerate colder temperatures, resist toxic chemicals, and grow faster — but these "advantages" come at an unacceptable price.

"Synthetic Forests" is a documentary exposing the truth about GE trees. In this short but hard-hitting film, leading scientists discuss the devastating and irreversible impacts of allowing GE trees into our global ecosystem.

Chinese scientists have managed to create searing plasma through heating hydrogen gas three times hotter than our Sun's core in a controlled experiment in eastern China, paving the way for a migration from depleting natural reserves towards more stable, sustainable, and controllable energy resources.

The experiment was conducted in the doughnut-shaped chamber of a magnetic fusion reactor last week at the Institute of Physical Science in Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, where nuclear scientists heated hydrogen up to a temperature of around 50 million degrees Celsius, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday.

The reactor, officially known as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), produced hydrogen plasma — the ionized gas consisting of approximately equal numbers of positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons — and maintained its temperature for 102 seconds.

A few days before the Chinese experiment, German scientists, in a similar experiment, used two megawatts of microwave radiation to heat hydrogen gas and create plasma. They managed to reach a temperature of 80 million degrees Celsius but could only maintain it for a fraction of a second.

The officials at EAST hope to approximate the solar nuclear fusion conditions, which occur deep inside the sun and convert hydrogen atoms into heavier ones, like Helium. In such fusion reaction some tiny portions of matter turn into massive amounts of energy through fusing Hydrogen nuclei together. The team, however, are halfway in their endeavor as they must reach 100 million degrees Celsius and maintain it for over 1,000 seconds (some 17 minutes) to mimic solar nuclear fusion reaction and produce controlled energy.

Humans have so far managed to create fusion energy through detonating nuclear bombs, dubbed thermonuclear or Hydrogen bombs, but the problem is the destructive and uncontrollable energy they release. The first such bomb was tested by the United States in 1952 in Enewetak Atoll islands, located in the Pacific Ocean.

After just nine weeks of internet-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy, the brain of patients suffering from social anxiety disorder changes in volume. Anxiety is reduced, and parts of the patients' brains decrease in both volume and activity. This study could help us develop more effective therapies for one of the most common problems in mental health.

We have known for many years that the brain is remarkably adaptable. For instance, previous studies have shown that juggling and video games affect brain volume. However many questions about how the brain adapts remain unanswered.

When babies are just three to four months old, they can pick out image differences that adults never notice. But after the age of five months, the infants lose their super-sight abilities, reports Susana Martinez-Conde for Scientific American.

Don't get too jealous of the superior discrimination that infants have however: The reason adults—or even babies older than about eight months—don't have it is because overtime, our brains learn what differences are important to notice.

Have you ever wondered why you feel healthier and happier when you stroll through the trees or frolic by the sea? Is it just that you're spending time away from work, de-stressing and taking in the view? Or is there more to it?

For more than 20 years, scientists have been trying to determine the mechanisms by which exposure to biodiversity improves health. Japanese scientists pioneered the search when they travelled to the island of Yakushima, famous for its biodiversity.

The Japanese already had a name for the experience of well-being in nature: shinrin-yoku or "forest bathing".

Five decades after the nation's most powerful earthquake hit Alaska, scientists have pinpointed the underwater slide that triggered some of the deadliest tsunami waves produced by the shaking.

Using modern technology to map the floor of Prince William Sound, scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and other organizations have found the landslide behind the tsunamis that killed about a third of the people in the Alutiiq village of Chenega, the service said on Monday.

Twenty-three of the village's 75 residents perished within minutes of the magnitude-9.2 earthquake that struck in 1964, making Chenega one of the communities hardest hit by the event. The village was nearly leveled and later rebuilt at a different site with a slightly different name, Chenega Bay.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, scientists speculated that underwater landslides produced the waves that struck Chenega, the USGS said. A USGS technical report on the earthquake that was published in 1969 cited "localized waves of unknown origin" as the source of the most destruction. "The local waves, and combinations of local waves and subaqueous slides, caused most of the earthquake related fatalities in Alaska," that report said.

But the bathymetric technology of the time allowed for study of the seafloor only to the depth of about 180 meters, or 330 feet, the USGS said. Modern surveys conducted with multibeam sonar technology and a seismic-reflection system revealed a big complex of underwater slides that had occurred at much lower depths, the USGS said.

The findings of the USGS-led project are described in a study published online in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

"What makes this slide unusual is that much of the material that slid was at a water depth of 250 to 350 meters," or 820 to 1150 feet, Peter Haeussler, a USGS geologist based in Anchorage and a co-author of the study, said in a statement released by the survey. "The deeper initiation depth made it particularly good at generating a tsunami."

A recently discovered asteroid is scheduled to fly by Earth in March, but NASA can't quite tell how far away it will be when that happens. One estimate is as close as 11,000 miles, about 95 percent closer than the moon.

The asteroid known as 2013 TX68, was first discovered three years ago, as its name implies, but the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey was only able to track its path for three days before it entered daytime skies, where monitoring is not possible. That short amount of time precluded scientists from getting a better understanding of what the asteroid's orbit around the sun looks like.

What is known is that the asteroid is 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter and will be in Earth's neighborhood for quite some time, but what is not known is whether that means 11,000 or 9 million miles away from our planet by next month. For comparison, the moon is 238,000 miles away.

"This asteroid's orbit is quite uncertain, and it will be hard to predict where to look for it," Paul Chodas of NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies said in a statement.

"There is a chance that the asteroid will be picked up by our asteroid search telescopes when it safely flies past us next month, providing us with data to more precisely define its orbit around the sun," Chodas added.

Bedbugs be gone! Scientists have successfully cracked the genetic makeup of the blood-sucking parasites, which could lead to their eventual annihilation.

Okay, complete eradication is perhaps wishful thinking. But researchers at the American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medicine are hoping a genome breakthrough will lead to more effective ways to battle the sleep-destroying pest.

By getting a handle on what makes the little ticks, erm ... tick, scientists may now be able to tailor pesticides to kill the ever-mutating creepy crawlies.