Forget close encounters of a third kind. Imagine galactic encounters with millions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy, each of them overflowing with complex life forms. A new study says it's a possibility.

Although researchers are nearly unanimous in the belief that some other life forms exist in the great expanse of outer space, the worlds that any intelligent life forms inhabit are probably too distant for any human-alien meetings in the near future.

"On the one hand, it seems highly unlikely that we are alone," said Louis Irwin, professor emeritus at the University of Texas at El Paso and lead author of the study published in Challenges journal. "On the other hand, we are likely so far away from life at our level of complexity, that a meeting with such alien forms is extremely improbable for the foreseeable future."

The team of researchers arrived at their conclusions after examining more than 1,000 exoplanets for particular characteristics like age, chemistry, density, temperature and distance from the parent star. From the available information, the team arrived at a "biological complexity index" (BCI) that ranges between 0 and 1.0. The index is determined by "the number and degree of characteristics assumed to be important for supporting multiple forms of multicellular life."

"I realise now that I wanted to disappear. To get so lost that nobody ever found me. To go so far away that I'd never be able to make my way home again. But I have no idea why." -Jessica Warman

When you lie down on your back on a clear, dark, moonless night, what is it that you see? If your vision is outstanding and observing conditions are just right, you're likely to see not only a few planets and thousands of stars, but also star clusters, some faint nebulae, the plane of the Milky Way, and maybe even a distant galaxy or two.

But when you start to look more deeply - beyond what you can see with your naked eye - you start to find that there's an amazing Universe past our own galaxy, past the stars, clusters and nebulae of the Milky Way out there. What once seemed like faint, fuzzy, inconsequential smudges have since revealed themselves to be distant galaxies, or island Universes not so different than our own, consisting of anywhere from hundreds of millions to many trillions of stars.
And the Universe is full of them, with roughly as many galaxies in the part observable to us as there are stars in the entire galaxy we inhabit.

What's perhaps surprising about these galaxies is that the farther away we find them, the faster they appear to be moving away from us. This was one of the most puzzling discoveries of the early 20th century, and it was finally put into order by Edwin Hubble (and, independently, Georges Lemaître) who realized that this was a consequence of living in an expanding Universe.

The resultant relation - that the farther away a galaxy is from us, the faster it appears to recede - is known as Hubble's law. The only exceptions to this rule happen when a galaxy has been subject to an intense, local gravitational interaction, giving it what's known as a significant peculiar velocity. But on the largest scales, Hubble's law, or the velocity/redshift relation, shows itself incredibly clearly.


You might instinctively wonder, especially if you know about the framework of the Big Bang, whether this will continue forever or not? Hubble's famous law was formulated all the way back in 1929, and for the majority of the 20th century, scientists were seeking the answer to that very question.

Read more here.

Researchers identify first piece of new brain-repair circuit

Duke researchers have found a new type of neuron in the adult brain that is capable of telling stem cells to make more new neurons. Though the experiments are in their early stages, the finding opens the tantalizing possibility that the brain may be able to repair itself from within.

Neuroscientists have suspected for some time that the brain has some capacity to direct the manufacturing of new neurons, but it was difficult to determine where these instructions are coming from, explains Chay Kuo, M.D. Ph.D., an assistant professor of cell biology, neurobiology and pediatrics.

In a study with mice, his team found a previously unknown population of neurons within the subventricular zone (SVZ) neurogenic niche of the adult brain, adjacent to the striatum. These neurons expressed the choline acetyltransferase (ChAT) enzyme, which is required to make the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. With optogenetic tools that allowed the team to tune the firing frequency of these ChAT+ neurons up and down with laser light, they were able to see clear changes in neural stem cell proliferation in the brain.
The findings appeared as an advance online publication June 1 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The mature ChAT+ neuron population is just one part of an undescribed neural circuit that apparently talks to stem cells and tells them to increase new neuron production, Kuo said. Researchers don't know all the parts of the circuit yet, nor the code it's using, but by controlling ChAT+ neurons' signals Kuo and his Duke colleagues have established that these neurons are necessary and sufficient to control the production of new neurons from the SVZ niche.

"We have been working to determine how neurogenesis is sustained in the adult brain. It is very unexpected and exciting to uncover this hidden gateway, a neural circuit that can directly instruct the stem cells to make more immature neurons," said Kuo, who is also the George W. Brumley, Jr. M.D. assistant professor of developmental biology and a member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. "It has been this fascinating treasure hunt that appeared to dead-end on multiple occasions!"

A large asteroid is set to fly by Earth on 8 June, travelling at a speed of 31,000mph.

According to Space.com, current estimates show that Asteroid 2014 HQ124, was detected in April by Nasa's Wise telescope.

While it is not unusual for asteroids to fly past Earth, or just outside the orbit of the moon, it is less common to discover a previously unknown celestial object of that size. According to Nasa, the Minor Planet Center has classified 2014 HQ124 as a "Potentially Hazardous Asteroid".

The asteroid is inclined to the plane of the solar system by 26 degrees and is currently at -71 degrees inclination. It is out of reach of all but most southern telescopes.

On 6 June 2014 the asteroid will brighten to about apparent magnitude 13.7 and be in Horologium, a small and faint constellation in the southern sky.

For the second time in just a few days, noctilucent clouds (also known as NLCs) have been sighted in Germany, SpaceWeather reports. Although their northern season is just getting underway, researchers aren't sure why these early NLCs seem to favor German longitudes.

This morning shortly before sunrise, Chris Kranich spotted the telltale electric-blue ripples over Kiel:
"These second noctilucent clouds of the season appeared shortly after astronomic midnight and rose over the horizon for about two hours before disappearing in the morning twilight," says Kranich.

Noctilucent cloud season, which begins every year in late spring and stretches into summer, is just getting underway. NASA's AIM spacecraft saw the first NLCs of the northern season on May 24th. Ground-level sightings followed soon thereafter - first on May 30 and then on June 3. So far all of the sightings reported to spaceweather.com have come from Germany.

AIM researchers aren't sure why these early NLCs seem to favor German longitudes, but they're looking into it.

See more noctilucent clouds captured by Chris Kranich here.

Source: SpaceWeather

There may be hope for people with desk jobs: A new kind of clothing aims to tone muscles and burn calories, and you don't even have to break a sweat.

The clothing, currently called "Skinesiology," was invented by a team of medical students who'd had trouble finding time to exercise. The clothes work by resisting muscles, and are designed to burn calories during everyday activities.

The team entered an entrepreneurship competition at New York University's Stern School of Business and won $75,000 to develop a prototype of the clothing.

"We're not creating [the clothing] as a replacement for exercise," said Franklin Yao, a first-year medical student at NYU School of Medicine, who is leading the startup project. Rather, it's a way to supplement exercise, Yao told Live Science.

Couch potato cure

More than one-third of U.S. adults are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The fact that many people either can't or don't want to exercise is a contributing factor, researchers say.

Although humans have led active lifestyles for hundreds of thousands of years throughout evolution, people have become more sedentary, said Dr. JR Rizzo, a rehabilitation doctor at NYU Langone Medical Center and the team's chief medical adviser.

It's a challenge to change people's habits, Rizzo said. "What if we could increase our caloric expenditure during daily activities by making clothing more resistant?" Rizzo asked.

The NYU medical students came up with the concept of workout clothes that make muscles work harder by resisting their motion and, as a result, burn extra calories.

Bear with me, for this may not be an easy read - but we need to crack the code of this much-discussed vainglorious chimera.
Which is not to say it doesn't exist - it does. Yet it exists as a byproduct of minds that operate in a sub human vacuum; that have severed their connection with with the normal diversity of emotions - and more particularly - with spirit and soul. Once this type of divorce is sanctioned there can only be deleterious consequences.

The current Transhumanist ethos is deeply atheistic and, as such, has no need to replace God, since it doesn't believe there is such an entity in the first place. But, ironically, it seemingly does have the need to create an all-powerful god of its own design.

Such a concept, pursued through to its conclusion, can, according to its proponents, provide some sort of final solution to the human dilemma. So we get the Transhumanist notion that the realisation of a computer that can outmaneuver the human brain will somehow produce a liberated society.

Nothing, in reality could be further from the truth. By handing over responsibility for the management of our lives to machines, we usurp our own ability to shape, alter, direct and ultimately rejoice in the art of living. Instead, we individually elect to become slaves to our own inventions.

A humungous Earth-like planet found by US astronomers has changed the perception of planet formation. A rocky world found by Kepler space observatory should by rights have become a giant ball of gas, but has remained a planet for billions of years.

The newly discovered Kepler-10c planet has been dubbed 'Mega-Earth' thanks to its diameter of 29,000 kilometers and an estimated weight 17 times greater than Earth, which has a diameter of 12,742 kilometers. This makes Kepler-10c the biggest rocky planet ever discovered.

The new planet is circling a very old Sun-like star, Kepler-10, some 560 light years from Earth. If you look up in the sky this star can be seen in the Draco constellation, which is 300 million light years away.

© NASA/JPL-Caltech/CXC/SAOCas A as seen by NuSTAR (blue) and Chandra (red, yellow and green).

Two elements deep within Cassiopeia A, hint the supernova remnant underwent a quark nova - a theoretical second explosion that leaves behind a quark star - just days after the original supernova.

Massive stars are thought to end their lives in cataclysmic explosions, leaving behind neutron stars or black holes as their corpses.

But there are even stranger possibilities.

Cassiopeia A exploded some 300 years ago and is now a beautiful cascade of gases surrounding a neutron star (or so we think). Dozens of ground- and space-based telescopes have collected the remnant's light over the years. And recently, NuSTAR - NASA's latest high-energy X-ray satellite - stared at Cas A for 13.8 days straight, shedding light deep into this remnant.

Now, astronomers from the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, have proposed a more exotic scenario: days after the first supernova explosion, the neutron star exploded once more, creating a quark star instead.

"It's hard not to imagine that nature wouldn't make use of this stage between a neutron star and a black hole," says lead author Rachid Ouyed, one of the first scientists to suggest the concept. "A quark nova can be thought as a bridge between these two."

Quarks are the fundamental building blocks of matter. They normally associate in groups of two or three, producing familiar protons and neutrons. But, like any new ideas in theoretical physics, they're enshrouded in controversy and debate.

NASA's revolutionary solar observatory has captured rare footage of super-hot bubbles on the sun's surface, known as coronal mass ejections.

"The field of view seen here is about five Earths wide and about seven-and-a-half Earths tall," NASA said in a description of the video, which shows the sun emitting flares into space.

While coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are not rare themselves (there can be up to two or three CMEs per week depending on the sunspot cycle), this time is different - because for the first time, the process was caught on camera by NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS.

The seven-foot ultraviolet telescope was launched into space in June 2013. It is able to peer into the lowest levels of the sun's atmosphere to observe how solar material moves, gathers energy, and heats up. It then documents the details using higher resolution imaging than ever before.