When matter gets swallowed by a black hole, it could fall into another universe contained inside the black hole, or get trapped inside a wormhole-like connection to a second black hole, a new study suggests.

"We were very surprised about the results," Böhmer says. Instead of a boundary around the singularity, they got two other kinds of solutions — both bizarre — that replaced the singularity

The small study of two rhesus monkeys reveals that cells in their brains respond selectively to specific number values — regardless of whether the amount is represented by dots on a screen or an Arabic numeral.

For example, a given brain cell in the monkey will respond to the number three, but not the number one. The results suggest that individual cells in human brains might also have a fine-tuned preference for specific numerical values.

"We are able to grab things out of the flow and propel them along a new path," says Erickson. He adds that microfluidic work is inherently fiddly, because drag, friction and viscosity are much stronger at such smaller scales. "Optics is the opposite — as you confine things to smaller spaces they get faster and more useful," Erickson adds.

The toughest passwords, including those used to log in to a Windows Vista computer, would normally take months of continuous computer processing time to crack using a computer's central processing unit (CPU). By harnessing a $150 GPU — less powerful than the nVidia 8800 card — Elcomsoft says they can cracked in just three to five days. Less complex passwords can be retrieved in minutes, rather than hours or days.