In August of 2011, astronomers witnessed the dazzling appearance of the closest and brightest Type Ia supernova since Type Ia's were established as the "standard candles" for measuring the expansion of the universe.

The visual of SN 2011fe was caught by the Palomar Transient Factory less than 12 hours after it exploded in the Pinwheel Galaxy in the Big Dipper. Because it was to see through binoculars, 2011fe was soon dubbed the Backyard Supernova. Major astronomical studies from the ground and from space followed close on its heels, recording its luminosity and colors as it rapidly brightened and then slowly faded away. 

If you want to design new materials that are durable, lightweight and environmentally sustainable, it makes sense to look at old kinds: Natural composites, such as bone. Bone is strong and tough because its two constituent materials, soft collagen protein and stiff hydroxyapatite mineral, are arranged in complex hierarchical patterns that change at every scale of the composite, from the micro up to the macro.

While researchers have come up with hierarchical structures in the design of new materials, going from a computer model to the production of physical artifacts has been a persistent challenge because the hierarchical structures that give natural composites their strength are self-assembled through electrochemical reactions, a process not easily replicated in the lab.

The gap between hypothesis and observation is never more evident than efforts to figure out howblack holes produce so many high-power X-rays.

If you want to make sure your extra-terrestrial efforts can survive a nuclear attack, working inside the Jamesburg Earth Station on, fittingly, ComSat Road, just outside Carmel, California, is a fine choice. A short drive to Pebble Beach and Spyglass golf courses means it is not a bad way to spend your weekends either.

If you enjoyed seeing Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon, Jamesburg is one of the dishes you can thank. But the 10-story high antenna went out of service in 2002. The land was sold to a gentleman who wanted a vacation home - the coolest Cold War vacation home ever, if you ask me, with blueprints and cinder block walls and a room the size of a football field.

David Brin first wrote this in 2006, summarizing a controversy that was then emerging among members of the community engaged in SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent civilizations. Since I am covering a new effort at METI - Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent civilizations - going online next week, he sent me this in our email exchanges and agreed to repost it here and provide a follow-up addendum at the end - Hank

X-ray experiments have found chemical traces of the original 'dinobird' Archaeopteryx and dilute traces of plumage pigments in a 150 million-year-old fossil.

Only 11 specimens of Archaeopteryx have been found, the first one consisting of a single feather. Until a few years ago, researchers thought minerals would have replaced all the bones and tissues of the original animal during fossilization, leaving no chemical traces behind, but two studies have turned up more information about this 'dinobird' and its plumage.

The problem of classifying elements of a data set as belonging to one class or another, depending on their characteristics, is a very, very well-studied one, and one which is particularly important in particle physics.

Imagine, for instance, that you collect events with four high-transverse-momentum leptons (electrons or muons) with the ATLAS or CMS detector, and you wish to sort out which of these fit better to the hypothesis of being originated by Higgs boson decay into two Z bosons (with each Z boson in turn producing a lepton pair) rather than to the alternative hypothesis of being due to the incoherent production of a pair of Z bosons -a process that has nothing to do with Higgs bosons. This means you need to classify the data events using their observed features.