When a moderate-sized M-class flare erupted from the Sun on May 17, it sent out a barrage of high-energy solar particles that belied its initial intensity. These particles traveled at nearly the speed of light, crossing the 93 million miles between the Sun and Earth in a mere 20 minutes and impacting our atmosphere, causing cascades of neutrons to reach the ground - a rare event known as a ground level enhancement, or GLE.

The first such event since 2006, the GLE was recorded by a joint Russian/Italian spacecraft called PAMELA and is an indicator that the peak of solar maximum is on the way.

The PAMELA spacecraft - which stands for Payload for Antimatter-Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics - is designed to detect high-energy cosmic rays streaming in from intergalactic space. But on May 17, scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center convinced the Russian team in charge of PAMELA to grab data from the solar event occurring much closer to home.

With the Moon as the most prominent object in the night sky and a major source of an invisible pull that creates ocean tides, many ancient cultures thought it could also affect our health or state of mind - the word "lunacy" has its origin in this belief. Now, a powerful combination of spacecraft and computer simulations is revealing that the Moon does indeed have a far-reaching, invisible influence - not on us, but on the Sun, or more specifically, the solar wind.

The solar wind is a thin stream of electrically conducting gas called plasma that's constantly blown off the surface of the Sun in all directions at around a million miles per hour. When a particularly fast, dense or turbulent solar wind strikes Earth's magnetic field, it can generate magnetic and radiation storms that are capable of disrupting satellites, power grids, and communication systems. The magnetic "bubble" surrounding Earth also pushes back on the solar wind, creating a bow shock tens of thousands of miles across over the day side of Earth where the solar wind slams into the magnetic field and abruptly slows from supersonic to subsonic speed.

A new image of the center of the distinctive galaxy Centaurus A, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), shows how the new telescope, which is still under construction, allows astronomers to see with unprecedented quality through the opaque dust lanes that obscure the galaxy's center.

Centaurus A is a massive elliptical "radio galaxy," (a galaxy that emits strong radio waves) and is the most prominent, as well as the nearest, radio galaxy in the sky. Its very luminous center hosts a supermassive black hole with a mass of about 100 million times that of the Sun.

As galaxies go, our Milky Way is pretty quiet. Active galaxies have cores that glow brightly, powered by supermassive black holes swallowing material, and often spit twin jets in opposite directions.

In contrast, the Milky Way's center shows little activity. But it wasn't always so peaceful. New evidence of ghostly gamma-ray beams suggests that the Milky Way's central black hole was much more active in the past.

"These faint jets are a ghost or after-image of what existed a million years ago," said Meng Su, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and lead author of a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal.

NASA astronomers announced Thursday they can now predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our galaxy, sun, and solar system: the titanic collision of our Milky Way galaxy with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

The Milky Way is destined to get a major makeover during the encounter, which is predicted to happen four billion years from now. It is likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed.

"Our findings are statistically consistent with a head-on collision between the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy," said Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore.

The human body isn't a metal machine, but it's still plenty complicated, and regulating it like a machine is tough to pull off.

That's why a new discovery by Klas Tybrandt, a doctoral student in Organic Electronics at Linköping University, Sweden, is exciting: he's developed the first integrated chemical chip, similar to silicon-based electronics, but for biologic material.

A chemical circuit made from it lets chemical substances - different types with different purposes - travel through the body, but still keeps them under control.

Send a certain chemical to muscle synapses that aren't signaling, for example, and guide it via the circuit. (The big chemical contender in this seems to be the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which enables control of muscles.)

Before this, the Organic Electronics research group at Linköping University had already developed transistors for transporting molecules, but this circuit offers a lot more flexibility - what was once delivery to single cells is now entire pathways.

Researchers are hoping this opens the gate for a whole new field of circuit technology based on ions and molecules instead of electrons and holes.

Source: AlphaGalileo Foundation

Glasses-wearers know the feeling of sitting in the optometrist's chair every year, looking through a mask as the doctor flips through different prescriptions of lenses. "Which is better? A? Or B?" the optometrist will ask, as the lenses slide in place.

Now, however, a company is preparing to make eyeglasses for which patients do their own flipping and prescribing. Wearers simply adjust their lenses with a dial until they can see clearly.

The glasses, called Eyejusters, are made for people who need different prescriptions for different tasks, such as reading and watching TV. They're also for people in developing countries who don't have access to optometrists.

Adjustable glasses such as Eyejusters let minimally trained volunteers give out glasses that users tweak to their own prescription. Though wearing incorrect prescriptions can worsen eyesight, University of Oxford studies have shown that people over the age of 12 can safely use adjustable lenses.

A moderate solar flare on May 17 lit up ground stations all over the world with an unexpected and puzzling pulse of high-energy particles. It should not have happened, and scientists are now trying to figure out why it did.

Major solar flares, flashes of light at various wavelengths often associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are known to disrupt communications and can even trip power grids on Earth. But the May 17 flare was an M-class event, moderate and relatively common and not expected to create disturbances on the surface of Earth. Yet either the flare or the CME generated a ground-level enhancement (GLE), a blast of high-energy particles that lit up ground stations called neutron monitors on Earth for the first time in nearly six years.

Scientists don't expect an M-class flare to create a GLE.

Ancient Egyptians may have chronicled the flickering of a star known as "the Demon," perhaps the earliest known record of a variable star, astronomers suggest.

The ancient Egyptians wrote calendars that marked lucky and unlucky days. These predictions were based on astronomical and mythological events thought of as influential for everyday life. The best preserved of these calendars is the Cairo Calendar, a papyrus document dating between 1163 and 1271 B.C. The entry for each day is prefaced by three hieroglyphics that indicate either good or bad luck, with the characters often derived from events of mythology.

Astronomers at the University of Helsinki in Finland had previously discovered that some of the fortunate days recurred in a pattern, every 29.6 days. This almost exactly matches the length of the lunar cycle - the time between two full moons. New moons may have been associated with bad luck.

Dimming demon star

The scientists also detected another pattern in the calendar, one that occurred every 2.85 days. Now the researchers suggest this approximately matches regular dimming of Algol, "the Demon Star," which lies approximately 93 light-years away in the constellation Perseus as one of the eyes of Medusa's head. Its name comes from the Arabic phrase, ra's al-ghul, which means "the demon's head."

Algol is the brightest known example of an eclipsing binary system - the large bright member of the system, Beta Persei A, regularly gets eclipsed by the dimmer Beta Persei B. From our point of view, Algol dims by more than a factor of three for 10 hours at a time, dwindling easily seen with the naked eye.

"It seems that the first observation of a variable star was made 3,000 years earlier than was previously thought," said researcher Lauri Jetsu, an astronomer at the University of Helsinki.

The Cairo Calendar describes how Wedjat, the Eye of Horus, regularly transformed from peaceful to raging, with good or bad influences on life. Horus was the patron god of kings in ancient Egypt.

"The eclipse seems to be linked with the lucky days, because it represents the pacification of the Eye of Horus," researcher Sebastian Porceddu, an astronomer and Egyptologist at the University of Helsinki, told LiveScience. "A bright Eye of Horus meant it is raging and a threat to mankind."

The distinctive "old person smell" you may have picked up on when visiting your grandparents most likely wasn't your imagination, a new study indicates.

When given whiffs from pieces of pads worn under the armpits of young, middle-aged and elderly people for five consecutive nights, study participants could reliably distinguish the body odor of the elderly, who were 75 and older, the researchers found.

"The results of this study support the cross-culturally popular concept of an 'old person odor,'" writes the international team in a study published today (May 30) in the journal PLoS ONE.

The notion that the elderly have a distinct smell exists in multiple cultures, and usually the odor is said to be unpleasant. But this probably has more to do with negative perceptions of old age, rather than with the odor itself, according to study researcher Johan Lundström, an assistant professor at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

In the study, participants rated the smell of the elderly people as less intense and less unpleasant than the body odor of young people (20 to 30 years old) and middle-aged people (45 to 55 years old). This effect was driven by how the participants rated the body odor from men, who appeared to smell the worst and the strongest in middle age. The odor from women of all ages was rated as less intense than men, and closer to neutral smelling for the young and middle-aged.