The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) on the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is going to show that two-way laser communication beyond Earth is possible, broadening the possibility of transmitting huge amounts of data.

In the future, this could allow for 3-D High Definition video transmissions from deep space missions back to Earth.

Humanities scholars writing in a new paper contend that brushes with the law are often related to 'finances' and therefore if criminals got better financial training when they're released from prison, and get private tutors rather than classroom instruction, their financial stress would be lower.

For the paper, 155 incarcerated men in two Midwestern jails completed a lengthy survey to assess their financial knowledge and behavior; 12 men agreed to in-depth interviews.

Angela Wiley, a University of Illinois professor of applied family studies and co-author of the article, said that four content areas emerged as being most important: investing, self-employment, budgeting, and saving.

Natural rivers are not straight and they are rarely idle; instead, they bend and curve and sometimes appear to wriggle across the surface over time.

That rivers can meander is obvious but how and why they do so is less well known. These questions are complicated by the fact that researchers have for the most part been unable to realistically create a meandering river in a laboratory.

Scientists have previously created simulated streams that bend and branch, but they were not able to limit the river to only a single main flow path or maintain such dynamic motion past the initial bend formation. Working with a 20-by-36 foot river simulator called the Eurotank, van Dijk et al. created a dynamically meandering river.

Early on a winter morning in 2011, residents of western Norway who lived or worked along the shores of the nation's fjords were startled to see the calm morning waters suddenly begin to rise and fall.

Starting at around 7:15 local time and continuing for nearly 3 hours, waves up to 5 feet high surged through the previously still fjord waters. The scene was captured by security cameras and by people with cell phones, reported to local media, and investigated by a local newspaper.

Drawing on this footage, and using a computational model and observations from a nearby seismic station, Bondevik et al. identify the cause of the waves - the devastating magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake that hit off the coast of Japan half an hour earlier.

Cosmic rays, high-energy particles, can damage electronics on Earth, as well as human and non-human DNA, which puts astronauts in space at risk but has also caused any number of genetic modifications in plants that are considered completely natural.  

Their origin has confounded scientists for decades. A study using data  collected by IceTop at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, reveals new information that may help unravel the longstanding mystery of exactly how and where these "rays", because the more scientists learn about the energy spectrum and chemical composition of cosmic rays, the closer humanity will come to uncovering where these energetic particles originate. 

How do you find a new element, like the recently discovered superheavy chemical element 115?

Elements beyond atomic number 104 are referred to as superheavy elements and are produced at accelerator laboratories and generally decay after a short time. Initial reports about an element with atomic number 115 were released from a research center in Russia in 2004 but their indirect evidence was insufficient for an official discovery.

The search for clean, green sustainable energy sources marches on. While some studies note that solar and wind energy could be viable by 2025, if they could bypass environmental lawsuits, hydrogen and nuclear are rushing to fill the gaps.

Thanks to a friend and follower of this blog, which I will not name for once to protect him from your flaming, I can share today with you one of the best instances of involuntary humor in particle physics graphs I have ever seen in my whole life.

The graph appears to be genuine, so this is a good candidate for the IgNobel prize IMHO.

A group of gamma-aminobutyric acid
(GABA) neurons, the neurotransmitters which inhibit other cells, shown to contribute to symptoms like social withdrawal and increased anxiety, may lead to  a new drug target for depression and other mood disorders.  

It is known that people suffering from depression and other mood disorders often react to rejection or bullying by withdrawing themselves socially more than the average person who takes it in strides, yet the biological processes behind these responses have remained unclear.

Data collected from 2009 through 2012 by NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne science campaign that studies polar ice, reveals evidence of a large and previously unknown canyon hidden under a mile of Greenland ice.