MPEC 2012-Y30, issued 2012 December 26, reports our recovery of comet 26P/Grigg - Skjellerup. We found the comet on 2012 December 05.6 and December 14.5 at about magnitude 20. We imaged it remotely with the 2.0-m f/10 from the Siding Spring-Faulkes Telescope South.
This comet is named after the singing teacher and amateur astronomer John Grigg and after J. Frank Skjellerup, an Australian telegraphist working at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.

On July 10, 1992, comet 26P was visited by Giotto spacecraft after its successful close encounter with comet Halley. The Giotto camera has been damaged in the Halley flyby and there are no pictures of the nucleus. In 1972 the comet was discovered to produce a meteor shower (first predicted by Harold Ridley), the Pi Puppids, and its current orbit makes them peak around April 23, for observers in the southern hemisphere, best seen when the comet is near perihelion.

Our recovery image (click on the image for a bigger version):

On 23 occasions over the past several years, wild dolphins were observed giving gifts to humans at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia. The gifts included eels, tuna, squid, an octopus and an assortment of many other types of different fin fish. While these gifts might not be your choice for a gift to find underneath your Christmas tree, some of the items that were offered to humans are highly valued food sources for cetaceans such as dolphins.

A report describing this rare form of food sharing behavior in wild dolphins was published on December 4, 2012 in the journal Anthrozoös: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People & Animals.

Food sharing is a fairly common behavior among animals of the same species, but it is a much rarer phenomenon between animals that are from different species. Perhaps one of the best known examples of inter-species food sharing occurs in domesticated cats that have a tendency to drop prey items at their owner's feet. Inter-species food sharing in wild animal populations has not been widely documented in the scientific literature.

There has been one observation of inter-species food sharing in false killer whales, a member of the dolphin family (Delphinidae). During an encounter that National Geographic photographer Flip Nicklin had in Hawaii, a false killer whale swam up to the photographer, released a large mahi mahi from its mouth and backed away. The photographer accepted the gift then, returned the fish to the whale. I suppose that is proper etiquette if a large cetacean offers you food while you're in the water with it.

Hoards of giant tropical Sunfish have invaded the North Sea because of strong winds, scientists have revealed.

The massive Sunfish - which weigh an average 157st each and measure 15ft by 12ft - have been spotted in Lincolnshire, Kent and Norfolk.

Large shoals of Sunfish - the largest bony fish in the world - have been tempted away from the mid-Atlantic by a massive hatch of jellyfish, which is their main food.

Marine scientists believe the sunfish, whose scientific name is Mola mola, have been carried round Scotland to the North Sea by strong prevailing winds and currents. Here they have been dying because they cannot easily tolerate water temperatures below 12C.

The British Marine Life Study Society has recorded significantly more sightings of sunfish on the East Coast than last year.

In January this year a sunfish was found on the beach in seaside resort Margate in Kent.
Then dog walker Matt Hyde, 44, found another while walking his Labrador Jimmy along The Sandilands beach near Sutton-on-Sea.

Wildlife enthusiast Carl Chapman made a third discovery of a dead sunfish on the beach in Overstrand, Norfolk, on December 9.

Meet Roboy, "one of the most advanced humanoid robots," say researchers at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Zurich.

Their 15 project partners and over 40 engineers and scientists are constructing Roboy as a tendon-driven robot modeled on human beings (robots usually have their motors in their joints, giving them that "robot" break-dance look), so it will move almost as elegantly as a human.

Roboy will be a "service robot," meaning it will execute services independently for the convenience of human beings, as in the movie Robot & Frank.

And since service robots share their "living space" with people, user-friendliness and safety, above all, are of great importance, roboticists point out. Which is why "soft robotics" - soft to the touch, soft in their interaction, soft and natural in their movements - will be important, and Roboy will be covered with "soft skin," making interacting with him safer and more pleasant.

Some ancient cultures referred to them as "the Menace of the Universe" and "the Harbinger of Doom." Comets have almost universally been viewed by the ancients as messengers or omens carrying bad news from the gods.

In the midst of our busy lives it's difficult to keep in mind that we reside on a ball that's corkscrewing through space around a ball of gas called our sun, which is also sweeping through our galaxy.

The ancients didn't have distractions like TVs and the Internet. They looked to the sky for clues and guidance for life on Earth, and comets brought mythology of angry gods and instilled fear in them.

Strangely, in more modern times, comets have been associated with actual dark events.

According to NASA:

Comets' influence on cultures is not limited simply to tales of myth and legend, though. Comets throughout history have been blamed for some of history's darkest times. In Switzerland, Halley's Comet was blamed for earthquakes, illnesses, red rain, and even the births of two-headed animals.

The Romans recorded that a fiery comet marked the assassination of Julius Caesar, and another was blamed for the extreme bloodshed during the battle between Pompey and Caesar. In England, Halley's Comet was blamed for bringing the Black Death. The Incas, in South America, even record a comet having foreshadowed Francisco Pizarro's arrival just days before he brutally conquered them.

Comets and disaster became so intertwined that Pope Calixtus III even excommunicated Halley's Comet as an instrument of the devil, and a meteorite, from a comet, became enshrined as one of the most venerated objects in all of Islam.

Discovery Date: December 18, 2012

Magnitude: 19.1 mag

Discoverer: Lincoln Laboratory Near-Earth Asteroid Research project

The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2012-Y18.

Discovery Date: December 12, 2012

Magnitude: 20.0 mag

Discoverer: Pan-STARRS 1 telescope (Haleakala)

The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2012-Y01.

Bats are amazing creatures. They've been around for at least 65 million years, and in that time have become one of the most abundant and widespread mammals on Earth.

The Bat Pack, a team of researchers at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL) in Geelong, conduct a wide range of research into bats and bat borne viruses, and their potential effects on the human population, as part of the effort to safeguard Australia from exotic and emerging pests and diseases.

Their paper, published today in the journal Science, provides an insight into the evolution of the bat's flight, resistance to viruses, and relatively long life.

The Bat Pack, in collaboration with the Beijing Genome Institute, led a team that sequenced the genomes of two bat species -- the Black Flying Fox, an Australian mega bat, and the David's Myotis, a Chinese micro bat.

Meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens must move quickly to trap evidence of a fresh meteorite fall. In 2008, a small asteroid roughly three meters across struck Earth's atmosphere over northern Sudan, producing a brilliant fireball in the sky. The asteroid's orbit had been tracked before striking Earth, upping the chances that searchers would be able to locate pieces of the meteorite on the ground. So Jenniskens traveled to the Nubian Desert to recover fragments, as did dozens of searchers from the University of Khartoum.

In April of this year, he did not have to travel nearly so far to gather fresh meteoritic material. A bright fireball lit up the daytime sky April 22 over northern California's gold country, a few hours' drive from Jenniskens's bases of operations in the San Francisco Bay Area: the SETI Institute in Mountain View and the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field. The California bolide, like its African predecessor, made a well-documented entry - three Doppler radar stations picked up the track of the fireball, pointing the way to meteorite fragments on the ground. (The asteroid itself had not been spotted in space - such small objects usually escape astronomers' notice.) Given the convenient location, the searchers were even able to marshal a slow-moving zeppelin to scan the area from the air, to look for impact scars on the terrain below caused by large meteorite fragments, but none were found.

Did you ever go to a high school reunion and reflect afterward, "How did I end up on a path so drastically different from the one my old pal took? We grew up in the same neighborhood, went to the same school, played the same sports, joined the same clubs -- what happened?" You might wonder the same thing about cells.

How do two neighboring stem cells in the blastocyst end up becoming completely different mature cell types? This has been a question of ongoing interest for researchers who study embryonic development. These cells theoretically have the same genetic code, and are indistinguishable at the blastocyst state, so what caused them to pursue such dramatically divergent careers in life?

Researchers from UC San Diego and Sandford Burnham Medical Research Institute published an article in Genes and Development that sheds light on the enigma of cell destiny. Colas et al. sifted through hundreds of sequences of non-coding microRNA to determine whether it regulates stem cell destiny. They thought to do this because among the many other functions of this non-protein coding region of the genome, microRNA seems to play a key role in regulating various cellular processes. They found two factors that regulate mesoderm, ectoderm, and endoderm formation, which is the initial step in embryonic development after implantation.

By way of a little biology review, we are talking about mammal embryos. Not all organisms develop an ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm. Some develop two of these, others do not. Colas et al. looked at mouse embryos as their model organism, although they did compare them to frog and zebra fish counterparts. Once the cells have been assigned to either the ectoderm, mesoderm, or endoderm layer, they will only become certain cell types. The endoderm tends to form the major organs involved in the digestive system, about half of the major components of the urinary system, as well as the lungs and trachea. The mesoderm tends to form the skeletal structure, skin and connective tissue, the other half of the urinary system, and the circulatory system. The ectoderm forms the nervous system and other parts such as tooth enamel, the lining of the mouth and nostrils, and hair and nails.