Ring of Hot Blue Stars Pinwheels Around Yellow Nucleus of Hoag's Object Galaxy

A nearly perfect ring of hot, blue stars pinwheels about the yellow nucleus of an unusual galaxy known as Hoag's Object. This image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captures a face-on view of the galaxy's ring of stars, revealing more detail than any existing photo of this object. The image may help astronomers unravel clues on how such strange objects form.

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Biodegradable cigarette filters with flower seeds.

These cigarette filters are called "Greenbutts" and they degrade in just one month rather than the typical 15 years. They are made from a natural blend of materials, including flax, hemp and cotton.

The seeds were added in by the photographer.

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Einstein and Atomic Weapons

In the summer of 1939 Albert Einstein was on holiday in a small resort town on the tip of Long Island. His peaceful summer, however, was about to be shattered by a visit from an old friend and colleague from his years in Berlin. The visitor was the physicist Leo Szilard. He had come to tell Einstein that he feared the Nazis could soon be in possession of a terrible new weapon and that something had to be done. Einstein was faced with a dilemma; assist the Allies in acquiring the ability to build atomic weapons or allow the real possibility of Hitler of acquiring the bomb?

Video : Einstein and Atomic Weapons

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Cosmic Voyage

Morgan Freeman narrates this film as you travel from the outer reaches of space down into the nucleus of a carbon atom. Cosmic Voyage explains, in layman's terms, how the universe began - the "Big Bang" and how the entire mass of the universe was compressed into a space the size of a tennis ball.

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Pulsars & Quasars

"A look at pulsars -- tiny objects (only a few miles across) with powerful magnetic fields that spin so fast they appear to blink on and off; and quasars -- the remnant cores of ancient galaxies that are so distant from us that they may be the oldest things in the universe.

UNIVERSE Pulsars & Quasars S4E10

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How the brain loses and regains consciousness

Study reveals brain patterns produced by a general anesthesia drug; work could help doctors better monitor patients,

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Birth of a Black Hole

Far out in space, in the center of a seething cosmic maelstrom. Extreme heat. High velocities. Atoms tear, and space literally buckles. Photons fly out across the universe, energized to the limits found in nature. Billions of years later, they enter the detectors of spacecraft stationed above our atmosphere. Our ability to record them is part of a new age of high-energy astronomy, and a new age of insights into nature at its most extreme. What can we learn by witnessing the violent birth of a black hole?

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NASA's Moon Secret

In 1979, Maurice Chatelain, former chief of NASA Communications Systems confirmed that Armstrong had indeed reported seeing two UFOs on the rim of a crater. "The encounter was common knowledge in NASA," he revealed, "but nobody has talked about it until now."

Soviet scientists were allegedly the first to confirm the incident. "According to our information, the encounter was reported immediately after the landing of the module," said Dr. Vladimir Azhazha, a physicist and Professor of Mathematics at Moscow University. "Neil Armstrong relayed the message to Mission Control that two large, mysterious objects were watching them after having landed near the moon module. But his message was never heard by the public-because NASA censored it. "

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$1 Billion Alien Hunting Telescope

Astronomers believe that the best way of finding extraterrestrial life could be to look for the heat that other civilizations produce using a mega telescope. And such a device has already been planned.

Space.com reports that the huge 250-foot telescope would be named Colossus and its aperture would be more than twice the size of any existing lens.

Scientists involved in the privately-funded project hope that the telescope would be able to spot cities or other signs of alien life on planets up to 70 light years away from Earth.

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Researchers Create Contact Lens With Built-In LCD

Another day, another step towards technologically tricked out contact lenses. The latest development comes from researchers at the Centre of Microsystems Technology at Ghent University, who've developed a prototype lens with an embedded, spherical curved LCD that isn't limited to a paltry amount of pixels.

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Scientist Study Health Benefits Of Psychedelic Drugs

A growing number of people are taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs such as cannabis and ecstasy to help them cope with a variety of conditions including anorexia nervosa, cluster headaches, and chronic anxiety attacks.

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The Benefits Of Meditation

What is meditation?
Studies have shown that meditating regularly can help relieve symptoms in people who suffer from chronic pain, but the neural mechanisms underlying the relief were unclear. Now, MIT and Harvard researchers have found a possible explanation for this phenomenon.

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This hyper-realistic robotic spider will give you nightmares

What do you get when you combine 26 tiny servo motors in a3D printed shell that looks a lot like a spider? Well, nightmares certainly, but you also get an incredibly lifelike little robot. The Robugtix T8 is an eight-legged robot that can move so much like a real spider, you’ll be tempted to smash it. But it’s expensive — don’t smash it.

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Ten of the Most Interesting Structures of the Universe

To quote the late Douglas Adams (the beloved author of “The Hitckhikers Guide to the Galaxy” books): “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”


Truer words have never been spoken, as the universe itself is so big, it is incomprehensible, even to the most knowledgeable and open minded individuals. With a diameter that extends more than 93 billion light-years across, many very large objects are just lurking out in space, waiting to be found. In this list, I’ve gathered up the most massive and bizarre structures found in the universe. Many of them are actually a collection of objects, held together by the immense force of gravity. And since space is so big, none of our Earthly means of measuring distances will suffice, so for the sake of this article, we’re going to use light-years, the rate at which light travels through space in one year, as a unit of measurement.

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A Perfect Storm

Two dramatically different faces of Mars, our Red Planet neighbour, appear in these comparison images showing how a global dust storm engulfed Mars with the onset of Martian spring in the Southern Hemisphere. When the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope imaged Mars in June 2001, the seeds of the storm were caught brewing in the giant Hellas Basin (oval at 4 o'clock position on disk) and in another storm at the northern polar cap.

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Cell phones germs

While toilets tend to get cleaned frequently, because people associate the bathroom with germs, cellphones and other commonly handled objects — like remote controls— are often left out of the cleaning routine.

Cellphones pick up germs all the time, Gerba said. "I see people talk on their phone on toilets."

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WORMHOLES

Tunnels through space-time that connect black holes – may be a consequence of the bizarre quantum property called entanglement. The redefinition would resolve a pressing paradox that you might be burned instead of crushed, should you fall into a black hole.

Knowing which hazard sign to erect outside a black hole isn't exactly an everyday problem. For theoretical physicists, though, it reveals an inconsistency between quantum mechanics and general relativity. Solving this conundrum might lead to the sought-after quantum theory of gravity.

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