‘(PHYS.ORG, May 2, 2012) The surface grime that hides the beauty of an object. But this new image of Messier 78 and surroundings, which reveals the submillimetre-wavelength radiation from dust grains in space, shows that dust can be dazzling. Dust is important to astronomers as dense clouds of gas and dust are the birthplaces of new stars.

In the centre of the image is Messier 78, also known as NGC 2068. When seen in visible light, this region is a reflection nebula, meaning that we see the pale blue glow of starlight reflected from clouds of dust. The APEX observations are overlaid on the visible-light image in orange. Sensitive to longer wavelengths, they reveal the gentle glow of dense cold clumps of dust, some of which are even colder than -250ºC. In visible light, this dust is dark and obscuring, which is why telescopes such as APEX are so important for studying the dusty clouds in which stars are born…’

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“(BBC 30 April 2012) File-sharing site The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK internet service providers, the High Court has ruled.

The Swedish website hosts links to download mostly pirated free music and video.Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media must all prevent their users from accessing the site.

"Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists," the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said.

A sixth ISP, BT, requested "a few more weeks" to consider their position on blocking the site.

BPI's chief executive Geoff Taylor said: "The High Court has confirmed that The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale.

"Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works without paying a penny to the people who created them…”

-- Better stock up on those torrents!!! ;)

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“(BBC 2 May 2012) The European Space Agency (Esa) is to mount a billion-euro mission to Jupiter and its icy moons.

The probe, called Juice, has just been approved at a meeting of member state delegations in Paris.

It would be built in time for a launch in 2022, although it would be a further eight years before it reached the Jovian system.

The mission has emerged from a five-year-long competition to find the next "large class" space venture in Europe.

Juice stands for JUpiter ICy moon Explorer. The concept proposes an instrument-packed, nearly five-tonne satellite to be sent out to the Solar System's biggest planet, to make a careful investigation of three of its biggest moons.

The spacecraft would use the gravity of Jupiter to initiate a series of close fly-bys around Callisto and Europa, and then finally to put itself in a settled orbit around Ganymede…”

-- Europe is going to Jupiter! Should we be prepared for a certain broadcast that goes likes this, - "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS - EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE." ;)

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-- Love this!!! <3

-- This should have been the official video.

"(www.nature.com, Leila Haghighat, 18 April 2012) Three separate studies in mice show normal function can be restored to hair, eye and heart cells.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the promise of regenerating damaged tissue was so far-fetched that Thomas Hunt Morgan, despairing that his work on earthworms could ever be applied to humans, abandoned the field to study heredity instead. Though he won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for his work on the role of chromosomes in inheritance, if he lived today, the advances in regenerative medicine may have tempted him to reconsider.

Three studies published this week show that introducing new cells into mice can replace diseased cells - whether hair, eye or heart - and help to restore the normal function of those cells. These proof-of-principle studies now have researchers setting their sights on clinical trials to see if the procedures could work in humans.

'You can grow cells in a Petri dish, but that's not regenerative medicine,' says Robin Ali, a geneticist at University College London, who led the eye study. 'You have to think about the biology of repair in a living system.'

Sprouting hair

In work published in Nature Communications, Japanese researchers grew different types of hair on nude mice, using stem cells from normal mice and balding humans to recreate the follicles from which hair normally emerges1. Takashi Tsuji, a regenerative-medicine specialist at Tokyo University of Science who led the study, says that the technique holds promise for treating male pattern baldness.

The team used a specialized nylon sheath to guide the hair through the skin layers, enabling it to erupt from the skin of the mice in 94% of all grafts. The hairs took between 2 and 5 weeks to emerge, and behaved as normal: they underwent normal growth cycles and established connections to the muscles and nerves underneath the skin. The hairs also lifted up from the skin in response to acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter known to cause hairs to stand on end..."

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"(ScienceDaily Apr. 19, 2012) - The boundary between electronics and biology is blurring with the first detection by researchers at Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory of ferroelectric properties in an amino acid called glycine.

A multi-institutional research team led by Andrei Kholkin of the University of Aveiro, Portugal, used a combination of experiments and modeling to identify and explain the presence of ferroelectricity, a property where materials switch their polarization when an electric field is applied, in the simplest known amino acid -- glycine.

"The discovery of ferroelectricity opens new pathways to novel classes of bioelectronic logic and memory devices, where polarization switching is used to record and retrieve information in the form of ferroelectric domains," said coauthor and senior scientist at ORNL's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) Sergei Kalinin.

Although certain biological molecules like glycine are known to be piezoelectric, a phenomenon in which materials respond to pressure by producing electricity, ferroelectricity is relatively rare in the realm of biology. Thus, scientists are still unclear about the potential applications of ferroelectric biomaterials..."

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"(AP April 21, 2012) An unmanned hypersonic glider likely aborted its 13,000 mph flight over the Pacific Ocean last summer because unexpectedly large sections of its skin peeled off, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said Friday.

The Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., atop a rocket and released on Aug. 11, 2011, was part of research aimed at developing super-fast global strike capability for the Department of Defense.

The vehicle demonstrated stable aerodynamically controlled flight at speeds up to 20 times the speed of sound, or Mach 20, for three minutes before a series of upsets caused its autonomous flight safety system to bring it down in the ocean, DARPA said in a statement.

A gradual wearing away of the vehicle's skin was expected because of extremely high temperatures, but an independent engineering review board concluded that the most probable cause was "unexpected aeroshell degradation, creating multiple upsets of increasing severity that ultimately activated the Flight Safety System," the statement said..."

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"(www.space.com, 30 April 2012) Skywatchers take note: The biggest full moon of the year is due to arrive this weekend.The moon will officially become full Saturday (May 5) at 11:35 p.m. EDT. And because this month's full moon coincides with the moon's perigee — its closest approach to Earth — it will also be the year's biggest.The moon will swing in 221,802 miles (356,955 kilometers) from our planet, offering skywatchers a spectacular view of an extra-big, extra-bright moon, nicknamed a supermoon.And not only does the moon's perigee coincide with full moon this month, but this perigee will be the nearest to Earth of any this year, as the distance of the moon's close approach varies by about 3 percent, according to meteorologist Joe Rao, SPACE.com's skywatching columnist. This happens because the moon's orbit is not perfectly circular..."

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“(blogs.discovermagazine.com 2011.11.22.) We know that our species is unique, but it can be surprisingly hard to pinpoint what exactly makes us so. The fact that we have DNA is not much of a mark of distinction. Several million other species have it too. Hair sets us apart from plants and mushrooms and reptiles, but several thousand other mammals are hairy, too. Walking upright is certainly unusual, but it doesn’t sever us from the animal kingdom. Birds can walk on two legs, after all, and their dinosaur ancestors were walking bipedally 200 million years ago. Our own bipedalism–like much of the rest of our biology–has deep roots. Chimpanzees, whose ancestors diverged from our own some seven million years ago, can walk upright, at least for short distances.

If looking for human uniqueness on the outside is difficult, is it any easier to look on the inside–in particular, at our mental lives? There’s no doubt that our minds allow us to do things that even our great ape relatives cannot. For one thing, we can represent the world symbolically in our heads, and we can use words to communicate that symbolic thought to one another. Yet we can sometimes find surprising links between our own mental lives and those of other animals. We’re very good at making and using tools, but that doesn’t mean other animals can’t do so as well. Thinking about the future may seem like a quintessentially human activity, but there’s some evidence that some bird species can travel forward in time, too.

Yet even as scientists find more links between our own faculties and those of other animals, some continue to stand out. And their rugged distinctiveness makes them all the more interesting. One of the most distinctive of all is, to me at least, the most surprising: teaching.

If you’re a college student reading this during a lecture because your professor is boring you out of your mind, you may not consider teaching a very big deal. But when you consider everything that goes into one person teaching another, it’s a remarkable behavior. Consider what it takes for you to teach a child how to tie her laces, or write her name in cursive, or skip a stone. She has to watch you do the action and store a representation of that action in her brain. She also needs to listen to you, to understand why a twist of the fingers or the flick of a wrist is important to the procedure. You, the teacher, have to watch her try it, recognize when she gets it wrong, and explain how to do it right. Just as importantly, you have to help the child understand why learning a particular action matters–so that she won’t cut her foot, so that she could throw a stone across the pond, and so on…”

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-- Whoa! Love this one too. Though I still like the violin cover better.

“(Phys.org, April 30, 2012) -- There's no reprieve in sight for Australian letterboxes bombarded with junk mail, with new University of Sydney research showing that junk mail is enormously effective in boosting in-store sales.

Professor Charles Areni and Dr Rohan Miller, of the University's Discipline of Marketing, found that featuring products in mail catalogue advertising significantly increased sales compared to advertising on in-store radio, which plays in stores while customers shop.

"We see the signs 'No Junk Mail' everywhere," says Professor Areni, "so it seems people don't want all that advertising material stuffed into their mailboxes.

"However, while people may say they hate junk mail, somebody out there is having long look at it and planning their purchases around what they see."

Soon to be published in the Journal of Marketing Communications, the research varied the in-store radio advertising and mail circular advertising in 95 variety discount stores, measuring the sales results of products featured in the two advertising media.

"We alternated what products were advertised over the stores, varying products featured in the junk mail versus in-store radio ads," says Professor Areni…”

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“(phys.org, April 28, 2012) The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, is celebrating its 25th birthday this week. It first turned its dish to the heavens this week in 1987, and now, a quarter of a century later, the JCMT continues to lead the world in submillimetre astronomy.

With a diameter of 15m, the JCMT is the largest dish in the world dedicated to observing at submillimetre (sub-mm) wavelengths. Submillimetre light comes from the coldest and most distant material in the universe and has a wavelength 1000 times longer than visible light. Sub-mm emission traces everything from cold dust in the Milky Way, just a few degrees above absolute zero, to distant galaxies whose light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe.

The JCMT was one of the first sub-mm telescopes to be built and it has blazed the trail in this field. One of the reasons for this success is the series of increasingly sensitive instruments, built using state-of-the-art technology, which have been responsible for some key discoveries in astronomy. An early instrument called UKT14 revealed young stars at the very earliest stages of their formation, objects known as Class 0 protostars. This discovery was vital for understanding how stars form from clouds of gas and dust. The world's first sub-mm imaging camera, SCUBA, operated on the JCMT for 8 years and enabled the discovery of a previously unknown population of dusty galaxies, that became known as 'SCUBA galaxies', that fundamentally changed our understanding of galaxy evolution in the early universe. SCUBA also produced the first ever images of cold debris discs around nearby stars, which may indicate the presence of planetary systems. All of these diverse discoveries have led to major scientific advances…”

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-- Follow the "See Here" link or click on either of the images to see the rest or download in JPEG format in either full or Facebook sizes.

-- SPACE SHUTTLE ENTERPRISE Y U NO FLY OVER HUDSON AS PROMISED??? =( In any case here are some of the shots of the Enterprise piggybacking on top of its 747 carrier as it flies over Jersey City twice, 4/27/2012. -_-

Shot with Canon 5D II and my trusty old KOMZ Zenitar Jupiter-37A 135mm f/3.5 Lens (Pre-war tech, baby! ;D ). I wish I had at least a 200mm. I was pretty “out-gunned” there, but the guy next to me had a Canon's EF 80-200/2.8L, so I got his flickr user-name, JR_in_NYC, if you're interested, he just shared his photos, - JR_in_NYC's photos of Shuttle Enterprise arriving at NYC.

SEE HERE