Glowing cats help in fight against AIDS, other diseases

 

Um. Yeah. Just, wow.

Mayo Clinic researchers have developed a genome-based immunization strategy to fight feline AIDS and illuminate ways to combat human HIV/AIDS and other diseases. The goal is to create cats with intrinsic immunity to the feline AIDS virus. The findings -- called fascinating and landmark by one reviewer -- appear in the current online issue of Nature Methods.

Read about it HERE

This week in space

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Cosmic crashes forging gold: Nuclear reactions in space do produce the heaviest elements

Collisions of neutron stars produce the heaviest elements such as gold or lead. The cosmic site where the heaviest chemical elements such as lead or gold are formed has most likely been identified: Ejected matter from neutron stars merging in a violent collision provides ideal conditions. In detailed numerical simulations, scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and affiliated to the Excellence Cluster Universe and of the Free University of Brussels have verified that the relevant reactions of atomic nuclei do take place in this environment, producing the heaviest elements in the correct abundances.

Now, to figure out how to exploit this to produce large amounts of gold and other heavy elements for the manufacturing industry.

 Read about it HERE

 

Fermi's latest gamma-ray census highlights cosmic mysteries

Every three hours, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope scans the entire sky and deepens its portrait of the high-energy universe. Every year, the satellite's scientists reanalyze all of the data it has collected, exploiting updated analysis methods to tease out new sources. These relatively steady sources are in addition to the numerous transient events Fermi detects, such as gamma-ray bursts in the distant universe and flares from the sun.

Read about it HERE

 

Research team pinpoints location of elusive black hole using radio jets

A team of Japanese astrophysicists and space scientists have found a way to more precisely describe where in space a very large, but distant black hole lies. In their paper published in Nature, the team describes how they’ve used data from a large array of radio telescopes spread across the Pacific ocean to measure high energy emissions that are ejected from areas inside the galaxy M87 due to the actions of the massive black hole that lies somewhere near its center.

This should actually give us a way to detect ones we just don't see in the data at the moment.

 Read about it HERE

 

Supernova 'brightens up' September 7-8

The nearest supernova of its type to be discovered for 40 years is predicted to be at its brightest 7-8 September and will be visible through a good pair of binoculars.

Sorry I reported this to you all a few days late, I missed the best viewing of it myself though if it makes you any less upset.

 Read about it HERE

 

Blazars

A blazar is a galaxy which, like a quasar, has an intensely bright central nucleus containing a supermassive black hole. In a blazar, however, the emitted light sometimes includes extremely high energy gamma rays, sometimes over a hundred million times more energetic than the highest energy X-rays that the Chandra X-ray Observatory can study. The overall emission has several other unique properties as well, including that its intensity can vary dramatically with time.

Sounds like we need to make an instrument better than Chandra to study these things, and then I imagine it'll show us something it can't study that's even more impressiveve.

 Read about it HERE

 

Our galaxy might hold thousands of ticking 'time bombs'

In the Hollywood blockbuster "Speed," a bomb on a bus is rigged to blow up if the bus slows down below 50 miles per hour. The premise - slow down and you explode - makes for a great action movie plot, and also happens to have a cosmic equivalent.

It's stuff like this that keeps me up at night... well this and millions of other things out there in space that could cease our existence in the blink of an eye. Basically with this one a new theory suggest that white dwarfs might be held up by their rapid spins and when they slow down enough... big bada boom

Read about it HERE

Today in Space

Wind delays NASA launch of twin moon spacecraft

I hope this thing launch happens tomorrow, this mission should give us more awesome data of the moon.

High wind forced NASA on Thursday to delay the launch of twin spacecraft destined for the moon, the first mission dedicated to measuring lunar gravity.

See the rest HERE

 

Kepler spacecraft discovers 'invisible world'

Kepler has been hard at work finding cool stuff, this is yet another cool find... let's just hope it's another planet that made it 'late' and not something more sinister

Usually, running five minutes late is a bad thing since you might lose your dinner reservation or miss out on tickets to the latest show. But when a planet runs five minutes late, astronomers get excited because it suggests that another world is nearby.

Read more about it HERE

 

Space image: The Moon's North pole

 

I love it, it's kinda trippy, I want to print it on a disc and spin it haha

The Earth's moon has been an endless source of fascination for humanity for thousands of years. When at last Apollo 11 landed on the moon's surface in 1969, the crew found a desolate, lifeless orb, but one which still fascinates scientist and non-scientist alike.

Read more about it HERE

Glowing Earth

 

This is just awesome!

The glowing orange line in the middle of this photo is the border between India and Pakistan, as seen from the International Space Station.The border is fenced and floodlit to cut down on smuggling and arms trafficking. There’s a similar fence between India’s eastern border and Bangladesh, but it’s not visible from space.

As for the glow around the Earth, that’s airglow caused by the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation hitting atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere.

Read more about it HERE

NASA Satellite Re-Entry

Well, there is a little less space junk that will be in orbit!

Heads up! That's the word from NASA today (Sept. 7) given the impending re-entry of a 6.5-ton satellite through Earth's atmosphere.

The huge Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere in an uncontrolled fall in late September or early October. Much of the spacecraft is expected to burn up during re-entry, but some pieces are expected to make it intact to the ground, NASA officials said.

The U.S. space agency will be taking measures to inform the public about the pieces of the spacecraft that are expected to survive re-entry.

Read more about it HERE