Observations with CSIRO's Australia Telescope Compact Array have confirmed that astronomers have found the first known "middleweight" black hole.

Outbursts of super-hot gas observed with a CSIRO radio telescope have clinched the identity of the first known "middleweight" black hole, Science Express reports.

Called HLX-1 ("hyper-luminous X-ray source 1"), the black hole lies in a galaxy called ESO 243-49, about 300 million light-years away.

Before it was found, astronomers had good evidence for only supermassive black holes -- ones a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun -- and "stellar mass" ones, three to thirty times the mass of the Sun.

"This is the first object that we're really sure is an intermediate-mass black hole," said Dr Sean Farrell, an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Sydney and a member of the research team, which included astronomers from France, Australia, the UK and the USA.

Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study some of the smallest and faintest galaxies in our cosmic neighbourhood. These galaxies are fossils of the early Universe: they have barely changed for 13 billion years. The discovery could help explain the so-called "missing satellite" problem, where only a handful of satellite galaxies have been found around the Milky Way, against the thousands that are predicted by theories.

Astronomers have puzzled over why some extremely faint dwarf galaxies spotted in our Milky Way galaxy's backyard contain so few stars. The galaxies are thought to be some of the tiniest, oldest, and most pristine galaxies in the Universe. They have been discovered over the past decade by astronomers using automated computer techniques to search through the images of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. But an international team of astronomers needed the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to help solve the mystery of why these galaxies are starved of stars, and why so few of them have been found.

Hubble views of three of these small galaxies, the Hercules, Leo IV and Ursa Major dwarf galaxies, reveal that they all started forming stars more than 13 billion years ago -- and then abruptly stopped -- all in the first billion years after the Universe was born in the Big Bang. In fact, the extreme age of their stars is similar to Messier 92, the oldest known globular cluster [1] in the Milky Way.

Individuals who are born deaf use the "hearing" part of their brain to feel touch and to see objects, suggests new research that highlights the plasticity of the human brain.

The new study, detailed online July 11 in The Journal of Neuroscience, shows that deaf people use the so-called auditory cortex to process both touch and visual stimuli much more than hearing individuals do.

"This research shows how the brain is capable of rewiring in dramatic ways," Dr. James Battey, Jr., director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, said in a statement. "This will be of greatinterest to other researchers who are studying multisensory processing in the brain."

Past research has suggested deaf people may use their brains differently than those born with hearing. For instance, researchers found when deaf individuals are signing, they rely on the same brain areas that interpret spoken language, suggesting that something about language is universal.

Another study has shown that those born deaf are better at processing peripheral vision and motion, the researchers noted. Perhaps, the researchers said, deaf individuals use several brain regions, particularly auditory ones, to process vision. But would deafness also affect how the brain processes touch and vision together? This has been a tough one to answer, say the researchers, because in the lab, it's tricky to produce precise tactile stimuli.

Black skin cancer, also known as melanoma, is particularly aggressive and becoming increasingly common in Switzerland. Despite intensive research, however, there is still no treatment. Researchers from the University of Zurich have now discovered a gene that plays a central role in black skin cancer. Suppressing this gene in mice inhibits the development of melanoma and its proliferation -- a discovery that could pave the way for new forms of therapy.

Until recently, it was assumed that a tumor was composed of many equivalent cells that all multiply malignantly and can thus contribute towards tumor growth. According to a more recent hypothesis, however, a tumor might also consist of malignant cancer stem cells and other less aggressive tumor cells. Normally, stem cells are responsible for the formation of organs. Cancer stem cells can divide in a very similar way and develop into other tumor cells to form the tumor. Efficient tumor therapy thus primarily needs to fight cancer stem cells. Consequently, a team of stem-cell researchers from the University of Zurich headed by Professor Sommer decided to find out whether mechanisms that are important for normal stem cells also play a role in cancer stem cells.

A group of diseases that kill millions of people each year can't be touched by antibiotics, and some treatment is so harsh the patient can't survive it. They're caused by parasites, and for decades researchers have searched for a "magic bullet" to kill them without harming the patient. Now, a team of microbiologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has made an advance that could one day lead to a new weapon for fighting parasitic diseases such as African sleeping sickness, chagas disease and leishmaniasis.

In the cover article of the current issue of Eukaryotic Cell, parasitologists Michele Klingbeil, doctoral candidate Jeniffer Concepción-Acevedo and colleagues report the first detailed characterization of the way key proteins in the model parasite Trypanosoma brucei organize to replicate its mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Understanding this spatial and temporal coordination could mean a foot in the door to launch new attacks on one of the parasites' essential cell processes, Klingbeil says.

She adds, "Parasites such as T. brucei, which causes African sleeping sickness, are not straightforward to treat because they're too much like our own cells. Antibiotics are ineffective, so we treat them as invaders, with toxic chemicals. We are trying to find their weaknesses so we can exploit those and eventually develop a very selective, effective and acceptable treatment."

In a slightly creepy but undoubtedly impressive feat of DIY electronics, an evidently lonely Japanese hacker has put together a virtual girlfriend through a combination of motion-tracking hardware, video goggles, and some scavenged 3-D game assets.

A video on YouTube, originally posted at Hack a Day, shows the view through a pair of video goggles that have been augmented with an Asus Xtion motion-tracking tool, essentially an off-brand Microsoft Kinect. This helps track his motion and the environment, and is assisted by some augmented-reality software that places virtual items on the image.

The last ingredient is, of course, a popular Japanese virtual pop idol. Hatsune Miku has starred in many games and concerts, and clearly the builder, known at the moment only by his online handle "Alsionesvx," is a fan. He collected some 3-D models and animations from a portable game that has some augmented reality functions and merged them with his hacked-together environment.

For the first time, researchers at Aalto University in Finland have located where the sounds associated with the northern lights are created. The auroral sounds that have been described in folktales and by wilderness wanderers are formed about 70 meters above the ground level in the measured case.

Researchers located the sound sources by installing three separate microphones in an observation site where the auroral sounds were recorded. They then compared sounds captured by the microphones and determined the location of the sound source. The aurora borealis was seen at the observation site. The simultaneous measurements of the geomagnetic disturbances, made by the Finnish Meteorological Institute, showed a typical pattern of the northern lights episodes.

"Our research proved that, during the occurrence of the northern lights, people can hear natural auroral sounds related to what they see. In the past, researchers thought that the aurora borealis was too far away for people to hear the sounds it made. This is true. However, our research proves that the source of the sounds that are associated with the aurora borealis we see is likely caused by the same energetic particles from the sun that create the northern lights far away in the sky. These particles or the geomagnetic disturbance produced by them seem to create sound much closer to the ground," said Professor Unto K. Laine from Aalto University.

Cbet 3166, issued on 2012 July 07, reports the discovery by Koichi Nishiyama and Fujio Kabashima (Japan) of a possible nova (mag 7.8) on two 40-s unfiltered CCD frames (limiting magnitude 13.7) taken around July 7.4986 UT using a 105-mm f/4 camera lens (+ SBIG STL6303E camera). The variable was designated PNV J18202726-2744263 when it was posted at the Central Bureau's TOCP webpage.

The nova has been designated NOVA SAGITTARII 2012 No. 4.

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 July 09.4, 2012 we can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with R-filtered CCD magnitude 8.7 at coordinates:

R.A. = 18 20 27.20, Decl.= -27 44 26.2

(equinox 2000.0; CMC-14 catalogue reference stars).

Our annotated confirmation image.

After spending 3 years at sea and traveling up to 300 kilometers away from home, a rainbow trout can swim straight back to its original hatching ground, following freshwater streams inland and rarely heading in the wrong direction. This remarkable feat of navigation likely relies on many senses; the fish have superb eyesight and smell. But the trout also seem to rely on Earth's magnetic fields, which point them in the right direction. Now, for the first time in any animal, scientists have isolated magnetic cells in the fish that respond to these fields. The advance may help researchers get to the root of magnetic sensing in a variety of creatures, including birds.

"We think this will really be a game changer," says Michael Winklhofer, an earth scientist at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich in Germany who led the new study. "To study magnetic sensory cells, you have to be able to get hold of them first, and that's what we've finally developed a way to do."

Previous research has shown that many species of fish, as well as migratory birds, have the ability to detect differences in magnetic field strengths, which vary around the globe. Scientists think that the key to this ability is magnetite, the most magnetic of all minerals, which they've found embedded in bird and fish tissues. They've even narrowed down which tissues in these animals could contain magnetite by using dyes that bind to the mineral. But they've never been able to isolate individual cells that contain magnetite, and some of the staining methods have led to false positives and controversy in the field.

The challenge in isolating magnetic cells is that they are few and far between - if they were clustered together they would interfere with each other's magnetism. "If you have a tissue containing these cells, it's likely that only one out of ten thousand cells is magnetic," says Winklhofer. "That makes it very hard to do any research."

The media-adopted name for the Higgs Boson, believed to be discovered this week, couldn't be more misleading. Lawrence M. Krauss explains how the particle could finally dispense with the idea of a supernatural creator. Plus, cosmologist Sean Carroll on how the discovery will revolutionize physics.

There has been a lot of hoopla since the July 4 announcement by the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) that the two largest experiments at the Large Hadron Collider had uncovered evidence for a new elementary particle. The particle in question appears to be the Higgs particle, which scientists have been seeking for almost 50 years and is at the heart of our current best theory of nature. But the real excitement seems to stem from the fact that this long-sought discovery is frequently called, in colloquial circles, "the God particle." This term appeared first in the unfortunate title of a book written by physicist Leon Lederman two decades ago, and while to my knowledge it was never used by any scientist (including Lederman) before or since, it has captured the media's imagination.
What makes this term particularly unfortunate is that nothing could be further from the truth. Assuming the particle in question is indeed the Higgs, it validates an unprecedented revolution in our understanding of fundamental physics and brings science closer to dispensing with the need for any supernatural shenanigans all the way back to the beginning of the universe - and perhaps even before the beginning, if there was a before.

The brash notion predicts an invisible field (the Higgs field) that permeates all of space and suggests that the properties of matter, and the forces that govern our existence, derive from their interaction with what otherwise seems like empty space. Had the magnitude or nature of the Higgs field been different, the properties of the universe would have been different, and we wouldn't be here to wonder why. Moreover, a Higgs field validates the notion that seemingly empty space may contain the seeds of our existence.