Hello, and welcome back to my office where this week I want to three bite-size bits of news at you. Let's start with everybody's favorite 5300 year old ice man, Oetzi, whose well-preserved body was discovered in 1991 by hikers in the Swiss Alps.

Scientists announced in Italy this weekend that they had sequenced Oetzi's entire genome, and it turns out that Oetzi had an even harder life than we thought. We already knew that he was killed by an arrow in the shoulder, not the knee. Now in addition to learning that he had brown hair and brown eyes and type O blood, we know that Oetzi was predisposed to heart disease and he was lactose intolerant.

They've also discovered that he was the earliest known carrier of Lyme disease. Sucky life. Scientists also found out that Oetzi shares a common ancestry with modern day inhabitants of the islands of Sardinia and Corsica. And a recently completed reconstruction of what Oetzi probably looked like tells me that Jeff Bridges may have found an ancestor too.

Next, let's head out into space. Where a mass of dark matter 2.4 billion light years away has astronomers very confused. So dark matter is a strange kind of matter that doesn't emit or reflect light, so it cannot be directly observed with telescopes. It behaves very peculiarly, and we don't understand it, but it can bend and distort light from galaxies. So scientists know that it's there. In fact, we think that it makes up about 20% of the stuff in the universe.

So astronomers have been observing an enormous collision of galaxy clusters, called Abell 520 a.k.a. the Train Wreck Cluster. Now what's got astrophysicists all perplexed is that this galactic cluster y-yeah, it's left a core of dark matter behind. Theoretically, dark matter and galaxies are supposed to hang together, even after a violent collision like this. But what astronomers observed, and the Hubble space telescope has recently confirmed, was that the galaxies sailed away from the dark matter, leaving this core behind.

So last week, the team studying the collision said that what they're seeing "defies explanation." They're astrophysicists, people. And all they can say, is huh? [lifts hands in air]

Finally, Sunday marks the one year anniversary of the earthquake that caused the meltdowns at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. The disaster left behind enormous amounts of contamination and a year later big questions remain about what will be done with it all.

Official estimates put the amount of radioactive waste at 90 million cubic meters, enough to fill 72 baseball stadiums. For now, reports say that it's being dumped in lined pits not far from the plant, until a disposal facility can be built. The trick will be building one that can last a very, very, very, very, very, very long time. Most of the contamination is in the form of two radioactive isotopes, iodine-131 and cesium-137. The good news, if you can say that there's any good news, is that iodine-131 has a half life of just 8 days, which means that it decays by half every 8 days. Cesium-137, though, has a half-life of over 30 years, and unlike iodine, cesium can be taken up by all kinds of different body cells, so it can cause the wide range of health effects, from nausea to cancer, that experts call radiation sickness.

As always, we'll stay on top of this one for you, but if you have any questions or ideas about what to do with Japan's nuclear waste, or if you live in Japan and want to talk to us about what you're seeing, you can contact us on Facebook or Twitter, of course, also in the Youtube comments below. I'll see you next week.