Heavens

Three astronomers at the University of Toronto have found the most numerous batch of young, supermassive stars yet observed in our galaxy: hundreds of thousands of stars, including several hundreds of the most massive kind --blue stars dozens of times heavier than our Sun. The light these newborn stars emit is so intense it has pushed out and heated the gas that gave them birth, carving out a glowing hollow shell about a hundred light-years across.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- An international team of astronomers has mapped in detail the star-birthing regions of the nearest star-forming galaxy to our own, a step toward understanding the conditions surrounding star creation.

Led by University of Illinois astronomy professor Tony Wong, the researchers published their findings in the December issue of the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – An otherwise nondescript binary star system in the Whirlpool Galaxy has brought astronomers tantalizingly close to their goal of observing a star just before it goes supernova.

The study, submitted in a paper to the Astrophysical Journal, provides the latest result from an Ohio State University galaxy survey underway with the Large Binocular Telescope, located in Arizona.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In 2008, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2.3 million automobile crashes occurred at intersections across the United States, resulting in some 7,000 deaths. More than 700 of those fatalities were due to drivers running red lights. But, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, half of the people killed in such accidents are not the drivers who ran the light, but other drivers, passengers and pedestrians.

The chemokine CXCL12 acts as a chemical signal which mobilizes hematopoietic and other types of stem cells to leave the bone marrow and enter the circulation. Secretion of CXCL12 also guides these cells to sites at which the perfusion of tissue is sub-optimal due to localized obstruction of blood flow. These capabilities have made CXCL12 and its cognate receptor CXCR4 interesting candidates for therapies aimed at mitigating the effects of damage to the heart caused by myocardial infarction.

The astrophysicist Stephen Hawking believes that if humanity is to survive we will have up sticks and colonise space. But is the human body up to the challenge?

Scientists at The University of Nottingham believe that Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a microscopic worm which is biologically very similar to the human being, could help us understand how humans might cope with long-duration space exploration.

The Milky Way galaxy continues to devour its small neighbouring dwarf galaxies and the evidence is spread out across the sky.

A team of astronomers led by Sergey Koposov and Vasily Belokurov of Cambridge University recently discovered two streams of stars in the Southern Galactic hemisphere that were torn off the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. This discovery came from analysing data from the latest Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) and was announced in a paper released today that connects these new streams with two previously known streams in the Northern Galactic hemisphere.

Sometimes when people talk about solar energy, they tacitly assume that we're stuck with some version of the silicon solar cell and its technical and cost limitations.

Not so.

The invention of the solar cell, in 1941, was inspired by a newfound understanding of semiconductors, materials that can use light energy to create mobile electrons -- and ultimately an electrical current.

URBANA – High-quality friendships in kindergarten may mean that boys will have fewer behavior problems and better social skills in first and third grades, said Nancy McElwain, a University of Illinois associate professor of human development and co-author of a study published in a recent issue of Infant and Child Development.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Racial minorities pay systemically more for basic water and sewer services than white people, according to a study by Michigan State University researchers.

This "structural inequality" is not necessarily a product of racism, argues sociologist Stephen Gasteyer, but rather the result of whites fleeing urban areas and leaving minority residents to bear the costs of maintaining aging water and sewer infrastructure.

At any given moment about 2,000 thunderstorms roll over Earth, producing some 50 flashes of lightning every second. Each lightning burst creates electromagnetic waves that begin to circle around Earth captured between Earth's surface and a boundary about 60 miles up. Some of the waves – if they have just the right wavelength – combine, increasing in strength, to create a repeating atmospheric heartbeat known as Schumann resonance.

The constellation Cygnus, now visible in the western sky as twilight deepens after sunset, hosts one of our galaxy's richest-known stellar construction zones. Astronomers viewing the region at visible wavelengths see only hints of this spectacular activity thanks to a veil of nearby dust clouds forming the Great Rift, a dark lane that splits the Milky Way, a faint band of light marking our galaxy's central plane.

For over a decade, Intel's widely used copy protection HDCP has been trusted by the media industry, which carries out business in high-resolution digital video and audio content worth thousands of millions. Researchers from the working group on secure hardware led by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Tim Güneysu of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum were able to checkmate the protection system of an entire industry with relatively little effort using a so-called "man-in-the-middle" attack. They will be presenting their results next week at the international security conference ReConFig 2011 in Cancun, Mexico.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- If dark matter exists in the universe, scientists now have set the strongest limit to date on its mass.

A study led by Hans Verhoef, a researcher at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, and published in this week's PLoS Medicine shows that supplementing young Tanzanian children with zinc —either alone or in combination with other multi-nutrients — does not protect against malaria.