Oct 29, 2006 - Something scary appears to be slithering across the plane of our Milky Way galaxy in this new Halloween image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The snake-like object is actually the core of a thick, sooty cloud large enough to swallow dozens of solar systems. In fact, astronomers say its "belly" may be harboring beastly stars in the process of forming. "The snake is an ideal place to hunt for massive forming stars as they have not had time to heat up and destroy the cloud they are born in," said Dr. Sean Carey, also known as "Dr. Scarey," of NASA's Spitzer Science Center. Dr. Scarey.  Spitzer was able to spot the sinuous cloud using its heat-seeking infrared vision. The object is hiding in the dusty plane of our Milky Way galaxy, invisible to optical telescopes. Because its heat, or infrared light, can sneak through the dust, it first showed up in infrared images from past missions.

Oct 26, 2006 - Using 3D models run on some of the fastest computers in the world, Laboratory physicists have created a mathematical code that cracks a mystery surrounding stellar evolution.  For years, physicists have theorized that low-mass stars (about one to two times the size of our sun) produce great amounts of helium 3 (³He). When they exhaust the hydrogen in their cores to become red giants, most of their makeup is ejected, substantially enriching the universe in this light isotope of helium. This enrichment conflicts with the Big Bang predictions. Scientists theorized that stars destroy this ³He by assuming that nearly all stars were rapidly rotating, but even this failed to bring the evolution results into agreement with the Big Bang. Now, by modeling a red giant with a fully 3D hydrodynamic code, LLNL researchers identified the mechanism of how and where low-mass stars destroy the ³He that they produce during evolution. 

Oct 29, 2006 - A seven year study with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with the best observational evidence yet that globular clusters sort out stars according to their mass, governed by a gravitational billiard ball game between stars. Heavier stars slow down and sink to the cluster’s core, while lighter stars pick up speed and move across the cluster to its periphery. This process, called “mass segregation”, has long been suspected for globular star clusters, but has never before been directly seen in action. Imagine trying to understand how a football game works based on just a few fuzzy snapshots of the game in play. This is the just the kind of challenge faced by astronomers trying to understand the dynamics of the swarm of stars in the globular star clusters that orbit our Milky Way Galaxy.

Oct 26, 2006 - Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have recently identified two quasars, or supermassive black holes, that may be on the verge of a colossal cosmic "belch."  Scientists have long suspected that when galaxies collide, the supermassive black holes that reside within them gorge on a magnificent "buffet" of dust, gas, and stars. The cosmic feast is provided by violent episodes of star formation triggered in the great galactic clash. Most telescopes cannot detect these feasting black holes because dense clouds of dust and gas kicked up in the galactic collision shroud the objects from view. However, at some point astronomers suspect that these celestial gluttons do get "full." Once this happens, scientists believe that the black holes let out an enormous belch of energy, strong enough to destroy much of its obscuring surrounding material.

Nov 03, 2006 - With the aid of complex computer simulations, scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam and at the University of Heidelberg have discovered how the shape and distribution of certain sticky areas on the cell affect its adhesion in blood vessels. According to this research, neither the number nor the size of these adhesive areas are the most important parameters; the most crucial factor is how far they extend from the cell surface. White blood corpuscles and red blood cells infected with malaria are seen to use this spiky hedgehog-like structure for their adhesion strategy (Physical Review Letters, 28. September 2006). Blood is the universal means with which different types of cells are transported in our bodies. Its movement is determined by hydrodynamic forces. The cells anchor themselves to the walls of the blood vessels in the target tissue with the aid of special adhesive molecules, which are also called receptors. In many cases these receptors are grouped in the cell surface in nanometer-sized patches. The adhesion process is based on the key and lock principle: as a rule, an adhesion molecule only bonds with specific partners.

Nov 08, 2006 - Current climate change impact models that consider only one weather variable, such as increasing temperature, sometimes spawn unsubstantiated doomsday predictions, according to researchers at Purdue and North Carolina universities. Climate change studies that assess the full range of interactions among temperature, radiation, precipitation and land use can better aid humans to prepare for extreme shifts in weather patterns, the scientists report in a special issue of the journal Global and Planetary Change. Climate change impact models often don't consider whether shifting weather will allow for sustainable agriculture, said Dev Niyogi, corresponding author of the journal article and Purdue agronomy, and earth and atmospheric sciences assistant professor. Niyogi's team looked at weather factor interactions and their impact on two different crop plants by using data for weather and field conditions that occurred in a year considered normal for the test area.

Nov 08, 2006 - Australia's blistering summer has only just begun but reservoir levels are dropping fast, crop forecasts have been slashed, and great swaths of the continent are entering what scientists yesterday called a "one in a thousand years drought". With many regions in their fifth year of drought, the government yesterday called an emergency water summit in Canberra. The meeting between the prime minister, John Howard, and the leaders of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Queensland was told that more than half of Australia's farmland was experiencing drought. David Dreverman, head of the Murray-Darling river basin commission, said: "This is more typical of a one in a 1,000-year drought, or possibly even drier, than it is of a one in 100-year event." He added that the Murray-Darling river system, which receives 4% of Australia's water, but provides three-quarters of the water consumed nationally, was already 54% below the previous record minimum.

Nov 06, 2006 - Civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has threatened the existence of wild bonobos, while new research on the hypersexual primates challenges their peace-loving reputation. Led by five trackers from the Mongandu tribe, I tread through a remote rain forest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the trail of the bonobo, one of the world's most astonishing creatures. Along with the chimpanzee, it's our closest relative, with whom we share almost 99 percent of our genes. The last of the great apes to be discovered, it could be the first to become extinct in the wild: in the past few decades, bonobo habitat has been overrun by soldiers, and the apes have been slaughtered for food. Most estimates put the number of bonobos left in the wild at less than 20,000. As the narrow trail plunges into a gloomy, rain-soaked tunnel through tall trees, Leonard, the head tracker, picks up a fallen leaf and brings it to his nose.

Nov 02 , 2006 - Ten years ago, science journalist John Horgan published a provocative book suggesting that scientists had solved most of the universe's major mysteries. The outcry was loud and immediate. Given the tremendous advances since then, Discover invited Horgan to revisit his argument and seek out the greatest advances yet to come.  One of my most memorable moments as a journalist occurred in December 1996, when I attended the Nobel Prize festivities in Stockholm. During a 1,300-person white-tie banquet presided over by Sweden's king and queen, David Lee of Cornell University, who shared that year's physics prize, decried the "doomsayers" claiming that science is ending. Reports of science's death "are greatly exaggerated," he said. Lee was alluding to my book, The End of Science, released earlier that year. In it, I made the case that science—especially pure science, the grand quest to understand the universe and our place in it—might be reaching a cul-de-sac, yielding "no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns."