The message isn't exactly "breathe easy, B.C."

But a new study of the historical earthquake and tsunami record along the Pacific Coast of southern Canada and the northern U.S. has found that the British Columbia stretch of the 1,200-kilometre-long seismic hazard zone - including Vancouver and Vancouver Island - is significantly less likely than California and Oregon to experience the next 9.0 "mega-quake" that's expected to hit the region some day.

A sleuthing team of Canadian geologists, after examining coastal tsunami deposits and other evidence to reconstruct the 6,500-year history of earthquakes in the volatile offshore area known as the Cascadia subduction zone, has concluded that major "megathrust" quakes - the last of which occurred there in January 1700 - happen about every 230 years along the southern part of the fault line but only every 480 years, on average, in the north.

The hitch, however, is that even if the epicentre of the next monster Pacific quake lies off the coast of California, the wall of sea water triggered by the event could well reach Canada, the study's lead author Lucinda Leonard, a researcher with the Geological Survey of Canada, told Postmedia News.

"It's fair to say that the probability of a major subduction earthquake is higher in the southern area, but we cannot be complacent in the north," she said. "Even if the next one ruptures only the southern part of the margin, the resultant tsunami will likely be hazardous to the B.C. coast."

There's also, of course, the difficulty of precisely predicting when, where and how the grinding of the Juan de Fuca and North America tectonic plates will produce the next "Big One" in the region. Despite an average historical frequency of 480 years between major ruptures in the northern part of the hot zone, Leonard points out that successive mega-quakes have occasionally occurred there within gaps as short as 200 years and as long as 700 years.

Rio Branco, Brazil - It's not every day a traveler casually looks out an airplane window and discovers the ruins of an unknown ancient civilization.

"I said, 'Wow, what am I seeing?'" said Alceu Ranzi, a geographer and palaeontologist with the Federal University in the Brazilian state of Acre. "This is not natural."

What he saw that afternoon in 1999 was a giant, geometrically precise circle carved in the earth. Nearly invisible from the ground, the earthwork had only recently emerged when farmers cleared a tract of forest. The huge structures suggested the area may have been home to many more people than anyone previously believed.

"It's something new that no one expected," Ranzi said. "No one expected that a discovery of this level still could have happened in that region."

Ranzi recruited a team of archaeologists from Brazil and Finland and began searching for more of these earthworks, which he calls geoglyphs.

With this new technology, expect to see some shiny LED tattoos in the future.

Ever wondered what it would be like to watch TV on.. your arm? A team of researchers at the University of Illinois is conducting research and development of new microscopic LED arrays that can be implanted under human skin to monitor health as well as deliver cancer-destroying medication.

The team of researchers have published details of their latest LED advancement, showing off tiny LED arrays that are 100 x 100 micrometres and a puny 2.5 micrometres thick. To get an idea of how small these LED arrays really are, a single red blood cell is about 8 micrometres in diameter while hair and paper are about 80-90 micrometres thick. The LED arrays are coated in silicone and rubber which makes them virtually waterproof and safe to put under human skin.

Earlier this year when Jupiter's great South Equatorial Belt (SEB) vanished, researchers urged amateur astronomers to be alert for its eventual return. The SEB had come and gone before, they noted, and the revival was something to behold. Alert: It might be happening now. After months of quiet in Jupiter's south equatorial zone, a white spot is rapidly forming where the SEB should be. Christopher Go of the Philippines took this picture on Nov. 9th:

It might not look like much, but this is how a revival of the SEB begins--a small disturbance in the upper atmosphere heralds a sudden profusion of spots and swirls. Amid the confusion, Jupiter's vast brown stripe emerges.

The existence of this spot has reportedly been confirmed by astrophotographer Donald Parker of Coral Gables, Florida, and Go himself saw it again on Nov. 10th. "The 'SEB outbreak spot' is also prominent in ultraviolet and methane band filters," notes Go. "This spot should grow bigger in the coming days."

Chopper was the sharpest tool in the box

Australia has laid claim to being the country that first invented a quite literally game-changing piece of cutting-edge technology - to wit, the stone axe with edge ground for greater sharpness.

"This new evidence for the earliest securely dated ground-edge implement in the world indicates that Australia was an important locale of technological innovation 35,000 years ago," comments Dr Bruno David, Down Under archaeologist.

Researchers believe that humanity's primitive ancestors were using stone tools as long as 3.4 million years ago. However it seems to have taken the greater technical nous of proper Homo sapiens to achieve proper edge grinding, making for a much cuttier tool and starting us off on the road to nuclear power and spaceships.

Also: Reg hack in large-red-button LHC control room incident

Particle-punishing boffins at the Large Hadron Collider - the most outrageously powerful matter-rending apparatus and largest machine of any kind assembled by the human race - have switched ammunition. The colossal superconductor massdriver cannons of the LHC are now firing "fully stripped" ultrahypervelocity lead projectiles rather than comparatively insubstantial hydrogen ones.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. The feature spans 50,000 light-years and may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy.

"What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center," said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who first recognized the feature. "We don't fully understand their nature or origin."

The structure spans more than half of the visible sky, from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus, and it may be millions of years old. A paper about the findings has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Finkbeiner and Harvard graduate students Meng Su and Tracy Slatyer discovered the bubbles by processing publicly available data from Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT). The LAT is the most sensitive and highest-resolution gamma-ray detector ever launched. Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light.

Other astronomers studying gamma rays hadn't detected the bubbles partly because of a fog of gamma rays that appears throughout the sky. The fog happens when particles moving near the speed of light interact with light and interstellar gas in the Milky Way. The LAT team constantly refines models to uncover new gamma-ray sources obscured by this so-called diffuse emission. By using various estimates of the fog, Finkbeiner and his colleagues were able to isolate it from the LAT data and unveil the giant bubbles.

Comet Ikeya-Murakami (C/2010 V1) is definitely undergoing an outburst event. Italian astronomers Ernesto Guido and Giovanni Sostero assembled the following animation from images they obtained between Nov. 4th and Nov 9th:

See the animated image here.

The sequence clearly shows an explosion in progress. "Only Nov. 7th is missing," they say, "because of rare cloudy skies over New Mexico, where the remotely-controlled telescope we used is located."

Another New Mexico observer, Leonid Elenin, estimates the size of comet's expanding atmosphere as 4x6 arcminutes. "There is also some evidence of two symmetrical jets emerging from the nucleus of the comet," he says.

The Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA) announced Sunday the discovery of the first-ever Pharaonic antiquity within the Kingdom's boundaries, dating back to the 12th century BC.

The announcement was made at a press conference held at the National Museum in King Abdul Aziz Historical Center in Riyadh.

Dr. Ali Ibrahim Al-Ghabban, Vice-President of Antiquities and Museums at the SCTA, told journalists the 3,100-year-old discovery was of hieroglyphic inscriptions on a fixed rock near the ancient Taima Oasis bearing a royal signature (a dual cartouche) for Ramses III, one of the kings of Pharaonic Egypt, who ruled Egypt between 1,192 and 1,160 BC.

New research on a 2,400 year old star table shows that the Ancient Egyptians kept close tabs on the Big Dipper, monitoring changes in the constellation's orientation throughout the course of an entire year.

The Big Dipper is composed of seven stars and is easily viewable in the northern hemisphere. Its shape looks like a ladle with a scoop attached. Ancient Egyptians represented it as an ox's foreleg.