In 2011, astronomers in Germany announced the discovery of a cloud of gas - with several times the mass of the Earth - accelerating fast towards the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way. They originally said that the cloud would pass closest to the black hole in mid-2013, but a new analysis suggests the date of closest passage as early 2014. The passage of the gas cloud near the black hole is already underway, and numerous observing programs have been set up to monitor the region around the Milky Way's center during 2013.

In April 2013, data acquired at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) showed that part of the gas cloud has already passed closest to the black hole. As expected, the cloud is undergoing what astronomers sometimes call spaghettification - or the noodle effect. That is, it's being stretched or elongated as it passes the hole, due to the hole's powerful gravity.

The front part of the gas cloud is now already moving 500 km/s faster than its tail, astronomers say, confirming earlier predictions that the gas cloud is doomed. It's not expected to survive its encounter with the black hole.

The top-secret PRISM program allows the U.S. intelligence community to gain access from nine Internet companies to a wide range of digital information, including e-mails and stored data, on foreign targets operating outside the United States. The program is court-approved but does not require individual warrants. Instead, it operates under a broader authorization from federal judges who oversee the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Some documents describing the program were first released by The Washington Post on June 6. The newly released documents below give additional details about how the program operates, including the levels of review and supervisory control at the NSA and FBI. The documents also show how the program interacts with the Internet companies.

Star Tau Boo's baffling magnetic flipsThe star Tau Boo rapidly flips its magnetic field, potentially because of its interaction with a planet six times Jupiter's mass.

For the first time, astronomers have watched the complete magnetic cycle of a star other than the Sun. Tau Boötis, known as Tau Boo, is a yellowish star that is a little brighter than our Sun. It is located 51 light-years away and hosts a giant exoplanet about six times the mass of Jupiter that orbits Tau Boo every 3.3 days.

In 2007, scientists saw that the magnetic field of Tau Boo flipped. Since then, the team has observed four reversals in polarity, confirming that the star has a rapid magnetic cycle of no more than two years - compared to 22 years for the Sun. "The Sun's magnetic field is a bit like a giant bar magnet, with a north pole and south pole," said team member Rim Fares of the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom. "Every 11 years, during solar maximum [the peak of sunspot activity], the Sun's poles swap over. It takes two flips to restore the magnetic field to its original orientation, so the Sun's magnetic cycle lasts 22 years. Tau Boo has the same magnetic behavior as the Sun, but its cycle is very fast compared to the solar one."

This abrupt shift changes the environment surrounding the large exoplanet, and the reasons for Tau Boo's fast cycle are still unclear.

Study has important potential for developmental learning disabilities including features of autism.

A little bit of learned fear is a good thing, keeping us from making risky, stupid decisions or falling over and over again into the same trap. But new research from neuroscientists and molecular biologists at USC shows that a missing brain protein may be the culprit in cases of severe over-worry, where the fear perseveres even when there's nothing of which to be afraid.

In a study appearing the week of July 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers examined mice without the enzymes monoamine oxidase A and B (MAO A/B), which sit next to each other in our genetic code as well as on that of mice. Prior research has found an association between deficiencies of these enzymes in humans and developmental disabilities along the autism spectrum such as clinical perseverance - the inability to change or modulate actions along with social context.

"These mice may serve as an interesting model to develop interventions to these neuropsychiatric disorders," said senior author Jean C. Shih, USC University Professor and Boyd & Elsie Welin Professor of Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the USC School of Pharmacy and the Keck School of Medicine of USC. "The severity of the changes in the MAO A/B knockout mice compared to MAO A knockout mice supports the idea that the severity of autistic-like features may be correlated to the amounts of monoamine levels, particularly at early developmental stages."

Remnants from the collision of over twenty fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994 still comprise 95% of the detectible water in Jupiter's atmosphere today. This discovery was possible thanks to one of the last observation missions of the infrared Herschel Space Telescope. A few days after the observation, the Herschel spacecraft ran out of its liquid helium coolant and will now have to be shut down.[1]

An article now online from the May 4, 2013 issue of ScienceNews reports on research showing the detection of upper atmosphere water deposits that originated with the comet's collision with the massive planet.[2]

"In July 1994, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plowed into Jupiter, and the comet fragments triggered dark scars of debris in the giant planet's atmosphere that were visible for weeks. The comet also left behind a more permanent deposit: millions of gallons of water. Water from the impact still makes up at least 95 percent of the water in the planet's upper atmosphere, researchers report April 23 in Astronomy & Astrophysics."

Hold on to your wand, Harry Potter: Science has outdone even your best "Leviosa!" levitation spell.

Researchers report that they have levitated objects with sound waves, and moved those objects around in midair, according to a new study.

Scientists have used sound waves to suspend objects in midair for decades, but the new method, described today (July 15) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, goes a step further by allowing people to manipulate suspended objects without touching them.

This levitation technique could help create ultrapure chemical mixtures, without contamination, which could be useful for making stem cells or other biological materials.

He's trying to revolutionize the automobile, and now he wants to do the same thing to mass transit.

In an intriguing tweet posted Monday, Musk (@elonmusk) promises that on Aug. 12 he will unveil a new mass transit method which will revolutionize travel. He calls his invention the Hyperloop.

Will publish Hyperloop alpha design by Aug 12. Critical feedback for improvements would be much appreciated.

- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 15, 2013

Experts speculate it could be a series of pneumatic tubes that move passengers along a river of air.

Musk has long been critical of California's proposed bullet train and predicts his Hyperloop will get passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes. The bullet train would make the trip in three hours.

An astronomer studying archived images of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has found a 14th moon orbiting the planet, NASA said on Monday.

Estimated to be about 12 miles in diameter, the moon is located about 65,400 miles from Neptune.
Astronomer Mark Showalter, with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, was searching Hubble images for moons inside faint ring fragments circling Neptune when he decided to run his analysis program on a broader part of the sky.

"We had been processing the data for quite some time and it was on a whim that I said, 'OK, let's just look out further," Showalter told Reuters.

"I changed my program so that instead of stopping just outside the ring system it processed the data all the way out, walked away from my computer and waited an hour while it did all the processing for me. When I came back, I looked at the image and there was this extra dot that wasn't supposed to be there," Showalter said.

Follow-up analysis of other archived Hubble images of Neptune verified the object was a moon.

Ukrainian amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov discovered a brand new comet on July 8 near the bright star Capella in the constellation Auriga. The comet was confirmed and officially christened C/2013 N4 (Borisov) on July 13. At the time of discovery, Borisov was attending the Russian-Ukrainian "Southern Night" star party in Crimea, Ukraine. He nabbed the comet - his first - using an 8-inch (20-cm) f/1.5 wide field telescope of his own design equipped with a CCD camera.The new comet is on the faint side, appearing as a small, fuzzy patch of 13th magnitude with a brighter center. To see it you'll need at least a 10-inch (25-cm) telescope and the fortitude to rise in the wee hours before dawn. The reason for the early hour is Borisov's location in Auriga, a constellation that doesn't clear the horizon until shortly before the start of morning twilight. Faintness and low altitude will combine to make Comet Borisov an enticing if challenging object for amateur astronomers.

Animation of Comet Borisov compiled from multiple images

C/2013 N4 is currently traveling through Auriga not far from the easy-to-spot naked eye star Beta and will slowly brighten as it approaches perihelion - closest point to the sun - on August 20 at a distance of 113.5 million miles (182.7 million km). Unfortunately its elongation or separation from the sun will be slowly shrinking in the coming weeks, causing the comet to drop lower in the sky as it approaches perihelion. Our fuzzy visitor misses Earth by a comfortable 192.5 million miles (310 million km) on August 11. It's likely Comet Borisov won't get much brighter than 12th magnitude. Astronomers are still working out the details of its orbit, so it's possible brightness predictions could change in the near future.

Why do planets farthest from the Sun have the fastest winds?

Earth's average wind speed is approximately 56 kilometers per hour, with a maximum of 372 kilometer per hour gust recorded on Mount Washington, New Hampshire in 1934. Some isolated wind phenomena, such as tornadoes and hurricanes, can sustain average velocities of 480 and 320 kilometers per hour for short periods. The maximum 24 hour speed record of 205 kilometers per hour from 1934 still remains, however.

Tornadoes continue to be a mystery to consensus science, as well as Electric Universe advocates, although it seems that they are more like rotating electric discharges than anything else. The electric charges in a tornado are whirling at many meters per second, so they probably form an electromagnetic field called a "charge sheath vortex."

It is commonly believed that weather is driven on Earth primarily by the Sun's thermal influence on the atmosphere. As we rotate beneath our primary, gases and dust absorb solar radiation at varying rates and in varying degrees. When any particular region heats up, the air expands and loses density, creating a relative low pressure area. Cooler air, being denser, will naturally flow into the bottom of the warm, low pressure region, causing an upwardly rotating convection cell to form.

Most weather systems on Earth are thought to be based on that simple kinetic explanation: winds blow when the cooler, denser air flows into the warmer, buoyant air.

The kinetic model of weather does not take into account the fact that planets much farther out in the Solar System have sustained winds that make those on our planet seem like gentle breezes. The average wind speeds on the gas giant planets are fantastic.

Jupiter's winds clock at 635 kilometers per hour around the Great Red Spot; Saturn's average wind speed is up to 1800 kilometers per hour; Uranus 900 kilometers per hour; and Neptune comes in at 1138 kilometers per hour. On Neptune the winds are blowing through an atmosphere that measures minus 220 degrees Celsius. Why is it that the most remote planets, receiving small fractions of the solar energy bathing Earth, are able to convert that small fraction into much larger effects?