A new breakthrough in the strange business of "quantum entanglement" may make measuring eerily connected particles easier than ever, scientists say.

Under the mind-bending rules of quantum mechanics, two particles can become entangled so that they retain a connection even when separated over long distances. The properties between the two are correlated so that an action performed on one will affect the other.

To study entangled particles, physicists have to be able to detect them. In some experiments, researchers measure one of the entangled pair first, and its presence signals, or "heralds," the presence of the second particle. Recently, a team of physicists at the Joint Quantum Institute in College Park, Md., achieved a new record in heralding efficiency, meaning they were able to detect more twin particle pairs than ever before.

In the experiment, the researchers used what's called a pump laser to produce a beam of light that passes through a special type of crystal. Occasionally, the photons of light in the laser beam will split in two, essentially, after passing through the crystal, creating a new pair of correlated photons. These photons will hit a detector screen exactly 180 degrees apart, so if the researchers find one, they know to look directly across the circle pattern formed on the detector, to the point 180 degrees around, to find the other.

Every 6.6 years, the comet Giacobini-Zinner circulates through the inner solar system and passes through the perihelion, the closest point to the Sun of its orbit. Then, the comet sublimates the ices and ejects a large number of particles that are distributed in filaments. The oldest of these particles have formed a swarm that the Earth passes trough every year in early October. The result is a Draconid meteor shower - meteors from this comet come from the northern constellation Draco - , which hits the Earth's atmosphere at about 75,000 km/h, a relatively slow speed in comparison with other meteoric swarms.

Josep Maria Trigo, researcher from the CSIC Institute of Space Sciences (ICE), states: "When a comet approaches the Sun, it sublimates part of its superficial ice and the gas pressure drives a huge number of particles that adopt orbits around the Sun, forming authentic swarms. The study shows that in the evening from October 8th to 9th 2011, the Earth intercepted three dense spindles of particles left behind by the comet when it crossed through the perihelion".

The researchers, who published their results in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society magazine, have obtained the orbits of twenty meteors in the solar system. Thus, they have confirmed the origin of the particles that caused the outbreak in that periodic comet. For this, they have count on 25 video-detection stations operated by the Spanish Meteor and Firewall Network (SPMN) and the collaboration of amateur astronomers.

Two of those filaments of meteoroids, which had been theoretically predicted already, have been identified by scientists with those left by the comet in 1874, 1894 and 1900. Nevertheless, researchers have confirmed that there was another dense region intercepted by the Earth which had not been predicted and that involves a new challenge for theoretical models.

In a second article, researchers analyze the chemical composition of six fireballs from that swarm of the comet recorded during the outbreak. José María Madiedo, researcher from the University of Huelva and coordinator of this second study, asserts: "One of them, with an initial mass of 6 kg and nearly half a meter in diameter, named Lebrija in honor of the city it over flew, came to compete with the brightness of the moon that night".

The six analyzed fragments have a possibly similar composition to the carbonaceous chondrites (a type of organic-rich meteorites) but they are much more fragile. Trigo emphasizes: "They don't seem to have suffered any chemical alteration during their brief stay in the interplanetary environment, which turns out to be very interesting to confirm the astrobiological role of these particles in the continuous transportation of water and organic material to the Earth".

The mystery blob that appeared on radars across the Tennessee Valley on Tuesday is still unexplained. The anomaly as it is affectionately being called, started appearing on doppler screens in the early afternoon hours and eventually covered an area nearly the size of Huntsville city limits itself. The blob was accompanied by increased military aircraft activity and numerous reports of strange chemical odors.

Huntsville, Alabama is largely anchored by various military-industrial complex companies, the NASA program and one of the largest US military bases, Redstone Arsenal. Redstone Arsenal is home to new units and personnel as a result of BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) as well as many classified entities.

To see a headline like this raises many possibilities to mild skeptics and the reckless conspiracy theorists alike. Scanning the internet, many blamed the anomaly on HAARP, which is not farfetched for a number of reasons, but unlikely in this case. Others mentioned chemtrails as it is constantly rumored that new, stealthier geoengineering technologies have been developed of late.

What is known is that there were more than the usual number of military helicopters flying around Tuesday afternoon. It is common to see the occasional training happening in Huntsville skies but there was an increased number of helicopters out, including multiple twin rotor Chinooks and an above average number of civilian copters. WTF News editor Baran Hines also noticed the uptick in activity over Huntsville.

You may have had remote controlled airplanes growing up, but they probably weren't as cool as the quadcopter. This tiny helicopter looks a lot like a toy, but it's really a high-tech robot controlled exclusively by human thought.

Developed by a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota, the four-blade helicopter, or quadcopter, can be quickly and accurately controlled for a sustained amount of time using the electrical impulses associated with a subject's thoughts.

The team used a noninvasive technique known as electroencephalography (EEG) to record the electrical brain activity of five different subjects. Each subject was fitted with a cap equipped with 64 electrodes, which sent signals to the quadcopter over a WiFi network.

The subjects were positioned in front of a screen that relayed images of the quadcopter's flight through an on-board camera, allowing them to see the course the way a pilot would. The plane, which was driven with a pre-set forward moving velocity, was then controlled by the subject's thoughts.

By imagining that they were using their right hand, left hand and both hands together, subjects controlled the flight path of the plane. If they imagined raising their left hand, for example, the plane turned left. If they imagined raising their hands together, the plane lifted higher in the air.

The oldest well-preserved skeleton of a primate, a 55-million-year-old specimen found in China, has been discovered, researchers report.

The primate appears to be the most primitive known relative of the group that contains tarsiers, small primates found only in Southeast Asia. The finding suggests this group diverged from anthropoids, the group that contains monkeys, apes and humans, during the Eocene epoch (55.8 million to 33.9 million years ago), a time of widespread warming.

It's not the oldest primate fossil, researchers say, but it is one of the oldest most-complete skeletons of the group known as tarsiiformes.

"This discovery is really exciting," vertebrate paleontologist Jonathan Bloch of the University of Florida's museum of natural history told LiveScience, "because it shows us the first really [well-articulated] skeleton of one branch of the crown primate tree," (the group including all primates alive today and their common ancestor). Bloch was not involved in the study.

The fossil confirms speculation that the earliest primates probably lived in trees, ate insects and were active during the daytime.

The primate, now named Archicebus achilles (roughly translated as "ancient monkey"), would have weighed about 1 ounce (20-30 grams), suggesting the earliest primates were very small.

The skeleton shares some features of tarsiers and some of anthropoids. For instance, the specimen's heel bone strongly resembles those of anthropoids, hence the species name, achilles.

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health, and their colleagues, have discovered that a gene called BACH2 may play a central role in the development of diverse allergic and autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, asthma, Crohn's disease, celiac disease, and type-1 diabetes. In autoimmune diseases, the immune system attacks normal cells and tissues in the body that are generally recognized as "self" and do not normally trigger immune responses. Autoimmunity can occur in infectious diseases and cancer.

The results of previous research had shown that people with minor variations in the BACH2 gene often develop allergic or autoimmune diseases, and that a common factor in these diseases is a compromised immune system. In this study in mice, the Bach2 gene was found to be a critical regulator of the immune system's reactivity. The study, headed by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), both part of NIH, and their colleagues appeared online in Nature, June 2, 2013.

The cores of black holes may not hold points of infinite density as currently thought, but portals to elsewhere in the universe, theoretical physicists say.

A black hole possesses a gravitational field so powerful that not even light can escape. A black hole generally forms after a star dies in a titanic explosion known as a supernova, which crushes the remaining core into dense lumps.

A maddening enigma called a singularity -- a region of infinite density -- lies at the heart of each black hole, according to general relativity, the modern theory of gravity. The infinite nature of singularities means that space and time as we know them cease to exist there.

Scientists have long sought ways to avoid the complete breakdown of all the known laws of physics brought on by singularities. Now researchers suggest the centers of black holes may not hold singularities after all.

These new findings are based on loop quantum gravity, one of the leading theories seeking to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity into a single theory that can explain all the forces of the universe. In loop quantum gravity, the four dimensions of spacetime are composed of networks of intersecting loops - ripples of the gravitational field.

The researchers applied loop quantum gravity theory to the simplest model of black hole - a spherical, uncharged, non-rotating body known as a Schwarzschild black hole.

A strange comet-like object discovered in 2010 ended up being an asteroid that had been the victim of a head-on collision from another space rock. The object created a bit of buzz because of its mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and long, trailing streamers of dust. Named P/2010 A2 (LINEAR), the object is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and has been the focus of much study, including images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and many ground-based observatories. But over time, the asteroid's long dust tail has grown to be so long that the entire object can't fit into the field of view of most observatories.
"Here, we are watching the death of an asteroid," said Jayadev Rajagopal, a scientist at the WIYN (Wisconsin Indiana at Yale NOAO) Telescope, speaking today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana. "We know of dozens of asteroids this has happened to in the past, but this is the only one showing us the event as it is happening."

Using the new wide-field camera at the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope, Rajagopal and his team have found that the peculiar asteroid P/2010 A2′s tail is much longer than was previously supposed. The tail is about a million kilometers long, roughly three times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The new One Degree Imager (ODI) can currently image an area of the sky about the size of the full moon: a future upgrade will increase the size of the field to about four times as large.

One day in 1788, students at the Hunterian School of Medicine in London were opening a cadaver when they discovered something startling. The dead man's anatomy was a mirror image of normal. His liver was on his left side instead of the right. His heart had beaten on his right side, not his left.

The students had never seen anything like it, and they rushed to find their teacher, the Scottish physician Matthew Baillie, who was just as stunned as they were. "It is so extraordinary as scarcely to have been seen by any of the most celebrated anatomists," he later wrote.

His report was the first detailed description of the condition, which came to be known as situs inversus and is thought to occur in about 1 in 20,000 people. Baillie argued that if doctors could figure out how this strange condition came to be, they might come to understand how our bodies normally tell the right side from the left.

Over two centuries later, the mystery of left and right still captivates scientists.

Following the posting on the Central Bureau's Transient Object Confirmation Page about a possible Nova in Sco (TOCP Designation: PNV J17335943-3606216) we performed some follow-up of this object remotely through the 0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD + f/4.5 focal reducer of iTelescope network (MPC Code Q62 - Siding Spring, AU).

On our images taken on June 03.7, 2013 we can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with unfiltered CCD magnitude 11.5 at coordinates:

R.A. = 17 33 59.44, Decl.= -36 06 20.7 (equinox 2000.0; UCAC-3 catalogue reference stars).

Our annotated confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version). North is up, East is to the left:
An animation showing a comparison between our confirmation image and the archive POSS2/UKSTU plate (R Filter - 1996).