Researchers working at the site of a recent ice core (designated NEEM) in northern Greenland. Christian Morel

Any interesting field of science (read: all of them) has its little mysteries—things that don’t quite make sense. They're the currency of a research scientist, since they provide interesting questions. One of these little stumpers is found in Greenland ice cores.

Ice cores, with their annual layering, have provided a revolutionary window into Earth’s climate history. By analyzing two isotopes of oxygen in the water molecules, researchers found a record of changing climate. In warmer times, the heavier 18O atoms become a little more common. In colder times, they are less so. This revealed all kinds of information about the last few glacial cycles, which are controlled by subtle changes in Earth’s orbit and amplified by positive feedbacks like CO2.

There are, however, complications. The oxygen isotope ratio can also shift for reasons other than temperature, like changing snowfall patterns. The complications gave researchers reason to be skeptical of a strange detail at the end of the last ice age.

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Nearly a week after female celebrities’ nude photos were stolen and shared across the Internet, reddit has banned the subreddit that helped to distribute them.

The reddit group /r/TheFappening and related subreddits were banned on Saturday night after reddit CEO Yishan Wong posted a blog titled “Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul.” The blog explained why the company is unlikely to make changes to its policies because of one incident.

In an update to the blog post, Wong wrote that the subreddit was banned because it violated rules unrelated to being a center for people to access stolen nude photos of female celebrities. He wrote that he disagrees with the distribution of stolen images, yet believes that reddit is a place for people to distribute media (and in this case, stolen nude photos):

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Richard Westcott reports on what is next in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Mike Mozart

Comcast has begun serving Comcast ads to devices connected to one of its 3.5 million publicly accessible Wi-Fi hotspots across the US. Comcast's decision to inject data into websites raises security concerns and arguably cuts to the core of the ongoing net neutrality debate.

A Comcast spokesman told Ars the program began months ago. One facet of it is designed to alert consumers that they are connected to Comcast's Xfinity service. Other ads remind Web surfers to download Xfinity apps, Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas told Ars in telephone interviews.

The advertisements may appear about every seven minutes or so, he said, and they last for just seconds before trailing away. Douglas said the advertising campaign only applies to Xfinity's publicly available Wi-Fi hot spots that dot the landscape. Comcast customers connected to their own Xfinity Wi-Fi routers when they're at home are not affected, he said.

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A meteorite that landed near the Nicaraguan capital Managua on Sunday could have come from the 2014 RC asteroid which was passing the earth at the time, experts have said.

Scientists are exploring why it is so difficult at accurately measure the Newtonian constant of gravity.

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A nine-year-old boy drove an unattended bus and hit two other vehicles in central Canada.

Family, friends and famous names from the worlds of TV, film and comedy have said a final farewell to Joan Rivers at her funeral in New York.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has visited flood-hit areas of Indian-administered Kashmir, following devastating monsoon rains.

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The Moto 360 (center) could almost pass for a real watch. Ron Amadeo

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});After what seems like an eternity, the most promising Android Wear hardware has finally hit the market. While the LG G Watch and the Samsung Gear Live were first to market, the Moto 360 has always felt like the flagship device for Android Wear.

While the software seems like it's headed in the right direction, the hardware for smartwatches has felt like a live experiment being carried out in the marketplace. Pebble has aimed for maximum battery life with a black-and-white e-paper screen, and Samsung's hardware machine gun has been in full effect, releasing everything from a wrist-mounted smartphone to a skinny, curved OLED device focused on fitness.

Spend a few minutes with the 360 and you'll quickly realize that the square, plastic designs other manufacturers are pushing are dead-on-arrival. The Moto 360 design is a huge step forward for smartwatches. It's round, it's comfortable to wear, and it looks like a normal watch.

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Time-lapse footage of a large dust storm in Phoenix, Arizona on Saturday.

Protests have taken place at the French port of Calais over the continuing influx of migrants trying to reach the UK.

Peter Hartree

The Bárðarbunga (or Bardarbunga) volcano has erupted, evoking memories of the 2010 Icelandic ash cloud that caused chaos across European and North American air routes. 

What has been happening?

The ice-covered Bárðarbunga volcano has a magma chamber beneath it, and measurements indicate that magma from this chamber has been escaping into a vertical underground crack. In total, the magma has migrated some 40 km northeast of the chamber. We call this process a dyke intrusion. Escape of magma from the chamber has removed support from the chamber roof, which has collapsed to trigger earthquakes in the area.

At the far northeast tip of the dyke intrusion, the magma managed to find a route to the surface on August 29, producing a small eruption at the Holuhraun lava field. After a pause, a larger eruption started in the same place on August 31—that eruption continues at the time of writing. Both of these events occurred along an ancient fissure that had erupted in 1797. So it looks like the magma in the new dyke intrusion met the old and cold 1797 dyke intrusion and followed its path to the surface. Had this not happened, the new dyke intrusion might have kept moving to the northeast.

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In late May, an international law enforcement effort disrupted the Gameover Zeus (GoZ) botnet, a network of compromised computers used for banking fraud.

The operation also hobbled a secondary, but equally important cyber-criminal operation: the Cryptolocker ransomware campaign, which used a program distributed by the GoZ botnet to encrypt victims' sensitive files, holding them hostage until the victim paid a fee, typically hundreds of dollars. The crackdown, and the subsequent discovery by security firms of the digital keys needed to decrypt affected data, effectively eliminated the threat from Cryptolocker.

Yet, ransomware is not dead, two recent analyses have found. Within a week of the takedown of Gameover Zeus and Cryptolocker, a surge of spam with links to a Cryptolocker copycat, known as Cryptowall, resulted in a jump in ransomware infections, states a report released last week by security-services firm Dell Secureworks. Cryptowall first appeared in November 2013, and spread slowly, but the group behind the program were ready to take advantage of the vacuum left by the downfall of its predecessor.

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Fergal Keane reports from Mariupol where shelling has shaken the ceasefire in eastern Ukraine as tanks are deployed.

Early this year, the International Court of Justice handed down a ruling that brought at least a temporary halt to Japan's whaling program. Normally, an international court case isn't science news. In this case, however, the whaling was justified under a clause of the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling that allowed whales to be killed “for the purposes of scientific research." And, as detailed in a perspective in this week's edition of Science, the court decision came down to whether Japan was actually doing any science.

Australia, which brought the case, argued that science is an international activity, and subject to some properties that hold no matter where it's done:

(i) defined and achievable objectives; (ii) use of appropriate methods, including use of lethal methods only where objectives cannot be answered through alternate methods; and (iii) proper assessment and response through the community of scientists.

Japan, in contrast, argued that if some research resulted from its whaling, the whole effort should be considered "for the purposes of scientific research."

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A 73-year-old South African heart surgeon has become the oldest person to swim the English Channel.

Swedish director Roy Andersson's comedy A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival.