Hubble has probed a clutch of monster stars about 170,000 light-years away on the edge of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Some two dozen behemoths were identified, all with masses in excess of a hundred times that of the Sun.
Four were known previously, including the remarkable colossus catalogued as R136a1, which is 250 times as massive as our home star.

But the new survey finds many more of the super-objects in a tight patch of sky within the Large Magellanic Cloud.

“In just a tiny bit of this satellite galaxy, we see perhaps a couple of dozen stars with more than a 100 solar masses, of which nine are in a tight core just a few light-years across,” explained Prof Paul Crowther from Sheffield University, UK.

The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave—what astronomers call the “shock breakout”—has been captured for the first time in the optical wavelength or visible light by NASA’s planet-hunter, the Kepler space telescope.

An international science team led by Peter Garnavich, an astrophysics professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, analyzed light captured by Kepler every 30 minutes over a three-year period from 500 distant galaxies, searching some 50 trillion stars. They were hunting for signs of massive stellar death explosions known as supernovae. 

In 2011, two of these massive stars, called red supergiants, exploded while in Kepler’s view. The first behemoth, KSN 2011a, is nearly 300 times the size of our sun and a mere 700 million light years from Earth. The second, KSN 2011d, is roughly 500 times the size of our sun and around 1.2 billion light years away.

“To put their size into perspective, Earth’s orbit about our sun would fit comfortably within these colossal stars,” said Garnavich.

It is generally reported by ecologists and the climate science camp that there has been a dangerous decline in the species of krill known as Euphausia Superba over the past few decades and the cause is the melting ice of Antarctica by global warming.  The Krill sometimes feed on the underside of ice. A simple picture, less sea ice from the predicted global warming and there is less Krill.

The story took hold and the media focus on ice loss in West Antarctica on the tip of the Peninsula as evidence of disruption of their habitat. This area has apparently seen some warming but it is only a small percentage of Antarctica.  

So is the overall pattern the same? If a decrease in sea ice disturbs their habitat and feeding leading to a decline then it follows that an increase in sea ice will improve their habitat and feeding regime and mitigate any decline, possibly even increasing their biomass.

In a 2006 research paper “Antarctic Temperature and Sea Ice Trends over the past Century: An assessment of Antarctic Climate Data” by George Taylor, the results are that sea ice has been increasing and the temperature falling. 

Top scientists at Roche Holding AG and AstraZeneca Plc are sizing up potential allies in the fight against cancer: the trillions of bacteria that live in the human body.

“Five years ago, if you had asked me about bacteria in your gut playing an important role in your systemic immune response, I probably would have laughed it off,” Daniel Chen, head of cancer immunotherapy research at Roche’s Genentech division, said in a phone interview. “Most of us immunologists now believe that there really is an important interaction there.” 

Two recent studies published in the journal Science have intrigued Chen and others who are developing medicines called immunotherapies that stimulate the body’s ability to fight tumors.

In November, University of Chicago researchers wrote that giving mice Bifidobacterium, which normally resides in the gastrointestinal tract, was as effective as an immunotherapy in controlling the growth of skin cancer. Combining the two practically eliminated tumor growth. In the second study, scientists in France found that some bacterial species activated a response to immunotherapy, which didn’t occur without the microbes.

Human Microbiome

That’s increased drugmakers’ interest in the human microbiome — the universe of roughly 100 trillion good and bad bacteria, fungi and viruses that live on and inside the body. Roche is already undertaking basic research in the field and plans to investigate the microbiome’s potential for cancer treatment, Chen said.

“Certainly, we are already scanning the space for interesting opportunities as the science continues to emerge,” he said. “We are very interested in testing these in a controlled setting.”

When will the governments (and their all too numerous “useful idiots” of the media) state the unadulterated truth to the people?

Carbon (like in wood, coal, oil, natural gas) is an energy source—not a “pollutant”

Presumably, any government has the right to levy a tax on anything they want. In that sense, a tax on “carbon” or any energy source would be no different than a tax on food or clothing; it’s all coming out of your pocket. However, the right to levy taxes does not give government a right to call “carbon” (by their interpretation really meaning “carbon dioxide”) as a form of “pollution.”

NO, carbon dioxide is NOT pollution, none whatsoever!

YES, carbon dioxide is a VITAL constituent of the atmosphere!

Carbon Tax

Whether Canada’s recently elected Prime Minister or any of the country’s provincial premiers think that a “carbon tax” is a good thing or not is all irrelevant. Governments always have the option to place levies and taxes on anything they choose. Whether the people they claim to represent and work for will find such charges acceptable or not can be gauged on the outcome of the next general election.

One thing that I cannot excuse, however, is for any government that claims to live by common standards of communication and honesty, to fail in providing facts and truthful information to its citizenry. And, quite frankly, IMHO, the previous government of this great country of Canada had seven years’ time to set the record straight but missed the opportunity. They had all the resources necessary to educate the citizenry to respect the country’s reliance on natural resources and feel good about our “carbon.”

Yes, dear government, you have the right to tax the hell out of us poor schmucks but you do not-I repeat, you do not – have the right to tell us lies, neither about “carbon pollution” nor anything else!

Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser — Bio and Archives

There is a novel device to come to your kitchen counter: the “Unboil-the-Egg” machine. This Vortex Fuidic Device: VFD can slice carbon nanotubes into precise length, when combined with water, a solvent and lasers.

What, you think you need that like a hole in your head? Even with the knowledge that “Professor Colin Raston from Adelaide’s Flinders University invented the vortex fluidic device (VFD) after a[n] eureka moment on a trans-Pacific flight?” 

I surmise that everyone needs at least one of those things, whatever they are. The good professor explains it in more detail: “the VFD can slice carbon nanotubes into precise length, when combined with water, a solvent and lasers”—no doubt, a revolutionary invention.

Nanotubes

As you well know, nanotubes and anything else “nano-“prefixed has been of great interest in recent times. So has everything else that’s getting smaller and/or more powerful. Just look at the miniaturizing of electronic storage capacity. In the 1970s, when I bought one of the first personal computers at the research institute where I worked, an external hard drive with 20 MEGA-B storage capacity cost $6,000. Now, you get 10 million times that storage capacity on a miniscule thumb drive for less than $10.

The nanotubes are just another modern invention. Basically, they are small, really small, i.e. molecule-sized tubes that have (at least potentially) a multitude of applications, from medicines to electronics. In this instance, the critical term is “vortex.”

Climate scientist Daniel Alongi has been indicted by the Australian government on charges of defrauding taxpayers out of $556,000 in false expenses since 2008.

Alongi has already admitted to creating false invoices, credit card statements, and e-mails to cover his misappropriation of funds. 

Alongi’s indictment raises serious questions concerning the credibility of his research. During the period of Alongi’s alleged fraud, his research focusing on the impact of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef, coastal mangroves, and coastal ecosystems was published in numerous national and international journals.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts said in a post on his popular climate website Watts Up With That he’s concerned Alongi may have falsified scientific findings to justify his expenses. Alongi has published 140 scientific publications and his work has been cited 5,861 times by other researchers.

“If Alongi falsely claimed to have spent half a million dollars on radioisotope testing, it would look pretty strange if he didn’t produce any false test results, to justify the expenditure of all that money,” wrote Watts. 

A newly discovered Anglo-Saxon settlement in England is surrounded by dry land today, but once was an island oasis amidst marshland. And at least some of its inhabitants were literate.

The long-ago island was inhabited continuously between at least A.D. 680 and A.D. 850, during the Middle Anglo-Saxon era, archaeologists from the University of Sheffield report in the April 2016 issue of Current Archaeology. Among the tantalizing discoveries in the area were 16 silver styluses for writing and a tablet inscribed with the female name “Cudberg” — perhaps a coffin plaque for a long-ago resident. 

The site is in Lincolnshire parish near the village of Little Carlton, an area of grassy fields, marshes and small forests. The first hint that something intriguing might be buried in this bucolic setting came in 2011, when a metal detector hobbyist named Graham Vickers discovered a silver writing stylus featuring decorative carvings.

A moment with Google will reveal all kinds of cranks offering “free” energy from quantum “zero-point” phenomena, but it’s a real thing with real effects.

At the tiniest scales, quanta vibrate, even at their lowest energy. If all motion ceased, an observer would be able to breach uncertainty theory. 

Now, National Institute for Science an Technology (NIST) boffins reckons zero-point motion could help do for temperature what silicon spheres will do for weight: tie a measurement to a fundamental property of the universe.

So far, NIST says it’s only carried out a demonstration of the technique, and currently it’s only accurate to a few percentage points.

But you have to start somewhere, and here’s where NIST has started: the researchers used a laser to observe a nanoscale beam of silicon nitride.

To see these picometre vibrations, the beam has a reflective cavity; the vibrations cause small changes in colour of the reflected light.

The day that heart transplant patients no longer need to wait for a donor match just got a little closer. Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital have successfully grown functional heart tissue from stem cells created from skin cells. Their paper has been published in the journal Circulation Research.

The team’s technique potentially allows heart tissue to be built with the patient’s own cellular material, which reduces the need for an exact donor match, and also vastly lowers the chance of immunorejection.

It’s not possible to simply grow an entire heart from cells. Organs require a scaffold to give the cells a shape. In the normal course of things, this scaffold, known as an extracellular matrix, is created from proteins secreted by the cells. 

“Generating functional cardiac tissue involves meeting several challenges,” lead author Jacques Guyette said in a statement.

“These include providing a structural scaffold that is able to support cardiac function, a supply of specialised cardiac cells, and a supportive environment in which cells can repopulate the scaffold to form mature tissue capable of handling complex cardiac functions.”

Scientists believe they are now a step closer to an answer after the discovery of a series of underwater craters at the bottom of the Barents Sea, off the coast of Norway.

While it’s not close to the Bermuda Triangle, which stretches from Florida to Puerto Rico and the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda, it’s hoped the craters are the key to finally explaining the baffling phenomenon.

The craters, which measure up to 800m wide and 45m deep, are believed to have been created by methane building up in sediments on the sea-floor of the gas-rich Norway coast. They then leak, “popping” through the sea bed and into the water above.

Silicon photonics is one of the industry’s hottest research fields, because it holds out the promise of accelerating on-chip communications without the extra heat that faster copper-based comms generate.

One of the big challenges is fabrication, and that’s the subject of research announced by University College London, Cardiff University, the University of Sheffield and the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). 

The group reckons they’ve cracked one of the big fabrication challenges: growing a 1,300-nanometre quantum dot laser directly on a silicon substrate.

The key characteristics of the device, according to this UCL press release, are that it can stand high temperatures (operating at up to 120°C (248°F)) but works with a low threshold current.

ABSTRACT: In any meaningful thermodynamic discussion it is necessary at the outset to clearly define the parameters of the “system” under study.  One of those parameters is whether or not the system is “closed”.

The typical explanation of the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis pulls a slight of hand in this regard in that it starts out describing the thermodynamics of one “system” with an emphasis on the first law of TD, but then switches twice midstream to different “systems” altogether and asserts that the thermodynamics of the second and third systems mirror the thermodynamics of the first system.

If you are already confused you are not alone. The “greenhouse effect” hypothesis is itself very confused. Let’s explore.

First system

The first system is the Earth/atmosphere ensemble, whose “boundary” is space and whose two thermal energy sources are 1) incoming sunlight and 2) internal nuclear decay.

This is, indeed, a “closed” system in that for all practical purposes there is no movement of matter into or out of the system that would carry thermal energy with it into or out of the system.  (For the sake of this discussion we will neglect the energy added to the system by meteors and lost from the system by the outer atmosphere as it continually loses molecules blown out into space by the solar wind.)

In this system the thermal energy that crosses the “boundary” between the system and its surroundings is 100{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} electromagnetic. There is absorbed sunlight (insolation – albedo) in and long-waver IR radiation out. 

According to the first law of thermodynamics for this entire Earth/atmosphere ensemble system to be in thermal equilibrium the total energy contained within the sunlight absorbed must equal the total energy contained within the outgoing long-wave radiation.

Of the many questions that vex humanity, there is one above all others.  It’s a question we’ve been asking ourselves since we realised we could ask ourselves questions.  There are a lot of people who think they know the answer, even though there are almost more answers than there are people.  Even so, we officially don’t know which of those many answers is the truth. 

The question is; where did life come from?

If we gloss over the various theological discussions such a question evokes – if only because we haven’t got that kind of time – we still end up with an encyclopedia volume’s worth of theories, hypotheses, suppositions, and crackpot ideas.  Primordial soup, panspermia and pseudo-panspermia, deep-hot-biosphere, the clay hypothesis, and several more.  All of those ideas and those unlisted are encompassed under a single term: abiogenesis – which is the idea that life can spontaneously manifest out of non-living components.  You might also hear the termbiopoiesis tossed about in this conversation, which is just a more specific reference to the three stages of the development of life.  But these fancy scientific words are such a small part of the question, it’s unfortunate so many people get hung up on them.

Last week I wrote what has quickly become the most read piece of writing I have ever written. It told the tale of how one researcher — Alexandra Elbakyan — has made nearly every scientific paper ever published available for free online to anyone, anywhere in the world.

This is part two, but it’s OK; this is a story that, just like Star Wars, you can read backward. The moment I started working on this story last October I knew it was a huge story.  I knew it deserved to be read not just by the hundreds of thousands of people who are now reading and sharing it. I knew it deserved to be in newspapers around the world. 

Chinese scientists have used stem cells to regrow eye lenses and implanted the results in a dozen children.

The pioneering procedure developed at Sun Yat-sen University and the University of California means hope for some of the 20 million cataract suffers estimated to constitute half of all cases of blindness and a third of visual impairment around the world – most notably in adults in Africa and South America. 

Patients can presently receive artificial intra-ocular lenses to replace degraded lens that no longer focus light on the retina.

Operation success rates are high, at about 90 per cent, with minimal complications.