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By zapping a scrap of metal with superpowerful x-rays, scientists created plasma that rivals the sun for heat.

The recent uptick in solar flares and other sun activity has been causing orbiting debris to fall faster, a NASA scientist reports.

CHEMISTRY COMMENTARY [More]

The embarrassing and damaging failure of U.S. policy on spent nuclear fuel can be repaired if the administration and Congress begin work now on new strategies, the co-chairmen of a presidential commission said yesterday.

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Plasma arcs over the sun, Earth shines in high resolution, a colorful halo surrounds the moon, and more in the week's best space pictures.

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care (Basic Books, 2012), by Eric Topol, a professor of innovative medicine and the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute.

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Which limb do you prefer? If you’re like most members of our species, you prefer your right hand for most tasks. If you’re like a smaller minority of our species, you might prefer your left hand. Very, very few of us are truly ambidextrous. Most of us have at least a minor preference for one hand over the other. So do wallabies.

On the one hand (ha!), this shouldn’t be all that surprising. Nervous systems became lateralized quite early in the evolution of vertebrates. For example, there is research showing that fish show a preference for touching the sides of aquariums with one side of their ventral fins or another. And it is not surprising that humans overwhelmingly favor their right hands. When it comes to feeding behaviors, fishes, reptiles, and toads all favor their right eye (and their brain’s left hemisphere). The same is true for birds like chickens, pigeons, quails, and stilts. The right-eye preference can be so strong that one bird – New Zealand wry-billed plover – evolved a beak that slopes slightly to the right. And a study of seventy-five whales showed that sixty of them had abrasions on the right side of their jaws, while the other fifteen had only injured the left side of their jaws. As Peter F. MacNeilage, Lesley J. Rogers and Giorgio Vallortigara pointed out in a 2009 article in Scientific American , the data indicated that whales tended to use one side of the jaw more than the other for gathering food, “and that ‘right-jawedness’ is by far the norm.”

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It may be surprising to hear that hydraulic fracturing is not the cause of water contamination , but what may be even more surprising is that shale gas produced using fracking may have lower life cycle greenhouse gas emissions than conventional gas.

According to a recent Environmental Science and Technology report , shale gas life-cycle [greenhouse gas] emissions are 6% lower than conventional natural gas

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Thinking, Fast and Slow [More]

A fighter pilot heads back to base after a long mission, feeling spent. A warning light flashes on the control panel. Has she noticed? If so, is she focused enough to fix the problem? [More]

The Apollo 1 Command Module after the fire that claimed the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Credit: NASA.

NASA s Apollo program began with one of the worst disasters the organization has ever faced. A routine prelaunch test turned fatal when a fire ripped through the spacecraft s crew cabin killing all three astronauts. Today marks the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, a tragic and preventable accident. There were warning signs, similar accidents that had claimed lives both in the United States and abroad. The Apollo 1 crew could have been saved from a gruesome death.

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BEIJING (Reuters) - A cancer-causing cadmium discharge from a mining company has polluted a long stretch of two rivers in southern China, and officials warned some 3.7 million people of Liuzhou in the Guangxi region to avoid drinking water from the river, state media reported on Friday.

Pollution of waterways by toxic run-offs from factories and farms is a pressing issue in China, prompting authorities to call for policy tightening, though the problem shows no sign of going away.

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We've all heard exercise is good for your physical and mental wellbeing. But a good workout can actually influence the mental wellbeing of others, too. Because bosses who hit the gym tend to be less abusive to their employees. That's according to a study in the Journal of Business and Psychology . [James P. Burton, Jenny M. Hoobler and Melinda L. Scheuer, Supervisor Workplace Stress and Abusive Supervision: The Buffering Effect of Exercise ]

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Carmakers learned years ago it's not easy to make a practical hydrogen fuel cell. Yet hydrogen fuel cells do work, and they're greener than batteries. So how about using a mini hydrogen fuel cell to re-charge something small--like your mobile phone battery?

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photo by Thomas Shahan

As the science media today is carrying news of how spiders use defocus to judge distance , I thought it an opportune moment to share the portfolio of a master of spider portraiture. Oklahoma artist Thomas Shahan may scarcely be out of college, but he is recognized worldwide for his startling portrayals of jumping spiders. If you’re not yet aware of Shahan’s portraits, drop what you are doing right now and have a look:

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By Jo Marchant of Nature magazine

Prion diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) are able to jump species much more easily than previously thought. [More]

Jumping Spider: image courtesy of Science/AAAS

To figure out how far away our dinner plate is our brain melds the slightly different images coming from our two eyes. Other creatures, including many insects, move their heads to glean how far a piece of food might be. But jumping spiders ( Hasarius adansoni ) don’t seem to possess either of these abilities. So how do they manage such quick and exacting lunges to capture their lunches?

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The moon of today is a static orb with little to no internal activity; for all intents and purposes it appears to be a dead, dusty pebble of a world. But billions of years ago the moon may have been a place of far more dynamism--literally.

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