Giant bubbles of gamma-ray-emitting materials surrounding the Milky Way are created by our galaxy's central black hole - and its appetite for stars - according to an international team of astronomers.

Back in November 2010 astronomers using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope released details of a colossal but previously unseen structure burgeoning out from the core of the Milky Way (see figure). Stretching some 25,000 light-years above and below our galaxy's main disc, the well-defined edge of these two gamma-ray-emitting "bubbles" hints at a sizeable and rapid release of energy as their creator.

Some astronomers have suggested that our galaxy's central super-massive black hole is powering the mysterious bubbles, but the exact process remains unclear. Now, a team of researchers led by K S Cheng at the University of Hong Kong has created a model that makes the connection.

In March of 1611, a German medical student named Johannes Fabricius left school at Leiden in Holland carrying several of the new-fangled telescopes that were beginning to appear in the Netherlands. He was off to visit his father - the well-known astronomer and astrologer David Fabricius who had had a heralded career working with Europe's celebrity astronomers, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.

In 1611, David Fabricius lived in Osteel, a town in the northwest part of Germany where, in addition to his celestial studies, he was a Protestant preacher. Once in Osteel, Johannes Fabricius hauled out his telescopes for his father, and on March 9 he began to observe the sun.

To their surprise, Johannes spotted black spots on the sun's surface. Sunspots had been seen before: the Chinese had records of them, and indeed England's Thomas Harriot saw them through telescopes in December of 1610. But having seen them 400 years ago this March, Johannes Fabricius was the first to publish a scientific treatise on the subject several months later. This publication opened a door to four more centuries of solar research - from proving to contemporary unbelievers that the sun rotated to modern attempts to understand what causes the 11-year sunspot cycle.

Near-Earth asteroid 2005 YU55 will pass within 0.85 lunar distances from the Earth on November 8, 2011. The upcoming close approach by this relatively large 400 meter-sized, C-type asteroid presents an excellent opportunity for synergistic ground-based observations including optical, near infrared and radar data.

An animated illustration by JPL shows the Earth and moon flyby geometry for November 8th and 9th when the object will reach a visual brightness of 11th magnitude and should be easily visible to observers in the northern and southern hemispheres.

The closest approach to Earth and the Moon will be respectively 0.00217 AU and 0.00160 AU on 2011 November 8 at 23:28 and November 9 at 07:13 UT.

Discovered December 28, 2005 by Robert McMillan of the Spacewatch Program near Tucson Arizona, the object has been previously observed by Mike Nolan, Ellen Howell and colleagues with the Arecibo radar on April 19-21, 2010 and shown to be a very dark, nearly spherical object 400 meters in diameter.

On January 31 University of Hawaii at Manoa astronomers used the UH 2.2-meter telescope on Mauna Kea to take the first new images in over three years of the potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid Apophis as it emerged from behind the sun.

The object became famous in late 2004, when it appeared to have a 1 in 37 chance of colliding with Earth in 2029, but additional data eventually ruled out that possibility.

Scientists have learned to exert control over memory. Biochemists at New York University have discovered that fading memory can be restored or on the contrary, memory can be erased by injecting a certain molecule into the brain.

The wonder-molecule, protein kinase M-zeta (PKM-zeta), regulates the efficiency of bindings between nerve tissues. Our memory depends on these bindings, says the director of the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity, Pavel Balaban.

"How memory originates? Nerve cells start binding each other in a different way, and new possibilities appear at the level of network to response in a different way to the same stimuli. All this is determined by the bindings between cells, Pavel Balaban said.

Just as some drivers obey the speed limit while others treat every road as if it were the Autobahn, some stars move through space faster than others. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, captured this image of the star Alpha Camelopardalis, or Alpha Cam, in astronomer-speak, speeding through the sky like a motorcyclist zipping through rush-hour traffic. The supergiant star Alpha Cam is the bright star in the middle of this image, surrounded on one side by an arc-shaped cloud of dust and gas -- a bow shock -- which is colored red in this infrared view.

Such fast-moving stars are called runaway stars. The distance and speed of Alpha Cam is somewhat uncertain. It is probably somewhere between 1,600 and 6,900 light-years away and moving at an astonishing rate of somewhere between 680 and 4,200 kilometers per second (between 1.5 and 9.4 million mph). It turns out that WISE is particularly adept at imaging bow shocks from runaway stars. Previous examples can be seen around Zeta Ophiuchi , AE Aurigae, and Menkhib. But Alpha Cam revs things up into a different gear. To put its speed into perspective, if Alpha Cam were a car driving across the United States at 4,200 kilometers per second, it would take less than one second to travel from San Francisco to New York City!

Miami-Dade's newest crime fighting tool is a literal 'eye in the sky'.

The Micro Air Vehicle, or MAV for short, is a small radio controlled drone aircraft equipped with a portable camera system. Miami-Dade Sgt. Andrew Cohen said drone will be used to gather real time information in situations which may be too dangerous for officers.

"If an SRT (Special Response Team) has to go into an area they don't know what's there, we don't know what is in the backyard," said Cohen, "They want to know if there are dogs in the backyard, if there is a shed, things that could be a threat to us."

The MAV is used by the military to scan dangerous areas before troops are sent in. Miami-Dade police used a $50,000 grant to buy one, but not everyone is happy with the purchase.

"What happens when they fly over backyards and they see something without a warrant that they want to take against," said ACLU Executive Director Howard Simon.

A new study by mathematicians in Australia has explained how skin remains stable in water and does not dissolve, and why it wrinkles and remains a strong barrier even after absorbing large quantities of water.

Myfanwy Evans, a mathematician at the Research School of Physics and Engineering at the Australian National University in Canberra, and her colleagues developed a stringy skin model to try to explain how the network of keratin fibers in the skin is arranged. Keratin is a fibrous protein also found in the nails and hair. Scientists already knew the keratin networks were important, but until now no one was certain of their structure.

After a period in water the outer layer of the skin (the stratum corneum) expands, producing prune-like wrinkles. Earlier researchers suggested the stratum corneum expands as it absorbs water, but no one had yet explained why skin doesn't fall apart when it has expanded.

Keratin is known to prevent evaporation from the skin and to absorb water to help keep the skin hydrated. The stratum corneum layer also gives the skin its stretchy properties and the ability to spring back.

Bright Jupiter has dominated the evening sky for months. Jupiter is an impressive planet - it's 11 times wider than Earth - and its influence reaches farther than you might guess.

Now that winter is nearing its end, Jupiter has descended far down the western sky. Look for it low in the west about an hour after sunset as twilight fades. Tomorrow the thin crescent moon will shine to its right, as shown here. In the following days the thickening crescent moon will climb higher above it in the twilight.

Jupiter has more mass than all the other planets, asteroids, comets, and everything else in the solar system combined. So it throws a lot of weight around. Its moving gravitational field sometimes tugs asteroids out of their accustomed paths or sends wayward comets into Earth-approaching loops. When the sun and planets were new and still jockeying for position 4.6 billion years ago, Jupiter undoubtedly helped to arrange the whole solar system.

And to a small extent, it is still doing so.

As Jupiter sinks low in the west these evenings, its influence is holding together a swarm of asteroids located far away from it, very high in the southwestern part of the sky. Jupiter also shapes a second, similar asteroid swarm on its opposite side, very far below the horizon toward the northwest.

These asteroids are locked in a special relationship with the planet due to an odd combination of its gravity and the sun's. The swarms share Jupiter's orbit but precede it and follow it by about a sixth of a circle. Each swarm, Jupiter, and the sun form an equilateral triangle.

This is no surprise. As long ago as the 1770s, the mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange figured out that a moving planet ought to create gravitational "low spots'' 60 degrees ahead of it and behind it in its orbit, where loose objects might collect.

Tehran - Findings of a new study said that fossil records verify a long-standing theory that horses evolved through natural selection.

The groundbreaking research was conducted by two anatomy professors at New York College of Osteopathic Medicine (NYCOM) of New York Institute of Technology.

Working with colleagues from Massachusetts and Spain, Matthew Mihlbachler, Ph.D., and Nikos Solounias, Ph.D. arrived at the conclusion after examining the teeth of 6,500 fossil horses representing 222 different populations of more than 70 extinct horse species. The records, spanning the past 55 million years, indicate a "critical" lag time between the evolution of horse teeth and dietary changes resulting from climate change.

The breakthrough findings were published in the March 4 issue of the journal Science.

"One of the advantages of studying extinct creatures like prehistoric horses is we can look at how animals responded to their environments over millions of years -- something that biologists who study living species cannot do," Mihlbachler said, adding that the biggest surprise of the study was that while some of the extinct populations they examined had extremely abrasive diets, much of the time, it seemed horses had it surprisingly easy. This suggests that "strong natural selection" for different types of teeth only happened occasionally during brief intervals in horse history.