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Even if you know an unexpected event is likely to occur, you are no better, and may be even worse, than those who aren't expecting anything unexpected at all.   Did you expect that confusing opening sentence?   Now you get the point.The study, from Daniel Simons, a professor of psychology and in the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, appears this month as the inaugural paper in the new open access journal i-Perception. (www.perceptionweb.com/i-perception)

The black hole at the edge of galaxy NGC 7793, twelve million light years from Earth, has been found to be doing something rare - emitting powerful jets of particles of a total length of 1,000 light years.  The energy produced by matter falling into a black hole this size is usually transformed into X-rays, not into jets, but this one is the exception - a miniature version of certain supermassive black holes present in the active nuclei of galaxies.

Future technology such as quantum cryptography and computation, or perhaps even larger scale teleportation, requires a deeper understanding of the phenomenon known as "entanglement", the quantum non-local connection, an aspect of quantum theory at the heart of the EPR paradox developed by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in 1935 which was experimentally verified in 1980 by Alain Aspect.Two photons are entangled if the properties of one depend on those of the other, whatever the distance separating them. A new source of entangled photons twenty times brighter than all existing systems has been developed by a team from the Laboratoire de Photonique et de Nano-structures (LPN) of CNRS and they say the device is capable of considerably boosting the rate of quantum communications.

Women are waiting until their 30s and 40s to have children, but when they decide to do so, they are a lot more willing to engage in a variety of sexual activities to capitalize on their remaining childbearing years, according to new research by psychologists at The University of Texas at Austin. 

ESA’s Planck mission is a 'time machine' to study the relic radiation from the Big Bang, and it has delivered its first all-sky image, one of four all-sky scans it will complete by the end of its mission in 2012.Planck is designed to map tiny irregularities in fossil radiation left over from the very first light in the Universe, emitted shortly after the Big Bang, and has enough sensitivity to reach the experimental limits of what can be observed, allowing researchers to peer into the early Universe and study its constituents, perhaps even the hypothetical dark matter and dark energy that continue to be a debate among the science community worldwide.  

Brain stem cells remain dormant until needed to make more neurons but little is known about the molecular guards that keep them quiet - or 'wake' them up.  Scientists from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies say they have identified the signal that prevents stem cells from doing too much proliferating, a move that protects the brain against too much cell division and ensuring a pool of neural stem cells that lasts a lifetime. 

Researchers have shown a new ability to control the behaviors of individual electrons within simple atoms and molecules by stripping them away, one by one, and in some cases creating 'hollow atoms'.The results describe how the Linac Coherent Light Source's intense pulses of X-ray light change the very atoms and molecules they are designed to image. Controlling those changes will be critical to achieving the atomic-scale images of biological molecules and movies of chemical processes that the LCLS is designed to produce.

By optimizing magnets, hybrid and electric cars can be made economically competitive, according to a research project currently underway at St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences in Austria.  Their project is seeking to find the ideal composition and structure of high-performance permanent magnets intended for use in cars, a move which can help conserve raw materials and they say the ideal designs can be identified quickly and without major expense, thanks to numerical simulation methods.

If you drink bottled water, soda (or pop, depending on whether you are from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh), or a micro brew-beer in Dallas, Denver or numerous other American cities, you may be carrying an 'iso-signature',  a natural chemical imprint related to that geographic location.Iso-signatures are a chemical in imprint in hair due to beverages may and could be used to track your travels over time, a new study suggests in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

It's been a good month for cosmic wonderment.  The Wide Field Imager (WFI) at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile caught the region around the star R Coronae Australis and on June 13th, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa returned after 7 years and 1.25 billion miles on a mission to gather material from the comet Itokawa.It exploded over the Australian outback - intentional, it seems, since it had parachuted its cargo already.  At least we hope it has cargo.  It experienced some malfunctions on the trip and the researchers will let us know, since they have already picked it up.But we get cosmic fireworks, so thanks Japan.

Neural circuitry is constantly changing to meet the challenges of its environment and ahead of his presentation on July 6th, sponsored by The Kavli Foundation , at the 7th FENS Forum of European Neuroscience in Amsterdam,  Tobias Bonhoeffer, director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany, offers insight into how new techniques enable researchers to watch this process of adaptation as never before.What happens to our brains as we experience the outside world? Scientists have learned that the brain undergoes structural changes as it absorbs sensory data, learns and adapts, but the actual mechanism of this process is just now coming into view.

The existence of multicellular organisms,  the first complex life forms (made up of several cells) has been extended from about 600 million years in the past to over 2 billion years ago, according to research published in Nature.That means organized life is a lot older than was scientifically accepted, though older existence was obviously assumed because the first traces of life appeared in the form of prokaryotic organisms (without a nucleus) 3.5 billion years ago.    The "Cambrian explosion" 600 million years ago marked a proliferation in the number of living species and was accompanied by a sudden rise in oxygen concentration in the atmosphere.