Best of Last Week – New state of water, solar plane crosses Pacific and OTC medicine found to cause cognitive problems

April 25, 2016 • by Bob Yirka

(ScienceX)—It was another good week for physics as a team at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced that a new state of water molecule was discovered. The new tunneling state was found to exist under extreme confinement and notably was not a sold, liquid or gas. A team at the University of Utah demonstrated the Inverse spin Hall effect: A new way to get electricity from magnetism—they changed magnetic "spin current" into electric current, possibly paving the way for use in electronic devices. And a team with members from Spain, France and Egypt demonstrated hydrogen atoms on graphene yielded a magnetic moment—offering a new and better way to give graphene magnetic properties.

In news from space, a team of astronomers, led by Suman Satyal with the University of Texas, found that an Earth-like planet may exist in a nearby star system. The system associated with the star Gliese 832 is just 16 light years away. A team of researchers working with Hubble announced that they had witnessed a star 'inflating' a giant bubble and used images of it to mark the 26^th anniversary of the space telescope's placement into orbit. And a team with NASA announced that the space probe Kepler was recovered and returned to the K2 mission—it is now back on the job, they reported.

In other news, a solar-powered plane completed its journey across the Pacific Ocean, making headlines around the globe. The plane, called The Solar Impulse 2, is on a mission to fly all the way around the world solely via solar power—the $100 million project started back in 2002. Also, a team of researchers at UCLA announced that they had found that fructose alters hundreds of brain genes, which can lead to a wide range of diseases, including Alzheimer's disease and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And an international team of researchers announced that they had discovered a new reef system at the mouth of the Amazon River.

And finally, if you are one of the millions of people that take over-the-counter medicines such as nighttime cold remedies, you might want to read a report by a team of researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine—they found brain scans linking physical changes to cognitive risks of a widely used class of drugs, and recommend adults avoid taking them.