Since Valentine's Day is approaching, it's a good time to combine X-rays from the NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue) produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)  into a new image of a ring - not of jewels - but of black holes. The composite image is of Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies located about 430 million light years from Earth.

When the shootings in Arizona occurred, various pundits in the media jumped on 'right ring radio' and 'culture of hate' (meaning conservative news programs) despite the fact that the shooter was not political and did not even watch shows like Fox News.

If your prism is left, you tend to view even the center as the right, so mainstream media can be somewhat forgiven for demonizing all qualities they dislike as being right wing (it happens in science also - various scientists and bloggers have no idea there are left wing anti-science positions but can recite entire volumes of anti-science right wing issues) but is it really the case that the right is 'meaner' than the left?   

In the somewhat irrational war on incandescent light bulbs, one thing left out is that the current alternatives are not great yet either.   If you break a CFL bulb, you'd better call in a HazMat team (and who knows what the high frequency ballasts are doing to your pets?) but if you break an LED, the lead levels are far too high, according to a new study.

It won't make it readable, but University of Arizona researchers have cracked at least one of the puzzles surrounding the Voynich manuscript, a book filled with drawings and writings nobody can make any sense of.

Using radiocarbon dating, a team led by Greg Hodgins in department of physics says the manuscript's parchment pages date back to the early 15th century, making the book a century older than previously thought. 

It's nonsensical structure has kept the Voynich manuscript fascinating for the 50 people who care; rows of text scrawled on visibly aged parchment, flowing around intricately drawn illustrations depicting plants, astronomical charts and human figures bathing in, some claim, the fountain of youth.

Arches in human feet have been instrumental in our ability to walk upright and researchers at the University of Missouri and Arizona State University say they have found proof that arches existed in a predecessor to the human species, Australopithecus afarensis, that lived more than 3 million years ago. 

Metastasis is when tumor cells move from the primary tumor to distant tissues - it is metastasis of the primary tumor that kills most cancer patients. One of the least studied routes of metastasis is the lymphatic system, though many tumors produce factors that promote the formation of new lymphatic vessels (lymphangiogenesis). The newly formed lymphatic vessels enable tumor cells to travel from the primary tumor to the regional lymph nodes from whence they can spread throughout the body.

Current treatment practice is to surgically remove the primary tumor as well as the metastatic lymph nodes, but tumor cells in metastatic transit inside the lymphatic vessels have not been given much attention.