astralavista

Over the last 80 years, few topics ignited more bitter squabbling among eminent physicists than black holes. Einstein didn't believe in them. Chandrasekhar did but never recovered his balance after he clashed with Eddington, who didn't. Oppenheimer proved their existence, only to have his claims publicly doubted by Wheeler, who paradoxically coined the term black hole. Hawking was a believer, he even showed how they eventually evaporate. The issue seemed settled.
But now George Chapline, scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says that black holes violate the laws of quantum physics and cannot exists. He says that the objects are instead dark energy stars, made of the mysterious invisible stuff that fills up 75% of the universe. [The remaining 20% is dark matter and 5% visible matter.] "Event horizons and closed, time-like curves cannot exists in the real world for the simple reason that they are inconsistent with quantum mechanics," wrote Chapline. Rather than spacetime singularities, Chapline says that black holes are really huge gobs of dark energy . He posits that these gobs, formerly known as black holes, might actually be the missing mass of the universe.
Under accepted theory, an imploding star of multiple solar masses will collapse into a rock of zero volume and infinite density. But we can never see the rock. It will be hidden from view by so called event horizon, predicted by Einstein's general relativity, where time freezes and beyond which there's no point of return.
However, Chapline says no such collapse can take place. He argues that an event horizon marks the space where regular visible matter undergoes a "phase transition" into a "compact object" made of dark energy. He says: "I call such a object a 'dark energy star.'"

Astronomers at the European Space Agency say they have evidence that shock waves unleashed by titanic galactic collisions stirred up clouds of hydrogen gas and ignited the first stars when the universe was just a billion years old.
The ESA teams trained their Infrared Space Observatory telescope at a pair of colliding galaxies called Antennae, some 60 million light years away. They noticed that overlapping regions of the galaxies were packed with vibrating hydrogen atoms.
The scientists believe that the images explain how shock waves produced by galactic collisions in the early universe "excited" clouds of hydrogen and helium and ignited the first stars. "These objects... would otherwise have taken much longer to form, since light elements such as hydrogen and helium take a long time to cool down and condense into a proto-star," ESA said in a press release. "Shock waves from the first cloud collisions may have been the helping hand."

Scientists at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod say that ice ages, which come and go every 100,000 years, are driven by the tilt of the Earth's axis.
They say that the angle between Earth's equatorial and orbital planes, called obliquity, shifts between 22.5 and 24 degrees every 41,000 years. They built a model that shows that as the tilt increases and the planet tips to the side like a poorly balanced sinker, more sunlight can reach high latitudes and thaw glaciers.
Since Earth is tipped now at 23.5 degrees and moving up, danger is some cool weather may be heading our way. Praise global warming for each balmy day, the scientists say. "Without the much more rapid anthropogenic or human influences on climate, Earth would probably be slowly moving toward glaciation," they say in a press release.
One mystery remains: Since the tilt switches every 41,000 year, how come the ice age cycle lasts 100,000 years? The scientists propose that glaciers must first grow large before they are sensitive to tilt changes.

Here's a picture of the Earth snapped by the Voyager from 4 billion miles away. It's a dated shot, taken in 1991, but it doesn't grow old. Here we are, clinging to a speck of dust in the vast cosmic emptiness, yet never in doubt that we are special.

Here's a first: a U.S. particle accelerator has produced a "fireball" similar to a tiny black hole. Horatiu Nastase, physicist at Brown University in Rhode Island, has published a paper saying that by smashing gold nuclei traveling at speeds near the speed of light the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven, New York made a fireball that was "the analog of a dual black hole." (see Black Hole Factory, Feb. 21)
Here's the catch: by analog he means "completely different from a black hole in the real universe; in particular, it cannot grow by gobbling up matter." He says that "because the amount of matter created at RHIC is so tiny, RHIC does not, and cannot possibly, produce a true, star-swallowing black hole."
In a nut, it's still not completely clear what the scientists at RHIC saw. Horatiu says that his fireball is just "mathematically similar" to a "real" black hole. Mathematically similar means that Nastase had to describe the fireball in 10 dimesions to make it look like a black hole. The black hole is "dual" becasue Nastase created a mathematical link between the "real" fireball and the imaginary 10-dimesional hole. Stay tuned for more details.
The New York Times published a nice wrap up on March 29.

Scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland have started recruiting 450 volunteers to test the safety of a new vaccine against the lethal bird flu brewing in Asia.
The flu emerged in Hong Kong in 1997 and has spread among poultry populations in Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere in Asia. So far it has infected 69 people who had come in contact with sick animals, and killed 46 of them, a chilling 67% mortality rate.
Health officials around the world have been sounding alarms, saying that the flu virus, labeled H5N1, could spark global influenza pandemic like the one in 1918, which killed 50 million people. Doctors in the U.S. says that even a relatively mild strain would kill over 200,000 Americans.
The drug maker Sanofi Pasteur made the new trial vaccine using an inactivated H5N1 virus isolated in Southeast Asia in 2004. The company didn't release any other production details.
The NIAID trial will test the vaccine's safety and ability to generate an immune response in 450 healthy adults aged 18 to 64. If the vaccine is shown to be safe in adults, there are plans to test it in other populations, such as the elderly and children.
Separately, Scientist at the British National Institute for Biological Standards and Control have also managed to build a vaccine against the H5N1. The NIBSC is due to present its report on the vaccine at the U.K.'s Society for General Microbiology on April 6.

Lightning sprites, faint, colorful and exceedingly brief flashes of light that shoot up above thunderheads as high as 50 miles, have been long veiled in mystery. They've been reported by pilots and flyers, but since they last only a few miliseconds they've never been filmed or photographed.
Now researchers at Stanford University say they've captured a few sprites on film in the skies above New Mexico. They posted the image online. The recording, made with a fast telescopic video camera, shows dynamic bead and streamer formations looking very much like the skies over Baghad a couple years ago.
Previous research by Duke University scientists has linked sprite development to powerful thunderstorms and strong cloud-to-ground lightning bolts.
Most often, sprites evolve quickly in a "very causal" way, according to Duke's Steven Cummer, "when an exceptional lightning burst builds up a high-altitude electric field sufficient to spawn a second spark, which turns into a sprite."

Biologists at Purdue University have found a plant that defies the 150-year old Mendelian inheritance laws and contradicts some of the most fundamental tenets of genetics.
The plant in question was able fix a mutant gene passed on by both parents. It simply skipped a generation and reverted to a healthy state of its grandparents. "This means that inheritance can happen more flexibly than we thought in the past," said Robert Pruitt, a molecular geneticist at Purdue. "While Mendel's laws that we learned in high school still are fundamentally correct, they're not absolute."
The scientists kept the plants, called Arabidopsis, in isolation so they couldn't accidentally crossbreed with plants that didn't have the mutated gene. Pruitt said that Arabidopsis have somehow kept a "cryptic copy of everything that was in the previous generation, even though it doesn't show up in the DNA, it's not in the chromosome. Some other type of gene sequence information that we don't really understand yet is modifying the inherited traits."
There's already talk that DNA may not be the only carrier of genetic information and the driver of evolution. Scientists have proposed that genes may be also passed by the less stable strands of DNA's cousin, RNA.

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have found a dazzling "super star cluster" shimmering with 500,000 brilliant young stars, some quite bizarre. The stars, many a thousand times bigger than the Sun, are packed like colorful marbles inside a tiny pocket of the Milky Way just six light years across. "If the Sun were located at the heart of this remarkable cluster, our sky would be full of hundreds of stars as bright as the full moon," ESO scientists said.
The cluster, called Westerlund 1, contains thousands of "monster stars," orbs that would fill up the solar system all the way to Saturn's orbit. There are superhot Wolf-Rayet stars, even Yellow Hypergiants, a type of star never before seen in our galaxy and as bright as a million Suns.
The cluster is located in the southern skies in the constellation Ara, just 10,000 light years away. The Westerlund stars are all very young, 3.5 to 5 million years old. [Our Sun is 4.5 billion years old.] Astronomers hope to learn from them how massive stars form and die.
Since there are so many big stars so close together, some of them may collide and form black holes. Others will go supernova, as many as 1,500 over the next 40 million years.
The cluster was discovered in 1961. But most of its stars were hiding under a thick blanket of interstellar gas that was only recently pulled off with new generation of telescopes.

A sobering image released by the European Space Agency shows how much "space debris," i.e. old satellites and other man-made garbage litters the Earth's orbit.
There are 8,700 objects in orbit that are larger than four inches and therefore "observable," but only 7% are operational spacecraft, ESA says. A full half are decommissioned satellites, spent upper rocket stages, and mission related objects like lens covers. The remaining 43% is detritus from 160 spacecraft orbital explosions recorded since 1961.
These explosions have also generated as many as 150,000 pieces of smaller junk one half to ten inches long. It's this debris that worries rocket engineers. "These are too small and numerous to be individually tracked but could cripple or kill any craft they hit," ESA says. Since they can't be seen, scientists have to rely on sophisticated probability models and software to navigate through the orbiting landfill.
"If you calculate the combined profile area of all satellites in orbit, you find that the average time between destructive collisions is about 10 years," said Heiner Klinkrad, ESA debris specialist. "It's now standard practice that near-Earth satellites carry an allowance of fuel simply for taking evasive manoeuvres during the craft's operational lifetime."

Just last week a California company announced it developed blood-borne metallic nanodust that could slip inside the tiniest capillaries and revolutionize magnetic resonance imaging(see In Dust They Trust). Now a group of biochemists from Carnegie Mellon University may have something even better.
The scientists say they have found a way to genetically program cells to make their own MRI markers. They say that the method will allow doctors visualize gene therapy and track where genetic drugs travel in patients.
Patients who need an MRI scan of the brain, the vascular system, or other body parts get injected with dyes, or contrast agents, to improve image quality. But dye molecules are too clunky and can't penetrate everywhere.
The Mellon approach uses an emasculated virus as a vehicle to carry a gene that makes ferritin, a "metalloprotein" which the body uses to store iron. The virus tricks targeted cells into producing their own ferritin. Since ferritin carries iron, its molecules act like nano-magnets and strong MRI markers.
"Our technology is adaptable to monitor gene expression in many tissue types," said Eric Ahrens, assistant professor of biological sciences in the Mellon College of Science. "You could link this MRI reporter gene to any other gene of interest, including therapeutic genes for diseases like cancer and arthritis, to detect where and when they are being expressed."
The Mellon report appears in the April issue of the Nature Medicine journal.

New pictures from the Envisat satellite show that B-15A,currently the world's largest free-floating iceberg, is moving again. The cucumber-shaped iceberg is the size of a small European country - 75 miles long and 13 miles wide.
The giant floe cracked off the B-15, the largest iceberg ever observed, near the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica in 2000. While its parent, which was the size of Jamaica, quickly disintegrated, B-15A remained remarkably sturdy, bullying the freezing Antarctic seas. For over two years it diverted sea currents, disrupted breeding patterns for a penguin colony and required extra icebreaker activity to maintain shipping routes.
During a vicious storm in 2003, B-15A got stuck on an Antarctic shelf 2,400 miles south of New Zealand. A piece of the berg broke off during the storm, but the bulk remained intact.
Scientists at the European Space Agency, which operates Envisat, say that in early March tides and local currents lifted the rogue berg and set it free again. Already, it nearly caused a titanic ice collision, dodging the 40-mile-long Drygalski ice tongue in McMurdo Sound on the Ross Sea by just a few kilometers.

The nanotech company QuantumSphere said it has developed nanodust that can travel through the human body and dramatically improve the quality of magnetic resonance imaging.
The particles, which circulate in the blood, are many times smaller than blood cells and can penetrate the tiniest blood vessels and cavities. Since they are also magnetic, they can focus the MRI's electromagnetic waves and improve images of internal organs "on the orders-of-magnitude" compared to existing methods.
The dust is blended with blood and the mix is injected in the bloodstream.
The nanomaterial is now going through Phase I animal testing. Assuming QuantumSphere gets the invention approved by the FDA, the dust could be a huge deal for brain imaging and treating brain disease like brain tumors, epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease. The particles could be used to show "functional" detailed images of the brain in action.

Astrophysicists at the University of Washington have used a supercomputer to create the first image of the mysterious dark energy that makes up three quarters of the mass of the universe. Strangely, the picture evokes an image of brain tissue with bright dots of galaxies illuminating the centers of neuron-like tangles of visible matter. Dark energy roils in the voids between the filaments. The image shows a segment of the universe 2.8 billion light years wide, 2.6 billion light tall, and 290 million light years thick.
The picture stemmed from data gathered by astrophysicists Andrea V. Maccio, Fabio Governato and Cathy Horellou. Their paper on dark energy flow in our cosmic neighborhood called the Local Group, which includes the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and a number of other smaller galaxies, was just submitted to the to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Researchers from Yale and Vanderbilt Universities argue that biologists and neuroscientists should be involved in drafting new laws. "Laws and public policy will often miss their mark until they incorporate an understanding of why, biologically, humans behave as they do," they said
Vanderbilt law professor and biologist Owen Jones said that "the legal system tends to assume that either people are purely rational actors or that their brains are blank slates on which culture and only culture is written. The reality is much more complicated and can only be appreciated with a deeper understanding of behavioral biology."
Writing in a paper published in the current issue of the Columbia Law Review, the researchers said that "legislators and legal scholars have traditionally relied heavily on the social sciences, such as economics, psychology and political science, often responding to the popular or political trends of their time. They have rarely looked to incorporate the latest findings from fields such as biology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, which...have shed brand new light on how the human brain is structured and how it influences behavior."

Two American researchers have dug up evidence that life's diversity on Earth gets periodically wiped out "in mysterious cycles of 62 million years for which science has no satisfactory explanation."
Physicists Richard Muller and Robert Rohde working at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have analyzed the fossils of 36,380 marine animals living over the past 542 million years. They discovered the cycle by creating an extensive computer database and analyzing the various genera. "What we're seeing is a real and very strong signal that the history of life on our planet has been shaped by a 62 million year cycle, but nothing in present evolutionary theory accounts for it," said Muller.
The researchers speculate that either periodic asteroid showers or cataclysmic volcanic eruptions may be behind the cyclical mass death. "My hunch, far from proven," Rohde said," is that every 62 million years the earth is releasing a burst of heat in the form of a plume formation event, and that when those plumes reach the surface they result in a major episode of flood volcanism. Such volcanism certainly has the potential to cause extinctions, but, right now there isn't enough geologic evidence to know whether flood basalts or plumes have been recurring at the right frequency."
Muller suspects comets. They "could be perturbed from the Oort cloud by the periodic passage of the solar system through molecular clouds, Galactic arms, or some other structure with strong gravitational influence," he said. "But there is no evidence even suggesting that such a structure exists."
Their report appears in the current issue of Nature

Chemists at the University of Wisconsin in Madison are working on miniscule chemical warfare agents that can disrupt communication between bacteria and prevent disease outbreak.
The scientists said their goal was to thwart the rise of "bacterial mobs," more mundanely known as biofilms. Such dangerous bug colonies thrive in hospitals and are sometimes resistant to the most powerful antibiotics. They can cause many lethal infections, like attacking the lungs of post-op cystic fibrosis patients, even crop up on sterilized medical implants.
The scientists said the bug mobs "have long baffled doctors because of their stupefying capacity to behave like a 'super-organism' that vetoes the normal characteristics of a bacterial cell in favor of new group behaviors." Said team member Helen Blackwell: "It's amazing that such simple organisms as bacteria can form these super-colonies that work together in such sophisticated ways."
Trying to outsmart the bugs, the scientists learned that germs sense each other and the overall density of their colony "by continuously exchanging small molecules [called acylated homoserine lactones] and peptides - a process known as quorum sensing. Past a certain density threshold, the colonies unite to initiate group behaviors, such as biofilm formation." Hence the researchers started working on chemicals to disrupt the communication and hijack the mob by piping in their own commands. "We want to design molecules to confuse bacteria so they can't sense their neighbors," says Blackwell, "but some types of quorum sensing are beneficial, so we are simultaneously searching for compounds that selectively turn on group behaviors."
The findings have been presented today at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society held in San Diego.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope say they've measured how fat a star can get. Studying the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way galaxy, the Arches cluster, they determined that stars can't get any larger than about 150 times the mass of our Sun, or 150 solar masses. That's a barely bare bones image of the burning behemoths they expected to find
"Standard theories predict 20 to 30 stars in the Arches cluster with masses between 130 and 1,000 solar masses, but we found none" said Donald F. Figer of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. "If they had formed, we would have seen them."
The discovery that stars have a weight limit offers an important to clue to how stars form, burn and die. "Even with the advances in technology, astronomers do not know enough about the details of the star-formation process to determine an upper-mass limit for stars," said Figer.
Astronomers have been debating for at least a century how large a star can get before it blows itself apart. Stars are cosmic foundries forging hydrogen into heavier atoms like carbon, oxygen, iron and all the rest of the elements that make people, dogs, trees and the rest the the visible universe. The elements scatter through space when stars go supernova in a cataclysmic explosion.
Figer spent seven years studying the Archer cluster. His paper appears in the current issue of Nature.

The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a series of pictures of a small galaxy laden with newborn stars that is being ripped to pieces by a gang of bigger peers. The galaxy NGC 1427A, which is 62 million light years away, strayed too close to a group of large galaxies in the Fornax cluster. The galaxy is being pulled by the gang's gravity, plunging headlong into the Fornax group at 400 miles per second.
Hubble astronomers said that NGC 1427A will not "survive long as an identifiable galaxy. Within the next billion years, it will be completely disrupted, spilling its stars and remaining gas into intergalactic space."

Two adjacent volcanoes blew off nearly simultaneously on the Russian peninsula Kamchatka earlier this year. The freak incident was caught on camera by the European Space Agency's Envisat MERIS satellite on March 7. One of the volcanoes, Kliuchevskoi, is Kamchatka's highest, towering 4,835 meters. It's comparable in size to Washington's Mt. Rainier. The other volcano, Sheveluch, is 3282 meters high. Kamchatka is one of the world's most volcanically active regions. Some 60 volcanoes are located in the vicinity.

Biochemists at the University of California, Los Angeles have unlocked the structure of telomerase, the enzyme that's been called the "biochemical elixir of youth and immortality," but which also fuels the malignant growth of cancer cells.
This is a big deal since telomerase has been so hard to find in human cells that some scientists referred to it as "that mythical enzyme."
Here's what it does: Each set of chromosomes is framed by a protective cap of DNA called a telomere. Telomeres make sure that when cells divide, no meaningful DNA sequence gets left out. But telomeres are also resposinble for shutting down old cells, i.e. aging. Like slow-burning blasting fuses, they shorten each time a cell divides. Once a telomere runs out, the cell shuts down and dies. Along with it die potentially cancerous mutations the cell accumulated with old age. But telomerase reverses this process. The enzyme restores the length of the caps and makes cells effectively immortal.
It sounds great but it's quite dangerous. That's why telomerase is turned off in the vast majority of cells in the body. It's only active in the developing embryo, germ cells, and cancer cells.
During cancer, active telomerase stokes malignant multiplication of cells and the growth of tumors. Understanding the chemical structure of telomerase and how to turn it off could launch development of new cancer drugs. "Knowledge of the structure should provide insights into how telomerase works," said Juli Feigon, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA, who led the research group. "Knowing the structure also will allow the pursuit of rational, structure-based drug design, and is a critical first step. The structure provides a potential target for drug intervention."
Feigon's findings were published in the March 4 issue of the Molecular Cell journal.

Pictures of the Earth never fail to amaze. Enjoy the latest set snapped in stylish black and white by the Rosetta spacecraft as it swung by us on March 4. The Rosetta took the pictures from 1,200 miles away as it was leaving towards a rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The date will not take place until 2014, though.
In the meantime, Rosetta is using the Earth and Mars as gravitational slings to push itself on.
The Rosetta launched in 2004. The European Space Agency built it for long-term close-range comet exploration. The Rosetta carries a large orbiter, which is designed to operate for a decade at large distances from the Sun, and a small lander.

Here's the theory behind the start of the solar system. In the beginning, some 6 billion years ago, there was blinding light from a nearby supernova. Shockwaves from explosion stirred a large cloud of interstellar gas. The gas collapsed at the cloud's center, igniting the precursor of our Sun (see below Wee Star Found.) Turbulence within the gas cloud gave birth to mile-wide clumps of micron-sized dust, which later grew into planets.
Here's the problem with the scenario. When scientist tried to recreate those conditions, the dust particles bounced "like two billiards balls smacked together." The protoplanets should have never formed.
Now physicists from the U.S. Department of Energy say found an answer to the enigma. The baby planets were held together by cosmic glue made of miniscule grains of sticky ice. Writing the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal, the scientists say that the dust was "encrusted with molecularly gluey ice" that enabled planets to "bulk up like dirty snowballs quickly enough to overcome the scattering force of solar winds."
James Cowin of the DOE's Pacific Northwest National Lab and leader of the team said that "this ice [was] very different from the stuff we chip off our windows in winter." At extremely low temperatures, between 5-100 Kelvin, the ice spontaneously becomes electrically polarized, pulling the grains together like little bar magnets.
At such low temperatures the ice grains become "fluffy," forming tiny "billiard balls made of Rice Krispies" that barely bounce. Such colliding snowballs would have enough electrical force to stop them from crumbling, as well as enough cushioning to survive the crashes and grow into large lumps, Cowin said.
Today, vestiges of this icy conception remain inside planets like Jupiter, comets, and the far reaches of the solar system.
Cowin "speculates" that similar forces might have been at work during the infancy of hotter inner planets like the Earth, involving silicate dust grains instead of ice.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have created a powerful computer program that simulates how matter falls into a black hole. They expected smooth and quiet demise of matter as it nears the hole's event horizon, the point of no return where Newtonian laws of gravity break down. Instead, the simulation, which the scientists posted on the internet, shows the falling matter flaring violently like a seething Mandelbrot set.
"Life in the vicinity of a black hole is anything but calm and quiet," the scientists said. "The relativistic effects that force matter to plunge inward ... create violent disturbances in density, velocity and magnetic field strength, driving waves of matter and magnetic field to and fro. While most of the matter moves inward toward the black hole, some is thrown away, spiraling outward at nearly the speed of light."

Michael Antle, neuroscientist at the University of Calgary, has found the body's clockwork. The timepiece, called the human circadian clock, is located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the brain. Reporting in the current issue of the Trends in Neurosciences journal, Antle said the clock is a tiny tangle of 20,000 time-keeping neurons no bigger than "half the size of pencil eraser." Antle said that the cells are organized "in a complex network of groups," each performing a different function, like a distributed computer network.
The circadian clock tells us when to go to bed, when to wake up, and is responsible for jet lags.
Antle said he will next try to reset the clock by changing levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin. But he cautioned that we were "probably still at least 10 years away from developing a pill that could reset the brain clock to eliminate jet lag, but this new perspective in how the cells are organized definitely improves our understanding."
All terrestrial organisms, even single-celled organisms, have circadian rhythms. Antle says that for every hour of time change a person experiences it takes about a day to fully adjust.

Scientists from the European Space Agency and NASA observed for the first time a stellar embryo in a collapsing cloud of hydrogen gas. They said that that the images were "analogous to a baby's first ultrasound."
Using the ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, they said that the object, some 500 light years from Earth in the R Corona Australis star-forming region, is a frigid embryonic star, called a Class 0 protostar. Class 0 protostar is just 10 000 to 100 000 years old. The stellar weather inside the cloud is freezing 33 K (-240 C).
But here's the riddle. The team said that the cloud was too cold to produce X-rays and that "matter [was] falling toward the protostar core 10 times faster than expected from gravity alone." According to accepted models, it takes millions years and a lot of hot dense hydrogen gas to fire up a new star and start belching X-rays.
The scientists now believe that the X-ray bursts were caused by magnetic fields, which "in the spinning protostar core accelerate infalling matter to high speeds, producing high temperatures and X-rays in the process. These X- rays can penetrate the dusty region to reveal the core."

A decade ago, the spottings of new planets outside our solar system made front-page news. But as more and more orbs started popping out in the sky, their visibility to the general public dimmed.
The planet hunt is still on, though. Big time. Just this year, astronomers have already discovered 11 planets. In total, we've found 152 planets and 134 planetary systems with one or more planets. One planet, called TrES-1b might even have rings like our neighbor Saturn.
Some stargazers have started searching for habitable planets, which are defined as having a temperature of about 300K to allow for liquid water.
Many of the observations have been made by amateur astronomers with backyard telescopes. For a complete tally, and planet detection methods check out the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia.

The Geological Society of London have told the British Government that catastrophic volcanic eruptions "might threaten global civilzation." It said that such eruption, hundreds times larger than Krakatoa, would cause damage comparable to the impact of a 1 kilometer asteroid, but is 5 to 10 times more likely. "Such eruptions are quite frequent on a 'geological' timescale, although not one has occurred on Earth in the short time that an interdependent human civilisation has existed," the society said. "There may be several super-eruptions large enough to cause a global disaster every 100,000 years. This means super-eruptions are a significant global humanitarian hazard. They occur more frequently than impacts of asteroids and comets of comparable damage potential."
Prof. Steve Sparks of the University of Bristol, co-lead author of the report, said: "Several of the largest volcanic eruptions of the last few hundred years, such as Tambora (1815), Krakatoa (1883) and Pinatubo (1991) have caused major climatic anomalies in the two to three years after the eruption by creating a cloud of sulphuric acid droplets in the upper atmosphere. These droplets reflect and absorb sunlight, and absorb heat from the Earth - warming the upper atmosphere and cooling the lower atmosphere. The global climate system is disturbed, resulting in pronounced, anomalous warming and cooling of different parts of the Earth at different times."
The detailed report is still under embargo. But last month, American scientists reported that huge volcanic eruptions in Siberia some 250 million years ago may have caused mass extinction of plants and animals.

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have watched the most distant object in the known Universe. The object is a remote cluster of galaxies that weigh as much as several thousand galaxies like our own Milky Way. It hovers 9 billion light years away. That's 500 million light years farther out than the previous record holding cluster.
The cluster must have formed when the Universe was less than one third of its present age, just 4.7 billion years after the big bang. (The Universe is thought to be 13,7 billion years old.)
The discovery of such a complex and mature structure so early in the history of the Universe is "highly surprising," the scientists said. "Until recently it would even have been deemed impossible."
Clusters of galaxies are gigantic structures containing hundreds to thousands of galaxies. They are the fundamental building blocks of the Universe. They give us clues about the underlying architecture of the Universe as a whole. (Our Milky Way galaxy, for example, belongs to the Virgo supercluster.)
"We seem to have underestimated how quickly the early Universe matured into its present-day state," said Piero Rosati, a member of the ESO team. "The Universe did grow up fast!"

Emmanuel Knill from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology has come up with a way to eliminate errors from quantum computers. Such supercomputers are the holy grail of everyone hobbled by inadequate computer speed. But prototypes have been woefully unrealiable. Knill's solution could make such machines work.
Ordinary computers use millions of transistors on a chip to perform mathematical and logical operations. The transistors talk to each other in words, or bits, of binary code, switching on and off to telegraph 0s and 1s. Quantum computers would use properties of individual atoms, such as their spin and magnetic properties, to do the same and compute at untold speeds. A quantum binary word is called a qubit.
But there's a hitch. Qubits are very prone to outside electronic noise and can easily get garbled. Knill's solved the problem by building a pyramid-style hierarchy of qubits, and teleportation of data at key intervals to continuously double-check the accuracy of qubit values. That's right, teleportation. It's one of the many odd behaviors permited on the atomic scale level by the laws of quantum mechanics. Last year, NIST physicists showed that teleporting works. They transferred key properties of one atom to another atom without using a physical link.
"There has been a tremendous gap between theory and experiment in quantum computing," Knill says. "It is as if we were designing today's supercomputers in the era of vacuum tube computing, before the invention of transistors. This work reduces the gap, showing that building quantum computers may be easier than we thought. However, it will still take a lot of work to build a useful quantum computer."