© NASAArtwork depicting the magnetar explosion of 2007.

[This post is a modified, updated version of an article I wrote a few years back. Since today is the anniversary of the event, I thought it could use an update.]

Eight years ago today - on Dec. 27, 2004 - the Earth was rocked by a cosmic blast so epic its scale is nearly impossible to exaggerate.

The flood of gamma and X-rays that washed over the Earth was detected by several satellites designed to observe the high-energy skies. RHESSI, which observes the Sun, saw this blast. INTEGRAL, used to look for gamma rays from monster black holes, saw this blast. The newly-launched Swift satellite, which was designed and built to detect bursts of gamma-ray from across the Universe, not only saw this blast but was so flooded with energy its detectors completely saturated - think of it as trying to fill a drinking glass with a fire hose.

Even more amazingly, Swift wasn't even pointed anywhere near the direction of the burst: In other words, this flood of energy passed right through the body of the spacecraft itself and was still so strong it totally overwhelmed the cameras.

It gets worse. This enormous wave of fierce energy was so powerful it actually partially ionized the Earth's upper atmosphere, and it made the Earth's magnetic field ring like a bell. Several satellites were actually blinded by the event. Whatever this event was, it came from deep space and still was able to physically affect the Earth itself!

So what was this thing? What could do this kind of damage?

A mysterious source of itchiness has been found. Certain nerve cells are specialized to detect itchy sensations, and those receptors don't detect painful sensations, according to a new study.

The finding, published Dec. 23 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, helps resolve a long-standing debate over whether itchiness is just a weird form of pain. Additionally, now that they have pinpointed the responsible nerve fibers, researchers could silence those nerves to develop better anti-itch treatments, said Ethan Lerner, a neuroscientist at Harvard University who was not involved in the study.

"This is a very convincing piece of work," Lerner told LiveScience. Scientists "can perhaps target this particular type of nerve as a means of treating itch, but still allow you to experience the protective aspect of pain."

Itchy mystery

For decades, why we itch has been a mystery. While some pain nerves have been found to fire in response to itchy stimulants, nerves that responded solely to itch proved elusive. Some researchers even wondered whether itch and pain were always processed by the same nerve fibers, but interpreted by the brain differently, said study co-author Xinzhong Dong, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University.

But the the urge to scratch seemed different in key ways from the experience of pain. For instance, when a mosquito bites, most people feel a powerful desire to scratch the bite, while the pain of touching a hot stove causes people to recoil, Dong told LiveScience.

The Ikei Laboratory of Tokyo Metropolitan University Graduate School of System Design is developing virtual body technology that utilizes the five senses. In addition to using conventional audio and video footage , this technology can recreate smells as well as the feel of the wind and of stepping on the ground.

"This exhibition of a virtual body is for the purpose of having a vicarious experience. This technology aims to enable various experiences as if having assumed a different person's body. This exhibition gives people the opportunity to vicariously experience traveling in Milan and running the world record 100-meter dash of famous athlete Usain Bolt."

The exhibition is made up of a 3D monitor,, headphones, a fan to create a breeze and spread scents, a chair that leans back and forth and vibrates partially, and foot pedals. These work together to stimulate the five senses of the subject fixed in his or her seat, creating a virtual vicarious experience.

While on his death bed, the brilliant Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan cryptically wrote down functions he said came to him in dreams, with a hunch about how they behaved. Now 100 years later, researchers say they've proved he was right.

"We've solved the problems from his last mysterious letters. For people who work in this area of math, the problem has been open for 90 years," Emory University mathematician Ken Ono said.

Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician born in a rural village in South India, spent so much time thinking about math that he flunked out of college in India twice, Ono said.

But he sent mathematicians letters describing his work, and one of the most preeminent ones, English mathematician G. H. Hardy, recognized the Indian boy's genius and invited him to Cambridge University in England to study. While there, Ramanujan published more than 30 papers and was inducted into the Royal Society.

"For a brief window of time, five years, he lit the world of math on fire," Ono told LiveScience.

But the cold weather eventually weakened Ramanujan's health, and when he was dying, he went home to India.

A massive whale, some 60 feet long, beached itself on Wednesday morning in New York City, where, despite rescue efforts, it seemed to have little chance of survival.

Experts said the ailing whale was a finback, the second biggest animal species in the world after blue whales, and came ashore in the Breezy Point neighborhood of Queens.

Police and firefighters immediately began carefully spraying it with water to keep it alive until experts could take over.

But Mendy Garron, a regional specialist for the federal NOAA Fisheries service, said the sea mammal was "really emaciated, not a good body condition at all."

It was "not moving a lot," she added, saying that this assessment meant the whale was unlikely to get back to sea.

A Mike Baillie fan passed along this fascinating discovery last week and I hoisted the paper to Scribd and the Tusk immediately. Mike is on to something mighty interesting. Nowhere has anyone noted the corellation between the two early Mayan "Baktun" transitions and spikes in ice core chemistry from Greenland. Calendrical genius that he is, Mike even reverse engineers the data and finds the Mayan calendar - baring incredible coincidence - serves to memorialize the two events as well as perpetuate a useful chime for the future.

It is hard to grasp given his sparse abstract, but if I understand Mike correctly he infers that the Maya calendar writer long after the two extraordinary events divided his calendar so that the first event would mark the end of an inaugural cycle representing a number of days which - if repeated four more times - would coincide with the 2nd event. These five cycles were then followed in the calendar by an additional eight cycles of equal periods reaching to our own time.

It would be as if you were amazed at the appearance of Santa Claus, began counting the days since you saw him, was startled by his return, and later decided these visits were so significant that your calendar itself should be divided so as to determine good times to look out for the jolly old fellow. He may or may not come - but it is the right time to look.

It turns out that the largest black holes may be even bigger than scientists previously thought. New research from NASA shows there are some real monsters out there, weighing the equivalent masses of 10 to 40 billion suns.

­Scientists refer to them as 'ultramassive' black holes, not to confuse them with 'supermassive' holes, with only a few confirmed examples.

These giants, all located in far-off galaxies about 1.3 billion light years from Earth, are more common than scientists originally thought.

A survey, conducted by author Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of Stanford University and her team, showed that at least ten out of 18 galaxies they studied had black holes that may weigh up to 40 billion times the mass of the sun.

"Ultramassive black holes - that is, black holes with masses exceeding 10 billion solar masses - are probably not rare; several and even dozens of these colossal black holes may exist," said Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo, the study's lead author.

The largest supermassive black hole in the heart of Milky Way, the galaxy that contains our Solar System, is estimated to weigh about 6.4 billion solar masses.

A Chinese satellite navigation network created to eventually compete with America's Global Positioning System has started offering services to Asian users outside the country.

The network's spokesman, Ran Chengqi, said in a press briefing that the Beidou system is offering from Thursday services including positioning, navigation, time and text messaging to users in the Asia-Pacific region.

China expects Beidou to generate a 400 billion yuan ($63 billion) annual market for services to the transport, meteorology and telecommunications sectors.

China, and especially its military, have long been wary of relying on the United States' dominant GPS network, fearing that Washington might take the system offline in a conflict or an emergency.

At the moment it is a faint object, visible only in sophisticated telescopes as a point of light moving slowly against the background stars. It doesn't seem much - a frozen chunk of rock and ice - one of many moving in the depths of space. But this one is being tracked with eager anticipation by astronomers from around the world, and in a year everyone could know its name.

Comet Ison could draw millions out into the dark to witness what could be the brightest comet seen in many generations - brighter even than the full Moon.

It was found as a blur on an electronic image of the night sky taken through a telescope at the Kislovodsk Observatory in Russia as part of a project to survey the sky looking for comets and asteroids - chunks of rock and ice that litter space. Astronomers Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok were expecting to use the International Scientific Optical Network's (Ison) 40cm telescope on the night of 20 September but clouds halted their plans.

It was a frustrating night but about half an hour prior to the beginning of morning twilight, they noticed the sky was clearing and got the telescope and camera up and running to obtain some survey images in the constellations of Gemini and Cancer.

When the images were obtained Nevski loaded them into a computer program designed to detect asteroids and comets moving between images. He noticed a rather bright object with unusually slow movement, which he thought could only mean it was situated way beyond the orbit of Jupiter. But he couldn't tell if the object was a comet, so Novichonok booked time on a larger telescope to take another look. Less than a day later the new images revealed that Nevski and Novichonok had discovered a comet, which was named Comet Ison. A database search showed it has been seen in images taken by other telescopes earlier that year and in late 2011. These observations allowed its orbit to be calculated, and when astronomers did that they let out a collective "wow."

Superhero entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX venture is working on something called the "Grasshopper Project," and the technology looks pretty impressive.

"We've begun testing reusability with something called the Grasshopper Project, which is a Falcon 9 first stage with landing gear that can take off and land vertically," Musk told Wired in October.

"The stages go to orbit, then the first stage turns around, restarts the engines, boosts back to the launch site, reorients, deploys landing gear, and lands vertically."

Today, Musk tweeted out a couple videos of the Grasshopper being tested on December 17 at the SpaceX rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas.

It's a big step toward rocket reusability, which Musk said will be a "fundamental breakthrough that needs to occur in rocketry."

Watch the Grasshopper in action. It goes 40 meters up in the air, hovers for a bit, and then lands back on its feet: