People nowadays
Large water reservoirs at the dawn of stellar birth
Herschel’s infrared view of part of the Taurus Molecular Cloud, within which the bright, cold pre-stellar cloud L1544 can be seen at the lower left. It is surrounded by many other clouds of gas and dust of varying density. The Taurus Molecular Cloud is about 450 light-years from Earth and is the nearest large region of star formation. The image covers a field of view of approximately 1 x 2 arcminutes. Credit: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE
ESA’s Herschel space observatory has discovered enough water vapour to fill Earth’s oceans more than 2000 times over, in a gas and dust cloud that is on the verge of collapsing into a new Sun-like star.
Stars form within cold, dark clouds of gas and dust – ‘pre-stellar cores’ – that contain all the ingredients to make solar systems like our own.
Water, essential to life on Earth, has previously been detected outside of our Solar System as gas and ice coated onto tiny dust grains near sites of active star formation, and in proto-planetary discs capable of forming alien planetary systems.
The new Herschel observations of a cold pre-stellar core in the constellation of Taurus known as Lynds 1544 are the first detection of water vapour in a molecular cloud on the verge of star formation.
More than 2000 Earth oceans-worth of water vapour were detected, liberated from icy dust grains by high-energy cosmic rays passing through the cloud.
Read more: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-large-reservoirs-dawn-stellar-birth.html
Mars Rock Touched by NASA Curiosity Has Surprises
ScienceDaily (Oct. 12, 2012) — The first Martian rock NASA’s Curiosity rover has reached out to touch presents a more varied composition than expected from previous missions. The rock also resembles some unusual rocks from Earth’s interior.
The rover team used two instruments on Curiosity to study the chemical makeup of the football-size rock called “Jake Matijevic” (matt-EE-oh-vick). The results support some surprising recent measurements and provide an example of why identifying rocks’ composition is such a major emphasis of the mission. Rock compositions tell stories about unseen environments and planetary processes.
“This rock is a close match in chemical composition to an unusual but well-known type of igneous rock found in many volcanic provinces on Earth,” said Edward Stolper of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who is a Curiosity co-investigator. “With only one Martian rock of this type, it is difficult to know whether the same processes were involved, but it is a reasonable place to start thinking about its origin.”
Awesome death spiral of a bizarre star
The name of this thing is AFGL 3068. It’s been known as a bright infrared source for some time, but images just showed it as a dot. This Hubble image using the Advanced Camera for Surveys reveals an intricate, delicate and exceedingly faint spiral pattern. It’s so faint no one has ever detected it before!
So what’s going on here? First off, this is not a spiral galaxy! It’s a binary star*, two stars that orbit each other, located about 3000 light years away from us. One of the stars is what’s called a carbon star, similar to the Sun but much older. The Sun is still happily fusing hydrogen into helium in its core, but older stars run out of available hydrogen. Eventually, they fuse helium into carbon. When this happens the star swells up and becomes a red giant (note: that’s the brief version; the actual events are a tad more complicated).
Read more:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/06/awesome-death-spiral-of-a-bizarre-star/
Mars rover Curiosity scoops, detects bright object
Be original
The weapon of mass deception
Turkey hits targets inside Syria after border deaths
Several Syrian troops were killed by Turkish fire, activists from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Turkey’s border town of Akcakala was shelled, apparently by Syrian government forces, on Wednesday, killing a woman and three children.
The UN Security Council is due to meet later on Thursday to condemn Syria’s actions.
Ankara’s response marks the first time it has fired into Syria during the 18-month-long unrest there.
Turkey also asked the UN Security Council to take “necessary action” to stop Syrian “aggression”.
The request was made by Turkish envoy to the UN, Ertugrul Apakan, in a letter to the current president of the 15-member Council, Guatemalan ambassador Gert Rosenthal.
Meanwhile, Nato envoys held an urgent meeting in Brussels at the request of Turkey, who is a member of the military alliance.
Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19822253
Drug Companies Pushing to Replace Nutrition with Pharmaceuticals; Take Your Medications Even if You Have No Symptoms
Monday, 01 October 2012
‘Medications are nutrition. That’s essentially the rationale behind a couple of Big Pharma corporations’ decision to give a failed Alzheimer’s drug a second chance.
In early August, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson said they were ending large-scale clinical trials of their experimental drug bapineuzumab in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease, because patients taking it did not show signs of improved memory or thinking skills.
That was disappointing to millions of Alzheimer’s sufferers and their families, though the results of the trials were all but expected by researchers and investors who believed the drug had little chance to succeed.’
Believe nothing 
