This morning, at a hastily arranged press conference, NASA scientists faced a barrage of questions from a frequently skeptical press corps. The questions, however, did not focus on budget issues or plans for future manned missions; instead, the press was concerned about the apparent absence of any visible ejecta from a crater that the Agency had just created by crashing the LCROSS probe into the Moon. NASA seemed very pleased with the data it has obtained, including detailed spectroscopic data, but the press was reflecting the public's desire for a geyser of debris to rise from the impact site and into the field of view of many of the telescopes that were watching.

Regardless of the public expectations, LCROSS clearly performed as planned. It recently separated from the Centaur stage that helped bring it to lunar orbit, and both of the spacecraft were directed towards the Cabeus crater at the Moon's south pole. The Centaur vehicle went first, creating an impact that could be observed from instruments on LCROSS, which followed it in. Less than four minutes later, LCROSS itself struck the lunar surface. The impacts were observed with a variety of telescopes on Earth and in Earth orbit, although the actual site of the impact was obscured by the Cabeus crater walls.

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz, and Ada E. Yonath for enlightening the science community on the structure and function of the ribosome, the protein factory of all living organisms. Out of the three big molecules for life (DNA, RNA, and proteins), proteins arguably do most of the work. They provide structural stability to our cells, give us mechanical motion in our muscles, transport the oxygen that we inhale, and play many other key parts in nearly every chemical reaction that occurs in cells.

DNA contains genetic information, but it is essentially a passive set of instructions and designs that cannot accomplish anything on its own. For there to be life, proteins must help transcribe the data in DNA into RNA, another carrier of information that is more chemically active than DNA, but still less functional than proteins. The messages in the RNA are translated in the ribosome to make specific sequences of proteins, which then goes on to perform essential biochemical functions. Thus, in studying the chemistry of life, we must understand how proteins are made in ribosomes.

Over the last few years, the Nobel Prize in Physics has been all over the map. 2006 saw a pair of observational cosmologists honored, while 2007 went to the people who discovered giant magnetoresistance, a phenomenon that is currently key to keeping hard drive capacities growing. Perhaps worried that they were getting too practical, the 2008 Prize was awarded to theoreticians who delved into symmetry breaking, a phenomenon that helps explain why our universe has more matter than antimatter. This year's prize is a complete reversal, honoring scientists that took theoretical ideas that had been kicking around for decades and brought them to the brink of commercialization in the form of CCD imaging and fiber optic communications.

Half the Prize is going to Charles K. Kao, who worked at the UK's Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, for his key contribution to the development of fiber optics. The basic concept behind fiber optics is simple: light traveling down a medium can be propagated indefinitely if it's surrounded by a material that has a slightly lower refractive index, allowing it to be reflected internally. The material that describes the award notes that scientists were demonstrating that light could be guided down water jets back in the 1850s, and glass-based devices were on the market roughly a century later.

Up until recently, looking for the changes in DNA that contribute to human genetic diseases was a laborious process that involved tracking the changes through the generations of individual families. The completion of the human genome has changed all of that, allowing researchers to check for hundreds of thousands of individual DNA changes in large populations, and to identify those changes that are associated with specific genetic diseases—as the number of people genotyped grows, data sharing might be able to increase the statistical power of these experiments. But researchers are now cautioning that sharing the data might allow someone to learn about the people who contribute DNA samples to these studies.

The research involves a technique called a Genome-Wide Association Study, or GWAS. These rely on a catalog of over half a million individual locations within the human genome that commonly vary between individuals. Technology like DNA chips allows researchers to take a DNA sample from a volunteer and obtain a genotype at all 500,000-plus sites (called SNPs, for single-nucleotide polymorphisms) in a single experiment. Because of this convenience, it's possible to obtain data from thousands of participants providing genetic mapping with a lot more statistical power than a few family pedigrees provide.

The Nobel Prize committee has journeyed to the ends of the chromosome in order to recognize researchers for their contributions to Physiology or Medicine. Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak were honored for characterizing the telomeres, specialized structures at the ends of the DNA that make up our chromosomes, as well as the mechanism by which they're maintained. The tips of the chromosomes in our cells might seem like an obscure subject of study, but protecting the loose ends of our DNA is necessary if cells are to continue to divide, so the work of these researchers has implications for everything from aging to cancer.

The DNA of bacteria is kept in a circular chromosome, and thus has no real end. But every organism that stores its DNA in a nucleus—a group termed eukaryotes, which includes every animal—maintains its DNA in a series of linear chromosomes. As a result, every eukaryotic cell contains a few loose DNA ends floating within its nucleus.

Power management features of electric fish: South American electric fish live in murky waters, and generate current in order to both sense their surroundings and communicate with fellow species members. But, as humans have found, it can be rather expensive to generate electricity, although the fish pay in terms of calories. So, it really shouldn't come as a surprise that they can regulate their power output.

But the details of the system are very elegant. Generating the currents requires the presence of a sodium ion channel on the surface of specialized cells. So, during the day, when they're less active, the fish simply pull the channels off the cell surface, and store them internally, so any electric signals they produce are low strength. When evening arrives, the channels get sent back to the cell's surface so that they can power charges at full strength. There's also a secondary system that allows the fish to power up quickly if they sense another species member nearby.

Chemical reactions rarely go from start to finish in a single step, as intermediates form during the transition between starting materials and final products. For example, when our bodies synthesize proteins, a new amino acid doesn’t just merge into a growing chain of amino acids. Instead, the formation of the bonds between amino acids in a protein (a peptide bond) involves a complex coordinated effort among different RNAs and enzymatic sites. If you’ve ever taken a course in organic or physical chemistry, you’ve seen firsthand that we expend as much effort on studying how a reaction occurs as we do on figuring out its eventual outcome.

Reactions aren't movies that you can freely pause or slow down to observe sequential steps, so chemists have employed a variety of clever techniques to work with the limitations. Scientists can radioactively label molecules to track reactions, or they can make it easier to monitor reaction progression by slowing down molecular motion through temperature reduction or placing chemicals in a kinetically impeding molecular capsule, just to name a few options. Building on past techniques, Makoto Fujita’s laboratory at the University of Tokyo combined X-ray crystallography with reactions trapped in cavities to directly capture structural data of reaction intermediates. The authors use this to create an X-ray snapshot of a rarely seen intermediate in this week's issue of Nature.

Nobel Prize season is right around the corner, which means one thing: it's time for the Annals of Improbable Research to hold its annual bash in Boston, at which it hands out its world famous prizes, the Ig Nobels. These prizes honor the best of the year's research that, according to the Annals, cannot or should not be repeated.

Each year, the awards ceremony features a theme; this year's theme celebrates the recent financial meltdown by celebrating "risk." Benoit Mandelbrot (of "Mandelbrot set" fame), delivered a keynote on risk. This was followed by a performance of "The Big Bank Opera," a work commissioned for this event, and a Big Bank cabaret.

As always, there were a series of 24/7 lectures, in which researchers attempted to explain their work in technical terms within 24 seconds, then provide an explanation for laymen in seven words. This year's lecturers included Stephen Wolfram (speaking on genius), and Nobel Laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who briefly discussed economics.

Wireless technology is exploding as the hardware becomes cheaper and uses less power. Chances are good that the upward trajectory will continue over the next few years, as companies are betting that smart devices and remote controls that use the short-range IEEE 802.15.4 protocol will find a place on the market. Now, researchers have used one of the features that provides that protocol with robustness against noise in order to track the movements of people around a room they couldn't otherwise see into.

Why do some embrace religion and others reject it outright? For a long time, scientists have been trying to answer this question by probing the neural roots of religion. Until fairly recently, many thought the answer lay in a "God-spot"—a small region of the brain that has been linked to the mystical experiences associated with faith.

Thanks in large part to the growing sophistication of brain-scanning techniques, which let neuroscientists peer into the brain’s inner workings, that concept has largely been rendered moot; there is now widespread agreement that religious behaviors are modulated by well-defined neural pathways. Indeed, several studies have indicated that the feelings of joy, doubt, and self-reflection that are evoked by intense religious experiences can be correlated with specific patterns of brain activation. Earlier this year, a group of researchers led by the National Institute on Aging’s Dimitrios Kapogiannis identified several of the cognitive mechanisms and brain circuits that seem to be engaged during the processing of religious belief.

Even if we weren't going to be increasingly reliant on renewable power, which is prone to fluctuations, it would make a lot of sense to add energy storage to the electric grid. That was the message provided by Imre Gyuk, who heads the US Department of Energy's program for energy storage. On-grid storage is frequently pitched as a way to smooth over the swings in renewable power that accompany changing weather, like a drop in sunlight or increase in the wind. But Gyuk used his talk at last week's EmTech meeting to argue that grid storage provides a basic level of reliability to the grid that would be valuable under any circumstances; enabling renewable energy's just a bonus.

Gyuk started his talk by pointing out that the US, which only has storage capacity for a bit more than two percent of its generating capacity, badly lags Europe and Japan, where the figures are 10 percent and 15 percent respectively. It's no surprise, he said, that the systems overseas are far more stable than the one in the states, as a few missing cycles can blow the whole system.

At Technology Review's EmTech conference last week, MIT professor Joel Schindall told the audience at a panel on energy storage why ultracapacitors may have a significant role to play in our transportation future. The good properties of these devices—fast charge/discharge cycles and an essentially unlimited number of cycles—make them a compelling choice for powering an electric vehicle. Schindall also explained why their downside, a far lower charge density than batteries, might not be as much of a problem as it might appear at first glance.

Schindall, who had spent some time away from academics, explained that during his first stint at MIT, a capacitor that could hold 350 Farads would have filled the whole stage. Before he returned, someone working on fuel cells had accidentally produced the first ultracapacitor. Now, with refinements, he was able to walk on stage with a 350 Farad ultracapacitor that was about the size of a D battery. The current generation of devices use activated carbon to hold charges, as its highly complex topology creates a lot of surface area across which charge differences can build up.

When most of us think about a machine composing musical pieces, we think of primitive songs coming out of a HAL 9000 that could be suitable for a child's toy, but nothing that music lovers would actually enjoy. That's because most of us haven't heard of Emily Howell. No, that's not a person—it's the name of a computer program written by University of California, Santa Cruz professor David Cope that, after nearly three decades of work, is about to release, uh, "her" first CD through Centaur Records.

Cope is Dickerson Emeriti Professor at UCSC—he attempted to retire years ago because he didn't want to go to meetings anymore—teaching graduate courses in music composition and computer-assisted composition. Cope is also an Honorary Professor of Computer Science at Xiamen University in China and is often ascribed as a computer scientist, though he insists that he is a music professor first, not a CS professor. However, given the work he has done on Emily Howell and "her" predecessor, EMI, it's clear that he has managed to mesh the two in ways that go far beyond a musical computer program.

This week, a climatology meeting is taking place at Oxford University that has a rather provocative title: 4 degrees & beyond. Most of the public policy discussions so far have focused on limiting the impact of climate change to somewhere in the neighborhood of 2°C, while many of the IPCC's projections have focused on the impact of doubling the preindustrial levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which they place at a bit above that figure. However, as the UN's climate conference in Copenhagen draws near, it's become increasingly clear that there is little appetite for placing any hard targets on emissions, which raises the specter that some of the IPCC's high-end scenarios may come to pass.

Speakers at the initial session of the meeting made the case that there are a number of reasons to think that some of the high-emissions scenarios, which could triple the preindustrial levels, might come to pass, and it's worth considering what the world would look like if they did.

Last week's EmTech 09 meeting played host to a panel discussion on the future of data storage. All three of the panelists were from companies that have a poorly known product on the market, and each of them discussed improvements that are in the pipeline, which we'll cover towards the end of this article. But they also provided a more general overview of the challenges facing storage technology at a time when data production is beginning to outstrip our ability to cope with it.