New Scientist has an amazing new therapy for patients in a vegetative state – using the same direct current-stimulation that increases creative “flow” to turn their brains back on all the way:

The team worked with 55 people who had experienced a traumatic brain injury or lack of oxygen to the brain and were in a minimally conscious or vegetative [...]

Georgia Tech researchers are trying to become prosthetic Neal Pearts, Science Daily reports, with an improvising robotic drumming limb:

The robotic drumming prosthesis has motors that power two drumsticks. The first stick is controlled both physically by the musicians’ arms and electronically using electromyography (EMG) muscle sensors. The other stick “listens” to the music being played and improvises.

“The second [...]

Nature digs up the info on the termite robots built this castle:

The robots all work independently. Each travels along a grid and can move, climb a step and lift and put down bricks. And they use sensors to detect other robots and existing bricks, and react to these stimuli according to a simple set of rules, such as [...]

New Scientist is not (we hope) introducing a 1950s-style horror film with their story on the giant, prehistoric virus THAT LIVES AGAIN:

Dubbed a pithovirus after the Greek pithos, meaning a large earthenware jar like an amphora, the virus infects amoebas but does not appear to harm human or mouse cells.

Even so, now that this virus has been revived from [...]

At least if we’re flies, it does. Nature has more on the laser beam that puts flies in the mood for love:

Optogenetics — triggering neurons with light — has been successful in mice but has not been pursued much in flies, says Barry Dickson, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia. [...]

A scientific visualization from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio, who have this to say about it:

An X-class solar flare erupted on the left side of the sun on the evening of Feb. 24, 2014. This composite image shows the sun in ultraviolet light with wavelength of both 131 and 171 Angstroms.

“X-class” means as powerful as solar flares get. [...]

New Scientist takes a surprisingly nuanced look at the way things like oysters and shrimp might actually be responding to trauma. They’re not all the same. Research shows that, as much as we want a guilt-free crab boil, invertebrates do feel pain… some of them:

Unlike crustaceans, insects seem to have no pain-related behaviours. If an insect’s leg is [...]

PhysOrg has the skinny on ESA’s Gaia telescope and its quest to catalogue a billion stars:

Gaia will be able to discern objects up to 400,000 times dimmer than those visible to the naked eye. The positional accuracy of its measurements are akin to measuring the width of a human hair at a distance of 500 km.

The process will involve [...]

DailyGalaxy.com shares the weird – an experiment that’s been proposed to tell for once and for all if classical physics can explain the universe, or if everything there is really depends on “spooky action at a distance” and the peculiar rules of quantum physics:

“It sounds creepy, but people realized that’s a logical possibility that hasn’t been closed yet,” [...]