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But "to really get a handle" on Titan's methane cycle, they'll need to monitor the exchange of methane between the lakes and the atmosphere. And that, she says, will require "a future lake-lander mission."

One of the quasar's jets is aimed directly at the galaxy, and the team thinks it's likely that the jet is driving the star-making process by blasting matter into the galaxy.

The discovery creates a new picture of galaxy formation

This is the first ion trap demonstration of a set of logical gates that are universal for quantum computation

the genital spines give an advantage before insemination by fastening the genitalia together like Velcro fasteners.

Researchers are reporting that they've made batteries and other energy-storage devices by printing layers of carbon nanotube–based ink atop standard photocopy paper. The result is a highly conductive sheet that can carry a charge and be easily incorporated into a flexible battery. Because of paper's low cost, that could help lower the price of batteries used in electric vehicles, wind farms, and other renewable sources.

the discovery will open up a new field of research, and it could lead to a new generation of superefficient light-sensitive devices.

the experiments showed that the electron vibrations resulting from the photons striking the antennas persisted at full strength four times longer than expected. The reason, the researchers report this week in Nature, is that quantum mechanics controls the energy. "It was an utter surprise," says physical chemist and co-author Gregory Scholes of the University of Toronto in Canada. For the results to have occurred, he explains, a property called quantum coherence must have been operating.

the research "will open an entirely new area of biophysics." And that effort should have "huge implications," he says, "not only for how we think about biophysics, but also light harvesting and light-sensitive devices."

The highlights: you can't disclose the agreement itself

Most of these devices have been able to identify and distinguish only between specific odors they've previously been trained to recognize, however, says neuroscientist Rafi Haddad of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. If an artificial nose is ever to replace the real thing, he says, it will have to be able to classify odors it has never encountered before.

Zodiacal light—the faint white glow that stretches across the darkest skies, tracing the same path the sun takes—has mystified scientists for centuries. They've known that it is sunlight reflected from a disk of dust spanning the inner solar system from Mercury to Jupiter. They just didn’t know where the dust came from—until now.