The world's first known odd couple: 250 million years ago, a mammal forerunner and an amphibian shared a burrow in South Africa.

Scientists scanning a 250 million-year-old fossilized burrow from the Karoo Basin of South Africa have discovered that two unrelated vertebrate animals nestled together and were fossilized after being trapped by a flash flood event. Facing harsh climatic conditions subsequent to the Permo-Triassic (P-T) mass extinction, the amphibian Broomistega and the mammal forerunner Thrinaxodon cohabited in a burrow.

It's mind over mechanics. A group in the University of Minnesota's College of Science and Engineering have developed a new noninvasive system that allows people to control a flying robot using only their mind.

It sounds fun but it also has the potential to help people who are paralyzed or have neurodegenerative diseases. 

Five subjects (three female and two male) who took part in the study were each able to successfully control the four-blade flying robot, also known as a quadcopter, quickly and accurately for a sustained amount of time.

Check out this June 7th, 2011 eruption showing dark filaments of gas blasting outward from the Sun's lower right. The solar plasma appears dark against the Sun's bright surface but it actually glows at a temperature of about 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. 

When the blobs of plasma hit the Sun's surface again, they heat up by a factor of 100 to a temperature of almost 2 million degrees F. As a result, those spots brighten in the ultraviolet by a factor of 2 – 5 over just a few minutes.

Cities have long been likened to organisms, ant colonies, and river networks. Yet clever analogies fail to capture the essence of how cities really function.  

A paper in Science attempts to derive a series of mathematical formulas that describe how cities' properties vary in relation to their population size, and then posits a unified, quantitative framework for understanding how cities function and grow. The resulting theoretical framework predicts dozens of statistical relationships observed in thousands of real cities around the world for which reliable data are available.

The Van Allen radiation belts in in the Earth's upper atmosphere, two doughnut-shaped rings of highly charged particles, were discovered in 1958. The Van Allen radiation belts consist of an inner ring of high-energy electrons and energetic positive ions, and an outer ring of high-energy electrons.  

But then in February of this year, a team of scientists writing in Science reported a previously unknown third radiation ring, which circled the Earth between the inner and outer rings in September 2012 and then almost completely disappeared.  

How did this temporary radiation belt appear and dissipate?