A long lost light reflector left on the lunar surface by the Soviet Union nearly 40 years ago has been found by a team of NASA physicists.

The French-built laser reflector was sent aboard the unmanned Luna 17 mission, which landed on the moon November 17, 1970, releasing a robotic rover that roamed the lunar surface and carried the missing laser reflector. The Soviet lander and its rover, called Lunokhod 1, were last heard from on September 14, 1971.

Researchers have developed and tested a modified enzyme called CocE that can break down cocaine into inactive products nearly 1,000 times faster than the human body does regularly.

In combination with previous studies that demonstrate CocE's effectiveness in rodent models, the new results suggest that CocE may be a good candidate for clinical treatment of cocaine toxicity.

The research was presented at the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics annual meeting on April 25.

Scientists have discovered a series of 400,000-year-old asphalt volcanoes about 10 miles off the California coast, at the bottom of the Santa Barbara Channel.

The largest of these undersea Ice Age domes lies at a depth of 700 feet (220 meters), too deep for scuba diving, which explains why the volcanoes have never before been spotted by humans. The discovery is documented this week in Nature Geoscience.

"They're larger than a football-field-long and as tall as a six-story building," says David Valentine, a geoscientist at University of California, Santa Barbara. "They're massive features, and are made completely out of asphalt."

A new study in Nature Geoscience suggests that as global temperatures increase, microbes in soil become less efficient over time at converting carbon in soil into carbon dioxide, a key contributor to climate warming.

The results contradict those of earlier studies that assume microbes will continue to spew ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the climate continues to warm. If microbial efficiency declines in a warmer world, carbon dioxide emissions will fall back to pre-warming levels, a pattern seen in field experiments. But if microbes manage to adapt to the warmth – for instance, through increased enzyme activity – emissions could intensify.

Scientists studying the DNA marker profiles between smokers and non-smokers have found several genetic variants that are associated with key smoking behaviors.

In a new Nature Genetics paper, the international research team reported that three genetic regions are associated with the number of cigarettes smoked per day, one with smoking initiation and one with smoking cessation.

The variants on chromosome 15 associated with heavy smoking lie within a region that contains nicotinic receptor genes, which other scientists have previously associated with nicotine dependence and lung cancer.

Physicists at Ohio University and the University of Hamburg in Germany have captured  the first images of atomic spin in action. 

The research indicates that scientists can observe and perhaps manipulate spin, a finding that may impact future development of nanoscale magnetic storage, quantum computers and spintronic devices.

The images have been published in a new Nature Nanotechnology study.