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An extraordinary outburst produced by a black hole in a nearby galaxy has provided direct evidence for a population of old, volatile stellar black holes. The discovery, made by astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, provides new insight into the nature of a mysterious class of black holes that can produce as much energy in X-rays as a million suns radiate at all wavelengths.The intriguing new ULX is located in M83, a spiral galaxy about 15 million light years from Earth, discovered in 2010 with Chandra. Astronomers compared this data with Chandra images from 2000 and 2001, which showed the source had increased in X-ray brightness by at least 3,000 times and has since become the brightest X-ray source in M83.

Habitat loss, urban expansion, vehicle strikes, dog attacks and disease have contributed to their dwindling numbers.Contrary to popular belief, koalas, which are native to Australia, are marsupials and not bears. They only eat the leaves of the eucalyptus tree and sleep for up to 20 hours a day. The current size of the koala population is unclear, according to the BBC’s Phil Mercer, with estimates varying from several hundred thousand to as few as 43,000. In New South Wales and Queensland, the numbers have fallen by as much as 40% since 1990.

Eole Water claims to have successfully modified the traditional wind turbine design to create the WMS1000, an appliance that can manufacture drinking water from humid air.

The company aims to start rolling out the giant products for sale later in 2012, initially focusing on remote communities in arid countries where water resources are scarce.

“This technology could enable rural areas to become self-sufficient in terms of water supply,” says Thibault Janin, director of marketing at Eole Water.

“As the design and capabilities develop, the next step will be to create turbines that can provide water for small cities or areas with denser populations,” he adds.

Eole Water is currently displaying a working prototype of the 24 meter tall WMS1000 in the desert near Abu Dhabi that has been able to produce 62 liters of water an hour, says Janin.

A tiny microorganism found in Norwegian lake sludge may be related to the very oldest life forms on this planet, a possible modern cousin of our earliest common ancestor. It is not a fungus, alga, parasite, plant or animal, yet it has features associated with other kingdoms of life. It could be a founding member of the newest kingdom on the tree of life , scientists said. Life on Earth is divided into two main groups, the prokaryotes and the eukaryotes. Prokaryotes are simple life forms, with no membranes or cell nuclei; this group includes bacteria and archaea. Eukaryotes, which include humans, animals, plants, fungi and algae, have cell membranes and nuclei. This new organism is a eukaryote. More specifically, it’s an algae-eating protozoan, a type of creature that have been known to science since the Civil War but which have lacked genetic studies because they’re difficult to culture. Researchers in Norway were able to harvest them from a lake bed and breed them in the lab. This one is called Collodictyon.Researchers led by Kamran Shalchian-Tabrizi, head of the Microbial Evolution Research Group (MERG) at the University of Oslo, were examining the species’ genes and morphological makeup and found it is not like anything else. It evolved a billion years ago, give or take a couple hundred million years. It could have been living the same way since then, providing scientists a glimpse of what the earliest life forms looked like. The organism is weird in several key ways. It has four flagella, for instance, which makes it different from bacteria and eukaryotes. Mammals, fungi and amoebae only have one flagellum — that’s the propeller-like feature that helps cells move (think of the “tail” of a sperm cell). Algae, plants and single-celled parasites called excavates are thought to have had two flagella. Collodictyon is somewhere between an excavate and an amoeba. Also, the organism has the same internal structure as a parasite, but it uses amoeba-like protuberances to catch its food, which are blue-green algae. So again, it combines features from two branches of the eukaryotes, further evidence that it’s a primordial creature, the researchers say. Even at its highest levels, the tree of life is mutable — the domain archaea was only recognized in 1990. So it wouldn’t be out of the question for this organism to spark an entirely new kingdom.

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Scientists at the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone Institutes today are announcing a research breakthrough in mice that one day may help doctors restore hearts damaged by heart attacks by converting scar-forming cardiac cells into beating heart muscle.

Cardiovascular disease is the world’s leading cause of death. Annually in the United States alone, the nearly 1 million Americans who survive a heart attack are left with failing hearts that can no longer beat at full capacity.

“The damage from a heart attack is typically permanent because heart-muscle cells deprived of oxygen during the attack die and scar tissue forms,” said Srivastava, a UCSF professor who directs cardiovascular and stem cell research at Gladstone, an independent and nonprofit biomedical-research institution. “But our experiments in mice are a proof of concept that we can reprogram non-beating cells directly into fully functional, beating heart cells offering an innovative and less invasive way to restore heart function after a heart attack.”

Google announced today that it’s throwing $55 million dollars to the wind… energy, that is. Which is set to generate 1,550 megawatts of energy enough to reportedly power 450,000 homes from a batch of turbines in the Mojave Dessert. Developed by Terra-Gen Power, the operation will carry the resulting energy via transmission lines to “major population centers.”  making it one of the largest sites in the country for wind energy generation. The ever humble internet giant pointed out that this particular injection of funds marks a total investment of $400 million in the clean energy sector. In fact, google signed a deal last year to power several of its data centers with wind power, and most recently announced the opening of a seawater cooled data center in Finland.

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There’s more to the cosmos than meets the eye. About 80 percent of the matter in the universe is invisible to telescopes, yet its gravitational influence is manifest in the orbital speeds of stars around galaxies and in the motions of clusters of galaxies. Yet, despite decades of effort, no one knows what this “dark matter” really is. Many scientists think it’s likely that the mystery will be solved with the discovery of new kinds of subatomic particles, types necessarily different from those composing atoms of the ordinary matter all around us. The search to detect and identify these particles is underway in experiments both around the globe and above it.

Scientists working with data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have looked for signals from some of these hypothetical particles by zeroing in on 10 small, faint galaxies that orbit our own. Although no signals have been detected, a novel analysis technique applied to two years of data from the observatory’s Large Area Telescope (LAT) has essentially eliminated these particle candidates for the first time.

WIMPs, or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, represent a favored class of dark matter candidates. Some WIMPs may mutually annihilate when pairs of them interact, a process expected to produce gamma rays — the most energetic form of light — that the LAT is designed to detect.

Bluefin tuna are some of the largest and fastest fish in the ocean—they’re powerful swimmers, built for endurance and speed. To help conserve energy on their long-distance journeys, tuna’s bodies are almost perfectly streamlined, reducing drag around their fins. And tuna can retract or fold those fins against the body so water flows more smoothly over their bodies. This makes them super-streamlined.

Unlike most fish, tuna are warm-blooded and can heat their bodies to 6° C (11° F) warmer than the surrounding water. This added warmth helps their muscles work faster and more efficiently. Tuna consume as much as 5% of their body weight daily and must continually swim with their mouths open to force water over their gills, supercharging their blood-rich muscles with oxygen.

Pacific bluefin tuna spawn off of Okinawa; between Taiwan and the Philippines; and in the Sea of Japan. They migrate over 6,000 nautical miles (11,112 km) to the eastern Pacific, eventually returning to their birth waters to spawn.

The proposed Skylon vehicle would operate like an airliner, taking off and landing at a conventional runway. Its major innovation is the Sabre engine, which can breathe air like a jet at lower speeds but switch to a rocket mode in the high atmosphere. Reaction Engines Limited (REL) believes the test campaign will prove the readiness of Sabre’s key elements. This being so, the firm would then approach investors to raise the £250m needed to take the project into the final design phase. The test stand will not validate the full Sabre propulsion system, but simply its enabling technology - a special type of pre-cooler heat exchanger.Sabre is part jet engine, part rocket engine. It burns hydrogen and oxygen to provide thrust - but in the lower atmosphere this oxygen is taken from the atmosphere. The approach should save weight and allow Skylon to go straight to orbit without the need for the multiple propellant stages seen in today’s throw-away rockets.

Analyzing DNA from four ancient skeletons and comparing it with thousands of genetic samples from living humans, a group of Scandinavian scientists reported that agriculture initially spread through Europe because farmers expanded their territory northward, not because the more primitive foragers already living there adopted it on their own.

The genetic profiles of three Neolithic hunter-gatherers and one farmer who lived in the same region of modern-day Sweden about 5,000 years ago were quite different — a fact that could help resolve a decades-old battle among archaeologists over the origins of European agriculture, said study leader Mattias Jakobsson, a population geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden.

From year to year, the moon never seems to change. Craters and other formations appear to be permanent now, but the moon didn’t always look like this. Thanks to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we now have a better look at some of the moon’s history.

NASA has been taking a creatively close look inside a crack in the Antarctic ice shelf that threatens to break off and create a city-sized iceberg.

Using data collected late last year by scientists, NASA have created an animated virtual ride through a giant canyon of Antarctic ice in Pine Island Glacier in western Antarctica. And while sea ice is expanding around much of the ice cap, Dr Pat Langhorne from Otago University says this is an area scientists are focused on.

“It’s a region that’s well known to be warming, there is a smaller ice extent in that area than there has been since satellites began,” says Dr Langhorne. The crack’s about 32 kilometres long and 50 metres deep, down to the water line of the Amundsen Sea.

A rise in sightings of a giant, invasive shrimp has government scientists working to determine the cause and possible consequences for native fish and seafood in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2010, there were 32 reported sightings of the Asian tiger prawn in Gulf and Atlantic waters, according to Pam Fuller, the U.S. Geological Survey biologist who runs the agency’s Nonindigenous Aquatic Species database. In 2012, those reports jumped to 331.

“We can confirm there was nearly a tenfold jump in reports of Asian tiger shrimp in 2011,” Fuller said. “And they are probably even more prevalent than reports suggest because the more fisherman and other locals become accustomed to seeing them, the less likely they are to report them.”

Fuller said scientists aren’t sure why Asian tiger prawn sightings have suddenly increased so dramatically. It could be that shrimpers are more aware of the prawns and are reporting them in greater numbers. But it is more likely their population has increased.

The tiger prawn is native to the western Pacific and is farmed commercially across the globe, but there are no known aquaculture facilities for the prawn in the U.S. The shrimp may have come to the U.S. in ballast water from Asian ships, or arrived on ocean currents from wild populations in the Caribbean or other locations.

The Asian tiger prawn is visually striking, characterized by its distinct “tiger stripes” in bands of black and white.

They are also very large. Tiger prawns can grow up to 14 inches long and weigh as much as 23 ounces.

As per a research, which has been published in the PLoS Pathogens, it has been revealed that a team of researchers at California University, has developed cells, which can kills HIV-infected cells in a living organism.

They have genetically engineered stem cells, which in return can form into immune cells that targets HIV infected cells. Lead researcher Scott G Kitchen said that they are satisfied with the findings of their research and are sure that the research will act as a foundation stone for a medical application that can be used to treat HIV infection.

Kitchen said that they have engineered human blood stem cells and have discovered that these cells can develop into engineered human blood stem cells, which will further attack HIV in tissues. In order to reach at the above given conclusion, the study researchers prepared a humanized mouse in which the human HIV infection closely reflected.

They introduced genetically engineered cells in the mouse and noticed the developments in it for six weeks. Kitchen said that they found that T cells number reduced as levels of HIV in the blood was found to be decreasing.

“We believe that this study lays the groundwork for the potential use of this type of an approach in combating HIV infection in infected individuals, in hopes of eradicating the virus from the body”, said Kitchen.

There are some great kits out there - the Makerbot, the Ultimaker, the Prusa Mendel, and others - but none as small and simple as the Printrbot.  This all-in-one 3D printer kit can be assembled and printing in a couple of hours.  Other kits will not only take you many more hours to build, they will also have hundreds more parts, and they will cost more.This design also does away with the finicky calibration and adjustment from which most 3D printers suffer.   This is the printer a kid could put together. They assemble the electronics,assemble the hotend, and put the connectors on all the motors and components… no soldering required!

The big and beautiful spiral galaxy M81, in the northern constellation Ursa Major, is one of the brightest galaxies visible in the skies of planet Earth. This superbly detailed view reveals its bright nucleus, grand spiral arms and sweeping cosmic dust lanes with a scale comparable to the Milky Way. Hinting at a disorderly past, a remarkable dust lane runs straight through the disk, below and right of the galactic center, contrary to M81’s other prominent spiral features. The errant dust lane may be the lingering result of a close encounter between M81 and its smaller companion galaxy, M82. Scrutiny of variable stars in M81 (aka NGC 3031) has yielded one of the best determined distances for an external galaxy — 11.8 million light-years.