We may have Jupiter to thank for our unusual solar system. 

Before the inner planets we now call  Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars formed, a great inward-and-then-outward journey that Jupiter made early in the solar system's history may have torn apart a number of super-Earths - planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune - and caused their giant remnants to fall into the sun billions of years ago.

Latency is so ingrained into modern communication we almost forget about it but in live or recorded events, like performances or rehearsals over a long distance, it is crippling.

 When recording a soundtrack over a pre-recorded base, the latency is perceptible to the human ear if a delay of 15-20 milliseconds occurs - the track seems displaced from the rest, giving the sense of being poorly played. To resolve displacement over long distances, elements such as sound capture, sound coding and decoding servers, intermediate network elements, lines of communication and the software used all must be factored in.

Patients with carpal tunnel syndrome are more than twice as likely to have migraine headaches, according to data derived from nearly 26,000 Americans responding to a national health survey. Among other questions, participants were asked whether they had had carpal tunnel syndrome during the past year or "severe headache or migraine" during the past three months.

Patients with carpal tunnel syndrome have symptoms such as hand numbness and weakness, resulting from pressure on the median nerve in the wrist. 

The association also runs in the other direction, with migraine patients having higher odds of carpal tunnel syndrome, say Dr. Huay-Zong Law and colleagues of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

To combat possible climate change due to greenhouse gases, a mix of alternative energy sources (except nuclear for the United States) and geoengineering schemes have been proposed. One idea proposes that ocean pipes could facilitate direct physical cooling of the surface ocean by replacing warm surface ocean waters with colder, deeper waters. 

A new study from a group of Carnegie scientists determines that these types of pipes could actually increase global warming quite drastically. 

When checking your email over a secure connection, or making a purchase from an online retailer, have you ever wondered how your private information or credit card data is kept secure?

Our information is kept away from prying eyes thanks to cryptographic algorithms, which scramble the message so no-one else can read it but its intended recipient. But what are these algorithms, how did they come to be widely used, and how secure really are they?

Lost in all of the hype and hysteria and White House panels on how industry is killing bees is the last indicator species that was being doomed by non-organic pesticides: frogs.

Most animals have a dorso-ventral (back-to-belly) body axis which determines the position of the central nervous system - dorsal in humans, ventral in insects.

Though there are obviously morphological differences, the same signaling molecules of bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) molecules establishes the dorso-ventral axis including the central nervous system in both insects and vertebrates, which led to the conclusion that this molecular mechanism was already present in the common ancestor. 

Tracing the origin of the dorso-ventral axis has not been easy but sea anemones have provided some answers.