Astronomers are puzzled by the announcement that the masses of the largest objects in the Universe appear to depend on which method is used to weigh them. The new work was presented at a specialist discussion meeting on 'Scaling Relations of Galaxy Clusters' organised by the Astrophysics Research Institute (ARI) at Liverpool John Moores University and supported by the Royal Astronomical Society.

Clusters of galaxies are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the Universe containing thousands of galaxies like the Milky Way and their weight is an important probe of their dark matter content and evolution through cosmic time. Measurements used to weigh these systems carried out in three different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum: X-ray, optical and millimetre wavelengths, give rise to significantly different results.

Eduardo Rozo, from the University of Chicago, explained that any two of the measurements can be made to fit easily enough but that always leaves the estimate using the third technique out of line. Dubbed the 'Axis of Evil', it is as if the Universe is being difficult by keeping back one or two pieces of the jigsaw and so deliberately preventing us from calibrating our weighing scales properly.

In the last week, there's been a lot of static electricity in the air.

First, a Northwestern University scientist overturned the conventional wisdom about how static electricity works.

Then, a small tsunami off the Cornish coast of England caused the sea to recede 150 feet or more - and people's hair to stand on end with static electricity.

What?

First, let's look at how static electricity works.

The new theory of static electricity

For a long time, it was thought that static electricity occurred when electrons came off the surface of one object and moved to another, creating an imbalance in charge.

But Bartosz Grzybowski, a physical chemist at Northwestern University, and his colleagues published a study in Science showing that the two objects in contact exchange more than ions. They actually exchange small bits of matter.

The Northwestern researchers expected to see that the positive and negative ions in two objects that had static electricity were uniformly distributed. But with a Kelvin force probe microscope, which measures the level of charge on various parts of the surface of an object, they showed that such charges aren't uniform; they're clumped into positive and negative regions about ten nanometers across.

With spectroscopy techniques, the researchers showed that when rubbed together, the materials' surfaces exchanged these nano-sized pieces of charged material.

This means if you rub a balloon on your head and your hair stands up, tiny pieces of balloon - these positive and negative clumps - actually stick to your hair.

However, they still do not know exactly how that forms static electricity.

A planetary scientist at the University of Arizona has determined Neptune's rotation.

According to the first accurate measurements of the planet's rotational period, a day on Neptune lasts about 15 hours, 57 minutes and 59 seconds.

University of Arizona planetary scientist Erich Karkoschka has discovered one of the largest improvements in determining the rotational period of a gas planet in almost 350 years since Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini made the first observations of Jupiter's Red Spot.

"The rotational period of a planet is one of its fundamental properties," Karkoschka, a senior staff scientist at the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, said in a statement. "Neptune has two features observable with the Hubble Space Telescope that seem to track the interior rotation of the planet. Nothing similar has been seen before on any of the four giant planets."

Giant gas planets rotate more like giant blobs of liquid, unlike rocky planets, which behave like solid balls spinning in a more straightforward path. Gas planets' rotation involves a lot of sloshing, swirling and roiling, which has made it difficult for astronomers to get an accurate idea of how fast they spin around.

"If you looked at Earth from space, you'd see mountains and other features on the ground rotating with great regularity, but if you looked at the clouds, they wouldn't because the winds change all the time," Karkoschka said in a statement. "If you look at the giant planets, you don't see a surface, just a thick cloudy atmosphere."

"On Neptune, all you see is moving clouds and features in the planet's atmosphere. Some move faster, some move slower, some accelerate, but you really don't know what the rotational period is, if there even is some solid inner core that is rotating."

An international team of researchers has now succeeded in generating a bacterium possessing a DNA in which thymine is replaced by the synthetic building block 5-chlorouracil (c), a substance toxic for other organisms. The genetic information of all living cells is stored in the DNA composed of the four canonical bases adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T).

The experimental work was based on a unique technology that enables the directed evolution of organisms under strictly controlled conditions. Large populations of microbial cells are cultured for prolonged periods in the presence of a toxic chemical -- in this case, 5-chlorouracil -- at sublethal levels, thereby selecting for genetic variants capable of tolerating higher concentrations of the toxic substance.

In response to the appearance of such variants in the cell population the concentration of the toxic chemical in the growth medium is increased, thus keeping the selection pressure constant. This automated procedure of long term evolution was applied to adapt genetically engineered Escherichia coli bacteria unable to synthesize the natural nucleobase thymine to grow on increasing concentrations of 5-chlorouracil.

After a culture period of about 1000 generations descendants of the original strain were obtained which used 5-chlorouracil as complete substitute for thymine. Subsequent genome analysis revealed numerous mutations in the DNA of the adapted bacteria. The contribution of these mutations to the adaptation of the cells towards the halogenated base will be the subject of follow-up studies.

A drug has been discovered which scientists believe can reverse the effects of premature ageing and could extend human life by more than a decade.

Rapamycin, which has been nicknamed the "forever young" drug, was created from a chemical found in the soil on Easter Island, one of the most remote places on Earth and 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile.

It was used in experiments on children suffering from Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS), a rare genetic condition in which ageing is hyper-accelerated and sufferers die of "old age" at around 12 years.

HGPS causes a dangerous process whereby a protein called progerin builds up in every cell of the body, causing them to age prematurely.

Rapamycin cleaned the cells of progerin, which swept away the defects and left healthy cells.

©RIA Novosti

At 7.14 a.m. local time (12.14 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time), an explosion occurred near the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in East Siberia's Krasnoyarsk Territory, not far from the Vanavara trading post, now Vanavara town, the administrative center of the Evenki Autonomous Area's Tungussko-Chunsky District.

On the morning of June 30, 1908, the sky exploded over a remote region of central Siberia. A fireball as powerful as hundreds of Hiroshima atomic blasts scorched through the upper atmosphere "as if there was a second sun," according to one eyewitness. Scientists today think a small fragment of a comet or asteroid caused the "Tunguska event," so named for the Tunguska river nearby. No one knows for certain, however, because no fragment of the meteoroid has ever been found. The explosion was so vast - flattening and incinerating over an 800 square-mile swath of trees - that generations of amateur sleuths have put forward scenarios as strange as stray black holes or UFO attacks to explain the tremendous explosion.

Now, a controversial scientific study suggests that a chunk of a comet caused the 5 to 10 megaton fireball - what amounts to the largest non-nuclear explosion in modern history. Crucially, according to the new hypothesis, most of the comet bounced off the atmosphere and back into orbit around the sun. The scientists have even identified a candidate Tunguska object - now more than 100 million miles away - that was somewhere near Earth on June 30, 1908 and will be passing close to Earth again in 2045. But just how could a comet - basically a ball of water ice and cosmic dust - create such a massive explosion and leave no trace? The answer, the scientists believe, can be found in basic chemistry rather than complicated physics or evidence yet to be found.

The mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere, says new Cornell University research. The conclusion is supported by an unlikely source: the exhaust plume from the NASA space shuttle launched a century later.

The research, accepted for publication (June 24, 2009) by the journal Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union, connects the two events by what followed each about a day later: brilliant, night-visible clouds, or noctilucent clouds, that are made up of ice particles and only form at very high altitudes and in extremely cold temperatures.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft moves through uncharted territory, literally, on a daily basis, moving through space and sending back collected data to researchers on Earth. But a recently discovered anomaly has been discovered at the edge of the Solar System. Could it pose a problem with Voyager 1's mission?

Voyager 1, the spacecraft launched 33 years ago to observe the largest planets circling the sun, is set to pass out of the Solar System within the next few years. It has entered what scientists refer to as the heliosphere, which is the outer border of the sun's charged particle influence. Data streaming back from both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 revealed that the border with interstellar space, however, isn't a smooth "transition zone" as was theorized. Instead, the border appears to be made up of "magnetic bubbles." Given the effects of magnetism on electromagnetic working systems, could the newly discovered "bubbles" pose a risk to Voyager 1's interstellar mission? Fortunately for Voyager 1 and her trailing sister craft, Voyager 2, the answer is "no."

Caltech professor Edward C. Stone, Voyager project scientist and former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, offered reassurance in an interview in early June. "The spacecraft are unaware of all this," he said. "From a spacecraft point of view, this is a better vacuum than anything here on Earth in a laboratory. Only our sensitive instruments will tell us when the direction and the speed of the wind has changed, and when the direction of magnetic field and its strength have changed."

Lab-grown meat would generate a tiny fraction of emissions associated with conventional livestock production

Meat grown artificially in labs could be a greener alternative for consumers who cannot bear to go vegetarian but want to cut the environmental impact of their food, according to new research.

The study found that growing meat in the lab rather than slaughtering animals would generate only a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with conventional livestock production.

The researchers believe their work suggests artificial meat could help feed the growing world population while reducing the impact on the environment.

According to the analysis by scientists from Oxford University and Amsterdam University, lab-grown tissue would reduce greenhouse gases by up to 96% in comparison to raising animals. The process would require between 7% and 45% less energy than the same volume of conventionally produced meat such as pork, beef, or lamb, and could be engineered to use only 1% of the land and 4% of the water associated with conventional meat.