Among the brilliant theorists cloistered in the quiet woodside campus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Edward Witten stands out as a kind of high priest. The sole physicist ever to win the Fields Medal, mathematics' premier prize, Witten is also known for discovering M-theory, the leading candidate for a unified physical "theory of everything." A genius's genius, Witten is tall and rectangular, with hazy eyes and an air of being only one-quarter tuned in to reality until someone draws him back from more abstract thoughts.

During a visit this fall, I spotted Witten on the Institute's central lawn and requested an interview; in his quick, alto voice, he said he couldn't promise to be able to answer my questions but would try. Later, when I passed him on the stone paths, he often didn't seem to see me.

Physics luminaries since Albert Einstein, who lived out his days in the same intellectual haven, have sought to unify gravity with the other forces of nature by finding a more fundamental quantum theory to replace Einstein's approximate picture of gravity as curves in the geometry of space-time. M-theory, which Witten proposed in 1995, could conceivably offer this deeper description, but only some aspects of the theory are known. M-theory incorporates within a single mathematical structure all five versions of string theory, which renders the elements of nature as minuscule vibrating strings. These five string theories connect to each other through "dualities," or mathematical equivalences. Over the past 30 years, Witten and others have learned that the string theories are also mathematically dual to quantum field theories - descriptions of particles moving through electromagnetic and other fields that serve as the language of the reigning "Standard Model" of particle physics. While he's best known as a string theorist, Witten has discovered many new quantum field theories and explored how all these different descriptions are connected. His physical insights have led time and again to deep mathematical discoveries.

A recent study published on Springer Link discusses conflict of interest in scientific research, an area long overdue for concise and unbiased study. It has long been recognised that researchers may be influenced by the sponsors of their research. There are many reasons for this including the pressure to publish and the need for repeat research funding to further ones career.

The typical portrayal of scientists in the media is of unbiased individuals on a quest for truth, only considering hard facts, uninfluenced by personal feelings, searching for the unvarnished truth. Reality however seems to be somewhat different.

If you're a Firefox user, you may have noticed a weird new extension that suddenly showed up in your browser this week.

The extension is called "Looking Glass 1.0.3" and this is its description: MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT FROM YOURS. Now that sounds ominous. It's really not, though. It's a promotional campaign between Firefox and the TV series Mr. Robot that brings an alternate reality game to your browser. This must have sounded like a great idea when somebody pitched it to Mozilla, but the backlash has been fierce.

Just days after the Geminid meteor shower, the asteroid from which it comes, 3200 Phaethon, will pass close to Earth.

What is it?

Asteroid 3200 Phaethon, discovered in 1983, is named for its close proximity. Phaethon was a Greek mythology figure who almost burned Earth because he drove a chariot of fire too close.

The asteroid is best known for being the parent body of the Geminid meteor shower, but NASA also calls it a mystery because they have several theories as to why it produces meteors, but they're not sure which is correct.

Is it going to be at a safe distance?

Absolutely. Though the asteroid itself is classified as potentially hazardous, this particular fly-by is at a safe distance of almost 6.5 million miles, scientists say.

Nasa has found an entire solar system with as many planets as our own.

The discovery of a new planet around the Kepler-90 star, which looks like our own sun, means the distant solar system has a total of eight known planets. And those planets look like those in our own neighbourhood: rocky planets orbit close to the star, with gas giants further away.

The star and its family of planets were already known about, having been detected by the Kepler space telescope. But the breakthrough came when astronomers found the new world, which was done using Google's artificial intelligence technology.

Physicists from Moscow's Steklov Institute of Mathematics have come up with a testable theory on how matter behaves inside a black hole.

The researchers' work, published in the September 2017 issue of the Journal of High Energy Physics, also proposes a theory that would reconcile quantum physics and the theory of general relativity, which describes gravity.

"We used an approach based on the holographic principle [of string theory]," study coauthor Mikhail Khramtsov said, according to the press service of the Russian Science Foundation.

The continental rock underlying the east coast of North America is pretty boring, tectonically speaking. The last dramatic geological goings-on there happened around 200 million years ago, and most change since then has been from glacial, wind and water erosion.

But a project that helped image the layers of rock below the continent with unprecedented clarity has helped reveal a small, unusual feature that seems to be a relatively new "blob" of hot, rising rock below part of the U.S. Northeast.

Exactly what caused this blob and whether other similar blob structures might lurk under other continents isn't clear, said study co-author Vadim Levin, a Rutgers University geophysicist, but it raises plenty of interesting questions. The work on the blob was published online Nov. 29 in the journal Geology and presented Monday (Dec. 11) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans.

The unusual feature had been spotted before, when scientists used the seismic waves that routinely ricochet through the Earth's interior to reveal some of the structures hidden below our feet. Such waves travel at different speeds and angles through different types of rock, including rocks of different temperatures and rock moving in different directions. The small feature below the Northeast showed up as an area of unusually high temperature, but the pictures were pretty fuzzy.

On February 15, 2013, a near-Earth asteroid with a diameter of 66 feet (20 meters) entered Earth's atmosphere traveling at around 40,000 miles per hour (60,0000 km/h). Within a few seconds, the cosmic projectile detonated 12 miles above the Chelyabinsk region of Russia, releasing as much energy as about 30 Hiroshima atomic bombs. This created a gigantic fireball - known as a superbolide - that caused shock waves to propagate outward for dozens of miles, damaging several thousand buildings and injuring 1,500 people.

Though the progenitor of the explosion had an initial mass of over 10,000 metric tons, only about 0.1 percent of that mass is believed to have reached the ground, indicating that something in the upper atmosphere not only caused the rock to explode, but also caused it to disintegrate much more than expected.

Geologists exploring volcanic rocks on Scotland's Isle of Skye found something out-of-this-world instead: ejecta from a previously unknown, 60 million-year-old meteorite impact. The discovery, the first meteorite impact described within the British Paleogene Igneous Province (BPIP), opens questions about the impact and its possible connection to Paleogene volcanic activity across the North Atlantic.

Lead author Simon Drake, an associate lecturer in geology at Birkbeck University of London, zeroed in on a meter-thick layer at the base of a 60.0 million-year-old lava flow. "We thought it was an ignimbrite (a volcanic flow deposit)," says Drake. But when he and colleagues analyzed the rock using an electron microprobe, they discovered that it contained rare minerals straight from outer space: vanadium-rich and niobium-rich osbornite.
These mineral forms have never been reported on Earth. They have, however, been collected by NASA's Stardust Comet Sample Return Mission as space dust in the wake of the Wild 2 comet. What's more, the osbornite is unmelted, suggesting that it was an original piece of the meteorite. The team also identified reidite, an extremely high pressure form of zircon which is only ever associated in nature with impacts, along with native iron and other exotic mineralogy linked to impacts such as barringerite.

Immense northern storms on Saturn can disturb atmospheric patterns at the planet's equator, finds the international Cassini mission in a study led by Dr Leigh Fletcher from the University of Leicester. This effect is also seen in Earth's atmosphere, suggesting the two planets are more alike than previously thought.

Despite their considerable differences, the atmospheres of Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn all display a remarkably similar phenomenon in their equatorial regions: vertical, cyclical, downwards-moving patterns of alternating temperatures and wind systems that repeat over a period of multiple years.