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A long-running US military project aimed at producing a "refrigerator sized" laser raygun capable of being mounted on US combat aircraft has received further funding of just under $40m.

Mercury's origins may be very different from its sister planets, including Earth, based on early findings that show surprisingly rich deposits of sulfur on the ground, scientists said on Thursday.

Early findings from the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury is forcing scientists to rethink how the planet closest to the sun formed and what has happened to it over the past 4 billion years.

NASA's Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging spacecraft -- nicknamed Messenger -- is three months into a planned year-long mission. It has also uncovered evidence of a lopsided magnetic field and regular bursts of electrons jetting through the magnetosphere.

"It's almost a new planet because we've never had this kind of observatory before," said lead researcher Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C.

Volcanoes appear to have played a rather large role in shaping Mercury, providing fresh material to fill its cratered face, but also possibly providing an unexpected supply of sulfur to the surface, a finding that suggests Mercury may have had different building blocks than Venus, Earth and Mars.

Boy, do we have the goodies for you this week. Several multi-object conjunctions, all for your viewing pleasure.

The first are morning events. As you all know, I am not a morning astronomer. However, there are occasions where I make an exception, this is one of them.

First, on Sunday morning, June 26, be outside and find a clear, uncluttered view to the east between 4:45 and 4:30 a.m. MDT.

High to the right is bright Jupiter, the largest of all the planets and just to its left is a very slender crescent moon.

They will be close enough to be in the same binocular field of view.

The next morning, Monday, June 27, an even thinner crescent will move down and left and stand between Jupiter and the tiny star cluster, The Pleiades, or M45, an awesome sight in binoculars.

Moving on to Tuesday, June 28, the moon will be between the Pleiades and the dim planet Mars (look just below the moon).

If you draw a line from Pleiades through the moon, past Mars and on down you will find bright Aldebaran, the eye of Taurus, the Bull.

An international team of astronomers recently presented compelling evidence that our galaxy is teeming with lonely Jupiter-sized planets adrift between stars. Alone in the void, unattached to any parent sun, these cosmic orphans appear to fill the heavens in vast numbers. Extrapolating from what they observed, Takahiro Sumi, an astrophysicist at Osaka University, and his colleagues reported in the journal Nature that there could be as many as 400 billion of these lonely wanderers in our Milky Way galaxy alone.

Needless to say, the observation opened a whole new field for cosmic inquiry, and added force to the question that has intrigued scientists, philosophers, poets, religious believers, science-fiction devotees and every child who has ever gazed upward on a clear, moonless night: Are we alone?

As if on cue, NASA then announced that its Kepler spacecraft, two years into a three-and-a-half year mission to find Earth-size planets around nearby stars, had found a totally unexpected profusion of candidates. Of the 1,235 suspected planets spotted so far, moreover, about a third were in multiplanet solar systems like ours. Judging from these discoveries, it would appear that planets out there are as numerous as grains of sand. Twenty-five years ago, when I was a student in high school, only nine planets were known, all in our solar system. We learned their names and sequence from the sun, from the fleet-footed Mercury to icy Pluto. We learned of the runaway greenhouse effect that had stoked Venus to blistering temperatures and read about the giant storm that is Jupiter's red spot, and we gazed at pictures of the rings of Saturn that the Voyager spacecraft had sent back.

"Just as a fish may be barely aware of the medium in which it lives and swims, so the microstructure of empty space could be far too complex for unaided human brains."

Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, physicist, Cambridge University

Our known Hubble length universe contains hundreds of millions of galaxies that have clumped together, forming super clusters and a series of massive walls of galaxies separated by vast voids of empty space.

Great Wall: The most vast structure ever is a collection of superclusters a billion light years away extending for 5% the length of the entire observable universe. It is theorized that such structures as the Great Wall form along and follow web-like strings of dark matter that dictates the structure of the Universe on the grandest of scales. Dark matter gravitationally attracts baryonic matter, and it is this normal matter that astronomers see forming long, thin walls of super-galactic clusters.

If it took God one week to make the Earth, going by mass it would take him two quintillion years to build this thing -- far longer than science says the universe has existed, and it's kind of fun to have those two the other way around for a change. Though He could always omnipotently cheat and say "Let there be a Sloan Great Wall."

The long-necked, lumbering Brachiosaurus that wandered the Earth150 million years ago ran a body temperature cooler than scientists had thought. The beasts most likely had special cooling mechanisms or behaviors to keep their temperatures down, a new study suggests.

These plant-eating dinosaurs, called sauropods - the largest animals ever to walk the Earth - probably had temperatures more like humans today, from around 96 degrees Fahrenheit to 100.8 F (roughly 35 to 38 degrees Celsius).

"Birds evolved from dinosaurs. We know modern birds are warm-blooded but we don't know at what point that evolved," said study researcher Rob Eagle of Caltech University. "This was the first quantitative measure of the body temperature of a dinosaur." (Warm-blooded mammals try to maintain their bodies at a constant temperature, whereas cold-blooded creatures take on the temperature of their surroundings.)

In the United States alone, 20 million people suffer from peripheral neuropathy, a condition that involves nerve degeneration and sometimes extreme pain, often without any explanation. Now we've found the culprit for this mysterious pain...and it's all one gene's fault.

Specifically, it's the gene SCNA9, which is involved in the sensory nerve fibers and produces a protein sodium channel known as Nav1.7. Yale researchers, working with colleagues in the Netherlands, found that this particular gene is responsible for the horrifically named "Man on Fire Syndrome", a rare disorder marked by pain so severe that it's like...well, I think you can probably guess what it's like.

What's more, when the researchers examined 28 patients with peripheral neuropathy that could not otherwise be explained, 30% of the patients showed mutations in the SCNA9. These mutations created hyperactive nerve cells, which in turn ultimately caused the nerve fibers to degenerate, resulting in the severe - and until now unexplained - pain.

Mounds of earth that have been found on the surface of Mars may once have been covered by sprawling lakes, scientist have claimed.

The incredible photographs showing valleys and channels were taken from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft which arrived at Mars in 2001.

Experts believe that the teardrop-shaped islands on the red planet could have formed deep underwater millions of years ago.

The breakthrough could add to evidence that cast oceans that supported life were once present on the planet.

'Based on this analogy, I am humbly suggesting that teardrop-shaped islands on Mars formed underwater in a relatively deep ocean,' said geologist Lorena Moscardelli of the University of Texas, Austin, lead author of a paper in the July Geology.

Astronomers have discovered a "bridge" of dark matter, a length of about 1.5 million light-years, joining more than a dozen galaxies.

It is believed that galaxies in the universe separated by blank spaces that are not quite empty, but filled with strands of dark matter, forming a network. Dark matter can not directly observe the modern instruments because of the fact that it does not emit electromagnetic radiation of sufficient intensity for observation. But the judge it can be indirectly by the gravitational effect on objects.

Israeli astronomers have observed 14 dwarf galaxies are located almost on the same line length of about 1.5 million light years away. They found that after a billion years of inactivity, some 30 million years ago, they again began the process of star formation, and simultaneously in all the galaxies. "This is a very strange thing. Normally you can not expect that in galaxies, unrelated to each other, will begin at the same time the processes of birth of stars, "- says co-author Noah Borsch from Tel Aviv University.

As long as there have been governments, there have been secret projects. With the influx of humans into space, the room for government black projects has grown significantly and, until recently, governments from all over the world have been able to consider space a safe zone from where they were free to hide things from the prying eyes of the populace.

Ever since humans have been flying and/or launching things into space, there have been opportunities to see space vehicles in flight thanks to the sunlight reflected off of their metallic exteriors. From dark skies far away from the city, it is possible to see some satellites as small as a refrigerator should the conditions allow. Needless to say, with space becoming ever more crowded, satellite watching has become a favorite past time for some astronomers such as the observation of natural objects was in decades past.

Come 2011, thanks to advances in technology, secret government satellites are frequently becoming objects of examination, too.