Image copyright: DAVID FINLAY

An Australian photographer has captured images of rare sprites, a meteor shower and the Southern Lights – all in a single night. Sprites – flashes of electricity – can reach the Earth’s upper atmosphere, often displaying as a brilliant light.

“It’s an intense electrical discharge out of the very top of a thunderstorm,” photographer David Finlay told the BBC. He took photos of the “space lightning” at Kiama, 120km (75 miles) south of Sydney.

Image copyright: MPI FOR EVO ANTHRO / J. KRAUSE

The DNA of extinct humans can be retrieved from sediments in caves – even in the absence of skeletal remains. Researchers found the genetic material in sediment samples collected from seven archaeological sites. The remains of ancient humans are often scarce, so the new findings could help scientists learn the identity of inhabitants at sites where only artefacts have been found. The results are described in Science.

Worry — it does a body good. And, the mind as well. A new paper by Kate Sweeny, psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, argues there’s an upside to worrying.

Taxpayers have spent more than $3 million on unreliable academic research, as science experts warn that research fraud and plagiarism in Australia is not being properly policed.

Twenty-one research projects largely funded by the federal government breached integrity standards in the past two years, figures from the Australian Research Council reveal. The federal government body, which provides tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded research grants, stopped funding three grants, recovered funding for one grant, and placed restrictions on funding for one researcher.

The role of sleep changes with every stage of life, from infancy to old age. The latest neuroscience is discovering how crucial sleep is to an infant’s growing brain, while the latest epidemiology is discovering how irregular sleep doubles the risk of death as we grow older. To mark National Sleep Week, Thrive Global spoke with some of the top researchers in sleep science to give you a map of how sleep changes through your lifespan.

Image copyright: BRET HARTMAN/TED

A British inventor, who built an Iron Man-style flight suit, has flown it at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver. Richard Browning’s short flight took place outside the Vancouver Convention Centre in front of a large crowd.

Since he posted the video of his maiden flight in the UK, Mr Browning has had huge interest in his flying suit. But he insists the project remains “a bit of fun” and is unlikely to become a mainstream method of transportation.

Image copyright: SAN DIEGO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

A study that claims humans reached the Americas 130,000 years ago – much earlier than previously suggested – has run into controversy. Humans are thought to have arrived in the New World no earlier than 25,000 years ago, so the find would push back the first evidence of settlement by more than 100,000 years. The conclusions rest on analysis of animal bones and tools from California. But many experts contacted by the BBC said they doubted the claims.

Image copyright: OLEG YAKOVLEV

It’s official: the greenhouse gas theory and the litany of fake science claims it spawned about carbon dioxide climate forcing suffer two hammer blows in the peer-reviewed literature.

Shrewdly relying only on accepted chemistry and physics plus official data from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), experts from the ‘hard’ sciences present two new papers offering an objective appraisal of the science argued over in the politicized global warming debate.

A new NASA study is challenging a long-held theory that tsunamis form and acquire their energy mostly from vertical movement of the seafloor.

….  The next time a warmist starts blathering on about carbon pollution, hand him a glass of tonic water and say “Here, have some carbon pollution.” Yes, that seltzer water contains plenty of the dreaded carbon dioxide. And because the media have warned of “carbon pollution” so often, the public now confuses CO2 with perceived soot emissions. But America’s modern coal-fired power plants use advanced scrubbers to remove mercury, nitrous oxide, sulfates, and particulate matter, leaving only a mixture of water vapor and carbon dioxide to rise up the “smokestack.” Of course, CO2 is also a key nutrient for all plant life and, according to NASA, is making the Earth greener.

“[The robots] are expanding skills, moving up the corporate ladder, showing awesome productivity and retention rates, and increasingly shoving aside their human counterparts”

You might think — or hope, if you’re a nerd deep inside — that this excerpt belongs to an unpublished novel from Isaac Asimov. Sadly, at least for sci-fi lovers, it actually comes from “The Rise of the Robots”, a book that explores the impact of technology on the future of our society.

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

Could advances in technology, genetics and artificial intelligence lead to a world in which economic inequality turns into biological inequality? asks the historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari. Inequality goes back at least 30,000 years.

Hunter-gatherers were more equal than subsequent societies. They had very little property, and property is a pre-requisite for long-term inequality. But even they had hierarchies. In the 19th and 20th Centuries, however, something changed. Equality became a dominant value in human culture, almost all over the world. Why?

Another March for Science is tomorrow and no one in their right mind would say they are against it because of its name. First of all, you are standing against the right of people to march for whatever cause they wish. Second, you would be portrayed as someone who is against science.

I am all for science. I think the climate changes. It always has and always will. Yet I have been portrayed as anti-science and a climate change “denier” by many who will be marching for things I certainly believe in.

Earlier this month, the first installment in the accumulating list of hundreds of new peer-reviewed scientific papers supporting a skeptical position on climate change alarm was made available. Included on the list were 38 papers linking climate changes to solar forcing: 38 Sun-Climate Scientific Papers, January-March 2017

Just in the last few weeks alone, another 20 scientific papers were identified which link solar variations to climate changes, which means 58 papers have already been published in 2017.

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

Doing moderate exercise several times a week is the best way to keep the mind sharp if you’re over 50, research suggests. Thinking and memory skills were most improved when people exercised the heart and muscles on a regular basis, a review of 39 studies found. This remained true in those who already showed signs of cognitive decline.