How an argument with Hawking suggested the Universe is a hologram: Stephen Hawking had a hard time accepting that the event horizon of a black hole could be a hologram. Now, people are starting to wonder whether the entire Universe is one.

New solid-state compound beats old school lithium-ion batteries: A new material lets lithium ions flow through it while remaining a solid, which may make for better batteries.

Did the Earth's lost moon create the Lunar Highlands?: Models have suggested that the collision that formed the Earth's Moon may have created a second, smaller companion. Now, researchers are suggesting the remains of this second moon may be pasted across the lunar far side.

Antarctic ice and future sea level rise: big questions : How stable will the West Antarctic Ice sheet be as the climate continues to warm? We're not sure, but a review in Nature Geoscience describes what we need to understand to estimate if it might collapse.

How Mosasaurs slid into the sea: A recently published paper provides new details on how some relatives of the Komodo dragon made it into the sea.

Desalination: is this as good as it gets?: Thermodynamic calculations suggest we're not going to do a whole lot better than the current generation of desalinization facilities. As a result, the authors of a new perspective on the process suggest that it's time to start thinking more carefully about the energy size of the equation.

Orbiter spots possible water seepage on surface of Mars: Repeated imaging using a high resolution camera has spotted some slopes on Mars that develop dark streaks during the Martian summer, indicating that water may be seeping out of nearby rocks.

Sealing leaky Southern Ocean carbon pump boosts ice ages: Some new research indicates that dust in the atmosphere may have a key role in modulating the severity of the Earth's recent ice ages.

Jolt framework lets users force some hung programs to recover: A group of MIT researchers have developed an experimental software framework that can detect when a program has entered an infinite loop in some cases and give the user the option of forcing the loop to end. Ars explains how it works.

Data shows past ice shelf collapses linked to warmer ocean water: New data shows that Heinrich events, where icebergs broke off ice shelves and deposited large amounts of freshwater into the Atlantic Ocean, were the product of altered ocean currents, rather than being their cause.