Recent Comments

    Big Data from World’s Largest Citizen Science Microbiome Project serves Food for thought

    May 17, 2018, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    American Gut Project, based at UC San Diego School of Medicine, is the world's largest crowdsourced, citizen science project. Credit: UC San Diego Health

    American Gut Project, based at UC San Diego School of Medicine, is the world’s largest crowdsourced, citizen science project. Credit: UC San Diego Health

    How factors such as diet, antibiotics and mental health status can influence the microbial and molecular makeup of your gut. Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and collaborators have published the first major results from the American Gut Project, a crowdsourced, global citizen science effort. The project, described May 15 in mSystems, is the largest published study to date of the human microbiome – the unique microbial communities that inhabit our bodies.

    This publication provides the largest public reference database of the human gut microbiome, which may help drive many future microbiome studies...

    Read More

    Astronomers find Fastest-Growing Black Hole known in Space

    May 17, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Computer-simulated image of a supermassive black hole. Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Coe, J. Anderson, and R. van der Marel (STScI) [link]

    Computer-simulated image of a supermassive black hole. Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Coe, J. Anderson, and R. van der Marel (STScI) [link]

    Astronomers at ANU have found the fastest-growing black hole known in the Universe, describing it as a monster that devours a mass equivalent to our sun every two days. The astronomers have looked back more than 12 billion years to the early dark ages of the Universe, when this supermassive black hole was estimated to be the size of about 20 billion suns with a 1% growth rate every one million years.

    “This black hole is growing so rapidly that it’s shining thousands of times more brightly than an entire galaxy, due to all of the gases it sucks in daily that cause lots of friction and heat,” said Dr Wolf from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophys...

    Read More

    Unusual Laser Emission from the Ant Nebula

    May 17, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The Ant Nebula, as imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, resembles the head and body of a garden ant. In reality, it's the result of a dying sun-like star and complex interactions of material at its heart. Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

    The Ant Nebula, as imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, resembles the head and body of a garden ant. In reality, it’s the result of a dying sun-like star and complex interactions of material at its heart. Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

    An international team of astronomers have discovered an unusual laser emission that suggests the presence of a double star system hidden at the heart of the “spectacular” Ant Nebula. The extremely rare phenomenon is connected to the death of a star and was discovered in observations made by European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel space observatory.

    When low- to middleweight stars like our Sun approach the end of their lives they eventually become dense, white dwarf stars...

    Read More

    A Quantum Entanglement between two physically Separated Ultra-cold Atomic Clouds

    May 16, 2018, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    Illustration of the quantum entanglement achieved between the two clouds of atoms starting from a single Bose-Einstein condensate. Credit: Iagoba Apellaniz. UPV/EHU

    Illustration of the quantum entanglement achieved between the two clouds of atoms starting from a single Bose-Einstein condensate. Credit: Iagoba Apellaniz. UPV/EHU

    Scientists have achieved, in an experiment, quantum entanglement between 2 Bose-Einstein condensates, spatially separated from each other. Quantum entanglement was discovered by Schrödinger and later studied by Einstein and other scientists in the last century. The groups of entangled particles lose their individuality and behave as a single entity. Any change in one of the particles leads to an immediate response in the other, even if they are spatially separated...

    Read More