In science fiction - like in Star Trek, for example - interstellar communication was never a problem; all you had to do was have Urhura open up hailing frequencies to Starfleet command. But in the real universe, communicating between star systems poses a dilemma with current radio technology.

There's also a very real problem today for operating spacecraft in that communications are impossible when a planetary body is blocking the signal. One of the more outlandish methods proposed for solving deep space communication problems has been to devise a technique using neutrinos. But now, it turns out, using neutrinos for communication might not be that crazy of an idea: communicating with neutrinos has, for the first time, been tested successfully.

Scientists of the MINERvA collaboration at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory successfully transmitted a message through 240 meters of rock using neutrinos. The team says their demonstration "illustrates the feasibility of using neutrino beams to provide a low-rate communications link, independent of any existing electromagnetic communications infrastructure."

The scientists used the a 170-ton MINERvA detector at Fermilab and a NuMI beam line, a powerful, pulsed accelerator beam to produce neutrinos. They were able to manipulate the pulsed beam and turn it - for a couple of hours - into a sort of "neutrino telegraph," according to R&D magazine.

There may be some frantic activity going on in the narrow, dusty disk surrounding a nearby star named Fomalhaut. Scientists have been trying to understand the makeup of the disk, and new observations by the Herschel Space Observatory reveals the disk may come from cometary collisions. But in order to create the amount of dust and debris seen around Fomalhaut, there would have to be collisions destroying thousands of icy comets every day.

"I was really surprised," said Bram Acke, who led a team on the Herschel observations. "To me this was an extremely large number."

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The chip achieves unprecedented accuracy by processing information from many different sensors.

Broadcom has just rolled out a chip for smart phones that promises to indicate location ultra-precisely, possibly within a few centimeters, vertically and horizontally, indoors and out.

The unprecedented accuracy of the Broadcom 4752 chip results from the sheer breadth of sensors from which it can process information. It can receive signals from global navigation satellites, cell-phone towers, and Wi-Fi hot spots, and also input from gyroscopes, accelerometers, step counters, and altimeters.

The variety of location data available to mobile-device makers means that in our increasingly radio-frequency-dense world, location services will continue to become more refined.

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.