The science professor who oversaw the world's longest running laboratory test - the Pitch Drop Experiment - has died after more than half a century on its watch, his university said Monday.

John Mainstone, the former head of the Department of Physics at the University of Queensland, was in charge of the experiment which demonstrated the fluidity and viscosity of pitch, a tar derivative once used to waterproof boats.

The experiment, established in 1927 by Professor Thomas Parnell, was designed to show that pitch, although it feels solid and can be shattered by a hammer blow at room temperature, acts like a fluid and flows through a glass funnel over time.

It took three years for the pitch to settle and then the glass funnel holding the substance was cut to allow it to flow out.

In the 83 years since then, only eight drops of pitch have fallen and no one has seen one actually fall, the university said.

When the Chelyabinsk meteorite streaked across the sky in February, it caused quite a bit of a stir in Russia. The resulting shockwave from its impact shattered glass, injuring over a thousand people. Now, scientists have found out a little bit more about this meteorite.

The main body of the meteorite fell to the bottom of the Cherbarkul Lake near Celyabinsk. That's why in order to learn a little bit more about the meteorite, scientist examined fragments of the space rock. The fragments are composed of the same minerals as the main body of the meteorite, which means that the scientists could learn what they needed to know about the event.

So what did they find? It turned out that the meteorite had undergone an intensive melting process before being subjected to extremely high temperatures upon entering Earth's atmosphere. Based on the color and structure, the researchers were able to divide the fragments into three types: light, dark and intermediate. The lighter fragments were the ones that were most commonly found, but the dark fragments were found in increasing numbers along the meteorites trajectory, with the greatest number found close to where it hit Earth.

Russia's Security Council is reportedly considering a ban on supplying the US with powerful RD-180 rocket engines for military communications satellites as Russia focuses on building its own new space launch center, Vostochny, in the Far East.

A ban on the rockets supply to the US heavy booster, Atlas V, which delivers weighty military communications satellites and deep space exploration vehicles into orbit, could put a stop to NASA's space programs - not just military satellites.
An unnamed representative of Russia's Federal Space Agency told the Izvestia newspaper that the Security Council is reconsidering the role of Russia's space industry in the American space exploration program, particularly the 2012 contract on delivering to the US heavy-duty RD-180 rocket engines.

Previously, Moscow has not objected to the fact that America's Atlas V boosters rigged with Russian rocket engines deliver advanced space armament systems into orbit. If a ban if put in place, however, engine delivery to the US would probably stop altogether, starting from 2015.

Scientists say they've created a handful of atoms of the elusive element 115, which occupies a mysterious corner of the periodic table.

The super-heavy element has yet to be officially named, but it is temporarily called ununpentium, roughly based on the Latin and Greek words for the digits in its atomic number, 115.

The atomic number is the number of protons an element contains. The heaviest element commonly found in nature is uranium, which has 92 protons, but scientists can load even more protons into an atomic nucleus and make heavier elements through nuclear fusion reactions.

Scientists hope that by creating heavier and heavier elements, they will find a theoretical "island of stability," an undiscovered region in the periodic table where stable super-heavy elements with as yet unimagined practical uses might exist.

In experiments in Dubna, Russia about 10 years ago, researchers reported that they created atoms with 115 protons. Their measurements have now been confirmed in experiments at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Germany.

Cbet nr. 3638, issued on 2013, August 26, announces the discovery of a new comet (discovery magnitude ~20.8) by professional survey F51 Pan-STARRS 1 (Haleakala) on CCD images obtained with 1.8-m Ritchey-Chretien on August 15, 2013. After posting on the Minor Planet Center's NEOCP webpage, other CCD astrometrists have commented on the object's cometary appearance. The new comet has been designated C/2013 P4 (PANSTARRS).

We performed follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 9 R-filtered exposures, 60-sec each, obtained remotely, from the Faulkes Telescope South (Siding Spring) on 2013, August 26.5, through a 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD (operated by Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network), shows that this object is a comet: sharp central condensation surrounded by a coma about 15" in diameter elongated in PA 190.

Below our confirmation image

If you read Techdirt, you're almost certainly familiar with Larry Lessig, the law professor at Harvard who (among many other things) has been an avid advocate for copyright reform and campaign finance reform, an author of many books about copyright and creativity, a well-known public speaker whose presentations are stunningly compelling, entertaining and informative, and the founder of some important organizations including Creative Commons. Of course, as an expert on copyright and creativity, and someone who's actually been involved in some of the key copyright legal fights over the past decade (tragically, on the losing side), you might think that a record label would think twice before issuing a clearly bogus threat to sue him over copyright infringement. Well, apparently Liberation Music was either unaware of Lessig's reputation and knowledge, or just didn't care.

Apparently, back in 2010, Lessig gave one of his many wonderful public talks, this one called "Open," at a Creative Commons event in South Korea. While that happened a few years ago, Lessig just put video of that talk online a few months ago. In that video, which is now down (for reasons explained below), there are a few brief clips of the Phoenix song Lisztomania, which was quite popular a few years ago. When the clip was posted, it appears that YouTube's ContentID noted two possible claims: one from Viacom and one from Liberation Music, though, oddly, Lessig was only informed about the Viacom one. Lessig disputed the Viacom block, but as YouTube was about to restore the video, Liberation Music took it one step further, and filed a full DMCA claim, demanding the video be taken down and kept offline (while many people confuse them, the ContentID match is not the same thing as a DMCA claim -- without getting into the details, the DMCA claim is a bit more serious).

Be careful what you say around a pregnant woman. As a fetus grows inside a mother's belly, it can hear sounds from the outside world - and can understand them well enough to retain memories of them after birth, according to new research.

It may seem implausible that fetuses can listen to speech within the womb, but the sound-processing parts of their brain become active in the last trimester of pregnancy, and sound carries fairly well through the mother's abdomen.

"If you put your hand over your mouth and speak, that's very similar to the situation the fetus is in," says cognitive neuroscientist Eino Partanen of the University of Helsinki. "You can hear the rhythm of speech, rhythm of music, and so on."

A 1988 study suggested that newborns recognize the theme song from their mother's favorite soap opera. More recent studies have expanded on the idea of fetal learning, indicating that newborns already familiarized themselves with sounds of their parent's native language; one showed that American newborns seem to perceive Swedish vowel sounds as unfamiliar, sucking on a high-tech pacifier to hear more of the new sounds. Swedish infants showed the same response to English vowels.

The Moon probably had water when it first formed four and a half billion years ago, according to a new study.

Research reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, found evidence of water that was brought to the surface from deep within the lunar mantle by a series of ancient impacts.

"I think it would be very tough to have this water be anywhere other than original to the material that formed the moon," says the study's lead author Dr Rachel Klima of Johns Hopkins University.

"I don't think this was cometary water that was somehow mixed in and excavated back out, or solar wind water. I think this had to be water that was initially there when the materials forming the moon accreted, and what we found supports that idea."

The new water signatures, in the form of hydroxyl molecules, were detected in the central peak of Bullialdus Crater on the Moon's near side, according to Hydroxyls are molecules consisting of an oxygen atom connected to a hydrogen atom.

The pairing is often seen as a substructure of a water molecule.

Scientists have discovered that one of the most diabolical proteins implicated in diabetes not only kills insulin-producing cells through one mechanism, but also damages the cells it doesn't kill through a second, novel mechanism.

Reigning in this rogue protein, called TXNIP, could significantly control diabetes, a disease that affects nearly 9 percent of Americans and is rapidly becoming a major cause of death and disability worldwide.

The scientists, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, identified several never-before-realized routes to target TXNIP with drugs. Their study appears today (Aug. 25) in the journal Nature Medicine.

A huge asteroid passing Earth and a distant supernova are starring in a series of stargazing webcasts this weekend, giving skywatchers with cloudy skies extra chances to see some deep-sky objects.

The free webcasts by the Virtual Telescope Project and Slooh Space Camera will stream live views of the near-Earth asteroid 2013 QR1 on Saturday and Sunday (Aug. 24 and 25). The large asteroid is about 820 feet (250 meters) wide and will pass Earth early Sunday at a safe distance of 1.8 million miles (3 million kilometers). It was discovered on Aug. 16 and is classified as a "potentially hazardous asteroid," with scientists tracking it to see if it may pose a threat to Earth in the future.

You can watch the asteroid and supernova webcasts on SPACE.com here. Both webcasts are dependent on good weather at their respective observing sites.