This year’s Nobel prize in physics when to three cosmologists for their work in studying the accelerating expansion of the universe and dark energy. (New Scientist)

SpaceX has set the goal of developing the first rocket and spaceship that is fully reusable. The hope is that it will be cheaper than the current partially reusable or non-reusable designs, but if we learned anything from the Space Shuttle program, that just might not work. (International Business Times)

The Tevatron Collider, what had been the largest proton accelerator from 1983 until the LHC came online has been shut down. It sure seems like every year the US moves further and further away from being a world leader. (Scientific American)

The Denisovans were a early hominid closely related to the Neanderthals who’s range spread from Siberia to Papua New Guinea. Portions of their genome have been found in human populations in Indonesia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Polynesia. (New Scientist)

Fence Lizards in Pennsylvania are demonstrating rather rapid evolution as they try to survive an invasive fire ant species.

(Via Atheist Media Blog)

A rat had it’s cerebellum deactivated and replaced with an artificial one. The result was that it was able to learn and act with the same motor reflexes that it could with its own cerebellum. This is a first for bidirectional cybernetics and shows promising potential for prosthetic technology. (New Scientist)

We’ve got another bullshit story this week. Scinests from Russia, the US, Canada, Sweden, Estonia, Mongolia, and China are going to be searching the Kemerova region of Siberia to look for the Yeti. “Sightings” have increased threefold in the last 20 years in this region and they have also found twig huts, twisted branches, and footprints that were up to 14 inches long. According to Igor Burtsev of the International Center of Hominology in Moscow, “Some of the Neanderthals…may have survived to this day in some mountainous wooded habitats that are more or less off limits to their arch foes [humans].” My guess is that they’ll find out that local teens are behind all of this… (Fox News)