Our planetary surveys are nowhere near Star Trek's strike rate - they keep finding worlds stuffed with green-skinned females, humanoid societies, and thinly veiled metaphors for the situations they left behind a few hundred light (and regular) years ago.  We find rocks which could freeze, explode and crush organic life just by looking at it.  Now we've found a couple of Earth-sized oxygen atmosphered bodies, which would be all the way M-Class except for one thing: they're stars.Specifically,... Read Full Story

Astronomers believe that supermassive black holes are standard objects in galaxies with bulges such as the spectacular Seyfert galaxy NGC 4258 shown here. Black holes with masses of a million to a few billion times the mass of the Sun are believed to be the engines that power nuclear activity in galaxies. Some nuclei fire jets of energetic particles millions of light years into space. Almost all astronomers believe that this enormous outpouring of energy comes from the death throes of stars... Read Full Story

Android’s Rapid Growth Has Some Developers WorriedA year after its release, Google’s open source Android operating system has become a sensation. After a slow start, it is now available on at least 12 phones, with more devices waiting in the wings. Good news for Android fans, right? Not really, say some developers. A slew of problems have made managing Android apps a “nightmare,” they say, including three versions of the OS (Android 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0), custom firmware on many phones, and hard... Read Full Story

Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd don't need to suit up for this one. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a cosmic "ghost," and scientists think it is evidence of a huge eruption produced by a supermassive black hole equal in power to a billion supernovas. The source, HDF 130, is over 10 billion light years away and existed at a time 3 billion years after the Big Bang, when galaxies and black holes were forming at a high rate. The explosion of each super-massive black hole may, according ... Read Full Story

The Medea Program has released secret spy pictures of a melting Arctic, but don't worry: we're not under alien attack just yet.  "The Medea Program" might look like something you'd see written on a thick paperback (possibly above an image of knives and spy satellites) but in reality it's a program to share declassified intelligence agency information with scientists.  Who might actually do something with it. The point is that the intelligence services have always had bigger budgets an... Read Full Story

ESO’s Very Large Telescope has captured the first time-lapse movie of a rare shell ejected by a “vampire star." The gas-sucking star is part of a double star system known as V445 in the constellation of Puppis ("the Stern") that is devouring part of a companion star looks to be a ticking time bomb. It appears that this double star system is a prime candidate to be one of the long-sought progenitors of the exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae, critical for studies of dark energy. In No... Read Full Story

Ancient pines close to treeline have wider annual growth rings for the period from 1951 to 2000 than for the previous 3,700 years, reports a University of Arizona-led research team. Regional temperatures have increased, particularly at high elevations, during the same 50-year time period. Increasing temperatures at high altitudes are fueling the post-1950 growth spurt has been observed in Rocky Mountain bristlecone pines, including ones in Arizona's San Francisco Peaks.Bristlecone pines live... Read Full Story

 The U.S. Department of Energy has already begun holding workshops on building a system that's 1,000 times more powerful as the Jaguar, capable of a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops. — an exascale system, said Buddy Bland, project director at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility that includes Jaguar. An exaflop is a million trillion calculations per second, (one quintillion) or 1,000 times faster than a petaflop. Exascale systems, according to Computerworld, "will be needed for high-... Read Full Story

  NASA's most awesome mission since pointing at the sky and saying "I bet we can put people there" has come to fruition, with absolute proof that there's water ice on the Moon - and lots of it. The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is the most explosive euphemism since Tom Clancy discovered the thesaurus.  It 'sensed' the contents of the lunar crater Cabeus by dropping an entire Centaur rocket booster into it, and when you 'drop' something in orbit it's very much lik... Read Full Story

Don't miss this awesome Dr MegaVolt spectacle at Burning Man: two coils firing simultaneously fill a 40-foot-long volume of space with electrical arcs! Austin Richards, creator of the Dr. MegaVolt character, has been building Tesla coils since 1981. Austin holds a Ph.D. in particle physics from UC Berkeley and a Physics BA from Amherst College, and has worked professionally on high-voltage systems since 1987. <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.yo... Read Full Story