Chaos. Nonlinear Dynamics

New high-precision tests carried out by the OPERA collaboration in Italy broadly confirm its claim, made in September, to have detected neutrinos travelling at faster than the speed of light. The collaboration today submitted its results to a journal, but some members continue to insist that further checks are needed before the result can be considered sound.

The chemistry of the cosmos today is not what it used to be. The stars and planets and interstellar gas around us are laced with carbon, oxygen, and many other elements heavier than hydrogen and helium - the only substances to have existed for a few hundred million years after the big bang.

Where did Earth's oceans come from? Astronomers have long contended that icy comets and asteroids delivered the water for them during an epoch of heavy bombardment that ended about 3.9 billion years ago.

The hydrogen bond is a wondrous thing. It helps give snowflakes their hexagonal symmetry; binds DNA into a double helix; shapes the three-dimensional forms of proteins; and even raises water's boiling point high enough to make a decent cup of tea.

A mid-sized asteroid impact with the ocean could drastically deplete the ozone layer for many years, according to a team of US researchers. Such damage would expose the surface to levels of UV radiation up to three times more severe than anything currently recorded on Earth.

Researchers in the US have made the first high-frequency AC "supercapacitors" containing graphene electrodes. The devices, which are much smaller than conventional capacitors, could be used in applications like computer processing units and other tiny integrated circuits.

Has the biggest question in computer science been solved? On 6 August, Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, sent out draft copies of a paper titled simply "P ≠ NP".

Biochemists and computer scientists at the University of Washington two years ago launched an ambitious project harnessing the brainpower of computer gamers to solve medical problems.

In The Rational Optimist, I argue that the human technological and economic take-off derives from the invention of exchange and specialisation some time before 100,000 years ago. When people began to trade things, ideas could meet and mate, with the result that a sort of collective brain could form, far more powerful than individual brains. Cumulative technology could begin to embody this collective intelligence.

esearchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Sheffield have applied computing power to crack a problem in egg shell formation. The work may also give a partial answer to the age old question “what came first the chicken or the egg?”