Another hot summer week has slithered past us and it is once more time to delve into the deep, wonderful caves of knowledge and go spelunking for science.

We have our usual half-dozen delights this week, including a world changing crop technology, stopping light dead in its tracks, an anti-mosquito patch, a hidden planet, antimatter in solar flares, and the possibility of life on Earth two billion years ago.

Let’s start off with that patch that stops mosquitoes.

I admire their approach. I am a big fan of stripping down problems to their very basics and then building the solution atop that stripped down base. So I really admire their back to basics approach.

And the technology looks amazing. If it works, it could change the world. Mosquitoes are a nuisance here, but around the world, they are killers. A simple patch made of food-grade compounds would be extremely cheap to make and hence well within the reach of the philanthropic organizations of the world to fund on a very large scale indeed.

Sales of the patch here in the modern world could also provide a revenue stream for distribution to where it is truly needed.

I don’t quite get how a patch on your clothing gives you full-body protection, though.

Next, let’s talk hidden planets. Scientists may soon be able to prove the existence of a massive and heretofore unknown planet dubbed Tyche (after Tyche Brahe, I assume) way, way out in the Oort Cloud.

The Oort Cloud, besides being fun to say, is the layer of ice asteroids forms the outer shell of our solar system. It’s where most of our comets come from, and it just might contain a massive gas giant like Jupiter as well.

Scientists have been hypothesizing that there was something out there perturbing Oort objects for a long time. A detailed analysis of all the forces acting on the Oort objects just did not add up. There had to be something they were missing.

And that thing might just be a planet called Tyche, way out beyond the orbit of Pluto.

I wonder if something that big could become a comet?

In other cosmic news, turns out there is antimatter in those solar flares.

Solar flares, those solar storms that cough out enormous chunks of solar material as well as loads of particles into the solar system, have long been thought to contain antimatter particles, but until recently, nobody had actually managed to detect them.

But what I really like about this story is this passage :

When the universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago in the Big Bang, there was probably about as much matter as antimatter, scientists think. Somehow, collisions with matter destroyed most of the antimatter (when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate), leaving a slight surplus of matter, which became the planets, stars and galaxies in our universe.

There is an awkward elegance to that explanation of why there is stuff rather than nothing that find enchanting. We are all products of a slight surplus in matter.

Imagine if things had gone differently!

Next, some Totally Trippy Physics : scientists have managed to stop light for a full minute.

You read that right. They made light (as in photons), which is not only the fastest thing in the Universe but the fastest thing there can be in the Universe, hold completely still for a full minute.

Back in 1999, it was demonstrated that the speed of light is only constant in a vacuum when scientists managed to create a medium that slowed light down to a mere 17 meters per second.

And way back then, I said “Well, what’s next? Stopping it completely? What then?”

Well, now they have done it, and by they, I mean George Heinze and his colleagues at the University of Darmstadt, Germany (man the Germans are doing the awesome physics lately).

Next, we make it roll over and shake a paw.

Moving a little closer to everyday life, we look at everyday life from 2 billion years ago.

When examining two billion year old soils samples, scientists have recently discovered evidence of a form of life called Diskagma buttonii which is too primitive to even be classified as plant or animal. The closest relative it has in the modern world is a kind of soil fungus.

I love how we keep finding evidence of life further and further back in the history of our planet. Not only is it a marvelous testament to the extraordinary tenacity of life, it pushes friend-of-the-column Drake’s Equation even further towards the “Universe filled with life” side of the equation.

And finding Diskagma buttonii wasn’t easy, either. They’re as small as 0.3 millimetres, and are darkly colored like the soil where they are found, making them undetectable via optical microscopy.

So this is a technological as well as a paleontological feat. Very impressive!

But not as impressive as this week’s Big Story.

Professor Edward Cocking (snigger) has invented a way for crops to take the nitrogen they need directly from the air instead of taking it from the soil and thus creating the need for highly toxic and expensive artificial nitrogen fertilizers.

That… is…. BIG. His discovery of a natural nitrogen-fixing bacteria could eliminate the entire fertilizer industry at a stroke, and create a rather extraordinary shortcut for the plant world in the process.

Eliminating the need for fertilization would be an enormous boon for the world food supply. Food prices would drop like a stone (which is a good thing for most people, Mister Farmer) and the third world would be far better able to feed itself, and finally have the chance to truly stabilize and modernize and join the rest of us in the modern world.

And that’s not even counting the benefit of no longer having enormous quantities of highly gross and environmentally damaging ammonia based fertilizers washed into the water cycle by rain and irrigation all the time by farming.

And just think of how much more “organic” cheap produce will be!

That’s it for this week, folks. Talk at ya later!