Meteorites may have delivered that essential ingredient for life to an early Earth

Credit: NASA

Did life on Earth develop from ingredients that came from somewhere else? Researchers have teased ammonia from a carbon-containing meteorite

(PHYSORG)- Researchers have teased ammonia of a carbon-containing meteorite from Antarctica, and propose that meteorites may have delivered that essential ingredient for life to an early Earth.

The results appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and add to a growing body of evidence that meteorites may have played a key role in the development of life here. The NASA graphic at left was released just last month, when researchers reported that meteorites may have also delivered Earth’s first left-hand amino acids.

Can information overload cause "brain freeze"?

 New research indicates too much information can affect areas of the brain and interfere with your ability to make decisions.

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Your compass is now wrong

Figure 1. Illustration of the orientation of magnetic field lines around planet earth (http://anshsmagnetism.wordpress.com/basic-concepts/).

The Earth's magnetic poles are shifting. They have always been on the move, but, recently, the pace of movement is quickening.

(FOX News)- The Earth's magnetic field is changing at an increasing rate, throwing off airports and altering the aurora borealis -- and its effect on ordinary compasses could mean the difference between homeward bound and hopelessly lost.

Earth’s northernmost magnetic point -- or magnetic north -- is distinct from its geographic North Pole, and scientists have long known that the magnetic poles are on the move.

But the magnetic poles have been moving faster lately, sliding towards Siberia at 34 miles per year at a speed that's accelerated 36 percent over the last 10 years, according to the United States Geological Survey, or USGS.

Since compasses rely on magnetic north to point you in the right way up the trail, the average $2-dollar model could very well point you in the wrong direction.

Dead infant dolphins wash ashore on Alabama and Mississippi coastlines

 Could this be related to last summers oil spill? Scientists are trying to find out the reason.

We will be hitchhiking into space with the Russians for a long time

NASA image via Wikimedia Commons.

We could be without a human lift vehicle for up to a decade.

(PHYSORG)- Once the US space shuttle program closes, it will be about a decade before America can make a new vehicle for sending astronauts to space, NASA's chief technologist predicts.

When the longtime centerpiece of US spaceflight shutters later this year, NASA will focus on experiments at the International Space Station (ISS) and on partnerships with private industry to build new spacecraft, Robert Braun told AFP in an interview this week.

But with spending squeezed and NASA at odds with lawmakers over a 2016 timeframe for building a new heavy-lift rocket and crew vehicle to replace the 30-year-old shuttle program, Braun said that developing the future mode of travel could take longer than Congress, or the US public, may want to hear.

Video: The Astounding Behavior of Blindfolded Dolphins

Blindfolded dolphins are astounding scientists with their ability to mimic each other without any visual clues.

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Do wormholes between stars exist?

Scientists are seriously investigating the possibility.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Wormholes are one of the stranger objects that arise in general relativity. Although no experimental evidence for wormholes exists, scientists predict that they would appear to serve as shortcuts between one point of spacetime and another. Scientists usually imagine wormholes connecting regions of empty space, but now a new study suggests that wormholes might exist between distant stars. Instead of being empty tunnels, these wormholes would contain a perfect fluid that flows back and forth between the two stars, possibly giving them a detectable signature.

The scientists, Vladimir Dzhunushaliev at the Eurasian National University in Kazakhstan and coauthors, have posted their investigation of the possibility of wormholes between stars on arXiv.org.  Read more here.

The First Robot Marathon (video)

 Japan holds the world's first robot marathon.

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Scientists discover oldest North American human remains in Alaska

(Credit: Ben Potter, University of Alaska, Fairbanks)

The remains are of a 11,500-year-old cremated Paleoindian child.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2011) — Scientists have discovered the cremated skeleton of a Paleoindian child in the remains of an 11,500-year-old house in central Alaska. The findings reveal a slice of domestic life that has been missing from the record of the region's early people, who were among the first to colonize the Americas.

The discovery, by Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and colleagues, appears in the 25 February issue of the journal Science.

Raw Video: Shuttle Discovery's Final Launch

This is so sad. Soon, we will be reduced to hitchhiking with the Russians.

Earthquake Warning System Available

 Unfortunately, the warning window is on 30 to 60 seconds.

Superfluid at core of neutron star

(Credit: Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/xx; Optical: NASA/STScI; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)

Superfluid is a bizarre substance that can climb upward and escape airtight containers.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 23, 2011) — NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered the first direct evidence for a superfluid, a bizarre, friction-free state of matter, at the core of a neutron star. Superfluids created in laboratories on Earth exhibit remarkable properties, such as the ability to climb upward and escape airtight containers. The finding has important implications for understanding nuclear interactions in matter at the highest known densities.

Cell Phone Use Creates Brain Changes (video)

New study shows cell phone radiation stimulates brain activity. This has not yet been linked to cancer.

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Smoking Weed May Lead to Problems In the Bedroom?

Using cannabis may lead to sexual dysfunction according to one researcher.

(PHYSORG)- Rany Shamloul's recent review of the medical literature on cannabis use and sexual health has revealed that cannabis use may negatively impact male sexual performance.

"Cannabis is the most widely-used illicit drug globally," says Dr. Shamloul, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology. "It is also often used by young, sexually active people who are unaware of the hazardous effects it may be having on their sexual health and performance."

Recent animal and in vitro studies have identified new negative connections between cannabis use and sexual dysfunction that may put an end to previous controversy.

The Real Life Cat Burglar (video)

Klepto Kitty Burglarizes Homes

Scientists Grive Car By Power of Thought

This opens a myriad of possibilities for the handicapped.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 21, 2011) — You need to keep your thoughts from wandering, if you drive using the new technology from the AutoNOMOS innovation labs of Freie Universität Berlin. The computer scientists have developed a system making it possible to steer a car with your thoughts. Using new commercially available sensors to measure brain waves -- sensors for recording electroencephalograms (EEG) -- the scientists were able to distinguish the bioelectrical wave patterns for control commands such as "left," "right," "accelerate" or "brake" in a test subject.

Video: AeroVironment's Nano Hummingbird Passes Flight Test

The "ornithopter" can fly up to 11 mph. This spybot is being developed for the military.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A prototype robot spy "ornithopter," the Nano-Hummingbird, has successfully completed flight trials in California. Developed by the company AeroVironment Inc., the miniature spybot looks like a hummingbird complete with flapping wings, and is only slightly larger and heavier than most hummingbirds, but smaller than the largest species.

Video: A Real Flying Car

 I want one, but the price is almost $100 grand.

BP oil spill is still on bottom of Gulf

A scientist has video and slides proving mush of the BP oil spill is still on the bottom of the gulf.

(AP) -- Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor.


That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.

At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't.

"There's some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn't seem to be degrading," Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil.

"Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don't know," Joye said, later adding: "there's a lot of it out there."

Solar Flares Create Spectacular Northern Lights (video)

 Our neighbors to the north are getting quite a show.

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New Robotic Hand Can Type on Keyboard

A new robotic hand (DART) approaches the functionality of a human hand.

(PhysOrg.com) -- When it comes to finding the single best tool for building, digging, grasping, drawing, writing, and many other tasks, nothing beats the human hand. Human hands have evolved over millions of years into four fingers and a thumb that can precisely manipulate a wide variety of objects. In a recent study, researchers have attempted to recreate the human hand by building a biomimetic robotic hand that they have optimized to achieve near-human appearance and performance.

The researchers, Nicholas Thayer and Shashank Priya from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, have published their study on the robotic hand in a recent issue of Smart Materials and Structures.

The researchers call the hand a dexterous anthropomorphic robotic typing hand, or DART hand, as the main objective was to demonstrate that the hand could type on a computer keyboard. They showed that a single DART hand could type at a rate of 20 words per minute, compared to the average human typing speed of 33 words per minute with two hands. The researchers predict that two DART hands could type at least 30 words per minute. Ultimately, the DART hand could be integrated into a humanoid robot for assisting the elderly or disabled people, performing tasks such as typing, reaching objects, and opening doors. Read more here.

A Gun That Can Control Weather? (video)

 They are called hail cannons. Some scientists claim they won't work, but farmers swear by them.

Scientists discover chemical compound that regrows hair

(Credit: UCLA/VA)

From the picture, it works well on mice in only 4 weeks.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 17, 2011) — It has been long known that stress plays a part not just in the graying of hair but in hair loss as well. Over the years, numerous hair-restoration remedies have emerged, ranging from hucksters' "miracle solvents" to legitimate medications such as minoxidil. But even the best of these have shown limited effectiveness.

Now, a team led by researchers from UCLA and the Veterans Administration that was investigating how stress affects gastrointestinal function may have found a chemical compound that induces hair growth by blocking a stress-related hormone associated with hair loss -- entirely by accident.

The serendipitous discovery is described in an article published in the online journal PLoS ONE.

"Our findings show that a short-duration treatment with this compound causes an astounding long-term hair regrowth in chronically stressed mutant mice," said Million Mulugeta, an adjunct professor of medicine in the division of digestive diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a corresponding author of the research....

Read more here.

Science Fiction Meets Medical Reality: Robots Operate

Robots in the operating room.

Massive Solar Flare May Disrupt Worldwide Communications for a Few Days

Credit NASA.

A Massive solare flare may interrupt your communications over the next few days.

(PHYSORG)- A powerful solar eruption that has already disturbed radio communications in China could disrupt electrical power grids and satellites used on Earth in the next days, NASA said.

The massive sunspot, which astronomers say is the size of Jupiter, is the strongest solar flare in four years, NASA said Wednesday.

The Class X flash -- the largest such category -- erupted at 0156 GMT Tuesday, according to the US space agency.

"X-class flares are the most powerful of all solar events that can trigger radio blackouts and long-lasting radiation storms," disturbing telecommunications and electric grids, NASA said.

South Korea Develops High Tech Robot "Super Gun" (video)

The turret-based weapon platform can mount multiple weapons and is capable of locking onto a human target three kilometers away.

Mock Mission to Mars: Frst steps on fake Red Planet

 The Russians are simulating a trip to Mars in Moscow. That main goal is seeing how the psychology of such a long space mission would work.



With the program cancellations and budget cuts, mock missions may be all NASA can do in the future. At least the Russians  have a vehicle capable of lifting humans into orbit.

IBM Supercomputer Crushes Ken Jennings at Jeopardy

The IBM supercomputer is named "Watson."

(PHYSORG)- An IBM computer crushed two human champions Tuesday in the second round of a man vs. machine showdown on the popular US television game show "Jeopardy!"

Most of the banter and gentle humor that usually pepper the popular quiz show was gone as the supercomputer dominated the game by beating his human opponents to the buzzer again and again.

Ken Jennings -- who holds the "Jeopardy!" record of 74 straight wins -- shook his buzzer in silent frustration as the computer's artificial voice answered the first dozen challenges without pause, getting all but one right.

"Watson" - named after Thomas Watson, the founder of the US technology giant -- receives the clues electronically by text message at the same time as they are revealed to the human contestants.

Science Teachers Experience Zero Gravity (video) #science

I am not sure how this will help them be better teachers, but it sure looks like fun!

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Feel Good Story: Deaf Dog Lears Sign Language

The project to teach a deaf dog sign language is a joint venture between children at a school for the deaf and prison inmates. The dog's name is "Sparky."

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) – A dog who couldn't hear has learned some sign language thanks to inmates at a U.S. prison and children at a school for the deaf.

Inmates at a Missouri prison trained the deaf dachshund named Sparky in sign language and then asked the Missouri School for the Deaf in Fulton to take him in.

Today, Sparky is right at home with the school's youngsters, who have taught him additional sign language. And a second deaf dog, a Boston Terrier named Petie, may be on his way to the school soon.

Superintendent Barbara Garrison approved bringing Sparky to the school.

"She really thought it would be a great learning experience for the kids," Garrison's secretary Barbara McGrath said in an interview.

3,000-year-old Olmec-style stone monument discovered in southern Mexican state of Chiapas

We may never know who the statue represents.

(PhysOrg.com) -- With one arm raised and a determined scowl, the figure looks ready to march right off his carved tablet and into the history books. If only we knew who he was - corn god? Tribal chief? Sacred priest?

"It's beautiful and was obviously very important," says University of Wisconsin-Madison archaeologist John Hodgson of the newly discovered stone monument. "But we will probably never know who he was or what the sculpture means in its entirety."

The man is the central figure on a stone monument discovered in 2009 at a site called Ojo de Agua in far southern Mexico in the state of Chiapas along the Pacific coast. Hodgson, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at UW-Madison, describes the new monument in the cover article of the current issue (December 2010) of Mexicon, a leading peer-reviewed journal of Mesoamerican studies. The article, titled "Ojo de Agua Monument 3: A New Olmec-Style Sculpture from Ojo de Agua, Chiapas, Mexico," is co-authored with John E. Clark, of Brigham Young University, and Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta, director of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Chiapas.

Monument 3 is just the second carved monument found in Ojo de Agua. Monument 1 was discovered accidently when a local farmer hit it with a plow in the 1960s. Monument 3 was a similarly fortuitous finding, uncovered in the process of digging an irrigation ditch. (Monument 2 is a large boulder with a flat surface and no visible carving, which Hodgson found in 2005 and reported in the January/February 2006 issue of Archaeology magazine in an article on Ojo de Agua.)

Read more here.

Bomb detecting plants?

Lab work is underway at Colorado State University to make green plants turn white in the presence of explosives.

(FOX News)- A scientist at Colorado State University has developed a way to make everyday plants one of the first lines of defense in the war on terror.

Lab work currently underway makes green plants turn white if they detect explosive, biological or chemical weapons in their environment. Imagine someone walking by these plants in an airport with hidden explosives -- and the plants changing color to alert security.

Professor June Medford and fellow scientists on the campus of Colorado State University are now working with the U.S. Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to develop high-tech plants for use in airports and other public areas.

Troops love new XM25 air burst grenade launcher

This weapon is an infantry "game changer." It has been nicknamed “the Punisher.”

(Army Times)- The XM25 has changed the battlefield with only 55 rounds, and earned a new name among soldiers. They call it “the Punisher.”

Since its first contact Dec. 3, the XM25 has been in nine engagements with two units at different locations, officials said. Specifically, it has disrupted two insurgent attacks on observation posts, taken out two PKM machine gun positions and destroyed four ambush sites.

In one engagement, an enemy machine gunner was “so badly wounded or so freaking scared that he dropped [his] weapon” and ran, said Lt. Col. Christopher Lehner, Program Manager Individual Weapons.
There were no casualties among units carrying the XM25 in those nine engagements, Lehner said.
“No longer can the enemy shoot at American forces, then hide behind something,” said Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller of Program Executive Office Soldier. “This is a revolutionary weapon. This is a game-changer.”

The XM25 has a target acquisition system that calculates range with the push of a button. The data is transferred to an electronic fuse, enabling the 25mm round to explode over the target and rain shell fragments on the enemy.

Can the Earth's Wandering Magnetic Poles Cause Deadly Superstorms?

Credit NOAA

The Earth's magnetic poles have started moving at an increased rate in recent years. Some fear a catastrophic pole flip. Most scientists don't seem worried.

(FOX News)- Will the wandering magnetic North Pole create crazy superstorms?

The eye-popping connection between the planet's weather and its magnetic field has caught hold among scaremongers recently, ever since scientists described the potential of devastating "superstorms" -- storms caused, scientists say, by flowing gushers of water in the sky known as atmospheric rivers. Some worriers say that these tubocharged tsunamis will soon be widespread, thanks to the increased movement of the Earth's magnetic field. 

And that when the field shifts, the story goes, anything can happen. All hell will break loose, they say, arguing that the shift has a greater effect on the world's weather than even the carbon-based influences scientists have been carefully monitoring.

Poppycock, say the best scientific minds in the Northern Hemisphere.

"Trying to link all of these things together is kind of preposterous," said Dr. Carol Raymond, principal scientist and a geophysicist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, which operates a fleet of satellites that closely monitor the planet and leads the charge in Earth Science research. Read more here.

The Amazing Trick Shot Quarterback

 He is the back-up Quarterback for UCONN?

Inventory Shows 18 Items Missing After Looting of the Egyptian Museum

Fortunately, none were from the most valuable items in the gated room containing the gold funerary mask of Tutankhamun.

CAIRO — A full inventory of the Egyptian Museum has found that looters escaped with 18 items during the anti-government unrest, including two gilded wooden statues of famed boy king Tutankhamun, the antiquities chief said Sunday.

The 18-day uprising that forced out President Hosni Mubarak engulfed the areas around the museum, on the edge of Cairo's Tahrir Square. On Jan. 28, as protesters clashed with police early on in the turmoil and burned down the adjacent headquarters of Mubarak's ruling party, a handful of looters climbed a fire escape to the museum roof and lowered themselves on ropes from a glass-paneled ceiling onto the museum's top floor.

Around 70 objects — many of them small statues — were damaged, but until Sunday's announcement, it was not known whether anything was missing.

Ancient Snakes Had Legs

New X-rays reveal the details.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A novel X-ray imaging technology is helping scientists better understand how in the course of evolution snakes have lost their legs. The researchers hope the new data will help resolve a heated debate about the origin of snakes: whether they evolved from a terrestrial lizard or from one that lived in the oceans. New, detailed 3-D images reveal that the internal architecture of an ancient snake's leg bones strongly resembles that of modern terrestrial lizard legs. The results are published in the 8 February issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

(YouTube)- New, detailed 3-D images reveal that the internal architecture of an ancient snake's leg bones strongly resembles that of modern terrestrial lizard legs. The results are published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Source: European Synchrotron Radiation Facility.

Did you realize losing your smart key could total your car?

One woman is facing this dilemma with a lost smart key to a Toyota Prius.

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Drug Offers New Treatment Possibilities for Alzheimer's

Alzheimer's is a horrible disease. Any hope is welcome news.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2011) — UC Santa Barbara scientists have made a discovery that has the potential for use in the early diagnosis and eventual treatment of plaque-related diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Type 2 diabetes.

The amyloid diseases are characterized by plaque that aggregates into toxic agents that interact with cellular machinery, explained Michael T. Bowers, lead author and professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Other amyloid diseases include Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, and atherosclerosis. Amyloid plaques are protein fibrils that, in the case of Alzheimer's disease, develop prior to the appearance of symptoms.

"The systems we use are model systems, but the results are groundbreaking," said Bowers...

Read more here.

The fallacies of "Creationism" and dancing with unicorns

 Why belief creationism is doomed to fail and actually drive people away from Christianity.

Welcome our new supercomputer overlords

Increases in computer speed will lead to computers that are much smarter than us by 2045. They may actually make humans in our current form obsolete.

Time reported:

...From that point on, there's no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn't even take breaks to play Farmville.

Probably. It's impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you'd be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we'll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity...

Read more here.

Available soon: Bomb-Resistant Boxers

Bomb resistant boxes will be available in the U.S in three weeks. Don't laugh. Protecting "the boys" is a serious concern for our brave fighting men.

(FOX News)- Designed to protect against improvised explosive devices, Blast Boxers have been available in Europe for about six months by British manufacturer BCB International Ltd. But now the protective shorts made of Kevlar fabric that purportedly protect soldiers in areas where standard body armor does not will be manufactured in upstate New York within three weeks.

Struggling for a Valentines Day Gift?

Here are some trendy Valentine gifts. And they are under $25.

The "Big One" is long overdue in Southern California

(Credit: Image courtesy of University of Oregon)

A major seismological event is long overdue for the southern end of the San Andreas Fault, but that doesn't mean it is imminent.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2011) — A chronology of 1,000 years of earthquakes at the southern end of the San Andreas Fault nixes the idea that lake changes in the now-dry region caused past quakes. However, researchers say, the timeline pulled from sediment in three deep trenches confirms that this portion of the fault is long past the expected time for a major temblor that would strongly shake the Los Angeles Basin.

The new study, appearing in the February issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, doesn't change existing thinking about the threat of a major quake -- potentially measuring 7.0 to 8.0 on the Richter scale -- for southern California. It does, however, provide the first published documentation of much-discussed data that have emerged in the last three decades from an area that is now rapidly being built up and populated, just north of the Salton Sea.

Can Heart attacks be prevented?

How Do You Prevent a Heart Attack?

Lucy's species mastered bipedalism

It's nice to know our 3 million year old ancestors weren't knuckle-draggers.

(PHYSORG)- A fossilized foot bone recovered from Hadar, Ethiopia, shows that by 3.2 million years ago human ancestors walked bipedally with a modern human-like foot, a report that appears Feb. 11 in the journal Science, concludes. The fossil, a fourth metatarsal, or midfoot bone, indicates that a permanently arched foot was present in the species Australopithecus afarensis, according to the report authors, Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, together with William Kimbel and Donald Johanson, of Arizona State University's Institute of Human Origins.

The research helps resolve a long-standing debate between paleoanthropologists who think A. afarensis walked essentially as modern humans do and those who think this species practiced a form of locomotion intermediate between the quadrupedal tree-climbing of chimpanzees and human terrestrial bipedalism. The question of whether A. afarensis had fully developed pedal, or foot, arches has been part of this debate. The fourth metatarsal described in the Science report provides strong evidence for the arches and, the authors argue, support a modern-human style of locomotion for this species. The specimen was recovered from the Hadar locality 333, popularly known as the "First Family Site," the richest source of A. afarensis fossils in eastern Africa, with more than 250 specimens, representing at least 17 individuals, so far known.

Read more here.

Do We Face An Asteroid Apocalypse In 2036?

Scientists Spar Over 2036 Asteroid Apocalypse

Astronomy Picture of the Day: Giant ring of black holes

This is a stunning stellar image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue).

(NASA)- Just in time for Valentine's Day comes a new image of a ring -- not of jewels -- but of black holes. This composite image of Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies located about 430 million light years from Earth, shows X-rays from the NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue) produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md.

Arp 147 contains the remnant of a spiral galaxy (right) that collided with the elliptical galaxy on the left. This collision has produced an expanding wave of star formation that shows up as a blue ring containing in abundance of massive young stars. These stars race through their evolution in a few million years or less and explode as supernovas, leaving behind neutron stars and black holes.

Time Stands Still in Black Hole?

A new study has found time stands still in fully mature Black Holes.

(Yahoo) The end of a black hole’s evolution may be a mind-bending kind of space-time independent of time. A new study proposes a method to tell how far any black hole is from reaching this end state.

Black holes are some of the weirdest things in the universe. They occur when mass is packed into a tiny volume, squished to its ultimate density.

Though observations suggest black holes are prevalent in the universe, scientists still don't really understand what goes on inside them. The equations of general relativity usually used to understand the physics of the universe break down in these cases.

"It is really beyond the physics we know," said Juan Antonio Valiente Kroon, a mathematician at Queen Mary, University of London. "To understand what happens inside a black hole, we need to invent new physics."

Mercifully, the physics for the end state of a black hole is somewhat simpler. A solution to the equations of general relativity was found that produced a situation called "Kerr spacetime." Scientists now think Kerr spacetime is what happens when a black hole has reached its final evolutionary state.

Stardust spacecraft will rendezvous with comet Tempel 1 on Valentine's Day

(NASA/JPL/Cornell)

A match made in the heavens...

(PhysOrg.com) -- There was the Stardust spacecraft, launched in 1999, and her cometary fiancée, Wild 2. Betrothed from afar, the two headed blissfully toward a 2004 rendezvous.

Meanwhile, the comet Tempel 1, making her own solitary way around the sun in 2005, was heading toward a more explosive relationship with the Deep Impact spacecraft.

But alas, heavenly though the matches were -- and fruitful, with each yielding valuable information about the evolution of the solar system -- neither lasted. In 2006, Stardust tossed her dusty tokens of Wild 2 down to Earth for analysis and vowed to start anew. She was a little older now; but with all her parts in good working order and adequate fuel, she was ready for a second mission. And Tempel 1, scarred by her violent encounter with Deep Impact, was looking for a kinder, gentler match.

On Valentine's Day, the two will meet...

Read more here.

NASA's 360-Degree Image of Sun (video)

NASA has a new 360-Degree image of the sun. The science behind this is fascinating.

Good News: Flu breakthrough promises a vaccine to kill all strains

Would not it be wonderful if a single flu vaccine could kill all strains? This has been successfully tested at Oxford.

Scientists at Oxford University have successfully tested a universal flu vaccine that could work against all known strains of the illness, taking a significant step in the fight against a disease that affects billions of people each year.

The treatment – using a new technique and tested for the first time on humans infected with flu – targets a different part of the flu virus to traditional vaccines, meaning it does not need expensive reformulation every year to match the most prevalent virus that is circulating the world.

Video: Sea World Treating Turtle Shot in Neck

 This 250lb sea turtle was shot with a shotgun.

Increase of Violence Against Women on Super Bowl Sunday is a Myth

The idea that women are more likely to beaten on Super Bowl Sunday is an urban myth that won't die. There is plenty of violence against women, but no evidence to support an increase during or after the Super Bowl.

The Daily Caller reported:

Though long ago debunked, the myth that more women fall victim to domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday still persists — ironically, according to some experts, to the detriment of women.

The myth dates back to 1993 when, like a game of telephone, anecdotal evidence became conflated into a statistical fact parroted throughout the media without confirmation. That year, The Associated Press and CBS labeled Super Bowl Sunday a “day of dread” for women across the country. Women advocates spoke of a “flood” of calls to domestic abuse hot lines and media mailings warned women “Don’t remain at home with him during the game.”

Christina Hoff Sommers, American Enterprise Institute resident scholar and equity feminist, tracked the rumor from its inception and, along with such journalists as Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle, demonstrated that despite the hysteria, women have never been in any greater danger on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day.

Read more here.

Australia: New flying robots help fight fires (video)

Firefighters get new tools to save lives.

MELBOURNE, Australia - The Metropolitan Fire Brigade is testing two new remotely controlled aerial cameras, which will help fight large fires.

The CyberQuad is an aerial platform which will hover above fires and detect hot-spots that are invisible to the naked eye.

Water-Powered Jet Pack (video)

Looks like fun, but use would be limited.

White-Nose Syndrome Killing North American Bats

This disease that is threatening to wipe out bat species across North America.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2011) — Conservationists across the United States are racing to discover a solution to White-Nose Syndrome, a disease that is threatening to wipe out bat species across North America. A review published in Conservation Biology reveals that although WNS has already killed one million bats, there are critical knowledge gaps preventing researchers from combating the disease.

WNS is a fatal disease that targets hibernating bats and is believed to be caused by a newly discovered cold-adapted fungus, Geomyces destructans, which infects and invades the living skin of hibernating bats. Since 2006 about one million bats across six species in eastern North America have died from WNS, and as a result several species of bats face endangerment or extinction.

"White-Nose Syndrome was first documented in 2006 in a tourist cave near Albany, New York. Dead and dying bats were then found in four nearby caves, 30 km west of Albany," said lead author Janet Foley from the University of California, Davis. "By July 2010 G.destructans was identified in hibernating bats in 13 states as well as in Ontario and Quebec across the Canadian Border."

Can the blind drive a car? (with video)

The National Federation of the Blind has a challenge for researchers to develop a car the blind can drive independently.

(PHYSORG)- Last Saturday, a blind driver dodged cardboard boxes thrown in front of him while driving a modified Ford Hybrid Escape around the Daytona International Speedway. He had only seconds to react to the obstacles.

"If we just put boxes on the track, people might think we planned the route," said Dennis Hong, whose robotics and mechanisms lab at Virginia Tech modified the cars.

Instead, Hong's team threw boxes from a van so they bounced around. “That shows everyone that their position is random, and that the drivers are really driving,” said Hong.

In addition to avoiding boxes and taking the raceway's turns, the driver, Mark Riccobono, also passed the van.

Fortunately, Riccobono and a second blind driver, Anil Lewis, had done it before.

Is Al Qaeda on Verge of Going Nuclear?

Al Qaeda on Verge of Radioactive Weapons?

An Electric Thinking Cap?

Scientists are on the verge of creating a cap to stimulate the brain.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 3, 2011) — Are we on the verge of being able to stimulate the brain to see the world anew -- an electric thinking cap? Research by Richard Chi and Allan Snyder from the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney suggests that this could be the case.

They found that participants who received electrical stimulation of the anterior temporal lobes were three times as likely to reach the fresh insight necessary to solve a difficult, unfamiliar problem than those in the control group. The study published on February 2 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

Amazing: The Skin Gun (video)

This video is a demonstration of a prototype spray on skin gun. It has already been used to help victims.

Strange UFO shot over Jerusalem

 This UFO video has created a lot of speculation on the Internet. The amazing thing is it was captured from four different camera angles.

The circular object was seen descending slowly over the holy city's iconic Dome of the Rock before flickering and shooting skyward like a rocket. Similar clips have been seen before and debunked as hoaxes. But this latest sighting has proved more difficult to dismiss -- as it was recorded from four different perspectives.

NASA Discovers Remarkable Six Planet Solar System

The star is sun-like. Five of the planets are smaller and orbit close to the star. The other planet is larger and orbits farther out.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A remarkable planetary system discovered by NASA's Kepler mission has six planets around a Sun-like star, including five small planets in tightly packed orbits. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and their coauthors analyzed the orbital dynamics of the system, determined the sizes and masses of the planets, and figured out their likely compositions--all based on Kepler's measurements of the changing brightness of the host star (called Kepler-11) as the planets passed in front of it.

"Not only is this an amazing planetary system, it also validates a powerful new method to measure the masses of planets," said Daniel Fabrycky, a Hubble postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Cruz, who led the orbital dynamics analysis. Fabrycky and Jack Lissauer, a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, are the lead authors of a paper on Kepler-11 published in the February 3 issue of Nature.

The five inner planets in the Kepler-11 system range in size from 2.3 to 13.5 times the mass of the Earth. Their orbital periods are all less than 50 days, so they orbit within a region that would fit inside the orbit of Mercury in our solar system. The sixth planet is larger and farther out, with an orbital period of 118 days and an undetermined mass.

Would you eat meat grown in a lab?

Researchers say cultured meat can reduce global warming and eliminate diseases.