A newfound comet is apparently on course to have an exceedingly close call with the planet Mars in October 2014, and there is a chance - albeit small - that the comet may even collide with the Red Planet.

The new comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) was discovered Jan. 3 by the Scottish-Australian astronomer Robert H. McNaught, a prolific observer of both comets and asteroids who has 74 comet discoveries to his name.

McNaught is a participant in the Siding Spring Survey a program that hunts down asteroids that might closely approach the Earth. He discovered the new comet using the 0.5-meter Uppsala Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, New South Wales, Australia.

A new experiment simulating conditions in deep space reveals that the complex building blocks of life could have been created on icy interplanetary dust and then carried to Earth, jump-starting life.

Chemists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hawaii, Manoa, showed that conditions in space are capable of creating complex dipeptides - linked pairs of amino acids - that are essential building blocks shared by all living things. The discovery opens the door to the possibility that these molecules were brought to Earth aboard a comet or possibly meteorites, catalyzing the formation of proteins (polypeptides), enzymes and even more complex molecules, such as sugars, that are necessary for life.

"It is fascinating to consider that the most basic biochemical building blocks that led to life on Earth may well have had an extraterrestrial origin," said UC Berkeley chemist Richard Mathies, coauthor of a paper published online last week and scheduled for the March 10 print issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

While scientists have discovered basic organic molecules, such as amino acids, in numerous meteorites that have fallen to Earth, they have been unable to find the more complex molecular structures that are prerequisites for our planet's biology. As a result, scientists have always assumed that the really complicated chemistry of life must have originated in Earth's early oceans.

Camels are well known for their ability to survive the hot and dry conditions of the desert, but a study suggests they once thrived in colder climes. Scientists have unearthed the fossilised remains of a giant species of camel in Canada's High Arctic.

An analysis of protein found in the bones has revealed that this creature, which lived about 3.5 million years ago, is an ancestor of today's species. The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Dr Mike Buckley, an author of the paper from the University of Manchester, said: "What's interesting about this story is the location: this is the northernmost evidence of camels."

Cold conditions

The mid-Pliocene Epoch was a warm period of the Earth's history - but surviving in the Arctic would have still been tough.

The ancient camels would have had to cope with long and harsh winters, with temperatures plunging well below freezing. There would have been snow storms and months of perpetual darkness.

Research uncovers a virus which infects a host that has a non-standard nuclear genetic code.

Among eukaryotes with modified nuclear genetic codes, viruses are unknown. Until now it had been believed that the modifications to the genetic code effectively prevented new viral infections. However, researchers have now reported the first example of a virus that can be shown to have crossed the boundary from organisms using the standard genetic code to those with an alternate genetic code.

"The finding is significant because it means that virus-host co-evolution after a genetic code shift can be more extensive than previously thought", said researcher Derek J. Taylor, professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo.

"It shows that these viruses can overcome what appears to be an insurmountable change in the host genome," Taylor said. "So the fact that we haven't previously seen any viruses in these species with a modified genetic code may not be because the viruses can't adapt to that shift. It may be that we haven't looked hard enough."

The study, titled "Virus-host co-evolution under a modified nuclear genetic code," was published on Tuesday, March 5th in PeerJ, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal in which all articles are freely available (https://PeerJ.com). The team of scientists, all from the University of Buffalo, discovered the highly adapted virus - a totivirus - in the yeast species Scheffersomyces segobiensis (a distant relative of human pathogens in the genus Candida).

A 30-second video of a newborn baby shows the infant silently snoozing in its crib, his breathing barely perceptible. But when the video is run through an algorithm that can amplify both movement and color, the baby's face blinks crimson with each tiny heartbeat.

The amplification process is called Eulerian Video Magnification, and is the brainchild of a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

The team originally developed the program to monitor neonatal babies without making physical contact. But they quickly learned that the algorithm can be applied to other videos to reveal changes imperceptible to the naked eye. Prof. William T. Freeman, a leader on the team, imagines its use in search and rescue, so that rescuers could tell from a distance if someone trapped on a ledge, say, is still breathing.

"Once we amplify these small motions, there's like a whole new world you can look at," he said.

M.P.E.C. 2013-E14, issued on 2013 March 04, reports the discovery of the asteroid 2013 ET (discovery magnitude 16.9) by Catalina Sky Survey (mpc code 703) on images taken on March 03.3 with a 0.68-m Schmidt + CCD.

2013 ET has an estimated size of 64 m - 140 m (based on the object's absolute magnitude H=23.1) and it will have a close approach with Earth at about 2.54 LD (Lunar Distances = ~384,000 kilometers) or 0.0065 AU (1 AU = ~150 million kilometers) at 1207 UT on March 09 2013. This asteroid will reach the peak magnitude ~15.0 on the first hours of March 09.

We performed some follow-up measurements of this object on 2013, March 04.4, while it was still on the neocp, remotely from the Haleakala-Faulkes Telescope North, through a 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD (Faulkes Telescope is operated by Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network). Below you can see our image, stack of 5X10-second exposures, taken with the asteroid at magnitude ~16.9 and moving at ~6.15"/min. At the moment of the close approach 2013 ET will move at ~ 153"/min. Click on the image below to see a bigger version. North is up, East is to the left.
Here you can see a short animation showing the movement of 2013 ET (three consecutive stacks of 5X10-second exposures each). North is up, East is to the left.

A recent NASA video reveals in extraordinary detail what the agency describes as "plasma rain" falling on the Sun. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded a medium strength solar flare, which scientists say generated these enormous plasma loops. But does NASA's interpretation provide real understanding of what we are seeing?

A flawed gene implicated in Parkinson's disease lets proteins build up dangerously in key brain cells, according to a study on Sunday that throws open new paths for tackling the tragic disorder.

Parkinson's patients suffer from progressive stiffness, slowing of movement and problems in coordination resulting from the loss of nerve cells that make a muscle-controlling chemical, dopamine.

A hallmark of the disease is the presence of so-called Lewy bodies, an accumulation of toxic proteins in these vital cells.

But how the proteins - the byproducts of normal cellular processes - are allowed to pile up within the cell, eventually killing it, has remained unclear.

A newly found asteroid will pass just inside the orbit of the Moon, with its closest approach on March 4, 2013 at 07:35 UTC. Named 2013 EC, the asteroid is about the size of the space rock that exploded over Russia two and a half weeks ago, somewhere between 10-17 meters wide (the Russian meteorite is estimated to be about 15 meters wide when it entered Earth's atmosphere). 2014 EC was discovered by the Mt. Lemmon Observatory in Arizona on March 2. . There is no chance this asteroid will hit Earth.

2013 EC will come within 396,000 kilometers from Earth, (246,000 miles, or around 1.0 lunar distances, 0.0026 AU.

The Moon's distance from the Earth varies between 363,104 km (225,622 miles) at perigee (closest) and 406,696 km (252,088 miles) at apogee (most distant point).

Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope have obtained what is likely the first direct observation of a forming planet still embedded in a thick disc of gas and dust. If confirmed, this discovery will greatly improve our understanding of how planets form and allow astronomers to test the current theories against an observable target.

An international team led by Sascha Quanz (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) has studied the disc of gas and dust that surrounds the young star HD 100546, a relatively nearby neighbour located 335 light-years from Earth. They were surprised to find what seems to be a planet in the process of being formed, still embedded in the disc of material around the young star. The candidate planet would be a gas giant similar to Jupiter.

"So far, planet formation has mostly been a topic tackled by computer simulations," says Sascha Quanz. "If our discovery is indeed a forming planet, then for the first time scientists will be able to study the planet formation process and the interaction of a forming planet and its natal environment empirically at a very early stage."

HD 100546 is a well-studied object, and it has already been suggested that a giant planet orbits about six times further from the star than Earth is from the Sun. The newly found planet candidate is located in the outer regions of the system, about ten times further out [1].

The planet candidate around HD 100546 was detected as a faint blob located in the circumstellar disc revealed thanks to the NACO adaptive optics instrument on ESO's VLT, combined with pioneering data analysis techniques. The observations were made using a special coronagraph in NACO, which operates at near-infrared wavelengths and suppresses the brilliant light coming from the star at the location of the protoplanet candidate [2].

According to current theory, giant planets grow by capturing some of the gas and dust that remains after the formation of a star [3]. The astronomers have spotted several features in the new image of the disc around HD100546 that support this protoplanet hypothesis. Structures in the dusty circumstellar disc, which could be caused by interactions between the planet and the disc, were revealed close to the detected protoplanet. Also, there are indications that the surroundings of the protoplanet are potentially heated up by the formation process.