"(Nat. Geo. July 5, 2012) There's a strange new brute on the celestial block—the middleweight black hole, a new study says.

After nearly three years of spying a superbright object nearly 300 million light-years away, astronomers with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and SWIFT telescope recently announced the discovery of HLX-1, the first representative of a new type of black hole.

Until recently, black holes were thought to come in only two sizes: Small stellar varieties that are several times heavier than our sun, and supermassive black holes that pack the gravitational punch of many million suns—large enough to swallow our entire solar system.

Notorious for ripping apart and swallowing stars, extra-large black holes live exclusively in the hearts of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

The new middleweight black hole is between these two types—equal to the matter of about 90,000 suns..."

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"(Phys.org July 6, 2012) The effect of spaceflight on a microscopic worm — Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) — could help it to live longer.

The discovery was made by an international group of scientists studying the loss of bone and muscle mass experienced by astronauts after extended flights in space. The results of this research have been published today, July 5 2012, in the online journal Scientific Reports.

Dr. Nathaniel Szewczyk, from The University of Nottingham, was part of the ICE-FIRST project which involved scientists from Japan, France, the US, and Canada. They discovered that spaceflight suppressed accumulation of toxic proteins that normally accumulate within aging muscle. They also discovered a group of genes that are expressed at lower levels during spaceflight. When the expression of these same genes were lowered in worms back on Earth the worms lived longer..."

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"(BBC July 4 2012) Cern scientists reporting at conferences in the UK and Geneva claim the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.

The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt to explain how matter attains its mass.

Both of the two Higgs-hunting experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have reached a level of certainty worthy of a "discovery".

More work will be needed to be certain that what they see is a Higgs, however.

The CMS team claimed they had seen a "bump" in their data corresponding to a particle weighing in at 125.3 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) - about 133 times heavier than the proton at the heart of every atom.

Indications are strong, but it remains to be seen whether the particle the team reports is in fact the Higgs - those answers will certainly not come on Wednesday.

The result announced at Cern, home of the LHC in Geneva, was met with applause.

The CMS team claimed that by combining two of its data sets, they had attained a confidence level just at the "five-sigma" point - about a one-in-3.5 million chance that the signal they see would appear if there were no Higgs particle.

However, a full combination of the CMS data brings that number just back to 4.9 sigma - a one-in-2 million chance..."

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"(phys.org July 2, 2012) A new method to isolate and grow the most dangerous cancer cells could enable new research into how cancer spreads and, ultimately, how to fight it. University of Illinois researchers and collaborators in China found that while a traditional culture of cancer cells has only a few capable of starting new tumors, a soft gel is capable of isolating tumor-repopulating cells and promoting the growth and multiplication of these cells in culture. The new culture technique could allow researchers to better study metastatic cancers.

The news a cancer patient most fears is that the disease has spread and become much more difficult to treat. A new method to isolate and grow the most dangerous cancer cells could enable new research into how cancer spreads and, ultimately, how to fight it.

University of Illinois researchers, in collaboration with scientists at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China, published their results in the journal Nature Materials.

"This may open the door for understanding and blocking metastatic colonization, the most devastating step in cancer progression," said Ning Wang, a professor of mechanical science and engineering who co-led the study..."

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"(Phys.org, July 2 2012) A favorite theme of science fiction is "the portal" -- an extraordinary opening in space or time that connects travelers to distant realms. A good portal is a shortcut, a guide, a door into the unknown. If only they actually existed...

It turns out that they do, sort of, and a NASA-funded researcher at the University of Iowa has figured out how to find them.

"We call them X-points or electron diffusion regions," explains plasma physicist Jack Scudder of the University of Iowa. "They're places where the magnetic field of Earth connects to the magnetic field of the Sun, creating an uninterrupted path leading from our own planet to the sun's atmosphere 93 million miles away."

Observations by NASA's THEMIS spacecraft and Europe's Cluster probes suggest that these magnetic portals open and close dozens of times each day. They're typically located a few tens of thousands of kilometers from Earth where the geomagnetic field meets the onrushing solar wind. Most portals are small and short-lived; others are yawning, vast, and sustained. Tons of energetic particles can flow through the openings, heating Earth's upper atmosphere, sparking geomagnetic storms, and igniting bright polar auroras..."

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"(BBC 7/2/2012) Hints of the Higgs boson detected last year by a US "atom smasher" have become even stronger, scientists have said.

The news comes amid fevered speculation about an announcement by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider on Wednesday.

Finding the particle would fill a glaring hole in the widely accepted theory of how the Universe works.

This 30-year hunt is reaching an end, with experts confident they will soon be able to make a definitive statement about the particle's existence.

The latest findings have come from analysis of data gathered by the US Tevatron particle accelerator, which was shut down at the end of last year.

Researchers squeezed the last information out of hundreds of trillions of collisions produced by the Tevatron - which was based at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois - since March 2001.

The latest findings have come from analysis of data gathered by the US Tevatron particle accelerator, which was shut down at the end of last year.

Researchers squeezed the last information out of hundreds of trillions of collisions produced by the Tevatron - which was based at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois - since March 2001..."

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"(news.discovery.com June 15, 2012) When NASA sent its Apollo astronauts to the moon, it sent them with "cheat sheets" -- wrist checklists attached to their suits that outlined the main stages of surface activities for each extravehicular activity (EVA).

But like all flight hardware, crews didn't train with their real checklists; they trained with a copy and only signed off on the unassembled flight version. Assembling the checklist fell to the backup crew, and also gave them a great opportunity to sneak practical jokes into the mission.

Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, and Al Worden were the Apollo 12 backup crew supporting Pete Conrad as commander, Al Bean as lunar module pilot, and Dick Gordon as command module pilot respectively. For Scott, being in charge of assembling the checklists was too good an opportunity.

Scott, Irwin, and Worden spent a fair bit of time flipping through the Conrad and Bean's checklists figuring out where to put in gags. They added a few cartoons and deliberately misspelled "albedo" as "albeano" in Bean's checklist. But it was the pictures they added that really caught the crew's attention..."

-- Obviously Discovery censored them, but I tracked them down for you. You're welcome. ;)

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"(boingboing.net, June 28 2012) This is not a geode. It's an animal. An apparently delicious animals with clear blood, whose body is accumulates surprisingly large amounts of a rare metal used to strengthen steel.

This is Pyura chilensis—an immobile ocean creature. Besides the other traits I mentioned, P. chilensis is also capable of both sexual and asexual reproduction. At the Running Ponies blog, Becky Crew explains the results of a 2005 study that detailed the creature's breeding habits for the first time.

The results showed that P. chilensis is born male, before becoming cosexual – having both male and female gonads – in its adolescence as it increased in size. The researchers also found that given the choice – that is, if situated around other individuals – these organisms prefer to breed via cross-fertilisation, writing, “Given that more events of natural egg spawning followed by successful settlement and metamorphosis were recorded in our paired specimens and in our manipulated cross trials … it appears that cross-fertilisation predominates in this species.”

Manríquez and Castilla also found that a greater number of fertilised eggs resulted from the paired specimens, which suggests that cross-fertilisation, or reproducing with another individual, predominates because it is more effective. This assumption was strengthened by the fact that individuals that had cross-fertilised before being put in isolation took at least two months before successfully producing offspring via selfing. However, they were careful to note that while cross-fertilisation was preferred, selfing did not produce inferior offspring. “No perceptible differences in fertilisation, settlement and metamorphosis success among self and outcross progeny were found,” they reported. This suggests that when stuck alone in the ocean, selfing provides an advantageous opportunity for loner P. chilensis individuals to still pass on their genes..."

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"(huffingtonpost.com 06/29/2012) When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security dared a Texas university research group to bring down a flying drone, the team accepted the challenge and did just that.

Turns out it's not too difficult to hack a drone.

Nor too expensive, for that matter. RT reports that the University of Texas at Austin scientists, led by Professor Todd Humphreys, managed to bring down a flying drone with a spoofer costing just $1,000. The research group gained control of the University-owned drone by using a device to hack its GPS system, according to Scientific American..."

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"(Nat. Geo. June 28, 2012) An alien planet has been caught "burping" off some of its atmospheric gas following a violent flare on its parent star, according to a study released Thursday.

The observation—the first of its kind—offers astronomers a rare glimpse of an extreme space-weather event on a planet outside our solar system.

"This discovery tells us that [atmospheric] evaporation is a genuine phenomenon for planets close to their stars," said study leader Alain Lecavelier, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris.

For the new study, Lecavelier and his team examined the atmosphere of HD 189733b, a Jupiter-like planet about 60 light-years from Earth.

The gas giant circles its host star in a very close orbit—equal to 1/30th the distance between Earth and the sun—earning it classification as a "hot Jupiter."

The team was hoping to witness evaporation of the planet's atmosphere, an event that until now had been seen on only one other world..."

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"(phys.org July 1, 2012) The first images of an upward surge of the Sun's gases into quiescent coronal loops have been identified by an international team of scientists. The discovery is one more step towards understanding the origins of extreme space storms, which can destroy satellite communications and damage power grids on Earth.

The study published today by University of Cambridge scientists working with colleagues in India and the USA is the first to visualise the movement of gases at one million degrees in coronal loops – solar structures that are rooted at both ends and extend out from active regions of the Sun. Active regions are the 'cradle' for explosive energy releases such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

The observation will help scientists understand what is considered to be one of the most challenging issues in astrophysics – how solar structures are heated and maintained in the upper solar atmosphere. Extreme solar activity can lead to severe space storms that interfere with satellite communications and damage electric power transmission grids on Earth. Solar activity is cyclical, with the next maximum forecast to occur around May 2013, and severe space weather is now listed very high on the UK's 2012 National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies..."

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"(Phys.org June 22, 2012) Although oceans and seas contain about 97% of Earth’s water, currently only a fraction of a percent of the world’s potable water supply comes from desalinated salt water. In order to increase our use of salt water, desalination techniques must become more energy-efficient and less expensive to be sustainable. In a new study, two materials scientists from MIT have shown in simulations that nanoporous graphene can filter salt from water at a rate that is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than today’s best commercial desalination technology, reverse osmosis (RO). The researchers predict that graphene’s superior water permeability could lead to desalination techniques that require less energy and use smaller modules than RO technology, at a cost that will depend on future improvements in graphene fabrication methods.

The scientists, David Cohen-Tanugi and Jeffrey C. Grossman of MIT, have published their study on water desalination using single-layer nanoporous graphene in a recent issue of Nano Letters.

“This work shows that some of the drawbacks of current desalination techniques could be avoided by inventing more efficient and targeted membrane materials,” Grossman told Phys.org. “In particular, tailored nanostructuring of membranes could allow for actual flow of water (with full salt rejection) via size exclusion, leading to much higher permeability compared to reverse osmosis.”

This is not the first time that researchers have investigated the use of nanoporous materials for desalination. In contrast to RO, which uses high pressure to slowly push water molecules (but not salt ions) through a porous membrane, nanoporous materials work under lower pressures and provide well-defined channels that can filter salt water at a faster rate than RO membranes..."

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"(Phys.org June 22, 2012) Research published in the Plant Cell shows that the spiral pattern of leaf formation from the point of growth affects the developing leaf's exposure to the plant hormone auxin; This exposure leads to measurable left-right asymmetry in leaf development, in species previously assumed to have symmetric leaves.

The front of a leaf is different from the back of a leaf and the tip is different from the base. However, a leaf from a tomato or an Arabidopsis plant superficially appears to be bilaterally symmetrical, or the same on the left and right sides. Don't let its appearance fool you; there is an underlying asymmetry between the left and right sides of such leaves—it just took a while for scientists to discover it. The story begins with the mechanism by which leaves form along a stem. In broad-leafed plants, dicots, leaves form from the meristem, an actively dividing tissue at the top of the plant, so that as you look down the stem, the oldest leaves are at the bottom. Leaves don't just become arranged by random chance either—phyllotaxis, the arrangement of leaves or flowers along a stem, affects key plant characteristics, such as how much light can filter through to lower leaves. Leaves can form opposite each other, or in alternation, or in whorls; often leaves form in spirals where the next leaf is offset by roughly 137 degrees, known as the "golden angle", which is related to the Fibonacci sequence..."

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"(Nat. Geo. June 21, 2012) Soil on the moon can hover over the surface, and the temperature six feet (two meters) deep can be more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit (167 degrees Celsius) colder than the topsoil.

Now researchers in Australia think they've solved the puzzle of moon soil's odd behavior: nanosize particles of lunar glass.

Small bubbles of glass form on the moon when micrometeorites hit the lunar surface.

Since the moon has no atmosphere to slow the projectiles, each one, no matter how tiny, "wreaks havoc," said Paul Warren, a research geochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn't involved in the new study.

Particles about a hundred microns wide—the size of a fine grain of beach sand—hit with enough force to melt bits of moon rock, forming tiny glass bubbles.

In a new study, Marek Zbik of the Queensland University of Technology analyzed glass bubbles collected by Luna 16, the first Soviet probe to return a sample from the moon.

Using a special type of x-ray microscope, Zbik constructed 3-D images of the bubbles' insides.

Instead of containing gas, as bubbles usually do on Earth, the moon bubbles are "filled with a highly porous network of alien-looking glassy particles that span the bubbles' interior," Zbik said in a press statement..."

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"(www.planetary.org 2012/06/22) Much of the space world, including my blog, is increasingly shifting its view toward the incredibly important event that will unfold on August 5 and 6: the landing of the gigantic Curiosity rover on Mars. For some of us, it's the culmination of years of anticipation. But for an awful lot of people out there, some moment in the next six weeks will be the first time that they've heard of this mission and how it's going to land. And nearly all of those people are going to ask the same question: Are they nuts?

When you watch the marvelous computer animation of Curiosity's landing, or today's viral video about the "Seven Minutes of Terror" (which I embedded below) you gain an appreciation for just how many little events in a seven-minute Rube Goldberg sequence must go perfectly in order for landing day to be a good one. With that appreciation comes fear. What if something goes wrong? Why is it so complicated?

I've decided that the best thing I can do to help people understand what it takes to land on Mars is to explain the landing in excruciating detail, copying from and explaining the content of this paper by Ravi Prakash and coauthors, with some additions from the launch press kit. I can't do it all in one post, so I'm going to split it over several, probably three or four. It helps that the rover's engineers make their own distinctions between different phases. Being acronym-ophiles, they refer to it all as "EDL," which stands for Entry, Descent, and Landing. Today, I'll talk about Curiosity's approach to Mars and its entry into the atmosphere..."

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