Scientists digging around roughly one-and-a-half miles below the Earth's surface in an Ontario mine may have just discovered the oldest free-flowing source of isolated, untouched water ever known. Though they don't know if anything has been living in this water, it contains both methane and hydrogen-key ingredients for life-and has likely been isolated in rock down there, untouched by Earth's atmosphere, for a staggering 1 billion years.

Kim Kardashian has gotten one. So, apparently, have other ladies in Miami. A "blood facial" or "vampire facial" is a cosmetic procedure during which a doctor draws a couple vials of blood from your arm, centrifuges the blood to separate out the plasma and platelets from the red blood cells, and then adds the platelet-rich plasma back into your face. Um... ew?

Behold, the largest structure in the universe. An international team of astronomers has discovered a large quasar group (also known as an LQG) that is some 4 billion light years across. For comparison, that's something like 1600 times farther than the distance between the Milky Way and the "nearby" Andromeda Galaxy.That's huge.

Absolute zero - that's zero degrees Kelvin, or -273 degrees C - is understood by textbook definition to be the absolute coldest anything can be, a temperature threshold at which atoms actually lose all of their kinetic energy and stop moving completely (or at which entropy reaches its lowest value). There can be nothing stiller than completely still, and hence absolute zero is as low-energy as something can go. Right? But researchers have discovered that's not exactly the case. By messing with the distribution of high- and low-energy atoms within a system, a team of physicists at the University of Munich in Germany has created what it defines as a negative temperature system - one that has a temperature south of absolute zero.

The latest TOP500 rankings of the world's fastest supercomputers is out today, and as expected Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan has unseated Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia in for the number one seat. That means a couple of things. For one, it represents something of a proving out for co-processor technology (that's technology that uses graphics processors alongside conventional processors to accelerate a machine's performance), which drove Titan's performance over the top. Secondly, it means it's been a really good year for American supercomputing.

Imagine being asked to solve a complex algebra problem that is roughly 95 percent variables and only five percent known values. This is a rough analogy perhaps, but it paints a fairly accurate picture of the task faced by modern cosmologists. The prevailing line of thinking says that the universe is mostly composed of dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities that have never been directly observed or measured even though the cosmological math insist that they are real. We can see their perceived effects, but we can't see them directly - and thus we can't seen the real structure of our own universe.