A study that appears in the journal Science claims that the melting of Greenland's ice has doubled in the last 10 years:

"In 1996 Greenland was losing about 100 cu km of ice per year," says Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lead author of the study, which he presented at last week's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis, Mo. "This year it will lose more than twice as much."

By comparison, he says, in 1996 Greenland dumped 90 times as much water into the sea as Los Angeles consumed; last year it was up to 225 times. "In the next 10 years," says Rignot, "it wouldn't surprise me if the rate doubled again."

The earth's magnetic field, it seems has been weakening quite rapidly over the last few centuries and might completely disappear or flip soon.

At the present rate, Earth's magnetic field could be gone within a few centuries, exposing the planet to the relentless blast of charged particles from space with unpredictable consequences for the atmosphere and life.

World-science is running an article citing a yet to be published paper which claims that scarlet coloured rain which dropped in parts of Kerala in July 2001 might have dumped microbes from space onto Earth.

“These particles have much similarity with biological cells though they are devoid of DNA,” wrote Godfrey Louis and A. Santhosh Kumar of Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, India, in the controversial paper.

World-science reports here and the complete paper can be found online here.

John Brockman, editor of the web magazine Edge asks over a 100 thinkers "What is your most dangerous idea?"

The answers went far and wide, touched a multitude of subjects: a new understanding of the human brain, why ET's wont make contact, things that are wrong with governments and schools, dark energy, genetics, global warming, the origin of life, relativity, quantum mechanics and more.

The most common theme that stood out was a better understanding of the human brain and the nature of life itself, questions which could hold the key to the eternal question: "where did we come from and where are we headed".

Read the entire series here.

The New York Times is hosting an article reporting the announcement by some physicists that they have put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."

To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.

The article also discusses some of the difficult and weird debates around the seemingly nonsensical but experimentally sound predictions that Quantum Physics has thrown at us.

Read on to find out more about this un-worldly world of Quantum Physics.