Boston Globe: "It's a sea change in the way we do astrophysics"--Astronomer Adam Frank, commenting on how, by zapping tiny samples with a powerful laser beam, scientists at the University's Laboratory for Laser Energetics can reproduce the unimaginable violence of stellar-scale collisions and explosions.

The "stunning power" of the lab's Omega laser "makes it the only facility on Earth that can realistically simulate the effects of anything from the relatively puny blast of a nuclear bomb to the explosion of a star," the Globe reports.

U.S. News & World Report: "There's no smoking gun or bloody sword. What these sites become is just fuel for the fire of the legend"--Arthurian scholar Alan Lupack, commenting on the proliferation of U.K. tourist attractions claiming a connection with Arthur, the "once and future" British monarch.

Although Lupack admits that "there are some intriguing connections between the Age of Arthur and some of these sites," there is little evidence the great king ever existed. Not, the article notes, that this has deterred reported birthplaces from sporting such Arthurian establishments as the King Arthur Hotel, the King Arthur Café, and the King Arthur Car Park.

Discover: "Imagine being totally trapped in your body and not being able to even communicate with anybody. You'd go nuts"--Computer-science graduate student Jessica Bayliss, speaking about a technology she has developed to help people with extreme paralysis connect with the world.

Bayliss's research taps into the mind via electrodes that generate EEGs that can be recognized by a computer program, eliminating the need for keyboard or mouse. While several teams around the world are working on brain-computer interfaces, she is the first to show that detection of the brain's weak electrical signals is possible in a busy--real-world, as opposed to laboratory--environment.

Philadelphia Inquirer: "It's like someone saying that they have found a way to use fingerprints to identify people, and we're saying we can produce those same fingerprints in the lab without having that person around"--Geochemist Ariel Anbar, noting that researchers have learned how to recreate chemical markers once thought to be produced only by living organisms.

The finding suggests that apparent fossils inside a Martian rock that landed in Antarctica were chemical artifacts and not, as previously speculated, evidence of biological activity. There is growing skepticism, the Inquirer reports, about the prospects of finding extraterrestrial life forms.

Popular Science: "The system waits until you get sick and then diagnoses what you have. It then throws multimillion-dollar technology at you to fix the illness"--Philippe Fauchet, director of the University's Center for Future Health, explaining why the center is developing inexpensive technology that people can use at home to detect illness long before it becomes chronic.

It's a project, the magazine predicts, "that promises to turn medicine upside down."

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