The combined power of ESA's Herschel space observatory and the ground-based Keck telescopes mean hundreds of previously unseen starburst galaxies have been characterized, revealing extraordinary high star-formation rates across the history of the Universe. Starburst galaxies give birth to hundreds of solar masses' worth of stars each year in short-lived but intense events. By comparison, our own Milky Way Galaxy produces the equivalent of only one Sun-like star per year, on average.

Even in deep space, atoms feel the the cosmic microwave background left over by the Big Bang. The cosmos is filled with electromagnetic interactions that show atoms they are not alone. Stray electric fields, like from a nearby electronic device, will also slightly adjust the internal energy levels of atoms, a process called the Stark effect.

Even the universal vacuum, presumably empty of any energy or particles, can very briefly muster virtual particles that buffet electrons inside atoms, further shifting their energies; this form of self-interaction is known as the Lamb shift.  

Physicists have found elusive Dirac electrons in a superconducting material called copper-doped bismuth selenide - and say it could serve as the silicon of the quantum era. 

Quantum computers use atoms to perform processing and memory tasks and for a generation have been promising dramatic increases in computing power because of their ability to carry out scores of calculations at once.  

Superconductors can, at cold enough temperatures, conduct electricity indefinitely from one kickstart of energy because they have no electrical resistance. Dirac electrons, named after the English physicist whose equation describes their behavior, are particles with such high energy that they straddle the realms of classical and quantum physics. 

Inside the brains of mice and men alike, a relatively big football-shaped region called the thalamus acts like a switchboard, providing the prefrontal cortex, the part that does abstract thinking and decision-making, with most of its information. The thalamus's responsibility even includes helping the prefrontal cortex to maintain consciousness and arousal.

Researchers have discovered what may be the earliest dinosaur,
Nyasasaurus parringtoni, a creature the size of a Labrador retriever, but with a five foot-long tai. It walked the Earth about 10 million years before more familiar dinosaurs like the small, swift-footed Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus.

A survey published in Archives of Pediatrics&Adolescent Medicine
 finds that 14.2 percent of teenage children with any mental disorder have been treated with a psychotropic medication in the last 12 months, which researchers suggest challenges concerns about widespread overmedication and misuse of psychotropic medications among young people in the U.S.

Concern has been raised about inappropriate prescribing of psychotropic medications to children and adolescents, but those criticisms were based on anecdotal reports, studies of small unrepresentative clinical samples and secondary analyses of large databases on prescription drug use that lacked clinical information, the authors write in the study background.