Weak transfer works like this: a slow-moving rock fragment travels to the outer edge of Earth’s gravitational pull and launches back into space, floating freely until it’s pulled in by another planetary system. Researchers say that planet could be something like Mars — or a planet in an entirely different solar system. The process also proves that the opposite could be true: a microbe-covered fragment from another planet could have crashed down onto Earth, sparking the onset of human existence here. Researchers estimate that anywhere between 100 trillion and 30 quadrillion fragments could have been exchanged between our solar system and our neighboring solar system, with as many as 200 billion of those rocks originating from Earth.

The only time in history when this phenomenon was possible was between 164 million to 288 million years after the formation of the solar system, according to the study. For any of this to point to Earth as the springboard for life in other solar systems, life on Earth would have had to be present 3.8 billion years ago when the conditions for weak transfer were right. Science currently clocks the first appearance of microorganisms on Earth at about 3.6 billion years ago.

The weak transfer theory is one of several proposed by scientists to answer the age-old mystery surrounding the origin of human life. Other popular hypotheses and beliefs used to explain the spark of life include that life originated when aliens landed on Earth, human life occurred spontaneously, or that it originated from God.

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The Orlando Sentinel received copies of NASA documents that detail the organization’s grand plans to build an outpost 38,000 miles from the moon in a region of deep space where the gravities of Earth and the moon reach equilibrium, creating a unique force field that would help the outpost to “stick” in place. The enormous rocket needed to get astronauts to the outpost is set to be built by 2017. NASA wants to build the outpost using a Russian-built module, parts from Italy and leftover components from the $100 billion International Space Station.

It’s a grand idea that comes with a grand price tag. Space officials say the project could cost billions — perhaps tens of billions — of dollars, though the exact amount is unknown. With the national economy in rocky water, it’s unclear whether the federal government will lend support to such and expensive and potentially dangerous space project. Top space officials acknowledge that the project would put astronauts at an extreme level of risk unparalleled by previous space missions due to the outpost’s deep-in-space location. The NASA documents received by the Orlando Sentinel note that the venture would require participants to accept a higher level of risk than posed by prior space missions, in part due to the fact that the risk of radiation exposure would be extremely high because the base would be located outside Earth’s protective magnetic field.

At best, the outpost could help NASA put the first human footsteps on Mars. At worst, it could be deadly. The state of the economy and the near-future political climate will be among the top indicators to determine whether NASA will get the funding and support to move forward with this ambitious project.

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The Aug. 24 flight experiment was the brainchild of Ron Fugelseth, a California-based motion graphics producer whose son has a beloved toy train named Stanley. Fugelseth decided to launch Stanley into the air using a weather balloon affixed to a three-foot parachute. The procedure involved several months of monitoring the winds, as well as calling the Federal Aviation Administration prior to launch to confirm that the train-toting balloon would not interfere with any airplane flight paths. The hour-long climb into the stratosphere ended with a 20-minute fall into a corn field where Fugelseth and his son retrieved Stanley.

Fugelseth caught the flight on video with an HD camera focused on Stanley, who was secured atop a wooden dowel perch. The footage has been edited into a two-and-a-half minute YouTube video that has already garnered more than one million views. Fugelseth even went so far as to animate Stanley’s face using After Effects and Photoshop to mimic how he imagines his son sees the toy train.

In order to easily find the landed train, Fugelseth equipped Stanley’s balloon with an old cell phone for GPS. The foam box surrounding the camera and phone was also colored bright orange for easy spotting — which, in a corn field, was surely useful. In addition, the dad used the University of Wyoming’s balloon trajectory website to plan a launch site that would keep Stanley from hitting anyone.

“I launched him from a location that I knew would bring him down into farm land,” Fugelseth wrote in the YouTube video description. “The prediction website was only 5-10 miles off, so he landed safely in a corn field, far away from any towns…. I didn’t want Stanley to be a murderer. Plus, I wanted to make sure my son got Stanley back. ”

Photo and video credit: Ron Fugelseth/YouTube

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A woman who wears her hair in a ponytail while jogging does not move her head from side to side, yet her ponytail whips back and forth like a pendulum. A trio of American and British researchers who studied the physics behind this phenomenon earned themselves the Ig Noble’s 2012 Physics Prize. Their research examines the combination of forces — gravity, elasticity — that explain why human hair contained by an elastic sways even when the human does not.

Another Ig Nobel winner offers a polite way to get someone to stop talking. Instead of telling the person to “shut up,” you can use a machine that plays back the speaker’s voice on a short delay. Inventors Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada of Japan found that hearing one’s own words played back will force the speaker into silence. The result of their findings is the SpeechJammer, a machine that can stop a person from speaking mid-sentence without causing any physical harm. The creators say the machine, which won the Acoustics Prize, can be used to prevent two people from talking over one another in debates or to reduce background noise in places like classrooms and trains.

The Ig Nobel Anatomy Prize went to the Netherland’s Frans de Waal and America’s Jennifer Pokorny. Humans can tell a lot from a person’s face: their mood, their approximate age and — almost always — you can determine their gender. Pokorny and de Waal found this is not true for certain species of monkeys, such as chimpanzees, which are more apt to identify the gender of other chimpanzees from seeing their rear ends. In addition to proving that chimps can differentiate between male and female behinds, their study also cast doubt that chimps can do the same from looking at another chimp’s face.

Featured photo credit: klohka/Shutterstock; Secondary photo credit: AJancso/Shutterstock

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Called lesula (the scientific name is Cercopithecus lomamiensis), the primate was first brought to the attention of researcher John Hart while sifting through photographs of a 2007 field expedition. One photo portrayed a 13-year-old girl named Georgette standing in a remote village in central DCR. Beside her was a monkey with a naked face, yellow mane, blue backside and bright red marking on its lower back. It was unlike any monkey Hart had ever seen, and it took him five years of careful research to find and identify the monkey as a brand new species.

Hart and his fellow researchers learned lesula is different from other monkey species because of its striking appearance. For example, the males, which are about 125 cm from head to tail, have bright blue backsides. This trait is found in only one other known monkey species, the owl-faced monkey (Cercopithecus hamlyni).

The lesula is typically shy, though the village monkey that prompted further research had become quite accustomed to human interaction. The species usually inhabits the dank rainforest floor where sunlight and people are scant. Since the region where it dwells is largely unexplored, researchers say it’s no wonder it took so long for the monkey to be scientifically known. However, lesula is a common sight for some villagers in remote regions of the DCR. In fact, villagers in the central part of the country are known to feast on lesula for dinner. Now that the monkey has been identified, researchers say the next step is to save it from being hunted by humans for bushmeat.

Featured photo credit: John Hart/PLOS One; secondary photo credit: Gilbert Paluku/PLOS One

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Exelon, which owns about 2 percent of the country’s wind capacity, has been lobbying members of Congress to kill the tax credits. Company executives say the credits disrupt the energy market in a way that’s counterproductive for nuclear power. They argue that the credits have been intact long enough to jumpstart the industry. Extending them, the argument goes, would unfairly favor wind power over other clean energy options.

That viewpoint doesn’t jive with the majority of AWEA board members, who voted to oust the company last week. The trade group has recently made attempts to secure an extension of the wind tax credits the hallmark of its efforts to advance the wind power industry.

Exelon became a major player in American wind power generation when it bought John Deere Renewables in 2010. The company now runs more than 35 wind projects in 10 states. Its stake in wind power production is so valuable that the company, though deeply involved with nuclear power, earned a spot of AWEA’s board.

Despite the company’s support for wind production, Exelon officials claim the wind farm tax credits effectively lower the wholesale price of electricity. That’s not good for Exelon’s bottom line. The company operates 10 nuclear plants and 17 reactors that account for about 20 percent of the nation’s total nuclear capacity. It is also vested in fossil, hydro, biomass, landfill gas, wind and solar power production. Politico reports that Exelon’s CEO told investors it has more than $400 million marked for wind development that it will funnel to other projects if the tax credits run out.

The incentives for wind farms are set to expire Dec. 31. If reelected, President Barack Obama has said he would extend the tax incentive. Republican rival Mitt Romney, however, has said he would let it expire.

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The Cayman Department of Vehicles and Licensing will now register electric cars on the island after previously barring them from its roads. The announcement came at the first ever Caribbean International Electric Car Show held at the Cayman Motor Museum. Among the vehicles on display was the Wheego, a two-seat compact car that runs about 100 miles on a single charge. The Wheego starts at $32,995 and qualifies for a $7,500 federal tax credit. The company is in the process of expanding its network of dealers to other Caribbean nations, including Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. The cars are currently sold in 13 states, Japan and now the Cayman Islands.

In Cayman, officials are planning to construct more than a dozen new solar-powered charging stations across the territory to help support the newly legalized electric cars. Cayman Automotive, the first car dealer in the territory to sell electric vehicles, has hopes of selling as many as 3,000 electric cars by 2018, the Caribbean Journal reports.

Electric cars offer buyers environmental and long-term cost benefits. But the industry faces several hurdles that have slowed adoption by the mass population. Fully electric cars take a long time to charge — the Wheego, for instance, takes 10 hours to charge from zero to 100 percent — and the relatively low availability of charging stations makes it difficult to travel long distances.

While no one expects instantaneous, widespread adoption of electric cars across the Cayman Islands, officials there say any reduction of carbon emissions will be beneficial to the territory’s fragile environment.

“We are thrilled to be able to introduce this technology to the Cayman Islands in an effort to further preserve our treasured ecosystem,” said Hon. McKeeva Bush, premier of the Cayman Islands, at the end of last year when the solar charging stations were announced. “Our natural environment, including the Mastic Trail, the Blue Iguanas and our pristine waters, is a source of national pride, which we plan to maintain for years to come. This development is crucial to our success.”

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The center has promised to plant twice as many trees along the parade route after the shuttle’s two-day procession in mid-October, but that’s not enough to appease some local residents who say replacing mature trees with saplings is not an even trade. They argue that young trees will decrease property values — which is not unfounded, as tree-heavy areas are often wealthier neighborhoods — as well as not provide ample shade.

Younger, actively growing trees actually produce more oxygen than more mature trees, scientists say. But mature trees absorb much more carbon dioxide than saplings, making them an important participant in the fight against air pollution.

Engineers charged with mapping a route from LAX airport to the California Science Center originally considered airlifting the shuttle to its final destination. They were forced to give up on that idea because the shuttle weighs too much for a helicopter to handle, and dismantling the shuttle was ruled out of the question because it would damage the heat sensors affixed to the body of the craft.

One shorter street route was planned along Leimert Boulevard, but residents strongly opposed it, as that route would have required removal of many trees planted in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The current plan has already gone underway, with crews chopping down pines and ficus in Inglewood. Some Inglewood officials are pleased to see the trees go, as the sidewalks will be repaired at no cost to the city and new, less problematic trees will line the streets. California Science Center officials and some community leaders also say the tree chopping is a fair price to pay to own a piece of American history.

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A new study by the Zoological Society of London and the International Union for Conservation of Nature found that human impacts contributing to the rising pH levels of the oceans, also known as ocean acidification, and increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be particularly harmful for species with external skeletons that can erode. Other problems affecting invertebrates include agricultural runoff, habitat loss and industrial waste.

The report assessed 12,000 species in the IUCN’s Red List of endangered species. However, the list only covers 1 percent of all described marine invertebrate species and even fewer (0.3 percent) of all described land invertebrates, so the threat could be significantly higher than the study determined.

These invertebrates are particularly helpful to humans in that many of them are insects that pollinate flowers or marine animals that help with water filtration, scientists say.

Spineless creatures have been largely ignored by human conservation efforts, scientists say. Conservation spending has historically focused on more iconic species such as eagles and polar bears. But this study proves that smaller, more prolific invertebrates like jellyfish and butterflies are just as vulnerable to pollution and our warming climate.

The report includes calculated worths of some of the potentially threatened invertebrates identified by the report. For example, the estimated worth of honeybees to the British economy was £200 million in 2007. Many people do not think about how integral insects and other invertebrates are to the economy, but their existence is worth billions of dollars each year across the globe.

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The honey gives the beer a rich flavor, but doesn’t sweeten it, according to the master brewer.

The president began making the first alcohol ever brewed on White House grounds in 2011 after buying a home brewing kit. Obama — who famously hosted a White House beer summit in 2009 to help diffuse racial tensions between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a Cambridge, Mass. police officer who arrested him — first served his homemade beer, a honey ale, to guests at their Super Bowl party in March 2011.

“To be honest, we were surprised that the beer turned out so well since none of us had brewed beer before,” White House Chef Sam Kass said in a blog post. “As far as we know the White House Honey Brown Ale is the first alcohol brewed or distilled on the White House grounds. George Washington brewed beer and distilled whiskey at Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson made wine but there’s no evidence that any beer has been brewed in the White House.”

A behind-the-scenes video released by the White House Saturday shows the kitchen staff brewing and bottling the beer.

The White House kitchen staff has since released the recipes for the two brews so Americans everywhere can drink as the president would.

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