Astronomers have gathered the most direct evidence yet of a supermassive black hole shredding a star that wandered too close. NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer, a space-based observatory, and the Pan-STARRS1 telescope on the summit of Haleakala in Hawaii, were among the first to help identify the stellar remains.

Supermassive black holes, weighing millions to billions times more than the sun, lurk in the centers of most galaxies. These hefty monsters lay quietly until an unsuspecting victim, such as a star, wanders close enough to get ripped apart by their powerful gravitational clutches.

Astronomers have spotted these stellar homicides before, but this is the first time they identified the victim. Using several ground- and space-based telescopes, a team of astronomers led by Suvi Gezari of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore identified the victim as a star rich in helium gas. The star resides in a galaxy 2.7 billion light-years away. The team's results will appear in today's online edition of the journal Nature.

"When the star is ripped apart by the gravitational forces of the black hole, some part of the star's remains falls into the black hole while the rest is ejected at high speeds," Gezari said. "We are seeing the glow from the stellar gas falling into the black hole over time. We're also witnessing the spectral signature of the ejected gas, which we find to be mostly helium. It is like we are gathering evidence from a crime scene. Because there is very little hydrogen and mostly helium in the gas, we detect from the carnage that the slaughtered star had to have been the helium-rich core of a stripped star."

This observation yields insights about the harsh environment around black holes and the types of stars swirling around them. It is not the first time the unlucky star had a brush with the behemoth black hole.

To say that the city of Dubai - located in the United Arab Emirates - is a playground for the wealthy would be a gross understatement. The urban wonderland is home to some of the most extravagant displays of affluence on Earth, so a new hotel popping up wouldn't normally make headlines. But when the hotel will send guests to rooms located 10 meters below the sea, well, that changes things.

Apparently bored with the blasé above-ground digs available all over the city, a Deep Ocean Technology is making your submarine dreams a reality with "Discus," a resort for people who prefer look at some lush ocean life over a crowded cityscape. When construction is completed, Discus will feature a large, above-water disc - complete with a helipad, of course - where visitors can enjoy food, drink, and any other pleasure money can buy. Then, when night falls, guests can retreat down to the massive underwater portion of the resort where the extravagant suites reside.

Current research ethics focuses on protecting study participants, but according to bioethicists from Carnegie Mellon University and McGill University, these efforts fail to prevent problems that undermine the social value of research.

Published in Science, CMU's Alex John London, and McGill's Jonathan Kimmelman and Benjamin Carlisle argue that current research ethics frameworks do not flag drug trials that, while not putting patients at risk, produce biased evidence. As an example, they point to phase IV research -- when pharmaceutical companies test drugs and devices that have been approved for marketing. They insist that without an adequate system of checks in place, phase IV trials will continue to be used by drug companies to market products without generating the information that clinicians and policy makers can use to improve care and maintain a more cost-effective health system.

"Medical care isn't like most consumer products where the consumer can assess the quality of the product from its performance and estimate its value for the money," said London, associate professor of philosophy and director of CMU's Center for Ethics and Policy. "In medicine we are forced to rely on what can at times be complex scientific studies for this information. So it is difficult to overstate the importance of preserving the integrity of this research."

A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has shown that an extra copy of a brain-development gene, which appeared in our ancestors' genomes about 2.4 million years ago, allowed maturing neurons to migrate farther and develop more connections.

What genetic changes account for the vast behavioral differences between humans and other primates? Researchers so far have catalogued only a few, but now it seems that they can add a big one to the list. A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has shown that an extra copy of a brain-development gene, which appeared in our ancestors' genomes about 2.4 million years ago, allowed maturing neurons to migrate farther and develop more connections.

Surprisingly, the added copy doesn't augment the function of the original gene, SRGAP2, which makes neurons sprout connections to neighboring cells. Instead it interferes with that original function, effectively giving neurons more time to wire themselves into a bigger brain.

On June 5 and 6, millions of people worldwide will be able to spot Venus crossing the Sun's face in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Venus will take about six hours to complete its transit, appearing as a small black dot on the sun's surface, in an event that will not happen again until 2117.

Jay M. Pasachoff, astronomer at Williams College, Massachusetts, US, explores the science behind Venus' transit and gives an account of its fascinating history, the journal Physics World reports.

Transits of Venus occur only on very rare occasions when Venus and the Earth are in a line with the Sun. At other times, Venus passes below or above the Sun because the two orbits are at a slight angle to each other, according to a Williams statement.

Transits occur in pairs separated by eight years, with the gap between pairs of transits alternating between 105.5 and 121.5 years - the last transit was in 2004.

Building on the original theories of Copernicus from 1543, scientists were able to predict and record the transits of both Mercury and Venus in the centuries that followed.

Kepler successfully predicted that both planets would transit the Sun in 1631, part of which was verified with Mercury's transit of that year. But the first transit of Venus to actually be viewed was in 1639 - an event that had been predicted by the English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks.

A Queen's University researcher has taken inspiration from Star Trek to create an other-worldly way to meet with one another. Using a series of strategically placed projectors and Microsoft Kinect image sensors, Dr. Roel Vertegaal and his team at the Human Media Lab in Canada have created a human-scale 3D videoconferencing pod, allowing people in different places to meet with one another, just as if they were in the same room at the same time.

Taking a slight jab at other popular videoconferencing options, Dr. Vertegaal said, "Why Skype when you can talk to a life-size 3D holographic image of another person?"

Dr. Vertegaal and his team are calling this new technology "TeleHuman," and it very much resembles the famous holodeck from Star Trek. In order to speak with one another, 2 people stand in front of long, life-sized cylindrical tubes. These tubes not only display a 3D image of the other person, but also capture 3D video. Projectors on the inside create a 3D image to display on the outside of the tube while cameras and tracking technology, such as the Kinect sensors, convert the data into another 3D image.

Since the pods are fitted to collect 3D data, those using TeleHuman are able to see 360 degree images and can even walk around a TeleHuman pod to see the other person's side or back.

Dr. Vertegaal said he and his team were able to assemble the devices mostly using existing hardware, like a 3D projector, convex mirrors and of course, the life-sized acrylic tubes.

We often think of the moon as a geologically dead fixture in our sky. That isn't a bad thing; scientists have long looked at the moon as a perfectly preserved slice of our solar system's history.

But new images returned from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter suggest that our natural satellite isn't dead at all. It's actually pretty active, having both shrank and grown fairly recently in its history.

The first evidence of an active moon came in 2010 when LRO's camera returned high-resolution pictures of landforms called lobate scarps. Previously found only in the equatorial regions in images from Apollo missions 15, 16 and 17, these lobe-shaped cliffs have now been found scattered across the lunar surface.

Web wanderers are more likely to get a computer virus by visiting a religious website than by peering at porn, according to a study released on Tuesday.

"Drive-by attacks" in which hackers booby-trap legitimate websites with malicious code continue to be a bane, the US-based anti-virus vendor Symantec said in its Internet Security Threat Report.

Websites with religious or ideological themes were found to have triple the average number of "threats" that those featuring adult content, according to Symantec.

"It is interesting to note that websites hosting adult/pornographic content are not in the top five, but ranked tenth," Symantec said in the report.

"We hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free; it's not good for repeat business."

Scientists from the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology have discovered a key element in the mechanism of DNA repair. When the DNA double helix breaks, the broken end goes searching for the similar sequence and uses that as a template for repair.

Using a smart new dual-molecule technique, the Delft group has now found out how the DNA molecule is able to perform this search and recognition process in such an efficient way. This week, the researchers report their findings in Molecular Cell.

A staggering problem

Sometimes, the DNA double helix gets broken: both strands are accidentally cut. This presents a vital problem because cells cannot cope with such damaged DNA.

Genomic DNA instabilities such as these, are a known cause of cancer. The good news is that an intricate DNA repair system exists which is impressively error-proof and efficient. How does this work?

First, proteins form a filamentous structure on the broken DNA end. Second, this filament examines recently copied DNA or the second DNA chromosome (remember that we have two copies of each chromosome) in search of a DNA sequence that matches that of the broken end.

Note that this is a daunting task: given that, for example, our human genome contains three billion base pairs, finding your few hundred base pairs of interest, is really like finding a needle in a haystack.

'Still this search process occurs within minutes and with great efficiency. How that is achieved, has been a mystery for decades.

The new experiments from our group now resolve this by revealing the key step in the process, the molecular recognition step', says scientist Iwijn de Vlaminck, who was the postdoc that did the experiments in the group of Prof. Cees Dekker at Delft.

Every second, lightning flashes some 50 times on Earth. Together these discharges coalesce and get stronger, creating electromagnetic waves circling around Earth, to create a beating pulse between the ground and the lower ionosphere, about 60 miles up in the atmosphere.

This electromagnetic signature, known as Schumann Resonance, had only been observed from Earth's surface until, in 2011, scientists discovered they could also detect it using NASA's Vector Electric Field Instrument (VEFI) aboard the U.S. Air Force's Communications/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite.

In a paper published on May 1 in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers describe how this new technique could be used to study other planets in the solar system as well, and even shed light on how the solar system formed.

"The frequency of Schumann Resonance depends not only on the size of the planet but on what kinds of atoms and molecules exist in the atmosphere because they change the electrical conductivity," says Fernando Simoes, the first author on this paper and a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "So we could use this technique remotely, say from about 600 miles above a planet's surface, to look at how much water, methane and ammonia is there."