The mystery behind one of the most famous astronomical images ever seen may finally have been cracked.

The famous three Pillars of Creation was first photographed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 in the Eagle Nebula.

However, until now experts have been unsure how it formed.

They now believe it was caused by a nearby supernova explosion about 6,000 years ago, but the light showing the new shape of the nebula will not reach Earth for another thousand years.

For as long as he can remember Eric Anderson wanted to become an astronaut. But knew his short-sightedness would prevent him from joining Nasa.

Instead, he has made it his mission to take others into space. He kick-started the space tourism industry at the age of 23 - so far his company, Space Adventures, has sent seven people (all multimillionaires) into space on Russian rockets - and is now planning a 17-day trip for two around the moon. At $125m (£81m) a seat, it will probably be the most expensive joyride ever. "It's more than a theme-park ride," he says.

One mega-rich customer has already signed up for the trip and Anderson says he's "pretty close" to publicly announcing who has paid to go on holiday to the moon, within four years. He assures those with memories of disastrous camping holidays in close confines that the soon-to-be space travellers "will get along just fine" in the tiny spacecraft.

Researchers from the University of Saskatchewan along with the Geological Survey of Canada have discovered the country's 30th meteor impact crater - a 25-kilometre astrobleme created more than 100 million years ago in the Arctic.

The pit-like hole created by the impact of a meteor is in the northwestern part of Victoria Island, and located between Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.

Researchers named the discovery the Prince Albert impact crater after the peninsula where the impact happened.

"It's another piece of the cosmic Earth puzzle," Brian Pratt, geology professor at the University of Saskatchewan, said in a press release. "Impact craters like this give us clues into how the Earth's crust is recycled and the speed of erosion, and may be implicated in episodes of widespread extinction of animals in the geological past."

A seven metric ton particle detector parked for over a year on the International Space Station (ISS) aims to establish whether there is an unseen "dark universe" woven into the cosmos, the scientist leading the project said on Wednesday.

And the detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer or AMS, has already broken all records in registering some 17 billion cosmic rays and storing data on them for analysis, Nobel physics laureate Samuel Ting told a news conference.

"The question is: where is the universe made from anti-matter?" said Ting. "It could be out there somewhere far away producing particles that we could detect with the AMS."

Physicists say that the event 13.7 billion years ago that brought the known universe into existence and has been dubbed the "Big Bang" must have created equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. But then anti-matter largely disappeared.

Why that happened is one of the great mysteries of the cosmos which are being investigated through the AMS and scientific analysts back on the ground at CERN, the European particle physics research center where Ting spoke.

The purpose of the AMS program, he said, "is to search for phenomena that so far we have not had the imagination or the technology to discover".

Some researchers have suggested that the invisible "dark matter" estimated to make up about 25 percent of the known universe could be linked to anti-matter, but others say that is highly unlikely.

NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has successfully adjusted its orbital location to be in a better position to provide prompt confirmation of the August landing of the Curiosity rover.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft carrying Curiosity can send limited information directly to Earth as it enters Mars' atmosphere. Before the landing, Earth will set below the Martian horizon from the descending spacecraft's perspective, ending that direct route of communication. Odyssey will help to speed up the indirect communication process.

NASA reported during a July 16 news conference that Odyssey, which originally was planned to provide a near-real-time communication link with Curiosity, had entered safe mode July 11. This situation would have affected communication operations, but not the rover's landing. Without a repositioning maneuver, Odyssey would have arrived over the landing area about two minutes after Curiosity landed.

Resulting microbial lipids may also signify oxygen dips in Earth's history

Cambridge, Mass. - In the days following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, methane-eating bacteria bloomed in the Gulf of Mexico, feasting on the methane that gushed, along with oil, from the damaged well. The sudden influx of microbes was a scientific curiosity: Prior to the oil spill, scientists had observed relatively few signs of methane-eating microbes in the area.

Now researchers at MIT have discovered a bacterial gene that may explain this sudden influx of methane-eating bacteria. This gene enables bacteria to survive in extreme, oxygen-depleted environments, lying dormant until food - such as methane from an oil spill, and the oxygen needed to metabolize it - become available. The gene codes for a protein, named HpnR, that is responsible for producing bacterial lipids known as 3-methylhopanoids. The researchers say producing these lipids may better prepare nutrient-starved microbes to make a sudden appearance in nature when conditions are favorable, such as after the Deepwater Horizon accident.

The lipid produced by the HpnR protein may also be used as a biomarker, or a signature in rock layers, to identify dramatic changes in oxygen levels over the course of geologic history.

"The thing that interests us is that this could be a window into the geologic past," says MIT postdoc Paula Welander, who led the research. "In the geologic record, many millions of years ago, we see a number of mass extinction events where there is also evidence of oxygen depletion in the ocean. It's at these key events, and immediately afterward, where we also see increases in all these biomarkers as well as indicators of climate disturbance. It seems to be part of a syndrome of warming, ocean deoxygenation and biotic extinction. The ultimate causes are unknown."

Welander and Roger Summons, a professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, have published their results this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lobsters sporting rare, unexpected colors and patterns are becoming more common in catches, and no one knows why.

Blue, pink, orange and even calico lobsters are winding up in traps. The orange ones are perhaps causing the most problems, since some chefs think they've already been cooked. But then the live, snapping crustacean reminds them otherwise.

Maybe social media is partly to blame?

"Are we seeing more because the Twitter sphere is active and people get excited about colorful lobsters?" Michael Tlusty, research director at the New England Aquarium in Boston, told Associated Press. "Is it because we're actually seeing an upswing in them? Is it just that we're catching more lobsters so we have the opportunity to see more?"

Ripping the legs off live crabs and crowding lobsters into seafood market tanks are just two of the many practices that may warrant reassessment, given two new studies that indicate crustaceans feel pain and stress.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence that virtually all animals, including fish, shellfish and insects, can suffer.

Robert Elwood, the lead author of both papers, explained to Discovery News that pain allows an individual to be "aware of the potential tissue damage" while experiencing "a huge negative emotion or motivation that it learns to avoid that situation in the future."

Both pain and stress are therefore key survival mechanisms.

Elwood, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at The Queen's University in Belfast, and colleague Mirjam Appel studied hermit crabs collected from rock pools in County Down, Northern Ireland. All of the crabs survived the experiments and were later released back into their native habitat.

Cbet nr. 3189, issued on 2012, July 23, announces the discovery of a new comet (discovery magnitude 18.3) by R. H. McNaught on CCD images obtained with the 0.5-m Uppsala Schmidt telescope at Siding Spring on July 20.7. The new comet has been designated P/2012 O2 (MCNAUGHT).

We performed some follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 13 R-filtered exposures, 10-sec each, obtained remotely, from the Haleakala-Faulkes Telescope North on 2012, July 23.5, through a 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD, shows that this object appears "soft" compared to the nearby field stars of similar brightness (stellar FWHM of 1.0") and elongated toward PA 260.

Our confirmation image in false color to enhance the coma and its elongation.
M.P.E.C. 2012-O27 (including previously unpublished prediscovery Mount Lemmon observations acquired by A. Gibbs on May 20) assigns the following preliminary elliptical orbital elements to comet P/2012 O2: T 2012 June 25.09; e= 0.54; Peri. = 183.05; q = 1.66 AU; Incl.= 24.53.

Discovery Date: July 18, 2012

Magnitude: 18.9 mag

Discoverer: Robert H. McNaught (Siding Spring)
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2012-O25.