|  Physicist Kip Thorne Talks Black Holes at the Genius Gala Awards  | Four innovators received awards at the fifth annual Genius Gala at Liberty Science Center in New Jersey, turning Friday night here into a geekfest. The brilliant recipients included paleontologist Jack Horner, astrophysicist Kip Thorne, architect Frank Gehry and social psychologist Ellen Langer from Harvard University. During his acceptance speech, Thorne said he felt "like a fraud" and that he's "not a genius." Thorne honored the colleagues he worked with while discovering gravitational waves this past September.
| Read More » Light Behaving Badly: Strange Beams Reveal Hitch in Quantum Mechanics A hidden property of corkscrew, spiraled beams of light could put a hitch in quantum mechanics. The photons, or light particles, inside these light-based Möbius strips spin with a momentum previously thought to be impossible. The findings could shake up some of the assumptions in quantum mechanics, the rules that govern the menagerie of tiny subatomic particles. Read More » Confirmed: The Soil Under Your Feet Is Teeming with Life  | That's the message of a new atlas describing the biodiversity of soil, to be released tomorrow (May 25) at the United Nations Environmental Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya. Soil even has its own microbiome containing at least a million bacterial species. Only about a quarter of worm species, 6 percent of fungi and less than 2 percent of soil bacteria have been studied and categorized.
| Read More » Scientists: Underground stone rings made by Neanderthals BERLIN (AP) — Two mysterious stone rings found deep inside a French cave were probably built by Neanderthals about 176,500 years ago, proving that the ancient cousins of humans were capable of more complex behavior than previously thought, scientists say. Read More » Swallow This Robot: Foldable Droid Could Mend Stomachs  | A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has proposed a new, minimally invasive way of using biocompatible and biodegradable miniature robots to carry out tasks inside the human body. The researchers have already demonstrated origami-inspired robots capable of swimming, climbing and carrying a load twice their weight, but creating an ingestible device that can operate inside a stomach presented a whole new set of challenges, said Shuhei Miyashita, who was part of the MIT team that developed the robot but is now a lecturer of intelligent robotics at the University of York in the United Kingdom. "The toughest problem we had to solve was that of getting the robot to work in such an unpredictable environment," Miyashita told Live Science.
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