Some microbes, simple as they may be, have an ability to gather energy from extreme sources like sulfur, formic acid, minerals, and... electricity? Yes, electricity. A team led by Peter Girguis from Harvard has discovered how a certain bacteria gets its energetic needs from electrons pulled from the environment. The results of this study were published in Nature Communications.

Rhodopseudomonas palustris are gram-negative bacteria that has remarkable dexterity in obtaining energy and is able to take cues from the environment to employ photoautotropic, photoheterotrophic, chemoautotrophic, or chemoheterotrophic metabolism. This flexibility has baffled microbiologists for some time. Girguis's team focused on the phototrophic aspects of its metabolism in order to begin teasing out some answers.

In this day and age of well-known NSA spying, everyone keeps saying that the only way to be safe is to use SSL/TLS, commonly known as "browsing with https://".

The sad reality is that HTTPS does virtually nothing to protect you from the prying eyes of alphabet soup agencies - or anybody else with enough knowledge about how these supposedly "secure" connections actually work.

It's true that connecting to web sites with SSL will certainly prevent "script kiddies" and other more winky opponents from eavesdropping on your surfing or otherwise interfering in your affairs. But as for the Real Bad Guys, forget it...

We shall begin by taking a brief dive down the rabbit hole of SSL, hopefully in a way that will make sense to even the least technically inclined among us.

This issue is, after all, so extremely important that I think everyone needs to understand what is really going on, and how web security actually works, without needing a PhD in cryptography, computer science, or engineering!

Buying voice risk analysis tools to root out benefit fraud is merely an authoritarian creation of suspicion for its own sake

Humankind has for centuries been trying to establish how to spot a liar without having to rely on language. The Chinese used to fill a man's mouth with dry rice, on the basis that the pressure of the untruth would interrupt his production of saliva, making the grains attach helpfully to his cheeks and tongue, to announce his mendacity. More recently we've had the polygraph test and, more recently still, voice risk analysis - they're a tiny bit more reliable than the rice, but really, there's not much in it.

They don't work for a number of reasons, but the main one is that they measure stress (on the basis that lying is more stressful than telling the truth). There's a huge variation in how we experience stress. A lot of people find any contact with a stranger stressful, whether they're lying or not; a lot of liars find it really difficult to become stressed, which is how they became delinquent in the first place, just chasing a thrill.

Overall, then, you have built a system in which the most dishonest actually perform pretty well, the least dishonest sometimes perform badly, and in the middle, there might be some whom you assess correctly on a good day.

A new study has suggested bacteria use a form of communication similar to human language.

The process, which involves chemical signals instead of words, allows the bacteria to thrive, according to Edinburgh University researchers.

They said insights into how bacteria "talk" to each other may help experts halt their growing resistance to antibiotics.

By interpreting the language they hope to find new drugs to fight infections.

An aggressive cyber weapon called Snake has infected dozens of Ukrainian computer networks including government systems in one of the most sophisticated attacks of recent years.

Also known as Ouroboros, after the serpent of Greek mythology that swallowed its own tail, experts say it is comparable in its complexity with Stuxnet, the malware that was found to have disrupted Iran's uranium enrichment programme in 2010.

The cyber weapon has been deployed most aggressively since the start of last year ahead of protests that climaxed two weeks ago with the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovich's government.

Ouroboros gives its operators unfettered access to networks for surveillance purposes. But it can also act as a highly advanced "digital beachhead" that could destroy computer networks with wide-ranging repercussions for the public.

Cyber warfare experts have long warned that digital weapons could shut off civilian power or water supplies, cripple banks or even blow up industrial sites that depend on computer-controlled safety programmes.

A beam of light can make waves in crystals, and those waves can be "tuned" - a phenomenon that might open up new technological possibilities, researchers say.

At the University of California, San Diego, physicists led by Dimitri Basov and Siyuan Dai fired a beam of infrared light at a tiny crystal of boron nitride. They focused the beam on the tip of an atomic force microscope. An atomic force microscope probes surfaces at the scale of atoms and molecules with a needle at the end of an arm, like that on a vinyl record player. The microscope transferred the momentum from the light to the crystal.

The light generated ripples - waves - in the boron nitride. The waves, called phonon polaritons, had wavelengths as short as those of ultraviolet light, about 300-400 nanometers, or billionths of a meter.

"A wave on the surface of water is the closest analogy," Basov said in a statement. "You throw a stone and you launch concentric waves that move outward. This is similar. Atoms are moving. The triggering event is illumination with light."

A chemical used in cosmetics, boron nitride (BN) is a van der Waals crystal, which means its atoms form layers, stacked on top of one another and held together by forces between molecules. By adjusting the wavelength of the light and the number of layers of boron nitride, the researchers were able to adjust the shape and size of the polaritons.

"The key novelty is that the wave properties can be tuned by altering the number of atomic layers in a [boron nitride] specimen," Basov told Live Science.

Scientists at a University of British Columbia lab examining human unconsciousness using Ouija boards are taking to the Internet to look for research funds.

Docky Duncan, a research assistant with UBC's Visual Cognition Lab, said in an interview Tuesday that the project is "off the beaten track" and there has been "incredible difficulty" getting even the modest $2,000 in funding it needs.

"The research methodology is so strange, using the Ouija board and all, that it might be a little too controversial for most grant organizations," he said.

Without an obvious organization to back the project, Mr. Duncan said researchers had to look to crowd-sourcing as an alternative.

"Grant organizations do great things for a lot of projects, but they definitely have a certain view of what a psychology project should be, and you throw Ouija boards into the mix and a lot of people either think they're possessed or they're a total sham and that they have no place in science," Mr. Duncan said.

Using crowd funding for an academic endeavour isn't unique: There are websites dedicated specifically to crowd funding science research, such as Experiment (formerly known as Microryza). And UBC is currently working on a UBC-specific crowd-funding tool.

The Ouija project previously launched a six-week funding campaign on Microryza that fell short of its goal. This time, though, Mr. Duncan is hoping the campaign, to be launched at the end of this month, will achieve its desired $2,000 mark.

Why do some humans have lighter skin than others? Researchers have longed chalked up the difference to tens of thousands of years of evolution, with darker skin protecting those who live nearer to the equator from the sun's intense radiation. But a new study of ancient DNA concludes that European skin color has continued to change over the past 5000 years, suggesting that additional factors, including diet and sexual attraction, may also be at play.

Our species, Homo sapiens, first arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and researchers assume that its first members were as dark-skinned as Africans are today, because dark skin is advantageous in Africa. Dark skin stems from higher levels of the pigment melanin, which blocks UV light and protects against its dangers, such as DNA damage - which can lead to skin cancer - and the breakdown of vitamin B. On the other hand, skin cells need exposure to a certain amount of UV light in order to produce vitamin D. These competing pressures mean that as early humans moved away from the equator, it makes sense that their skin lightened.

Recent research, however, has suggested that the picture is not so simple. For one thing, a number of genes control the synthesis of melanin (which itself comes in two different forms in humans), and each gene appears to have a different evolutionary history. Moreover, humans apparently did not begin to lighten up immediately after they migrated from Africa to Europe beginning about 40,000 years ago. In 2012, for example, a team led by Jorge Rocha, a geneticist at the University of Porto in Portugal, looked at variants of four pigmentation genes in modern Portuguese and African populations and calculated that at least three of them had only been strongly favored by evolution tens of thousands of years after humans left Africa. In January, another team, led by geneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona in Spain, sequenced the genome of an 8000-year-old male hunter-gatherer skeleton from the site of La Braña-Arintero in Spain and found that he was dark rather than light-skinned - again suggesting that natural selection for light skin acted relatively late in prehistory.

The world's first Cosmonaut; everyone knows his name, but few people ever knew the man. Some say Yuri Gagarin's iconic first spaceflight was the product of immense good fortune. Others believe he was destined for greatness. With the 80th anniversary of his birth drawing near, RT meets some of Gagarin's friends and family, who tell the more personal and untold story of the first man ever to venture into space.

It may sound like science fiction but an Australian team is working on a project to zap orbital debris with lasers from Earth to reduce the growing amount of space junk that threatens to knock out satellites with a "cascade of collisions".

The project is very realistic and likely to be working in the next 10 years, Matthew Colless, director of Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, told Reuters.

"It's important that it's possible on that scale because there's so much space junk up there," he said. "We're perhaps only a couple of decades away from a catastrophic cascade of collisions ... that takes out all the satellites in low orbit."