ScienceDaily (Sep. 2, 2010) — Earth today is one of the most active planets in the Solar System, and was probably even more so during the early stages of its life. Thanks to the plate tectonics that continue to shape our planet's surface, remnants of crust from Earth's formative years are rare, but not impossible to find. A paper published in Nature Sept. 2 examines how some ancient rocks have resisted being recycled into Earth's convecting interior.

Throughout the world there exist regions of ancient crust, referred to as cratons, which have resisted being recycled into the interior of our tectonically dynamic planet. These geologic anomalies appear to have withstood major deformation thanks to the presence of mantle roots. A mantle root is a portion of Earth's mantle that lies beneath the craton, extending like the root of a tooth into the rest of the underlying mantle.

String theory was originally developed to describe the fundamental particles and forces that make up our universe. The new research, led by a team from Imperial College London, describes the unexpected discovery that string theory also seems to predict the behaviour of entangled quantum particles. As this prediction can be tested in the laboratory, researchers can now test string theory.

Over the last 25 years, string theory has become physicists' favourite contender for the 'theory of everything', reconciling what we know about the incredibly small from particle physics with our understanding of the very large from our studies of cosmology. Using the theory to predict how entangled quantum particles behave provides the first opportunity to test string theory by experiment.

If you wanted to hide something away for all eternity, where could you put it? Black holes might seem like a safe bet, but Stephen Hawking famously calculated that they leak radiation, and most physicists now think that this radiation contains information about their contents. Now, there may be a way to make an "eternal" black hole that would act as the ultimate cosmic lockbox.

The recipe for this unlikely object was discovered by looking at an even more abstruse entity, the white hole. White holes are black holes that run backwards in time, throwing out matter instead of sucking it in. Where a black hole might form from a collapsing star, a white hole would explode and leave a star in its place. White holes have never been observed, though general relativity predicts they could exist in principle.

IT'S a big skull. No, wait, it's two people under an arch. Hold on, it's a skull again. Two very different images can be perceived in the trick picture Blossom and Decay (see right). Now we are one step closer to working out how the brain spontaneously flips between such views, with the discovery of what may be the relevant brain region.

The precise neural mechanism that provokes the brain to switch its view of a scene is unknown, but it is thought to play a major role in perception by acting as a sort of reality check, says Ryota Kanai of University College London. "We need a trigger to prompt possible different interpretations so that we don't get stuck with a potentially incorrect interpretation of the world."

People have been using antibiotics for nearly 2,000 years, suggests a new study, which found large doses of tetracycline embedded in the bones of ancient African mummies.

What's more, they probably got it through beer, and just about everyone appears to have drank it consistently throughout their lifetimes, beginning early in childhood.

While the modern age of antibiotics began in 1928 with the discovery of penicillin, the new findings suggest that people knew how to fight infections much earlier than that -- even if they didn't actually know what bacteria were.

PERSONALITY is pointless unless someone notices you have it.

Both humans and animals have personalities - consistent behavioural patterns - but how did they evolve? To find out, Max Wolf of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, created simple simulated animals with personalities that were either consistently aggressive or meek, or flipped between the two.

They were pitted against each other in repeated contests designed to be representative of many seen in the real world - for instance when an individual is defending its territory.

Wild chimpanzees are learning how to outwit human hunters.

Across Africa, people often lay snare traps to catch bushmeat, killing or injuring chimps and other wildlife.

But a few chimps living in the rainforests of Guinea have learnt to recognise these snare traps laid by human hunters, researchers have found.

There it was, amid the long list of crucial bills that state legislators in Wisconsin were racing to vote on before their session ends next week: A bill to select the state’s official microbe. Yes, microbe.

Peculiar, perhaps, until one considers what appeared to be the extremely short list of contenders (one) for this state honor — none other than Lactococcus lactis, the bacterium used to make cheddar, Colby and Monterey Jack cheese, and an unsung hero in this, the nation’s No. 1 cheese-producing state.

Ancient galaxies may be cosmic senior citizens today, but some have a wild streak in their past, one packed with frenetic star birth, astronomers say.

Researchers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have found that a significant set of galaxies in an ancient, distant cluster were actively forming stars about 10 billion years ago, which is how long it's taken for their light to reach Earth.

Beer: Some people think it’s proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Others value it as a great source of antibiotics—of course, those people lived 1,700 years ago.

For much of the last three decades, anthropologist George Armelagos has been trying to explain how mummies that date from an ancient kingdom in Nubia—the area south of Egypt that’s located in present-day Sudan—got so much of the antibiotic tetracycline in their bones. Since scientists didn’t synthesize antibiotics like that one until the 20th century (and these bones date back to between 350 to 550 A.D.), finding a buildup in ancient bones screams out “contamination.”

Nasa is aiming to get closer to the Sun than ever before, with plans to plunge a car-sized unmanned spacecraft into the star's outer atmosphere.

Scientists hope to launch the Solar Probe Plus (SPP) sometime before 2018.

Before it is destroyed by the sizzling temperatures exceeding 1,400C (2,550F), the craft will have to obtain valuable data about our parent star.

An abundant metal with vast energy potential could quickly wean the world off oil, if only Western political leaders would muster the will to do it, a UK newspaper says today. The Telegraph makes the case for thorium reactors as the key to a fossil-fuel-free world within five years, and puts the ball firmly in President Barack Obama's court.

Thorium, named for the Norse god of thunder, is much more abundant than uranium and has 200 times that metal's energy potential. Thorium is also a more efficient fuel source -- unlike natural uranium, which must be highly refined before it can be used in nuclear reactors, all thorium is potentially usable as fuel.

The stalled weather pattern blamed for disastrous floods in Pakistan and a record heatwave in Russia may have averted disasters elsewhere by putting the North Atlantic hurricane season on hold.

Forecasters had predicted that warm sea-surface temperatures and the onset of the weather pattern known as La Niña would make a busy Atlantic hurricane season this year. In June, Phil Klotzbach and William Gray of Colorado State University predicted 18 tropical storms, with 10 reaching hurricane force and five becoming deadly major hurricanes. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast similar numbers.

ALIEN life may already exist on Earth - us.

There's an idea - common, but not popular in scientific circles - that all life on Earth was seeded from comets, asteroids or meteors which struck the planet and contained the building blocks necessary to kickstart the evolutionary process.

It's called "panspermia" and it caused an all-in boffin barney some 15 years ago when several scientists backed claims there was evidence of life in a Martian meteorite found in the Allan Hills in Antarctica.

Researchers at the NanoRobotics Laboratory of the École Polytechnique de Montréal, under Professor Sylvain Martel, produced this remarkable video showing a swarm of about 5,000 flagellated bacteria--of a type which are subject to manipulation by magnetic fields--being directed to assemble six 100 μm epoxy bricks into the shape of a tiny step pyramid. IEEE Spectrum explains:

Just north of a truck stop along Interstate 80 in Battle Mountain, Nev., lies evidence that the Earth’s magnetic field once went haywire.

Magnetic minerals in 15-million-year-old rocks appear to preserve a moment when the magnetic north pole was rapidly on its way to becoming the south pole, and vice versa. Such “geomagnetic field reversals” occur every couple hundred thousand years, normally taking about 4,000 years to make the change. The Nevada rocks suggest that this particular switch happened at a remarkably fast clip.

Anyone carrying a compass would have seen its measurements skew by about a degree a week — a flash in geologic time. A paper describing the discovery is slated to appear in Geophysical Research Letters.

Anthropologists have unearthed the leftovers of the world's first known organized feast, which took place around 12,000 years ago at a burial site in Israel, according to a new study.

Based on the findings, approximately 35 guests ate meat from 71 tortoises and at least three wild cattle while attending this first known human-orchestrated event involving food.

The discovery additionally provides the earliest known compelling evidence for a shaman burial, the apparent reason for the feasting. A shaman is an individual who performs rituals and engages in other practices for healing or divination.

Earlier this week, a television commercial advertising medicinal marijuana was aired in California – the first ever broadcast in the U.S. The ad was shown over Fox affiliate KTXL in Sacramento, and has swirled up a nice little cloud of controversy from community members who worry about the commercial's effect on children. The ad itself features a series of testimonials from customers, all A-typical of our drug culture stereotypes: A pretty young woman claims she was diagnosed with a bone disease, while a middle-aged woman says she was hit by a drunk driver.

Today, the administration of psychoactive drugs to children (6-17) is all too common and growing at an alarming rate. These drugs often cause the opposite of the intended effect, often condemning children to a life of misery and ill health. The prescription of these drugs is said to treat "chemical imbalances" which were said to cause ADHD, Depression and Bi-polar disorder. It turns out, however, that what we were calling "disease-causing chemical imbalances," is simply incorrect . The sad irony is, the inappropriate use of these medications is in fact creating different chemical imbalances, which do cause mental disorders, many of which are both life-long and debilitating.

A Japanese rocket unfurled a 300-metre-long ribbon in space on Monday, testing technology that could one day allow spacecraft to navigate by surfing Earth's magnetic field.

Conventional spacecraft have to burn fuel to manoeuvre in orbit. But the fuel adds weight and cost to the launch and eventually gets used up, limiting the probes' lifetime.

In principle, it is possible to propel an orbiting spacecraft without fuel by using a long piece of metal to interact with the magnetic field surrounding our planet. "You're essentially pushing against the Earth's magnetic field," says Les Johnson of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.