It's not like we've never seen the planetary nebula NGC 1514 before, but we've never seen it though WISE's infrared eyes, until now. And in a stunning surprise, cylindrical rings appear to be encircling the dying star, like a neon-lit carousel, or perhaps like rolling tire surrounding a glowing blob. "I just happened to look up one of my favorite objects in our WISE catalogue and was shocked to see these odd rings," said Michael Ressler, a member of the WISE science team at JPL. "This object has been studied for more than 200 years, but WISE shows us it still has surprises.


At first glance the rings look like the double-ringed space station in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Too bad the Bad Astronomer beat me to that likeness. He also compared it to a tuna can.)

Other people see different things in this image.

"I am reminded of the jellyfish exhibition at the Monterey Bay Aquarium - beautiful things floating in water, except this one is in space," said Edward (Ned) Wright, the principal investigator of the WISE mission at UCLA, and a co-author of a paper on the findings, reported in the Astronomical Journal.

Physicists working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, have succeeded in trapping antihydrogen - the antimatter equivalent of the hydrogen atom - a milestone that could soon lead to experiments on a form of matter that disappeared mysteriously shortly after the birth of the universe 14 billion years ago.

The first artificially produced low energy antihydrogen atoms - consisting of a positron, or antimatter electron, orbiting an antiproton nucleus - were created at CERN in 2002, but until now the atoms have struck normal matter and annihilated in a flash of gamma-rays within microseconds of creation.

The ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus) experiment, an international collaboration that includes physicists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), has now trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms, each for more than one-tenth of a second.

While the number and lifetime are insufficient to threaten the Vatican - in the 2000 novel and 2009 movie "Angels & Demons," a hidden vat of potentially explosive antihydrogen was buried under St. Peter's Basilica in Rome - it is a starting point for learning new physics, the researchers said.

"We are getting close to the point at which we can do some classes of experiments on the properties of antihydrogen," said Joel Fajans, UC Berkeley professor of physics, LBNL faculty scientist and ALPHA team member. "Initially, these will be crude experiments to test CPT symmetry, but since no one has been able to make these types of measurements on antimatter atoms at all, it's a good start."

CPT (charge-parity-time) symmetry is the hypothesis that physical interactions look the same if you flip the charge of all particles, change their parity - that is, invert their coordinates in space - and reverse time. Any differences between antihydrogen and hydrogen, such as differences in their atomic spectrum, automatically violate CPT, overthrow today's "standard model" of particles and their interactions, and may explain why antimatter, created in equal amounts during the universe's birth, is largely absent today.

The team's results will be published online Nov. 17 in advance of its print appearance in the British journal Nature.

Washington -- Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) scientists have analyzed and developed the first comprehensive empirical characterization of solar Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) size, speed, mass, and kinetic energy. CMEs are the most energetic phenomena in the solar system and the major drivers of geomagnetic storms. They were discovered in 1971 by scientists in the Space Science Division (SSD), Solar Physics Branch. NRL's subsequent sustained basic and applied research on CMEs and their effects on the ionosphere, thermosphere, and the nation's space assets led to a progressively fuller physics-based understanding of space weather phenomena and contributed materially to the space weather forecasting capabilities used by the Air Force Weather Agency to support U.S. warfighters.

To analyze this solar cycle set, NRL researchers have studied the uniquely long-term and comprehensive CME observations obtained by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sponsored and NRL's SSD-developed and -operated Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) coronagraph aboard the NASA-European Space Agency (ESA) Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission.

The continuous operation of the LASCO coronagraph since 1996 has resulted in the longest and most complete database of CME properties ever assembled. The CME properties such as size, speed, mass, and kinetic energy have been measured and catalogued for 13,587 CMEs (as of December 2009) from 130,000 calibrated LASCO images. This unique database was compiled by SSD researchers Drs. Angelos Vourlidas, Russell Howard, and outside collaborators. Their data analysis, soon to be reported in the Astrophysical Journal, provides a robust understanding of the dynamic properties of CMEs and their long-term trends, information important for understanding the geoeffective potential of CMEs and improving space weather forecasting capabilities.

Prague - Astronomer Tycho Brahe uncovered some of the mysteries of the universe in the 16th century - and now modern-day scientists are delving into the mystery of his sudden death.

On Monday, an international team of scientists opened his tomb in the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn near Prague's Old Town Square, where Brahe has been buried since 1601. After eight hours of work, they lifted from the tomb a tin box like a child's coffin in which Brahe's remains were placed after the only previous exhumation, in 1901.

Brahe's extraordinarily accurate stellar and planetary observations, which helped lay the foundations of early modern astronomy, are well documented but the circumstances surrounding his death at age 54 are murky.

It has been long thought that he died of a bladder infection: Legend said it was the result of his reluctance to breach court etiquette during a reception by leaving for a toilet. Kidney disease was another suspect.

A farming village established almost 2,000 years ago beside the Roman road leading westward out of London has been uncovered in the parkland around a stately home, now in deepest suburbia.

Extensive remains of the road and village, burials - including skeletons in ditches that are still puzzling archaeologists - and thousands of artefacts including pre-Roman jewellery were found at Syon House near the Thames in Isleworth. The mansion has been the London home of the Dukes of Northumberland for 400 years.

The finds were on the Brentford side of their land on a site being cleared for a new hotel. They were discovered only a few hundred yards from the spot where, according to passionately held local tradition, Julius Caesar crossed the Thames in 54 BC, defeating the British chieftain Cassivellaunus and his alliance of local tribes.

The haul includes pottery, a lava stone quern, coins, a dagger, jewellery including shale bangles and a gold Bronze Age bracelet, in addition to the foundations of huts and a stretch of Roman road.

The strange ditch burials, like the jewellery, may date from long before the Romans arrived, and are still being studied at the Museum of London.

Rome - An almost 2,000 year-old Roman temple dedicated to Diana, the goddess of virgins and wild animals, has been unearthed in a protected park in the Italian region of Tuscany.

The ancient religious sanctuary, found in the Maremma national park is 350 square metres large, and was discovered in perfect condition by a team of Italian and other European archaeologists following a two-year dig.

Bullet-crack backtrack attack-smack

The UK Ministry of Defence has turned to famed techsploration firm BBN - which among other things gave the world the "@" symbol in email - to provide a shoulder-mounted gunshot detector able to backtrack bullets in flight and locate enemy gunmen firing at British troops.

A researcher from Queen's University has created a medical tool that will improve the way brain injury and disease are assessed in patients.

Stephen Scott, creator of the medical tool and a professor at the Centre for Neuroscience Studies at Queen's University, developed the tool to assess brain function. This type of objective tool could eventually be used to design better therapies for treating brain disease or injury.

The medical tool is called the KINARM Assessment Station, and it is the only objective tool capable of assessing brain function. KINARM consists of a chair with robotic arms and a virtual reality system which guides the patients through several tasks. These standardized tasks mimic everyday activities such as hitting a ball with a virtual paddle. After completing these tasks, KINARM creates a detailed evaluation that specifies any abnormal behavior.

"The beauty of this system is that it captures the subtle deficits caused by a brain injury that are not measured by traditional tests," said Scott. "Traditional testing methods, such as touching a finger to the nose or bouncing a ball, just don't capture the complexity of brain processes."

With the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) only two months away, tech companies are gearing up to display their latest and greatest. The CES held a press preview event earlier this week in New York City, showcasing some of the tech goodies to expect next January in Las Vegas. From GPS-enabled ski goggles and high-tech solar phone chargers to teeny tiny upgradable computers, here's what's getting big buzz so far.

GE WattStation

The GE WattStation could easily become a roadside staple as more people pick electric cars as their vehicles of choice. Designed for plug-in electric vehicles, this charger significantly zaps the time needed to reenergize the cars, and the device's smart grid-enabled technology could also help utility companies manage keep track of the energy consumption for each charging station.