Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope have for the first time obtained a three-dimensional view of the distribution of the innermost material expelled by a recently exploded star. The original blast was not only powerful, according to the new results. It was also more concentrated in one particular direction. This is a strong indication that the supernova must have been very turbulent, supporting the most recent computer models.

Unlike the Sun, which will die rather quietly, massive stars arriving at the end of their brief life explode as supernovae, hurling out a vast quantity of material. In this class, Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A) in the rather nearby Large Magellanic Cloud occupies a very special place. Seen in 1987, it was the first naked-eye supernova to be observed for 383 years (eso8704), and because of its relative closeness, it has made it possible for astronomers to study the explosion of a massive star and its aftermath in more detail than ever before. It is thus no surprise that few events in modern astronomy have been met with such an enthusiastic response by scientists.

The remains of St John the Baptist have been found in an ancient reliquary in a 5th century monastery on Sveti Ivan Island in Bulgaria, archaeologists have claimed.

The remains - small fragments of a skull, bones from a jaw and an arm, and a tooth - were discovered embedded in an altar in the ruins of the ancient monastery, on the island in the Black Sea.

A Greek inscription on the stone casque contains a reference to June 24 - the date on which John the Baptist is believed to have been born.

"We found the relics of St John the Baptist - exactly what the archaeologists had expected," said Bozhidar Dimitrov, Bulgaria's minister without portfolio and a former director of the country's National History Museum, who was present when the stone urn was opened.

"It has been confirmed that these are parts of his skeleton."

An early piano believed to have been played by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has surfaced in Germany and could be worth millions of pounds.

Public broadcaster SWR said the instrument was built in 1775 and acquired in the 1980s by piano manufacturer Martin Becker in the southern German city of Baden-Baden from an antiques dealer in Strasbourg, eastern France.

When Mr Becker decided to auction off the fortepiano, a music historian noticed the offer and "had a hunch that it could be the same long-lost instrument that Mozart played whenever he was in Strasbourg," SWR said.

"I had the idea to offer it on (online auction site) eBay and maybe get between 30,000 and 40,000 euros for it," Mr Becker told the radio station.

A historic oil painting in Vienna shows the composer Joseph Haydn, a Mozart contemporary, playing what may be the same instrument.

Usually, the Northern Lights can only be seen by folks who live far to the north. But this week, the Aurora Borealis is making an appearance in lower Canada, some of the United States, Norway and other countries around the globe.

The reason has to do with solar storms. On Sunday, an eruption on the sun's surface blasted plasma toward the Earth. That plasma is helping to give millions of people a peek at something they'd never seen.

Fortunately for us, these lucky ducks are taking pictures and posting them on Flickr. You can check out several of our absolute favorites here. Enjoy!

The Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics released the latest information on the July 31/August 1 activity on the Sun that is just now reaching Earth. They predict we'll have multiple opportunities for a display of the Northern Lights over the next two days. The latest word from the solar scientists is that the Sun erupted not just once, but four times. All four coronal mass ejections are headed toward Earth.

Space weather forecasts are even more challenging than regular weather forecasts, said Dr. Leon Golub, and a coronal mass ejection is like a hurricane: it's large and fuzzy, and doesn't always move at the same speed. Currently, the estimated arrival times are:

• Wednesday, Aug. 4 - 3:00 a.m. EDT (0700 GMT on Aug. 5; aurorae not visible in daylight)
• Wednesday, Aug. 4 - 1:00 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT, again the daylight issue)
• Wednesday, Aug. 4 - 8:00 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT on Aug. 5)
• Thursday, Aug. 5 - 2:00 a.m. EDT (0600 GMT)

Any one of these events may or may not generate an aurora. It depends on details like magnetic field orientation. If the magnetic field in the oncoming solar plasma is directed opposite Earth's magnetic field, the result could be spectacular aurorae. If the fields line up, the coronal mass ejection could slide past our planet with nary a ripple.

The Center for Astrophysics suggested these two resources:

Map of current auroral activity

Chart of proton flux (watch for the numbers to go up as each wave arrives)

What's so special about the human brain? It turns out that we're no better endowed between the ears than you would expect for a primate of our size

Oversized brains are to humans what trunks are to elephants and elaborate tail feathers are to peacocks - our defining glory. What would we be without our superlative, gargantuan, neuron-packed brains? Like Donald Trump without his towers, Simon Cowell without his sneering put-downs or Bridget Jones without her diaries. We would just be ordinary primates. Unquestionably smart ones, of course, just not special.

Uncomfortable as it is to contemplate, it is looking increasingly likely that our brains are not something to write home about after all. One group of researchers has scrutinised the primate archaeological record and concluded that the human brain has evolved just as would be expected for a primate of our size. Meanwhile, a biologist who has compared the number of neurons in the brains of all sorts of animals says there is nothing special about the human brain compared with other primates. No one is doubting the fact of human intelligence, but they say it can no longer be attributed to a "supersized" brain. Humans, apparently, are no more than ordinary primates with ordinary-sized brains.

These findings undermine a fundamental and long-standing belief about our place in the kingdom of life: that Homo sapiens is the greatest species ever to grace the Earth and that we have become the greatest because our brains are the best ever to have evolved. Admittedly, justifying this assertion has taxed our self-professed ingenuity. Clearly ours is not the biggest brain on the planet in absolute terms - whales and elephants outdo us by up to six times - but we counter this by arguing that bigger animals are bound to have bigger brains. And if you take body size into account our brain is exceptionally large, as much as seven times larger than those of other mammals (Science, vol 121, p 447). The underlying assumption is still that when it comes to intelligence, brain size matters. But does it?

Manila: A team of archaeologists have found a 67,000-year-old foot bone in northern Luzon, and hailed it as the oldest fossil found in the Asia-Pacific region, a television news report said.

"So far this could be the earliest human fossil found in the Asia-Pacific region. The presence of humans in Luzon shows these early humans already possessed knowledge of seacraft-making in this early period," Dr Armand Mijares, leader of a team of archaeologists from the University of the Philippines that found the fossil in Callao Cave in Cagayan Province, northern Luzon, told GMA-7.

The bone, found in an extensive cave network, predates the 47,000-year-old Tabon Man that is previously known as the first human to have lived in the country, said Taj Vitales, a researcher with the Philippina national museum's archaeology section.

"This would make it the oldest human remains ever found in the Philippines," Vitales told AFP.

Sunspot 1092, a key player in the Earth-directed eruptions of August 1st, is big enough to see without the aid of a solar telescope. Oleg Toumilovitch "spotted" it on July 31st rising over Blairgowrie, South Africa:

"During the first few minutes of sunrise only a fraction of the sunlight makes it's way to the observer - mostly from the red part of visible spectrum," notes Toumilovitch. "During this time large sunspots can be seen without a special solar filter." Be careful, though! Even when dimmed by clouds and haze, direct sunlight can hurt your eyes. "If you try to take a picture like this," advises Toumilovitch, "look only at the screen of your digital camera, not the optical viewfinder."

Many grade school students perform a simple physics experiment by using iron fillings to outline a magnetic field. Seizing on their inner-child, physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, recently performed the same experiment. Except, being high-level research scientists and all, they replaced the iron fillings with ultra-cold atoms, and used them to trace a normally invisible microwave field.

A microwave field is the same electromagnetic energy field that causes attraction in magnets, but with more powerful more powerful energy waves.

Late 20th century saw polar chill as CO2 rose

New research by German and Russian scientists indicates that summer temperatures in the Arctic actually fell for much of the later 20th century, plunging to the levels seen at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

The new results are said by their authors to indicate that solar activity exerted a powerful influence over Arctic climate until the 1990s, an assertion which will cause some irritation among academics who contend that atmospheric carbon is the main factor in climate change.

The latest analysis was done using the rings of Scots pines (Pinus sylvestris) from the Khibiny Mountains on the Kola Peninsula, situated between the Arctic Circle and the port of Murmansk. The tree rings were probed by specialist ring boffins at Institut für Botanik at the Universität Hohenheim in Stuttgart, cooperating with colleagues in Russia and at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung (UFZ).