Nasa said that the investigations will cover human research, biological and physical sciences, technology development, Earth observation, and education.

BBC: Soyuz spacecraft docks at ISS after just six hours

Sceptics have an obvious rejoinder to the observation that bubbles can leave behind useful physical assets: those assets, they say, would eventually have been built anyway, and on better terms.

ECONOMIST: Booms and busts

In a paper just published in Physical Review Letters, Guenther Walther, a mathematician at Stanford University in California, shows that the observation that the number of neutrinos detected decreases when sunspots are plentiful is no more than an error in counting.

ECONOMIST: Particle physics

Checking data collected at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and the Federal Physical and Technical Institute in Germany, they came across something even more surprising: long-term observation of the decay rate of silicon-32 and radium-226 seemed to show a small seasonal variation.

FORBES: Radioactive Decay Rates May Not Be Constant After All