An as yet undiscovered planet might be orbiting at the dark fringes of the solar system, according to new research.

Too far out to be easily spotted by telescopes, the potential unseen planet appears to be making its presence felt by disturbing the orbits of so-called Kuiper belt objects, said Rodney Gomes, an astronomer at the National Observatory of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro.

Kuiper belt objects are small icy bodies - including some dwarf planets - that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Once considered the ninth planet in our system, the dwarf planet Pluto, for example, is one of the largest Kuiper belt objects, at about 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers) wide. Dozens of the other objects are hundreds of miles across, and more are being discovered every year.

What's intriguing, Gomes said, is that, according to his new calculations, about a half dozen Kuiper belt objects - including the remote body known as Sedna - are in strange orbits compared to where they should be, based on existing solar system models.

The objects' unexpected orbits have a few possible explanations, said Gomes, who presented his findings Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Timberline Lodge, Oregon.

"But I think the easiest one is a planetary-mass solar companion" - a planet that orbits very far out from the sun but that's massive enough to be having gravitational effects on Kuiper belt objects.

A sixfold increase in Maryland children potentially at risk

The number of young children deemed at risk of lead poisoning in Maryland and nationwide expanded drastically Wednesday as a federal health agency declared it would effectively cut in half its threshold for diagnosing the environmental illness.

Acknowledging mounting evidence that children can suffer lasting harm from ingesting even minute amounts of lead, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it would reduce the level at which it recommends that doctors, families and health authorities act to lower a child's exposure to the toxic metal.

Officials estimate the CDC's adoption of a new "reference level" for assessing low-level exposure to lead could add 200,000 children nationwide to 250,000 considered poisoned under the old threshold. In Maryland, the percentage increase is probably even greater. Under the new standard, 3,500 more children statewide would have been added to the 531 who tested positive for lead poisoning in 2010, the most recent year for which figures are available.

Imagine reading an entire book, but then realizing that your glasses did not allow you to distinguish "g" from "q." What details did you miss?

Geneticists faced a similar problem with the recent discovery of a "sixth nucleotide" in the DNA alphabet. Two modifications of cytosine, one of the four bases that make up DNA, look almost the same but mean different things. But scientists lacked a way of reading DNA, letter by letter, and detecting precisely where these modifications are found in particular tissues or cell types.

Now, a team of scientists from the University of Chicago, the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, the University of California, San Diego and Emory University has developed and tested a technique to accomplish this task. The results are published May 17 in the online edition of the journal Cell.

The team used the technique to map 5-methylcytosine (5-mC) and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5-hmC) in DNA from human and mouse embryonic stem cells, revealing new information about their patterns of distribution. These studies have revealed that these DNA modifications play major roles in fundamental life processes such as cell differentiation, cancer and brain function.

Volcanic eruptions can spark squalls of lightning that are as intense as the biggest superstorms over the central United States, according to researchers who have captured the most detailed measurements of electrical discharges during a volcanic blast. The data, they say, could help to illuminate what causes volcanic lightning and point the way towards a system that can quickly detect ash plumes from remote eruptions, which can disrupt air travel.

Observers as far back as Pliny the Elder in 79 AD have noted that eruptions often trigger lightning storms, but researchers have only recently started to set up monitoring stations to capture that electrical activity and study its causes. In early 2009, seismic rumblings beneath Alaska's Mount Redoubt provided an opportunity for a team from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro and the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. They raced to the mountain and set up four small monitoring stations with very high frequency (VHF) antennas to record the radiation from any lightning discharges. Two months later, Mount Redoubt erupted and the team was deluged with data.

"We had 16 large volcanic lighting storms, so that was a lot of data to compare between the different eruptions," says Sonja Behnke, a graduate student at the New Mexico institute and first author on a paper about the eruption in the geophysics publication EOS this week¹.

Comet C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) was found by Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Maui, on the night of 2011, June 5-6. At the moment of discovery the comet was at a distance of nearly 7.9 AU from the Sun (discovery magnitude 19.4). According to it's orbit, around perihelion in March 2013 the comet would be located only 0.30 AU from the Sun and might become a bright naked eye object ( ~ magnitude 1). For more info about the discovery of this comet, see our previous post on this blog of 2011, June 09.

We performed some follow-up measurements of comet C/2011 L4 remotely from the Siding Spring-Faulkes Telescope South on 2012, May 18.5 through a 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD. The comet is now at 4.6 AU from the Sun (m2 ~ 15.6). Below you can see our follow-up image (click on it for a bigger version):

On June 5th, 2012, Venus will pass across the face of the sun, producing a silhouette that no one alive today will likely see again.

Transits of Venus are very rare, coming in pairs separated by more than a hundred years. This June's transit, the bookend of a 2004-2012 pair, won't be repeated until the year 2117. Fortunately, the event is widely visible. Observers on seven continents, even a sliver of Antarctica, will be in position to see it.

It has been known for some time that during pregnancy, the placenta enables a two-way trafficking of immune cells between mother and fetus. Some of the exchanged cells are capable of establishing long-lasting cell lines that persist for at least half a century after birth and are immunologically active.

Known as microchimerism, two genetically distinct and separately derived populations of cells are present in the same individual or organ. While it can occur artificially, as with recipients of blood transfusions or bone marrow transplants, it occurs naturally during most pregnancies. For instance, approximately 50-75% of women after giving birth carry fetal immune cells,[1] and about half as many offspring carry maternal immune cells.

The bidirectional fetomaternal trafficking of cells through the placenta is known as "fetal microchimerism" when moving in the fetal -> maternal direction, and "maternal microchimerism" when moving in the maternal -> fetal direction.

While much of the focus on this phenomenon in the past 15 years has been on the possible pathological role that these fetal cells play in contributing to autoimmune diseases in the mother, i.e. the "bad microchimerism" proposed by Nelson JL in 1996,[2] a more positive perspective is beginning to emerge, also known as the "good microchimerism" hypothesis, which "...suggests that persistent fetal cells, instead of inducing a maternal immune response, provide a rejuvenating source of fetal progenitor cells that may have the capacity to participate in maternal tissue repair processes."[3]

Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2004 and titled "Transfer of fetal cells with multilineage potential to maternal tissue," researchers discussed the role that fetal microchimerism may play in responding to maternal injury by developing multilineage capacity in maternal organs. They found evidence that male fetal microchimeric cells had differentiated into maternal epithelial tissues (thyroid, cervix, intestine and gallbladder," indicating their stem-cell like qualities and the possibility that they were contributing to repair and/or regeneration of those injured maternal tissues.[4]

Rome - A project to drill deep into the heart of a "supervolcano" in southern Italy has finally received the green light, despite claims that the drilling would put the population of Naples at risk of small earthquakes or an explosion. Yesterday, Italian news agency ANSA quoted project coordinator Giuseppe De Natale of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology as saying that the office of Naples mayor Luigi de Magistris has approved the drilling of a pilot hole 500 meters deep.

The Campi Flegrei Deep Drilling Project was set up by an international collaboration of scientists to assess the risks posed by the Campi Flegrei caldera, a geological formation just a few kilometers to the west of Naples that formed over thousands of years following the collapse of several volcanoes. Researchers believe that if it erupted, Campi Flegrei could have global repercussions, potentially killing millions of people and having a major effect on the climate, but that such massive eruptions are extremely rare.

The project's organizers originally intended to bore a 4-kilometer-deep well in the area of the caldera late in 2009, but the plan was put on hold by then-mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino after scientists expressed concerns about the risks.

Among the critics was Benedetto De Vivo, a geochemist at the University of Naples, who told Science in 2010 that the drilling might cause seismic activity or generate an explosion if it allowed the high-pressure supercritical fluids expected to exist at depths of about 3 kilometers or more to come into contact with magma inside the caldera. "Nobody can say how bad this explosion would be, but it could put at risk some of the surrounding population," he said. De Vivo added that he didn't understand why the well was to be located on the grounds of the former Bagnoli steel mill, on the western outskirts of Naples, and not farther west. (De Vivo did not state that the study might trigger an eruption of the supervolcano.)

Adlène Hicheur, the particle physicist convicted of terrorist charges, has been released less than two weeks into his four-year prison sentence, according to his former supervisor. Jean-Pierre Lees, a researcher at the Particle Physics Laboratory in France, told physicsworld.com that Hicheur was released from a French jail on the night of Tuesday 15 May, just one day after the deadline for him to appeal his guilty verdict had elapsed. According to Lees, Hicheur had considered appealing the verdict but in the end had decided against it because it would have required him to remain in prison for an additional eight months.

Hicheur, a 36-year-old French-Algerian, was arrested by French police on 8 October 2009 on suspicion of having links with the organization Al-Qaida au Maghreb islamique (AQMI). Prior to his arrest, Hicheur was working as a postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and spent time at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Hicheur remained in custody without charge for almost two and a half years - the maximum time permissible under French anti-terrorism laws

In November 2010 Lees sent a letter to the French Physical Society expressing concerns about the continued imprisonment of Hicheur without charge that was signed by 19 physicists including the Nobel laureate Jack Steinberger. Hicheur also received support from an "international defence committee", consisting of about 100 scientists, which wrote to the French authorities, including the then French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

The FSMB is an elite, highly influential, secretive private organization. We also believe that it is thoroughly corrupt. Action Alert!

Each of the fifty states, as well as the District of Columbia and the US territories, has laws that define the practice of medicine; each one delegates the authority to enforce those laws to a state medical board. State medical boards also adopt policies and create guidelines related to the practice of medicine. They have the power to revoke physician licenses for violating the state's laws of the practice of medicine - subject to the boards' interpretation of the law, which can be highly arbitrary.

The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) is a private 501(c)(6) trade association that purports to represent the seventy state medical and osteopathic boards of the US and its territories, and cosponsors the United States Medical Licensing Examination. It is tremendously powerful: whatever it suggests in terms of medical care policies are often adopted by the state medical boards. A private trade association with no public funding, transparency, or accountability arguably has the power to interpret state medical law and grant or revoke medical licenses! Ever wonder why it's so hard to find a doctor who will prescribe bioidentical hormones or administer chelation therapy? We believe it's because the FSMB has made it such a career risk for the doctor to use his own independent judgment.