From the nature of the universe (that's if there is only one) to the purpose of dreams, there are lots of things we still don't know – but we might do soon. A new book seeks some answers

1 What is the universe made of?

Astronomers face an embarrassing conundrum: they don't know what 95% of the universe is made of. Atoms, which form everything we see around us, only account for a measly 5%. Over the past 80 years it has become clear that the substantial remainder is comprised of two shadowy entities – dark matter and dark energy. The former, first discovered in 1933, acts as an invisible glue, binding galaxies and galaxy clusters together. Unveiled in 1998, the latter is pushing the universe's expansion to ever greater speeds. Astronomers are closing in on the true identities of these unseen interlopers.

2 How did life begin?

Four billion years ago, something started stirring in the primordial soup. A few simple chemicals got together and made biology – the first molecules capable of replicating themselves appeared. We humans are linked by evolution to those early biological molecules. But how did the basic chemicals present on early Earth spontaneously arrange themselves into something resembling life? How did we get DNA? What did the first cells look like? More than half a century after the chemist Stanley Miller proposed his "primordial soup" theory, we still can't agree about what happened. Some say life began in hot pools near volcanoes, others that it was kick-started by meteorites hitting the sea.

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Radio frequency (RF) communication has been the communications platform in space used so far. But RF is reaching its limit just as demand for more data capacity continues to increase.

“LLCD is designed to send six times more data from the moon using a smaller transmitter with 25 percent less power as compared to the equivalent state-of-the-art radio (RF) system,” said Don Cornwell, LLCD manager. “Lasers are also more secure and less susceptible to interference and jamming.”

The LLCD experiment, developed by MIT, is hosted aboard NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) — a 100-day robotic mission designed, built, integrated, tested and to be operated by NASA’s Ames Research Center. LADEE will attempt to confirm whether dust caused a mysterious glow on the lunar horizon astronauts observed during several Apollo missions and explore the moon’s tenuous, exotic atmosphere.

Launch of the LADEE spacecraft is set for September aboard a U.S. Air Force Minotaur V rocket from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va. It will take 30 days to reach the lunar orbit, when LLCD will begin operation for 30 days.

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The success of the experiment conducted in Tokyo is attributable to the use of a hybrid technique in which two conceptually different and previously incompatible approaches were combined. "Discrete digital optical quantum information can now be transmitted continuously – at the touch of a button, if you will," explained Professor Peter van Loock of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). As a theoretical physicist, van Loock advised the experimental physicists in the research team headed by Professor Akira Furusawa of the University of Tokyo on how they could most efficiently perform the teleportation experiment to ultimately verify the success of quantum teleportation. Their findings have now been published in the prestigious specialist journal Nature.

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Founded in 1919, the Paris-based International Astronomical Union (IAU) has more than 11,000 members in more than 90 countries, making it the de facto authority in the field.

Without any official laws enforcing the use of planetary names, the decisions on what to call new discoveries are usually a matter of consensus.

The changes announced by IAU hope to make public’s involvement more streamlined, asking that submissions are “sent to iaupublic@iap.fr” and promising that they will be “handled on a case-by-case basis”.

“The IAU fully supports the involvement of the general public, whether directly or through an independent organised vote, in the naming of planetary satellites, newly discovered planets, and their host stars,” says the statement.

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The global leaders for ultra-powerful lasers are French and the technology is much in demand abroad, with many applications such as nuclear simulation, medical treatment, redirecting thunderstorms and basic physics. To maintain their lead, researchers have recently proposed a new concept based on optic fibre.

"It's picking up," says Laurent Boudjemaa, head of the laser development and products department at the French electronics firm Thales, in reference to sales of high-power laser systems. His team has almost finished fine-tuning one of these giants, codename Cetal. Due for delivery this summer to a destination near Bucharest, Romania, it is one of the first in this category in Europe, with a peak power of one petawatt (PW), or 1bn MW, equivalent to a million nuclear reactors. In 2012 Thales delivered another of these monsters, appropriately named Bella and currently the world's most powerful, to the University of California, Berkeley.

"The market for lasers exceeding 0.1 petawatts is expanding at the rate of about 30% a year," says Gilles Riboulet, head of Amplitude Technologies, launched in 2001 by former Thales staff. The two companies now share most of the global market. In the Amplitude factory at Evry, in the Paris suburbs, 150 wooden crates containing another 1-PW behemoth, aka Draco, are ready to leave for Dresden, Germany. Another one, Vega, will soon follow, destination Spain. Each unit sells for about €10m ($13m). Nor is that all.

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By melting and absorbing heat at a critical moment during a “magnesiothermic reaction” (one using magnesium at an elevated temperature), the salt prevents the collapse of the nanostructures. The molten salt can then be washed away by dissolving it in water, and it can be recycled and used again.

The paper in Scientific Reports is open-access.

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When burned, it produces nothing more than water vapour and nitrogen, which makes up 78 per cent of Earth's atmosphere. Earlier this year Italian tyre-maker Marangoni built an ammonia-gasoline hybrid automobile, the Marangoni Toyota GT 86-R Eco-Explorer (see picture). The car can go for 178 kilometres on just one tank of ammonia. So can ammonia itself be made in a clean way?

Most ammonia is produced by heating natural gas or coal as a source of hydrogen, then forcing it to react with atmospheric nitrogen. It's highly energy-intensive, accounting for between 2 and 3 per cent of the world's energy budget and emitting over a billion tonnes of carbon each year in the process.

Now engineer John Holbrook has developed a technique he hopes will make the process cleaner. Instead of heating a fossil fuel, his technique, called solid state ammonia synthesis, works by drawing hydrogen out of water vapour through a charged membrane, and then reacting it with nitrogen.

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Scientists took stem cells from a cow and, at an institute in the Netherlands, turned them into strips of muscle that they combined to make a patty.

One food expert said it was “close to meat, but not that juicy” and another said it tasted like a real burger.

Researchers say the technology could be a sustainable way of meeting what they say is a growing demand for meat.

Making meat from stem cells

Prof Mark Post, of Maastricht University, the scientist behind the burger, said the meat was made up of tens of billions of lab-grown cells.

He starts with stem cells extracted from cow muscle tissue. In the laboratory, these are cultured with nutrients and growth-promoting chemicals to help them develop and multiply. Three weeks later, there are more than a million stem cells, which are put into smaller dishes where they coalesce into small strips of muscle about a centimeter long and a few millimeters thick.

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Scientists have implanted a false memory in the brains of mice in an experiment that they hope will shed light on the well-documented phenomenon whereby people "remember" events or experiences that have never happened.

False memories are a major problem with witness statements in courts of law. Defendants have often been convicted of offences based on eyewitness testimony, only to have their convictions later overturned when DNA or some other corroborating evidence is brought to bear.

In order to study how these false memories might form in the human brain, Susumu Tonagawa, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his team encoded memories in the brains of mice by manipulating individual neurons. He described the results of the study in the latest edition of the journal Science.

Memories of experiences we have had are made from several elements including records of objects, space and time. These records, called engrams, are encoded in physical and chemical changes in brain cells and the connections between them. According to Tonagawa, both false and genuine memories seem to rely on the same brain mechanisms.

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NASA

In little more than a month, Marshall engineers built two subscale injectors with a specialized 3-D printing machine and completed 11 mainstage hot-fire tests, accumulating 46 seconds of total firing time at temperatures nearing 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit while burning liquid oxygen and gaseous hydrogen.

“We saw no difference in performance of the 3-D printed injectors compared to the traditionally manufactured injectors,” said Sandra Elam Greene, the propulsion engineer who oversaw the tests and inspected the components afterward. “Two separate 3-D printed injectors operated beautifully during all hot-fire tests.”

Post-test inspections showed the injectors remained in such excellent condition and performed so well the team will continue to put them directly in the line of fire.

“The additive manufacturing process has the potential to reduce the time and cost associated with making complex parts by an order of magnitude,” said Chris Singer, director of the Marshall Center’s Engineering Directorate.

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Earth appears as an insignificant-looking pale blue dot below Saturn's majestic rings in a breathtaking new image from the Cassini spacecraft.

Dr Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at the American space agency Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, US, said: "We may not be able to see individual continents or people in this portrait of Earth, but this pale blue dot is a succinct summary of who we were on 19 July.

"Cassini's picture reminds us how tiny our home planet is in the vastness of space, but also testifies to the ingenuity of the citizens of this tiny planet to be able to send a robotic spacecraft so far away from home to take a picture of Earth and study a distant world like Saturn."

It is only the third time the Earth has ever been photographed from the outer Solar System. Previous pictures were taken by Nasa's Voyager-1 spacecraft in 1990 and Cassini in 2006.

The new image marked the first time people on Earth knew in advance that their planet's portrait was being taken from interplanetary distances.

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Novel microchips imitate the brain's information processing in real time. Neuroinformatics researchers from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich together with colleagues from the EU and US demonstrate how complex cognitive abilities can be incorporated into electronic systems made with so-called neuromorphic chips: They show how to assemble and configure these electronic systems to function in a way similar to an actual brain.