The United Kingdom's high-risk research agency will fund '56.8 million (US$75 million) worth of projects in the controversial area of geoengineering ' manipulating Earth's environment to avert negative effects of climate change. The 21 projects include small-scale outdoor experiments that will attempt to thicken Arctic sea ice and to brighten clouds so that they reflect more sunlight. The hope is that successful technologies could one day contribute to efforts to prevent the planet from passing dangerous climate tipping points. Supported by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) as part of its five-year Exploring Climate Cooling programme, the projects are among the most significant geoengineering experiments funded by a government. The research has the potential to be beneficial, but must be undertaken cautiously, says Peter Frumhoff, a science-policy adviser at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. 'I am strongly supportive of responsible research on solar geoengineering and other climate interventions,' he says....

MIT physicists have captured the first images of individual atoms freely interacting in space. The pictures reveal correlations among the 'free-range' particles that until now were predicted but never directly observed. Their findings, appearing today in the journal Physical Review Letters, will help scientists visualize never-before-seen quantum phenomena in real space. The images were taken using a technique developed by the team that first allows a cloud of atoms to move and interact freely. The researchers then turn on a lattice of light that briefly freezes the atoms in their tracks, and apply finely tuned lasers to quickly illuminate the suspended atoms, creating a picture of their positions before the atoms naturally dissipate. The physicists applied the technique to visualize clouds of different types of atoms, and snapped a number of imaging firsts. The researchers directly observed atoms known as 'bosons,' which bunched up in a quantum phenomenon to form a wave. They also captured atoms known as 'fermions' in the act of pairing up in free space ' a key mechanism that enables superconductivity....

It isn't easy to figure out how the Earth was built, because it happened 4' billion years ago, and no one was there to watch. So scientists have had to look at what the Earth looks like now and at all of the other planets, moons and debris in the solar system. They've concluded that the Earth was built in the same way that you would build a big snowball to make a snowman. The mass that would become our home rolled through planetary debris ' rocks floating in space ' for more than 100 million years, adding more and more material, until it grew into a full-size planet. How do scientists like me know this is what happened' First, studies of the size, composition and location of asteroids and comets, many of which are as old as the Earth, indicate that 4' billion years ago the solar system looked the way Saturn looks today, with rings of space rocks orbiting around the Sun. There's still one such ring around the Sun ' it's called the asteroid belt and lies between Mars and Jupiter, with the Sun's gravity holding the rocks in orbit....