A team of California scientists have developed the world's first portable brain scanner, and it may soon be able to "read a person's mind," playing a major role in facilitating medical breakthroughs.

"This is very exciting for us because it allows us to have a window into the brain. We're building technology that will allow humanity to have access to the human brain for the first time," said the project's leader, Phillip Low.

KGTV reports that the device, created by San Diego-based NeuroVigil, and dubbed the iBrain, fits over a person's head and measures unique neurological patterns connected to specific thought processes.

Comet Garradd sails slowly past globular star cluster M92 in this stunning image from a skywatcher in California.

The comet approached M92 as it flew over the Hercules constellation. It passed within half a degree of M92 on the day the image was taken.
M92 is one of the brightest globular clusters in the sky, and can sometimes be seen with the naked eye from the northern hemisphere. It's located more than 27,000 light-years from Earth. (A light-year is the distance light travels in one year - about 6 trillion miles, or 10 trillion kilometers.)

One day in the fall of 2011, Neil Sheeley, a solar scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., did what he always does -- look through the daily images of the sun from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

But on this day he saw something he'd never noticed before: a pattern of cells with bright centers and dark boundaries occurring in the sun's atmosphere, the corona. These cells looked somewhat like a cell pattern that occurs on the sun's surface -- similar to the bubbles that rise to the top of boiling water -- but it was a surprise to find this pattern higher up in the corona, which is normally dominated by bright loops and dark coronal holes.

In the first Back to the Future movie, all it took to travel through time was 1.21 gigawatts and a flux capacitor (packed into a DeLorean sports car for style points). Despite centuries of dreams and decades of bona fide research, flux capacitors remain beyond our grasp, as do any other time travel-enabling devices.

From a pure physics point of view, travel into the future is not at all impossible and in fact happens all the . . . time. With all due respect to Doc Brown, however, backward time travel stacks up as a much tougher proposition.

"We can travel at different rates to the future," said Seth Lloyd, a professor of quantum mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "To go into the past and mess around with it, that's more controversial."

My watch or yours?

For a real, everyday example of time travel, consider the satellites of the Global Positioning System. Were it not for built-in calibrations, the GPS atomic clocks would gain 38 microseconds over terrestrial timepieces every day, throwing off their location accuracy by several miles. "Clocks on Earth tick a tiny bit slower than satellites out in space," said Lloyd.

The reason: time dilation, as described by Einstein's two theories of relativity. According to the special theory, the faster an object moves relative to another object, the slower it experiences time. For GPS satellites zooming around Earth at nearly 9,000 mph (14,000 kph), this effect cuts seven microseconds off their clocks daily (relative to clocks on Earth).

The second effect, explained by the general theory of relativity, involves gravity. Clocks closer to the center of a gravitational mass, such as Earth, tick more slowly than those farther away. GPS satellites orbit 12,500 miles (20,100 km) above the ground, and as a result have 45 microseconds tacked onto their clocks per day. The net result of the two relativistic phenomena is 38 microseconds, which engineers have accounted for with GPS technology.

Scientists from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, using images from NASA's two Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO-A and STEREO-B) spacecraft and Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) have found a previously unreported solar feature - coronal cells in the atmosphere of the Sun.

The study, published online in the Astrophysical Journal, describes cells with bright centers and dark boundaries occurring in the Sun's atmosphere, the corona.

These cells look somewhat like a cell pattern that occurs on the Sun's surface - similar to the bubbles that rise to the top of boiling water - but it was a surprise to find this pattern higher up in the corona, which is normally dominated by bright loops and dark coronal holes.

The coronal cells occur in areas between coronal holes - colder and less dense areas of the corona seen as dark regions in images - and "filament channels" which mark the boundaries between sections of upward-pointing magnetic fields and downward-pointing ones. Understanding how these cells evolve can provide clues as to the changing magnetic fields at the boundaries of coronal holes and how they affect the steady emission of solar material known as the solar wind streaming from these holes.

Following the posting on the Central Bureau's Transient Object Confirmation Page about a possible Nova in Cen (TOCP Designation: J14250600-5845360) we performed some follow-up of this object remotely through the 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD of "Faulkes Telescope South" (MPC Code - E10).

On our images taken on April 09.5, 2012 we can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with Bessell-R CCD magnitude 8.7 at coordinates:

R.A. = 14 25 04.45, Decl.= -58 45 34.3

(equinox 2000.0; UCAC-2 catalogue reference stars).

According to VIZIER there is a 15.319 J-magnitude star at 2.6 arcseconds from the transient position (NOMAD1 0312-0489482).

Our confirmation image;

An animation showing a comparison between our confirmation image and the archive POSS2/UKSTU plate (R Filter - 1997).

Russia plans to send a satellite with a radio beacon to near-Earth asteroid of 99942 Apophis for finding out how big is a threat of its collision with Earth, the country's Academy of Sciences said in its report on Saturday.

The asteroid is considered by the Russian scientists as the most serious threat to Earth as for now.

In 2029, Apophis will be at a distance of only about 36,000 miles to our planet, at the height of the orbits of geostationary satellites. The asteroid could change its orbit and cannon Earth in 2036.

The core target of the possible mission will be to clarify the exact trajectory of Apophis for up to 2036. The satellite will be equipped with a radioisotope power source with a buffer battery.

"From technical point of view the mission could be started for implementation from 2015," the Academy said in the report.

Bacteria are the most populous organisms on the planet. They thrive in almost every known environment, adapting to different habitats by means of genetic variations that provide the capabilities essential for survival. These genetic innovations arise from what scientists believe is a random mutation and exchange of genes and other bits of DNA among bacteria that sometimes confers an advantage, and which then becomes an intrinsic part of the genome.

But how an advantageous mutation spreads from a single bacterium to all the other bacteria in a population is an open scientific question. Does the gene containing an advantageous mutation pass from bacterium to bacterium, sweeping through an entire population on its own? Or does a single individual obtain the gene, then replicate its entire genome many times to form a new and better-adapted population of identical clones? Conflicting evidence supports both scenarios.

In a paper appearing in the April 6 issue of Science, researchers in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) provide evidence that advantageous mutations can sweep through populations on their own. The study reconciles the previously conflicting evidence by showing that after these gene sweeps, recombination becomes less frequent between bacterial strains from different populations, yielding a pattern of genetic diversity resembling that of a clonal population.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have discovered how exposure to arsenic can turn normal stem cells into cancer stem cells and spur tumor growth. Inorganic arsenic, which affects the drinking water of millions of people worldwide, has been previously shown to be a human carcinogen. A growing body of evidence suggests that cancer is a stem-cell based disease. Normal stem cells are essential to normal tissue regeneration, and to the stability of organisms and processes. But cancer stem cells are thought to be the driving force for the formation, growth, and spread of tumors.

Michael Waalkes, Ph.D., and his team at the National Toxicology Program Laboratory, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of NIH, had shown previously that normal cells become cancerous when they are treated with inorganic arsenic. This new study shows that when these cancer cells are placed near, but not in contact with normal stem cells, the normal stem cells very rapidly acquire the characteristics of cancer stem cells. It demonstrates that malignant cells are able to send molecular signals through a semi-permeable membrane, where cells can't normally pass, and turn the normal stem cells into cancer stem cells.

According to Star Trek lore, it is only 51 years until Earth's first contact with an alien species. In the movie Star Trek: First Contact, on April 5, 2063, Vulcans pay a visit to an Earth recovering from a war-torn period (see the movie clip below.) But will such a planet-wide, history-changing event ever really take place? If you are logical, like Spock and his Vulcan species, science points towards the inevitability of first contact.

This is according to journalist Marc Kaufman, who is the science editor for the Washington Post and author of the book First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for life Beyond Earth. He says that from humanity's point of view, first contact would be a "harbinger of a new frontier in a dramatically changed cosmos."

What are some of the arguments for and against the likelihood of first contact ever taking place and what would the implications be?


"One argument against first contact is from those who say there is no other life in the Universe," said Kaufman, speaking to Universe Today via phone, "and with that is the Fermi paradox, which says that if there is so much life out there, why hasn't it visited us yet? That was posited back in the 1950's and with everything we've learned since then, it seems rather presumptuous and Earth-centric to say that because no one has come to Earth, there is no life out there."