Los Alamos' RAPTOR
(RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response)
telescopes in New Mexico and Hawaii received a very bright cosmic birth announcement for a black hole on April 27th. 

The RAPTOR (RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response) system is a network of small robotic observatories that scan the skies for optical anomalies such as flashes emanating from a star in its death throes as it collapses and becomes a black hole - an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravity field. 

This birth announcement arrived from the constellation Leo in the form of an exceptionally bright flash of visible light that accompanied a powerful burst of cosmic gamma-ray emissions.

Faced with inevitable pain, most people choose to get over with as soon as possible, according to a new paper in which participants chose between real painful stimuli in the form of electric shocks, and imagined painful dental appointments occurring at different times in the future.

Most people chose to hasten the experience of pain, and would even accept more severe pain to avoid having to wait for it, a smaller proportion preferred to put it off into the future.

There are widespread differences in how genes are expressed in men and women's brains, based on post-mortem adult human brain and spinal cord samples from over 100 individuals analyzed by byscientists at the University College London Institute of Neurology who studied the expression of every gene in 12 brain regions.  

Contrary to sociological claims that poor people are more likely to be criminals, increasing the minimum wage will not lower violent crime or property crime, according to research presented today at the American Society of Criminology’s 69th annual meeting in Atlanta. 

The scholars studied official U.S. crime data and economic data from 1977 to 2012 to compare violent crime and property crime rates among states that abided only by the federal minimum wage standards, and the 18 states that had raised their minimum wage requirement at one time or another above the federal mandate.

Health care costs are going to continue to go up and a new paper says that physicians control more than 80 percent of those costs.

That part is true, though doctors are often forced to practice such "defensive medicine" for legal reasons. 

Neutrinos can pass right through your body, the walls of your house, entire planets, even emerging from near the surface of fascinating and frightening black holes. 

And now, an international scientific collaboration  using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory telescope built over a mile deep in the Antarctic ice has taken an 'astronomical' step forward in unmasking the origins of some of these high-energy particles, the so-called "messengers of the universe."

The researchers have observed 28 very high-energy particle events and they constitute the first solid evidence of neutrinos coming from "cosmic accelerators"—potentially such sources as exploding stars or accreting black holes.