A cluster of at least three asteroids between 20 and 50 kilometres across colliding with Earth over 3.2 billion years ago caused a massive change in the structure and composition of the earth's surface, according to new research by Australian National University earth scientists.
According to Dr Andrew Glikson and Mr John Vickers from the Department of Earth and Marine Sciences at ANU, the impact of these asteroids triggered major earthquakes, faulting, volcanic eruption and deep-seated magmatic activity and interrupted the evolution of parts of the Earth's crust.

Impact! (Courtesy: Thinkquest Library)The identification of impact ejecta — materials ejected by the hitting asteroid — is based on unique minerals and chemical and isotopic compositions indicative of extraterrestrial origin, including Iridium anomalies.
The impact ejecta from the Barberton region in the eastern Transvaal (of Australia) indicate the formation of impact craters several hundred kilometres in diameter in oceanic regions of the earth, analogous to the lunar maria basins (large dark impressions on the surface of the moon). The seismic effects of the impacts included vertical block movements, exposure of deep-seated granites and onset of continental conditions on parts of the earth surface:).

The Hydrogen atom consists of a single Proton at its nucleus, and an Electron orbiting it. The closer the electron is to the nucleus, lesser the energy it has. The lowest energy state (according to Quantum Mechanics) that the electron can have, is called its ground state, when the electron is supposed to be closest to the nucleus.
However, according to Randy Mills and co-workers at BlackLight Power, a company based in Cranbury, New Jersey, there might be a still lower energy-state, which they have termed the hydrino state:-?.

Left: Shrunken Hydrino State, Right: Normal Ground State (Courtesy: Blacklight Power)Mills argues that the hydrino state could be used as a new source of energy - a claim that has led to a predictably negative response from other researchers:). Termed it the Blacklight process, the claim is that the process allows the electron to move closer to the proton, to which it is attracted, below the prior-known ground state. According to them, this generates power as heat, light, and plasma (a hot, glowing, ionized gas) with the formation of strong hydrogen products that are the basis of a vast class of new chemical compounds with broad commercial applications.
Earlier this year, Andreas Rathke of the European Space Agency published a paper in which he argued that the theory for the hydrino state put forward by Mills was the result of a mathematical mistake. Now another theorist has joined the debate: Jan Naudts of the University of Antwerp in Belgium argues that the Klein-Gordon equation of relativistic quantum mechanics does indeed permit the existence of a low-energy hydrino state!
A video explaining the Blacklight process is described here. Only time will tell. I, for one, am quite skeptical. Another skeptical look is provided here.

Hubble is still going strong:). Gazing deep into the sky, it has located a school of galaxies located within a tiny region of space. They are all very different: some are large, some are small. Some are old, and some are new. Most of them have never been seen before, until now:).

Galactic Find (Courtesy: HubbleSite)A handful of large fully formed galaxies are scattered throughout the image. These galaxies are easy to see because they are relatively close to us. Several of the galaxies are spirals with flat disks that are oriented edge-on or face-on to our line of sight, or somewhere in between. Elliptical galaxies and more exotic galaxies with bars or tidal tails are also visible.
Many galaxies that appear small in this image are simply farther away. These visibly smaller galaxies are so distant that their light has taken billions of years to reach us. We are seeing these galaxies, therefore, when they were much younger than the larger, nearby galaxies in the image. One red galaxy to the lower left of the bright central star is acting as a lens to a large galaxy directly behind it. Light from the farther galaxy is bent around the nearby galaxy's nucleus to form a distorted arc.
This image is a composite of multiple exposures of a single field taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys. This image took nearly 40 hours to complete and is one of the longest exposures ever taken by Hubble:):).

What is information? According to the Webster dictionary, it is the knowledge obtained from investigation, study, or instruction. In our everyday world, when we gain information, that means we have learnt something new to add to our existing knowledge. It seems things are a bit murkier (as usual!) in the world governed by Quantum Mechanics:). Quantum Mechanics describes the world of the smallest, of the Protons, Neutrons and Electrons, and it is possible to have something called Negative Information in that world:)).

Electron Cloud around a Sugar Molecule (Courtesy: Actuality Systems)So what is Negative Information? According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, at the quantum level, we cannot accurately compute both the position and the velocity of a particle (say, an electron). When we try to accurately find the position, there will be a large error in (our knowledge of) the velocity, and vice-versa. That is how the sub-atomic world works, and there is no way around it. Thus, there is a fundamental limit on how much we can know about a particle, and therefore about any set of particles. Since we cannot pin-point the electrons (or any other particle), we can only estimate their probabilities of being at any place at any given time, and can visualize this probability as a electron cloud.
However, there are situations when one might be able to know more than they are supposed to:D. The Uncertainty Principle, that stops us from knowing too much, also allows us to know too much for a while, and then let us know too less:)). So, over time, the principle is satisfied, but for small durations of time, you might be able to know more than you are supposed to know. The principle cancels out this extra knowledge by providing misleading, or negative information. Funny thing is: since you do not know when the system is providing accurate or inaccurate information, you do not know if you are getting more, or less:D:D.
This discovery, that quantum knowledge can be negative was made by three researchers, Drs Michal Horodecki, Jonathan Oppenheim and Andreas Winter, of the Universities of Gdansk, Cambridge and Bristol. Their work was published in Nature in August 2005:):).

Robots have a big step at kicking us humans into the dustbin of history;);). They have learnt how to catch!! A robotic catcher, developed by scientists at the University of Tokyo, Japan, can comfortably grab a ball careering through the air at 300 kilometres per hour, or 83 metres per second, according to its creators, Akio Namiki and his colleagues:).

Robotic Hand (Courtesy: NewScientist)he robot does not even need a catching mitt. It resembles a single metallic claw, with just three fingers instead of the human complement of five. An array of 32 by 48 individual photo detectors in its “palm”, tracks a ball's trajectory at high speed. And a series of specialised image processing circuits recognise this movement almost instantly.
An approaching ball triggers the robot's three fingers into action. Actuators embedded in each joint use a burst of high current to move through 180 degrees in less than one tenth of a second. This enables the machine to snatch the ball in the split second it takes to arrive.
A video of the robotic hand catching the ball can be seen here:):).

Parion (also known as Parium) is an ancient city (3000 years old) in western Turkey. The city was named after the famed warrior Paris, son of King Priam of Troy (in Iliad, Homer's epic):):). There were a number of architectural structures, towers and four temples in the city. Recently, archaeologists unearthed a number of works of art including crowns of a prince or a king under that city, which were buried in four sarcophagi (stone coffins bearing sculpture and inscriptions).

Ancient Parion Coins (Courtesy: Snible)Inside the coffins, there were two crowns of a prince or a king who was believed to have lived some 2000 years ago, two golden coins bearing figure of the sun god and several other pieces of jewelry. Also unearthed were 150 pieces of works of art during the excavations. All these findings reveal the importance of Parion in ancient times.
The findings will be exhibited in the Canakkale Museum of Archaeology. Also, the ancient city of Parion is expected to be opened to tourism like famous ancient city of Efes (Ephesus):):).

Once it was in the realm of science-fiction. Yes, DNA sequencing (and its associated field, called Bioinformatics) has come a long way:). The first attempt at sequencing begun in 1990, and it took nearly 14 years to complete. Now scientists are getting much better at it, and faster and more accurate genome deciphering techniques are on the horizon. A report published online by the journal Nature describes one such method that is 100 times faster than conventional ones:):).

Microscopic Image of human chromosomes (Courtesy: BBC)The new technique has been developed by Jonathan M. Rothberg of 454 Life Sciences Corp. in Branford, Connecticut and his colleagues. The technique uses tiny fiber-optic vessels (55 microns x 50 microns) to detect and sequence hundreds of thousands of DNA molecules simultaneously. The results indicate that the setup can sequence 25 million base-pairs (each human chromosome is about 51 to 245 million base-pairs long, and we have 46 chromosomes) in a single four-hour run with greater than 99% accuracy:):).
A single such run of the system was able to sequence entire genome of the parasitic bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium (one of the organisms with the smallest genome), which includes 580,069 base-pairs!! And with an accuracy of 99.96%, that is just plain astounding:).