A Japanese amateur astronomer has discovered a new comet.

Masayuki Iwamoto of Tokushima Prefecture discovered a new celestial object low in the eastern sky in the dawn on January 9, 2020 (JST) and communicated it to the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's window for reports of new astronomical objects. On January 13 (UTC), this object was independently discovered by Gennady Borisov in Crimea. Through analysis of confirmation observations by other observers, this object was determined to be a comet.

A number of bizarre shape-shifting objects have been discovered close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

The blobs are thought to be giant stars that spend part of their orbits so close to the black hole that they get stretched out like bubble gum before returning to a compact, roughly spherical form.

"These objects look like gas and behave like stars," said Andrea Ghez, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California Los Angeles and a co-author of the paper.

In my experience, most people who believe in Darwinian evolution know very little about what the theory really says and how this evolution is supposed to work. They believe that it most certainly works, but when you ask questions about the specifics, you won't get much out of them. And if you do, it will likely turn out that what they say isn't actually true.

The theory of evolution by natural selection is like a rich folklore, full of persistent myths that refuse to die no matter how many times you prove them wrong. We have a very flawed educational system that promotes established dogma instead of looking seriously at the science that's supposed to support it, and questioning this dogma is often met with downright aggression.

You go to school, you get served the standard version of EvolutionIsTrue™, you're told in no uncertain terms that it's 'proven' (even though nobody can show you any actual proof), and if you're like most people, you probably never question it or think about it much after that. You see references to evolution in nature documentaries that regurgitate the same misguided ideas that your teachers used to tell you, and your completely false idea of evolution keeps getting reinforced.

You think you know a lot about evolution because you went to university, though the reality is that you know exactly as much - or as little - as the university wanted you to know. If you meet somebody who has actually done any research into the matter and tells you something different from the standard version, you just laugh and don't even consider there might be anything to it.

But how much is the standard version actually rooted in reality? And how much does the popular version that everyone 'knows' have to do with the real version that scientists deal with in their labs? Let's have a look at a few examples of how what's being presented to us has little to do with reality and what it does to our minds and way of thinking.

When physicists detected signals of high-energy neutrinos coming from a rather unlikely direction in the cosmos, they naturally went looking for a powerful source that might explain it.

An intense examination of the most likely origins of these more reactive forms of 'ghost' particles has now come up empty-handed, opening the way for more exotic speculations over what might be behind the odd signals.

Trawling through seven years of data from the neutrino-hunting IceCube experiment, a large team of researchers from around the globe are now forced to admit conventional explanations for the discovery are looking pretty weak.

An Australian university has launched an investigation into the research record of a discredited scientist it educated, as findings by academics who supervised her doctoral training are challenged.

James Cook University said it has appointed an external panel to look for evidence of misconduct in the research conducted by marine biologist Oona Lönnstedt between 2010 and 2014, when she was undertaking PhD studies at the Queensland institution.

The university said the panel's as yet unidentified members include "eminent academics with expertise in field work, marine science and ethics" and a former federal court judge.

During the past decade, our human evolutionary tree has turned into something more resembling an unwieldy bush. Scientists have discovered swapped segments of DNA that we shared from mating between two other hominids, Neanderthals and Denisovans, which were first sequenced in 2010 and 2014, respectively.

How much of our hominid cousins remains in each of us today, and whether or not the presence of ancient hominid DNA has conferred any adaptation advantages or disadvantages has been a prime area of exploration.

Scientists have shown that single hominid genes can convey advantages, including a famous case of high-altitude adaption, which was the result of DNA swapping, otherwise known as genomic introgression, of a Denisovan for the gene EPAS1. That discovery may help explain why Tibetans are uniquely adapted to high-altitude living.

An international research team, with significant participation of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), has gained important insights into the origin of the material in the spiral arms of the Milky Way, from which new stars are ultimately formed. By analysing properties of the galactic magnetic field, they were able to show that the dilute so-called warm ionized medium (WIM), in which the Milky Way is embedded, condenses near a spiral arm. While gradually cooling, it serves as a supply of the colder material of gas and dust that feeds star formation.

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, a disc-shaped island of stars in the cosmos, in which most bright and young stars cluster in spiral arms. There they form from the dense interstellar medium (ISM), which consists of gas (especially hydrogen) and dust (microscopic grains with high abundances of carbon and silicon). In order for new stars to form continuously, material must be constantly flushed into the spiral arms to replenish the supply of gas and dust.

Being buried in a big wooden box is slowly becoming a thing of the past. A new project is being developed in Italy that has a unique approach to the concept of death.

The idea of having your body become the seed of a tree after passing was developed by Italian designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel, and it is titled the "Capsula Mundi" project. The two designers came up with the idea of using an organic and biodegradable capsule as all-natural coffins, and are now trying to get it out of the start-up phase.

The idea is that, instead of creating burial grounds full of tombstones, the deceased will be able to provide nutrients for a tree of their choosing that will be placed on top of the area that they were buried.

The body of the deceased is placed in one of these biodegradable capsules in a fetal position. The capsule, with the deceased in it, is then buried, and either a tree or the seed of a tree is then planted above the capsule. The person being buried would choose what kind of tree they would want planted when they are alive.

A book is made of wood. But it is not a tree. The dead cells have been repurposed to serve another need.

Now a team of scientists has repurposed living cells — scraped from frog embryos — and assembled them into entirely new life-forms. These millimeter-wide "xenobots" can move toward a target, perhaps pick up a payload (like a medicine that needs to be carried to a specific place inside a patient) — and heal themselves after being cut.

"These are novel living machines," says Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research. "They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism."

The new creatures were designed on a supercomputer at UVM — and then assembled and tested by biologists at Tufts University. "We can imagine many useful applications of these living robots that other machines can't do," says co-leader Michael Levin who directs the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts, "like searching out nasty compounds or radioactive contamination, gathering microplastic in the oceans, traveling in arteries to scrape out plaque."

The results of the new research were published January 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A new comet was discovered yesterday, and it's already history. "The first comet discovery of the decade goes to... SOHO!" reports Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC. During the early hours of Jan. 13th, coronagraphs onboard SOHO (the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spotted the tiny comet plunging into the sun, where it rapidly evaporated:

SOHO is the most prolific comet hunter in history. "It's actually quite unusual that it has taken 13 days for SOHO to find a comet," notes Battams. "This is the furthest we've gone into a new calendar year without a discovery since 2008. We're closing in on 3,900 comets discovered, and should comfortably pass 4,000 sometime this year!"