NASA’s curiously worded press release earlier this week about an event later today prompted speculation that the space agency had discovered extraterrestrial life; going by a leak ahead of conference, it’s actually something about as alien as you can get from physiology as we know it, only on this very planet. According to NOS, NASA has found a new type of bacteria in Mono Lake, California, which lives with levels of arsenic in its biology that were hitherto believed impossible.nullnullnullnullnull

NASA find new lifeform: arsenic microbe widens likelihood of extraterrestrial life - SlashGear

An upper layer of Earth's atmosphere recently shrank so much that researchers are at a loss to adequately explain it, NASA said on Thursday.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! RUN!

Scientists baffled by unusual upper atmosphere shrinkage

A team of researchers at MIT has just announced that they have successfully modified a virus to split apart molecules of water, paving the way for an efficient and non-energy intensive method of producing hydrogen fuel. The team engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus to assemble the components needed to crack apart a molecule of water, yielding a fourfold boost in efficiency over similar processes.nullnullnull

MIT Researchers Harness Viruses to Turn Water Into Hydrogen Fuel | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World

A few month's ago, Erik Verlinde at the the University of Amsterdam put forward one such idea which has taken the world of physics by storm. Verlinde suggested that gravity is merely a manifestation of entropy in the Universe. His idea is based on the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy always increases over time. It suggests that differences in entropy between parts of the Universe generates a force that redistributes matter in a way that maximises entropy. This is the force we call gravity.

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Gravity Emerges from Quantum Information, Say Physicists

The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth.

Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).

It's a Metroid.

The world's only immortal animal | Yahoo! Green

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Scientists supersize quantum mechanics : Nature News

Scientists have identified a previously unknown type of ancient human through analysis of DNA from a finger bone unearthed in a Siberian cave.

The extinct "hominin" (human-like creature) lived in Central Asia between 48,000 and 30,000 years ago.

An international team has sequenced genetic material from the fossil showing that it is distinct from that of Neanderthals and modern humans.

BBC News - DNA identifies new ancient human dubbed 'X-woman'

HAVE you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.

In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain - life - 29 June 2009 - New Scientist

Louis Menand:

There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it.

As a branch of medicine, depression seems to be a mess. Business, however, is extremely good.

Gary Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it's all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains -- that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one.

Slim Charles:

It's what war is, you know? Once you in it ... you in it. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight!

Menand:

The discovery of the remedy creates the disease.

Is psychopharmacology evil, or is it useless?

Ian Malcolm:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Menand:

Many people today are infatuated with the biological determinants of things.

People like to be able to say, I'm just an organism, and my depression is just a chemical thing, so, of the three ways of considering my condition, I choose the biological. People do say this. The question to ask them is, Who is the "I" that is making this choice? Is that your biology talking, too?

Roger Highfield:

The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals", everything is made of chemicals.

Menand:

Do we resist the grief pill because we believe that bereavement is doing some work for us? Maybe we think that since we appear to have been naturally selected as creatures that mourn, we shouldn't short-circuit the process. Or is it that we don't want to be the kind of person who does not experience profound sorrow when someone we love dies?

Drew Gilpin Faust:

In the 21st century, we shy away from death, and we tend to think of a good death as a sudden one. Not so in the 19th century. Dying well meant having time to assess your spiritual state and say goodbye -- which is difficult to do if you're killed in battle.

Head Case

Two photons can be connected in a way that seems to defy the very nature of space and time, yet still obeys the laws of quantum mechanics.

Physicists at the University of Geneva achieved the weird result by creating a pair of ‘entangled’ photons, separating them, then sending them down a fibre optic cable to the Swiss villages of Satigny and Jussy, some 18 kilometres apart.

Physicists spooked by faster-than-light information transfer