Discovery Date: July 24, 2013

Magnitude: 17.7 mag

Discoverer: Robert H. McNaught (Siding Spring)
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2013-O54.

Discovery Date: July 16, 2013

Magnitude: 20.6 mag

Discoverer: Pan-STARRS 1 telescope (Haleakala)
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2013-O53.

Following the posting on the Central Bureau's Transient Object Confirmation Page about a possible Supernova in M74 (TOCP Designation: PSN J01364816+1545310) we performed some follow-up of this object remotely through a 0.43-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD of iTelescope network (MPC Code Q62 - Siding Spring, AU).

On our images taken on July 27.7, 2013 we can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with R-filtered CCD magnitude 13.0 and V-filtered CCD magnitude 12.6 at coordinates:

R.A. = 01 36 48.20, Decl.= +15 45 31.0

(equinox 2000.0; UCAC-3 catalogue reference stars). Our annotated confirmation image (single 120-second exposures under a cloudy sky):
An animation showing a comparison between our confirmation image and the archive POSS2/UKSTU plate (R Filter - 1990) can be viewed here.

I love this galaxy. Not only does M74 display a near perfect spiral form but if this latest supernova is confirmed, it will be the third to "go boom" in the galaxy in just 11 years. The new object, designated PSN J01364816+1545310, was discovered blazing near 12.4 magnitude by the Lick Observatory Supernova Search at Lick Observatory near San Jose, Calif. "PSN" stands for "possible supernova" and the long string of numbers give the object's position in the sky using the celestial equivalents of latitude and longitude.

The life and death of the world's tallest species of bird is the focus of a new book being published by Craig Potton Publishing this month.

'First we killed them, then we ate them, and then we forgot about them,' says Quinn Berentson, author of Moa: The life and death of New Zealand's legendary bird. 'Human beings have not been kind to the moa, and the biggest insult is we've almost completely forgotten about them. Like most 'Kiwis' I realised I actually knew nothing about the really iconic and unique birds that made New Zealand famous around the world - the moa. Writing the book is my attempt to get the real story of the moa out there and remind us all what we lost.'

The moa are arguably the most unusual and unique family of birds that have ever lived but they became extinct reasonably quickly after the arrival of the Maori in New Zealand, and were a distant memory by the time European explorers arrived in the country. So the identification of their bones in the 1840s caused a worldwide sensation. 'The discovery was described at the time as "the zoological find of the century," and the surprising discoveries have persisted until the present day,' says Quinn.

'The moa has fascinated and bamboozled the finest minds in natural history for 170 years and so, rather than write an encyclopaedia, I've tried to tell the story of its rediscovery - with all the twists and turns, devious personalities and unlikely events - and summarize the latest scientific discoveries that have occurred in just the last few years and have totally changed our perception of the giant birds.

Basically almost everything we thought we knew about the moa has been turned on its head over the last 10 years because of advanced DNA analysis. It turns out for most of the last 170 years we had a totally mistaken view of what the birds looked like, how they lived and even where they lived. Now New Zealand scientists have finally solved many of the mysteries that baffled the best minds in natural science for the last century.'

'It's a serious book about a popular subject and will fill a real gap in our natural history literature,' says publisher Robbie Burton. 'It's a fascinating story and an important book that richly recounts and illustrates the life and death of the giant bird.

Pasadena, California -- The true identity of centaurs, the small celestial bodies orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Neptune, is one of the enduring mysteries of astrophysics. Are they asteroids or comets? A new study of observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) finds most centaurs are comets.

Until now, astronomers were not certain whether centaurs are asteroids flung out from the inner solar system or comets traveling in toward the sun from afar. Because of their dual nature, they take their name from the creature in Greek mythology whose head and torso are human and legs are those of a horse.

"Just like the mythical creatures, the centaur objects seem to have a double life," said James Bauer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Bauer is lead author of a paper published online July 22 in the Astrophysical Journal. "Our data point to a cometary origin for most of the objects, suggesting they are coming from deeper out in the solar system."

"Cometary origin" means an object likely is made from the same material as a comet, may have been an active comet in the past, and may be active again in the future.

In worms, the spread of death can be seen easily under a microscope as a wave of blue fluorescence travelling through its gut

Researchers from Wellcome Trust likened spread of blue glow travelling through the worm's body to that of the Grim Reaper, stalking death

The research could prove to be a useful model for understanding death in people and perhaps even lead to an increase in life expectancy

British scientists have captured death spreading like a wave through the body of a worm, by studying the blue fluorescence that travels cell-to-cell until the whole organism is dead.

Researchers from the Wellcome Trust and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) likened the spread of the blue glow travelling through the worm's body to that of the Grim Reaper, stalking death.

They believe that the research could eventually prove to be a useful model to understanding death in people and perhaps even lead to an increase in life expectancy.

Psychopaths do not lack empathy, rather they can switch it on at will, according to new research.

Placed in a brain scanner, psychopathic criminals watched videos of one person hurting another and were asked to empathise with the individual in pain.

Only when asked to imagine how the pain receiver felt did the area of the brain related to pain light up.

Scientists, reporting in Brain, say their research explains how psychopaths can be both callous and charming.


The team proposes that with the right training, it could be possible to help psychopaths activate their "empathy switch", which could bring them a step closer to rehabilitation.

Japanese mathematics professor Kokichi Sugihara spends much of his time in a world where up is down and three dimensions are really only two. Professor Sugihara is one of the world's leading exponents of optical illusion, a mathematical art-form that he says could have application in the real world.

Three sloped ramps are aligned along three of the four sides of a square. Each ramp appears to be sloped in the same direction but when a marble is placed at one end of the ramp it seems to defy gravity.

It's called an "anti-gravity slide". Only when the the entire structure is turned 180 degrees, is the illusion revealed.

Japanese mathematics professor Kokichi Sugihara from the Meiji Institute near Tokyo, has made a career of creating optical illusions. He's devised and built more than a hundred of them, like this one called "Perches and a Ring".

As we've written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America's apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.

Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition.

But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have indentified a witch's brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.

When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.