Got a telescope for Christmas? Point it at Saturn. A giant storm even brighter than Saturn's rings is raging through the planet's cloudtops. "I've never seen anything like this," says veteran planetary photographer Anthony Wesley. "It's possible that this is the biggest storm on Saturn in many decades." Here it is recorded by Wesley's 16-inch telescope on Dec. 22nd:

Instruments on NASA's Cassini spacecraft are picking up strong bursts of radio static. Apparently, lightning is being generated in multiple cells across the storm front. Cassini's cameras are also beaming back fantastic images of the tempest.

"At it's current size and brightness, the storm should be visible to anyone with a mid-size scope under steady seeing," continues Wesley. "This is a great time to be a planetary photographer." [Sky maps: Dec. 29, 30, 31]

In 2008, Fermilab particle astrophysicist Craig Hogan made waves with a mind-boggling proposition: The 3D universe in which we appear to live is no more than a hologram.

Now he is building the most precise clock of all time to directly measure whether our reality is an illusion.

The idea that spacetime may not be entirely smooth - like a digital image that becomes increasingly pixelated as you zoom in - had been previously proposed by Stephen Hawking and others. Possible evidence for this model appeared last year in the unaccountable "noise" plaguing the GEO600 experiment in Germany, which searches for gravitational waves from black holes. To Hogan, the jitteriness suggested that the experiment had stumbled upon the lower limit of the spacetime pixels' resolution.

Black hole physics, in which space and time become compressed, provides a basis for math showing that the third dimension may not exist at all. In this two-dimensional cartoon of a universe, what we perceive as a third dimension would actually be a projection of time intertwined with depth. If this is true, the illusion can only be maintained until equipment becomes sensitive enough to find its limits.

"You can't perceive it because nothing ever travels faster than light," says Hogan. "This holographic view is how the universe would look if you sat on a photon."

This looks huge:

Глава правительства Владимир Путин подписал план перехода властных структур и федеральных бюджетников на свободное ПО. Согласно документу, внедрение Linux во власти должно начаться во II квартале 2012 г.

Сегодня стало известно, что премьер-министр Владимир Путин подписал документ, в котором описан график перехода властных структур на свободное ПО (СПО).

Документ называется «План перехода федеральных органов власти и федеральных бюджетных учреждений на использование свободного программного обеспечения» и освещает период с 2011 до 2015 г.

[Via Google Translate: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed a plan for transition of power structures and the federal budget [to] free software. According to the document, the introduction of Linux in government should begin in II quarter 2012.

It may come as a surprise to many that quails are able to distinguish one another, let alone that they form close relationships with other quails. Nevertheless, it has long been known that disruption of the birds' social environment causes them stress. A group within the UMR 6552 at the CNRS-Université de Rennes 1 in France has been studying the influence of adults on the behavioural development of their offspring. Together with scientists in Austria, they have now shown that changing the composition of groups of quails housed together causes the birds to behave more aggressively towards one another. In parallel, the level of steroid hormones (corticosterone) in their blood increases when their group composition is disrupted.

Intriguingly, the eggs they lay were found to have significantly higher levels of testosterone when the mothers were subjected to social stress of this kind. The results are consistent with previous findings from other groups, which showed that House sparrows, American coots and Common starlings lay eggs with more testosterone when they breed in dense colonies than when they nest in isolation. But the new work from the French-Austrian collaboration goes considerably further, showing that the eggs of females under social stress hatch later and the chicks grow more slowly after hatching, at least for the first three weeks. There are also indications that the chicks' behave differently: they are more cautious and seem more susceptible to disturbance. Furthermore, they tend to move about more, which can be interpreted as increased attempts to escape from threats or to seek more social contact.

Some of the brightest stellar explosions in the galaxy may be flying under astronomers' radar, a new study suggests.

Researchers using observations from a sun-studying satellite detected four novas exploding stars not quite as bright or dramatic as supernovas. The scientists were able to follow the explosions in intricate detail over time, including before the novas reached maximum brightness.

While other astronomers had discovered all four novas before, two of them escaped detection until after they had reached peak luminosity, the study revealed. This fact suggests that many other stellar explosions even some that are incredibly bright may be occurring unnoticed, researchers said.

The atmosphere around a super-Earth exoplanet has been analyzed for the first time by an international team of astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope. The planet, which is known as GJ 1214b, was studied as it passed in front of its parent star and some of the starlight passed through the planet's atmosphere. We now know that the atmosphere is either mostly water in the form of steam or is dominated by thick clouds or hazes. The results appear in the 2 December 2010 issue of the journal Nature.

The planet GJ 1214b was discovered in 2009 using the HARPS instrument on ESO's 3.6-meter telescope in Chile. Initial findings suggested that this planet had an atmosphere, which has now been confirmed and studied in detail by an international team of astronomers, led by Jacob Bean (Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), using the FORS instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope.

"This is the first super-Earth to have its atmosphere analyzed. We've reached a real milestone on the road toward characterizing these worlds," said Bean.

GJ 1214b has a radius of about 2.6 times that of the Earth and is about 6.5 times as massive, putting it squarely into the class of exoplanets known as super-Earths. Its host star lies about 40 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Ophiuchus (the Serpent Bearer). It is a faint star, but it is also small, which means that the size of the planet is large compared to the stellar disc, making it relatively easy to study. The planet travels across the disc of its parent star once every 38 hours as it orbits at a distance of only two million kilometers: about seventy times closer than the Earth orbits the Sun.

Researchers found that the more CTCs an early-stage breast cancer patient has, the higher the risk.

Researchers from the Women's Hospital at the University of Munich have discovered that the number of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) found in a patient with early-stage breast cancer may be able to predict the risk of cancer recurrence and death.

Brigitte Rack, M.D., study leader and head of the department of gynecological oncology at the Women's Hospital at the University of Munich, Germany, along with a team of researchers, believe that the risk of cancer recurrence and death increases within an early-stage breast cancer patient if they have CTCs present. The more CTCs they have, the higher the risk of cancer relapse and death, according to Phase III results of the SUCCESS trial.

"The CTCs might have been released from the primary tumor before these patients underwent surgery, and the expression of stem cell markers on disseminated tumor cells has been shown by several groups," said Rack.

Television and cinema screens that produce holographic images without the need for special glasses are being developed by computer giant Apple.

A recently granted patent reveals that Apple, the company behind the iPod and iPhone, has been working on a new type of display screen that produces three dimensional and even holographic images without the need for glasses.

The technology could be used to produce a new generation of televisions, computer monitors and cinema screens that would provide viewers with a more realistic experience.

The system relies upon a special screen that is dotted with tiny pixel-sized domes that deflect images taken from slightly different angles into the right and left eye of the viewer.

By presenting images taken from slightly different angles to the right and left eye, this creates a stereoscopic image that the brain interprets as three-dimensional.

Apple also proposes using 3D imaging technology to track the movements of multiple viewers and the positions of their eyes so that the direction the image is deflected by the screen can be subtly adjusted to ensure the picture remains sharp and in 3D.

A rocket carrying a communication satellite has exploded just after lift-off in the second launch failure for India's space agency this year.

The rocket exploded in the first stage after it launched from the Sriharikota space centre. It was carrying a GSAT-5P satellite into orbit.

In April, a rocket on a developmental flight plunged into the Bay of Bengal.

Yashpal, a retired Indian scientist and independent commentator, said other countries have experienced such failures.

"I hope it's just one of those things," Mr Yashpal, who uses just one name, told reporters.

India is planning its first manned space flight in 2016.

An Indian satellite launched in 2008 to orbit the moon was abandoned last year after communication links were cut off and scientists lost control of the satellite.

Researchers from the University of Arizona have devised a method that sends chemotherapeutic drugs directly to cancerous tissue without affecting surrounding healthy tissue.

The researchers working on this study include Marek Romanowski, study leader and associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Arizona; Xenia Kachur, a third-year graduate student in the Biomedical Engineering Graduate Interdisciplinary Program (GIDP) at the University of Arizona, and Sarah Leung, a fourth-year graduate student in the Biomedical Engineering GIDP.

Up until now, chemotherapeutic drugs have been enclosed in liposomes, which are tiny capsules made of organic lipids that are naturally found in human cells. These liposomes keep an individual's immune system from attacking it before it reaches the cancerous tissue, and aid in the delivery of the drugs to kill cancerous cells. The problem is that these liposome casings do not deliver the drugs directly to cancerous tissue only, and they release the drugs in an uncontrollable manner. The drugs affect healthy tissue as well, killing all cells in its path regardless of whether it's cancerous or not because it has no way of knowing which cells have cancer, which is why chemotherapy has such harsh side effects such as hair loss.