As the sun rose over Australia on Friday morning, May 10th, the solar disk turned into a ring of fire. The day began with an annular solar eclipse:
Nicole Hollenbeck took the picture from inside the narrow path of annularity about 70km south of Newman, Australia. At the time, more than 95% of the sun's diameter was covered by the Moon.

In an annular eclipse the Moon is not quite big enough to cover the entire solar disk. A blinding ring of solar fire juts out around the Moon, overwhelming the sun's delicate corona. It may not be the same as totality, but annularity has a charm and beauty all its own. Browse the gallery for more images from the eclipse zone.

Brevard County - Kennedy Space Center, Florida - NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft has discovered a pair of stars that have taken over the title for the third-closest star system to the sun. The duo is the closest star system discovered since 1916.

Both stars in the new binary system are "brown dwarfs," which are stars that are too small in mass to ever become hot enough to ignite hydrogen fusion. As a result, they are very cool and dim, resembling a giant planet like Jupiter more than a bright star like the sun.

"The distance to this brown dwarf pair is 6.5 light-years - so close that Earth's television transmissions from 2006 are now arriving there," said Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a researcher in Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.

"It will be an excellent hunting ground for planets because the system is very close to Earth, which makes it a lot easier to see any planets orbiting either of the brown dwarfs."

The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

In fossil remnants of iron-loving bacteria, researchers of the Cluster of Excellence Origin and Structure of the Universe at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), found a radioactive iron isotope that they trace back to a supernova in our cosmic neighborhood. This is the first proven biological signature of a starburst on our Earth. The age determination of the deep-drill core from the Pacific Ocean showed that the supernova must have occurred about 2.2 million years ago, roughly around the time when the modern human developed.

Most of the chemical elements have their origin in core collapse supernovae. When a star ends its life in a gigantic starburst, it throws most of its mass into space. The radioactive iron isotope Fe-60 is produced almost exclusively in such supernovae. Because its half-life of 2.62 million years is short compared to the age of our solar system, no supernova iron should be present on Earth. Therefore, any discovery of Fe-60 on Earth would indicate a supernova in our cosmic neighborhood. In the year 2004, Fe-60 was discovered on Earth for the first time in a ferromanganese crust obtained from the floor of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Its geological dating puts the event around 2.2 million years ago.

So-called magnetotactic bacteria live within the sediments of Earth's oceans, close to the water-sediment interface. They make within their cells hundreds of tiny crystals of magnetite (Fe3O4), each approximately 80 nanometers in diameter. The magnetotactic bacteria obtain the iron from atmospheric dust that enters the ocean. Nuclear astrophysicist Shawn Bishop from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen conjectured, therefore, that Fe-60 should also reside within those magnetite crystals produced by magnetotactic bacteria extant at the time of the supernova interaction with our planet. These bacterially produced crystals, when found in sediments long after their host bacteria have died, are called "magnetofossils."

A few heavy, unstable atoms have pear-shaped nuclei, research suggests.

The lopsided nuclei, described today (May 8) in the journal Nature, could be good candidates for researchers looking for new types of physics beyond the reigning explanation for the bits of matter that make up the universe (called the Standard Model), said study author Peter Butler, a physicist at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom.

Odd shapes

Whereas most atoms have spherical or football-shaped nuclei, atoms with pear-shaped nuclei at their centers have been predicted to exist. But finding them proved difficult. [See Video of the Strange Pear-Shaped Nuclei]

To find them, Butler and his colleagues used a particle accelerator called REX-ISOLDE at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, or CERN, in Switzerland to accelerate radioactive ions of radon-220 and radium-224 until they reached about 10 percent of the speed of light.

"The [Large Hadron Collider] LHC makes all the big news, but in order to get the particles to high energy it uses a whole chain of low accelerators. What we use is one that is pretty ancient by accelerator standards," Butler said.

Having a neighborly chat improves seed germination, finds research in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Ecology. Even when other known means of communication, such as contact, chemical and light-mediated signals, are blocked, chilli seeds grow better when grown with basil plants. This suggests that plants are talking via nanomechanical vibrations.Monica Gagliano and Michael Renton from the University of Western Australia attempted to grow chilli seeds (Capsicum annuum) in the presence or absence of other chilli plants, or basil (Ocimum basilicum). In the absence of a neighboring plant, germination rates were very low, but when the plants were able to openly communicate with the seeds more seedlings grew.

However when the seeds were separated from the basil plants with black plastic, so that they could not be influenced by either light or chemical signals, they germinated as though they could still communicate with the basil. A partial response was seen for fully grown chilli plants blocked from known communication with the seeds.

Dr Gagliano explained, "Our results show that plants are able to positively influence growth of seeds by some as yet unknown mechanism. Bad neighbors, such as fennel, prevent chilli seed germination in the same way. We believe that the answer may involve acoustic signals generated using nanomechanical oscillations from inside the cell which allow rapid communication between nearby plants."

As concerns over cyber security grow with each newly publicized attack, computer scientists have been pursuing quantum technology as a silver bullet against would-be hackers.

According to a groundbreaking announcement, scientists at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico have been utilizing a small-scale "quantum internet" for the past two years.

Quantum cryptography is possible because of the phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. When two photons become 'entangled,' changing the spin of one of the photons will alter the spin of the other photon almost instantaneously.

These entangled photons can be used to create an encryption key that cannot be secretly deciphered, as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle dictates that simply trying to measure the characteristics of a photon will alter it.

For all its promise, computer scientists have only been able to use secure quantum communications with point-to-point communications. This means that messages can only be sent between two parties that each have one of the two entangled photons. Even this type of communication has only been demonstrated over relatively short distances of less than 70 miles.

All lightning on Earth may have its roots in space, new research suggests.

Lightning flashes on Earth about 100 times per second, but what triggers lightning in thunderstorms remains mostly unknown. Especially odd is the fact that decades of analysis suggest electrical fields within thunderclouds have only a tenth or so of the strength needed to spark a lightning bolt.

More than 20 years ago, physicist Alex Gurevich at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow suggested lightning might be initiated by cosmic rays from outer space. These particles strike Earth with gargantuan amounts of energy surpassing anything the most powerful atom smashers on the planet are capable of.

When cosmic rays slam into air molecules, they can make them spit out huge numbers of electrons. This shower of electrons would collide into still more air molecules, generating more electrons. All in all, cosmic rays could each set off an avalanche of electrons, a chain reaction Gurevich calls a runaway breakdown.

Are you prepared to meet your robot overlords?

The idea of superintelligent machines may sound like the plot of The Terminator or The Matrix, but many experts say the idea isn't far-fetched. Some even think the singularity - the point at which artificial intelligence can match, and then overtake, human smarts - might happen in just 16 years.

But nearly every computer scientist will have a different prediction for when and how the singularity will happen.

Some believe in a utopian future, in which humans can transcend their physical limitations with the aid of machines. But others think humans will eventually relinquish most of their abilities and gradually become absorbed into artificial intelligence (AI)-based organisms, much like the energy making machinery in our own cells.

Rio de Janeiro - Brazilian geologists on Monday announced the discovery of what could be part of the continent submerged when the Atlantic Ocean was formed as Africa and South America drifted apart 100 million years ago.

Roberto Ventura Santos, a top official at Brazil's Geology Service (CPRM), said granite samples were found two years ago during dredging operations in an area known as "Rio Grande Elevation", a mountain range in Brazilian and international waters.

Granite is seen as a continental rock.

"This could be the Brazilian Atlantis. We are almost certain but we must bolster our hypothesis," said Ventura.

"We will have final (scientific) recognition this year when we conduct drilling in the area to retrieve more samples of these rocks."

Initially, the scientists thought they were mistaken, Ventura noted.

But last month, their case was bolstered when team of Brazilian and Japanese scientists aboard Japan's manned research submersible, Shinkai 6500, observed the underwater geological formation located opposite the Brazilian coast.

"From an analysis we began to see that the area could be a piece of the continent that disappeared into the sea millions of years ago," Ventura said.

Source: AFP

Those in the Australian outback and parts of the Pacific Ocean will be able to view an annular eclipse of the sun - in which a ring of the sun's surface appears around the body of the moon's silhouette - on the morning of May 10, 2013 at shortly after 8 a.m. local time. About 95% of the solar disk will be covered, and yet this is considered a partial eclipse. At no time will the sky darken, or stars pop into view. The remaining 5% of sun is so bright that those in the right place on Earth to see the eclipse will need to look at it through specially filtered glasses for the entire event. View the illustrations below to learn more about the May 10, 2013 annular solar eclipse.
The May 10 annular eclipse as seen in Australia. The annular phase will start in extreme northwest Australia in the state of Western Australia, where some veteran eclipse chasers will try to see it at sunrise. The 300-km-wide path will include Tennant Creek, about 500 km north of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. The path of annularity will leave the Australian continent well north of Cairns, where tens of thousands of people saw a total solar eclipse in November, and even north of Cooktown; Cliff Island and Flinders Group National Parks will be in the zone. Annularity will last about 3 minutes at Tennant Creek and about 4-1/2 minutes at the centerline, about 50 km north of Tennant Creek. The path of annularity will leave Queensland with about 4-3/4 minutes of annularity.