Peeping into the vastness of our galaxy, NASA reported that the Herschel space telescope of the European Space Agency (ESA) took images of vast comet belts surrounding two planetary systems. "Herschel continues to reveal surprising information about the strange configuration of solar systems in the Milky Way," said NASA Herschel Project Scientist Paul Goldsmith.

The Herschel space telescope, officially named the Herschel Space Observatory, is known to have the largest single mirror for a space telescope at 3.5 meters in diameter. It can "collect long wavelength radiation from some of the the coldest and most distant objects in the Universe," according to the ESA. It was launched in 2009 and its mission is expected to end by 2013.

NASA also contributed to study for this mission. The Herschel Project Office is located at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, USA.

The Geminid meteor shower peaks on Dec. 13th and 14th when Earth runs through a stream of debris from a strange object that some astronomers are calling a "rock comet."


The 2012 Geminid meteor shower peaks on the night of Dec. 13-14, The Geminids are a unique meteor shower in that their identified parent body is not a comet, but what seems to be an asteroid! Of the meteor showers with known parent bodies studied by meteor scientists, the Geminids are the only shower to have an asteroidal parent body; all others have a cometary origin.

3200 Phaethon measures 5.10 km in diameter which increases the 'unique' factor; considering the amount of debris we see, we would expect Phaethon to be a much larger body!

In what could be a major turning point in the global socio-cultural-political landscape, an inter-continental team of scientists drawn out from Asia, Europe and the USA has found that the ancestors of the European Roma are the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes from north-western India.

"We have proved scientifically that the forefathers of the European Roma Gypsies are the doma, a collective term for the ancient aboriginal populations of the Indian subcontinent, also known as Dalits," Dr Kumaraswamy Thangaraj from Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad told The Pioneer. Dr Thangaraj led the team of scientists in the 30-month-long study.

The scientists were from CCMB, Estonian Biocentre, Tartu University, Estonia, University of Bern, Switzerland; University of Cambridge, UK and Stanford University, USA. The ancestry of European Roma Gypsies was always enmeshed in controversy though it was widely believed that they had their origins from north-west India. The exact parental population group and time of dispersal into various continents remained a mystery all these years. This is the first time a scientific research has proved that the Gypsies in Europe have an Indian Dalit origin.

The Roman Gypsies are spread all over Europe, the USA and South America. Dr Gyaneshwer Chaubey from Estonian Biocentre said the breakthrough was made by studying the Y chromosomes of the Gypsies with that of various ethnic groups in Indian subcontinent. "The Y chromosome is passed on from father to sons and grandsons. All males of a family or gotra evolved from a single founder male will possess the same Y chromosome," Dr Chaubey explained from Estonia through video-conferencing. He said the parental lineage of the Gypsies was traced based on the genetic signatures existing on Y chromosomes.

Discovery Date: November 7, 2012

Magnitude: 19.0

Discoverer: Rob Matson (SWAN/SOHO spacecraft images)

The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2012-X02.

A mysterious spike in atmospheric carbon-14 levels 12 centuries ago might be a sign the Sun is capable of producing solar storms dozens of times worse than anything we've ever seen, a team of physicists calculates in a paper published this week in Nature.

Carbon-14 (14C) is created when high-energy radiation strikes the Earth's upper atmosphere, converting nitrogen-14 into 14C, which eventually makes its way into plants via photosynthesis.

Earlier this year, a team of Japanese physicists discovered a spike in 14C in tree rings of Japanese cedars dating from the 774 - 75 growing season. But they were unable to explain where that 14C might have come from because all possible explanations appeared unlikely.

But Adrian Melott, a physicist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, who is the lead author of the new study, says that the Japanese team made a miscalculation in ruling out one of these possibilities - a giant solar storm.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have for the first time found that the outer region of a dusty disc encircling a brown dwarf contains millimetre-sized solid grains like those found in denser discs around newborn stars. The surprising finding challenges theories of how rocky, Earth-scale planets form, and suggests that rocky planets may be even more common in the Universe than expected.

Rocky planets are thought to form through the random collision and sticking together of what are initially microscopic particles in the disc of material around a star. These tiny grains, known as cosmic dust, are similar to very fine soot or sand. However, in the outer regions around a brown dwarf -- a star-like object, but one too small to shine brightly like a star -- astronomers expected that grains could not grow because the discs were too sparse, and particles would be moving too fast to stick together after colliding. Also, prevailing theories say that any grains that manage to form should move quickly towards the central brown dwarf, disappearing from the outer parts of the disc where they could be detected.

Italian physics professor Enzo Di Fabrizio captures twisted ladder that props up life

Fifty-nine years after James Watson and Francis Crick deduced the double-helix structure of DNA, a scientist has captured the first direct photograph of the twisted ladder that props up life.

Enzo Di Fabrizio, a physics professor at Magna Graecia University in Catanzaro, Italy, snapped the picture using an electron microscope.

Previously, scientists had only seen DNA's structure indirectly. The double-corkscrew form was first discovered using a technique called X-ray crystallography, in which a material's shape is reconstructed based on how X-rays bounce after they collide with it.

Bethesda, MD - November 30, 2012 -- Using genetic analyses, scientists have discovered that Northern European populations - including British, Scandinavians, French, and some Eastern Europeans - descend from a mixture of two very different ancestral populations, and one of these populations is related to Native Americans.

This discovery helps fill gaps in scientific understanding of both Native American and Northern European ancestry, while providing an explanation for some genetic similarities among what would otherwise seem to be very divergent groups. This research was published in the November 2012 issue of the Genetics Society of America's journal GENETICS.

According to Nick Patterson, first author of the report, "There is a genetic link between the paleolithic population of Europe and modern Native Americans. The evidence is that the population that crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia into the Americas more than 15,000 years ago was likely related to the ancient population of Europe."

Spaun, a new software model of a human brain, is able to play simple pattern games, draw what it sees and do a little mental arithmetic. It powers everything it does with 2.5 million virtual neurons, compared with a human brain's 100 billion. But its mistakes, not its abilities, are what surprised its makers the most, said Chris Eliasmith, an engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Ask Spaun a question, and it hesitates a moment before answering, pausing for about as long as humans do. Give Spaun a list of numbers to memorize, and it falters when the list gets too long. And Spaun is better at remembering the numbers at the beginning and end of a list than at recalling numbers in the middle, just like people are.

"There are some fairly subtle details of human behavior that the model does capture," said Eliasmith, who led the development of Spaun, or the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network. "It's definitely not on the same scale [as a human brain]," he told TechNewsdaily. "It gives a flavor of a lot of different things brains can do."

Eliasmith and his team of Waterloo neuroscientists say Spaun is the first model of a biological brain that performs tasks and has behaviors. Because it is able to do such a variety of things, Spaun could help scientists understand how humans do the same, Eliasmith said. In addition, other scientists could run simplified simulations of certain brain disorders or psychiatric drugs using Spaun, he said.

Astronomers have discovered a mammoth black hole containing as much mass as 17billion Suns. The monster object is more than 11 times wider than the orbit of Neptune, the eighth planet in our Solar System. It lies at the heart of a small lens-shaped galaxy called NGC1277, 220million light years away in the constellation Perseus.

News of the incredible object comes as a separate research team reported the discovery of a quasar with the most energetic outflow ever seen. Observations of the incredible quasar known as SDSS J1106+1939 may answer questions about how the mass of a galaxy is linked to its central black hole mass and why there are so few large galaxies in the universe. The black hole at NGC1277 makes up an enormous 14 per cent of the galaxy's mass. Other black holes found at the centres of galaxies only account for around 0.1 per cent.