Astronomers may have just spotted the first asteroid caught visiting the solar system from another star.

The Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii discovered the object, initially dubbed A/2017 U1 and later named ‘Oumuamua, on October 18. More observations from other telescopes around the world suggest the object’s trajectory is at an unusually steep angle to the plane on which all the planets lie, and it does not orbit the sun. A/2017 U1’s slingshot route suggests it is a recent visitor to the solar system — and is now on its way out again. The discovery was announced in a bulletin published October 25 by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.
All asteroids previously seen come from within the solar system and circle the sun. Even comets, which come from a distant reservoir of icy rocks in the solar system called the Oort cloud and can have highly titled orbits, still orbit the sun.

Astronomers first pegged the object as a comet thanks to its elongated path, but additional telescope observations October 25 indicate it’s more likely that A/2017 U1 is an asteroid. Those observations revealed that the object looked like a single, sharp point of light, suggesting it is not a comet, which would have an extended icy halo. The asteroid, which is probably no more than 400 meters across, zoomed into the solar system at 25.5 kilometers per second and is now fleeing at 44 km/s.

The new data also supported the wacky trajectory, suggesting the object truly is a visitor from beyond. “It’s now looking very promising,” says planetary scientist Michele Bannister of Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, although she would still like to get more data to be sure. Astronomers are already planning to measure the colors in the asteroid’s reflected light to figure out what it’s made of, a clue to its origins.

Bit by qubit, scientists are edging closer to the realm where quantum computers will reign supreme.

IBM is testing a prototype quantum processor with 50 quantum bits, or qubits, the company announced November 10. That’s about the number needed to meet a sought-after milestone: demonstrating that quantum computers can perform specific tasks that are beyond the reach of traditional computers (SN: 7/8/17, p. 28).

Unlike standard bits, which represent either 0 or 1, qubits can indicate a combination of the two, using what’s called quantum superposition. This property allows quantum computers to perform certain kinds of calculations more quickly. But because qubits are finicky, scaling up is no easy task. Previously, IBM’s largest quantum processor boasted 17 qubits.

IBM also announced a 20-qubit processor that the company plans to make commercially available by the end of the year.

Bit by qubit, scientists are edging closer to the realm where quantum computers will reign supreme.

IBM is now testing a prototype quantum processor with 50 quantum bits, or qubits, the company announced November 10. That’s around the number needed to meet a sought-after milestone: demonstrating that quantum computers can perform specific tasks that are beyond the reach of traditional computers. Unlike standard bits, which represent either 0 or 1, qubits can indicate a combination of the two, using what’s called a quantum superposition. This property allows quantum computers to perform certain kinds of calculations more quickly. But because quantum bits are more finicky than standard bits, scaling up is no easy task. Previously, IBM’s largest quantum processor boasted 17 qubits.

A race is now on to commercialize quantum computers, making them available to companies that want to solve problems particularly suited to quantum machines, such as designing new materials or speeding up the search for new drugs. IBM also announced a 20-qubit processor that the company plans to make commercially available by the end of 2017. Meanwhile, Google has its own plans to commercialize quantum computers. The company’s quantum computing researchers are currently testing a 22-qubit chip and are designing a larger one.

What looks like a spider, but with a segmented rear plus a long spike of a tail, has turned up in amber that’s about 100 million years old.

Roughly the size of a peppercorn (not including the tail, which stretches several times the body length), this newly described extinct species lived in forests in what is now Myanmar during the dinosaur-rich Cretaceous Period.

Spiders as their own distinctive group had evolved long before. Whether this tailed creature should be considered a true spider (of the group Araneae) is debatable though, researchers acknowledge February 5 in two studies in Nature Ecology & Evolution. In one of the papers, the fossils’ chimeric mash-up of traits both spidery and nonspidery inspired Bo Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing and colleagues to name the species Chimerarachne yingi.
C. yingi indeed has some anatomy that, among living animals, would be unique to spiders, says Gonzalo Giribet of Harvard University, a coauthor of the other paper. The fossils have what look like little structures that could have exuded spider silk, as well as distinctive male spider sex organs. Called pedipalps, these modified legs have no direct connection to a sperm-producing organ. Spiders need to load them before mating, for instance by ejaculating a sperm droplet and dipping pedipalps in it, so the structures can deliver the sperm a bit like a syringe.

But the abdomen-like end of a true spider’s body isn’t segmented and certainly doesn’t have a tail. Giribet and his colleagues’ analysis puts C. yingi in an ancient sister group of spiders. That’s startling in itself, Giribet says, because researchers have speculated that this Uraraneida group had gone extinct much earlier. So, spider or not, C. yingi remains intriguing.

A 26-year-old woman felt something in her left eye. For days, she couldn’t shake the sensation. But this was no errant eyelash or dive-bombing gnat.

A week after that first irritation, the Oregon resident pulled a translucent worm, about a centimeter long, from her eye. With that harrowing feat, she became the first ever reported case of a human infestation with the cattle eyeworm, Thelazia gulosa. “This is a very rare event and exciting from a parasitological perspective,” says medical parasitologist Richard Bradbury of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “Perhaps not so exciting if you are the patient.”
Over 20 days, she and her doctors removed 14 worms from her infected eye, researchers report online February 12 in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. After that, no more irritation.

T. gulosa is a nematode found in North America, Europe, Australia and central Asia. It infects the large, watchful eyes of cattle. The worm spends its larval stage in the abdomen of the aptly named face fly, Musca autumnalis. As the fly feasts on tears and eye secretions, it spreads the nematode larva, which then grow into adult worms.

Two other Thelazia species are known to infect humans, but rarely. There have been more than 160 cases reported for one species in Europe and Asia, and only 10 cases in North America, by a species found in dogs. This new perpetrator was not expected to be seen in a human, Bradbury says.

The young woman had been horseback riding near cattle farms in Gold Beach, Oregon, which may explain her face-to-face with the fly.
“It is just unfortunate for the patient,” Bradbury says, “that she was not able to swish away that one infected fly quickly enough from her eye.”

AUSTIN, Texas — Babies’ stroke-damaged brains can pull a mirror trick to recover.

A stroke on the left side of the brain often damages important language-processing areas. But people who have this stroke just before or after birth recover their language abilities in the mirror image spot on the right side, a study of teens and young adults shows. Those patients all had normal language skills, even though as much as half of their brain had withered away, researchers reported February 17 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Researchers so far have recruited 12 people ages 12 to 25 who had each experienced a stroke to the same region of their brain’s left hemisphere just before or after birth. People who have this type of stroke as adults often lose their ability to use and understand language, said study coauthor Elissa Newport, a neurology researcher at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

MRI scans of healthy siblings of the stroke patients showed activity in language centers in the left hemisphere of the brain when the participants heard speech. The stroke patients showed activity in the exact same areas — just on the opposite side of the brain.

It’s well established that if an area of the brain gets damaged, other brain areas will sometimes compensate. But the new finding suggests that while young brains have an extraordinary capacity to recover, there might be limits on which areas can pinch-hit.

“When you look at a very well-defined population, recovery takes place in a very particular set of regions,” said Newport. Young children usually show language activity in the same areas on both sides of their brain, Newport noted, and the left side becomes more dominant over time. But in the case of a major stroke to the left side, the corresponding areas on the right side of the brain might already be primed to take over.