It may sound counterintuitive to use a microbial protein to improve water quality but some bacteria are doing just that to protect themselves from potentially toxic nanoparticles in their own environments, and clean up crews of the future could potentially do the same thing on a larger scale.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has teamed up with the W.M. Keck Observatory to precisely measure the mass of Eris, the largest member of a new class of dwarf planets in our solar system. Eris is 1.27 times the mass of Pluto, formerly the largest member of the Kuiper Belt of icy objects beyond Neptune.

Some advice my dad gave me: "If your wife says she never dreams about sex with another man, she's lying. If she says she never dreams about sex with another woman, she's lying then too."

He may have been on to something. It turns out everyone, men and women alike, dream about sex.

In a detailed study that served to investigate the actual nature and content of sexual dreams across a large sample of dream reports from men and women, approximately eight percent of everyday dream reports from both genders contain some form of sexual-related activity.

Electrically charged gas in the magnetosphere of Saturn suggests volcanic activity on two of its moons. The direction of the ejected electrons points back towards Tethys and Dione. Previously it had been thought only only Enceladus was an active world.

"Innovative" science classes - new ways of teaching that are interactive, non-boring and therefore in defiance of every method that made America the home of great scientists for 150 years, are all the rage. The goal is to get more women in science, more minorities in science, more everyone in science.

It may not be working, and it may even make things worse, says a study the University of Colorado at Boulder. The researchers looked at interactive teaching methods, which can include online homework systems, help-room sessions, student discussions, and other methods that were not part of traditional science classes in the US.

The long supposed connection between mind and music has been further demonstrated by an international collaboration of physicists led by Simone Bianco and Paolo Grigolini at the Center for Nonlinear Science at the University of North Texas. A statistical analysis reveals a remarkable similarity between the distributions produced by music compositions and brain activity.