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NASA-funded researchers are monitoring a big event in our planet's atmosphere. High above Earth's surface where the atmosphere meets space, a rarefied layer of gas called "the thermosphere" recently collapsed and now is rebounding again.

an ambitious European plan to simulate the entire planet. The idea is to exploit the huge amounts of data generated by financial markets, health records, social media and climate monitoring to model the planet's climate, societies and economy. The vision is that a system like this can help to understand and predict crises before they occur so that governments can take appropriate measures in advance.

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."

Today, we're announcing the first-ever round of Google Focused Research Awards — funding research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These awards, totaling $5.7 million, cover four areas: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy.

a team reports studying the turbulent flow of solar wind particles by monitoring the accompanying waves of magnetic field. The team used a cluster of satellites to measure the field in unprecedented spatial detail. They found that the waves aren't equally strong in all directions but are larger in certain preferred directions, as theorists had predicted. The observation will help astrophysicists better understand the consequences of the solar wind, including its effect on the transmission of cosmic rays, particles that arrive at Earth from elsewhere in our galaxy.

Astronomers have discovered a whole new class of alien planet: a vast population of Jupiter-mass worlds that float through space without any discernible host star, a new study finds.

Sumi and his team looked at two years' worth of data from a telescope in New Zealand, which was monitoring 50 million Milky Way stars for microlensing events. They identified 474 such events, including 10 that lasted less than two days. The short duration of these 10 events indicated that the foreground object in each case was not a star but a planet roughly the mass of Jupiter. And the signals from their parent stars were nowhere to be found.

the algorithm is designed for robots that will be monitoring an environment for long periods of time, tracing the same routes over and over. It assumes that the data of interest — temperature, the concentration of chemicals, the presence of organisms — fluctuate at different rates in different parts of the environment.

But it turns out to be a monstrously complex calculation. “It’s very hard to come up with a mathematical proof that you can really optimize the acquired knowledge,”

The new algorithm then determines a trajectory for the sensor that will maximize the amount of data it collects in high-priority regions, without neglecting lower-priority regions.