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.

I am in Tilburg, Netherlands, for a conference on the future of philosophy of science. Ah!, you might say, and what would that look like?

The possibility that autism is more common in offspring of older parents has generated considerable interest. To investigate the theory, a study using data from 10 US study sites participating in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, was developed to examine the relation between parental age at delivery and the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Confirmation of such an association has important public health implications in light of increasing trends in recent decades for couples to delay having children.

As I lay inside the box in the pitch blackness waiting for the show to begin, I wonder if the operator forgot to start it. Nothing is happening – no sound, no sights…nothing at all. Ah, wait, did I just hear something? Maybe, although perhaps that was just part of the box’s machinery I am not supposed to hear. But now I’m hearing it again, more distinctly – a raspy visceral groaning.

Definitely the show has begun!

I'm a big fan of arch-skeptic Bob Park, but his position on cell phones and cancer is just too simplistic:

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."

If you find politically vocal celebrities annoying, you may be able to take comfort in new research  which suggests that movie stars are unlikely to influence the outcome of political elections.

Two new studies from North Carolina State University show that young voters are not swayed by celebrity endorsements of political candidates – and sometimes voters like the candidate less as a result of receiving a celebrity's endorsement. God bless America's young people.

The research was presented April 22 at the 68th Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago.

Regular aerobic exercise keeps you physically healthy, but scientists are beginning to uncover evidence that it may also improve your cognition. Researchers writing in Neuroscience say they have found that regular exercise speeds learning and improves blood flow to the brain.

While there is ample evidence of the beneficial effects of exercise on cognition in animal models, it has been unclear whether the same holds true for humans. The new study tested the hypothesis in monkeys and provides information that is more comparable to human physiology as a result.

The idea that the blind have a more acute sense of smell than the sighted is a myth, according to an ongoing study at the Université de Montréal. Vision loss doesn't enhance the sense of smell, researchers say, blind people just pay more attention to how they perceive smells.

"If you enter a room in which coffee is brewing, you will quickly look for the coffee machine. The blind person entering the same room will only have the smell of coffee as information," says Mathilde Beaulieu-Lefebvre, a graduate student at the Université de Montréal Department of Psychology. "That smell will therefore become very important for their spatial representation."