Just like buses, really. You wait around for ages, and then three planets with a mass comparable to Neptune turn up at once, all in the same star system. A team of European astronomers have made this discovery with the HARPS spectrograph, a unique ‘planet-hunting machine’ running on a telescope in Chile.

Despite the UK government thoroughly denying the existence of UFOs in that ‘leaked’ report some people think that the truth may be ‘out there’ after all. Which is why Ian Crawford, a researcher from University of London’s Birkbeck College, thinks that future Lunar mission crews should be keeping an eye out for alien artifacts, which may have got there by accident or by design.

Is there anything these science types can’t do? Not content with being able to alter the speed at which it travels, now they’ve found a way to make light travel backwards. To add weirdness to confusion, these backward travelling pulses move faster than lightspeed as well. Apparently it’s not as much of a causality violation as it may sound, but I’m going to simply take their word for that.

That ‘dark matter’ stuff is still causing headaches for cosmologist and astronomers, not to mention layman science geeks like myself. And here’s more fuel for the fire; this article on ‘dark energy’ discusses a number of ideas pertaining to black holes, but also mentions the theory that the entire universe itself may be a ‘dark energy star’. My head hurts.

They’re more like cages, really, but at an atomic scale. Scientists have discovered a new configuration of atoms of gold that forms an enclosed space in a similar way to ‘buckyball’ carbon. That makes the Au16 cluster the smallest metal cage possible; now the boffins intend trying to trap other molecules in the cages.