The farthest we have 'seen' in space just got a little farther away, thanks to ESO's Very Large Telescope and GRB (Gamma Ray Burst) 090423.

VLT has shown that a faint gamma-ray burst detected last Thursday is the signature of the explosion of the earliest, most distant known object in the Universe (a redshift of 8.2). The explosion apparently took place more than 13 billion years ago, only about 600 million years after the Big Bang.

An international team of researchers has determined key structural features of the largest known virus -the mimivirus, called by some a possible "missing link" between viruses and living cells. It was discovered accidentally by French scientists in 1992 but wasn't confirmed to be a virus until 2003.  The findings may help determine whether the unusual virus causes any human diseases.

The virus infects amoebas, but it is thought to possibly be a human pathogen because antibodies to the virus have been discovered in pneumonia patients. However, many details about the virus remain unknown, said Michael Rossmann, Purdue University's Hanley Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences.

Facial recognition is not as automatic as it may seem, according to researchers who have identified specific areas in the brain devoted solely to picking out faces among other objects we encounter.

Two specific effects have been established as being critical for facial recognition – holistic processing (in which we view the face as a whole, instead of in various parts) and left-side bias (in which we have a preference for the left side of the face). Psychologists Janet H. Hsiao from the University of Hong Kong and Garrison W. Cottrell from the University of California, San Diego wanted to test if these effects were specific for facial recognition or if they help us to identify other objects as well.

"The Lost World", published in 1912, is not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous work but his account of an isolated community of dinosaurs that survived the catastrophic extinction event 65 million years ago has lasted into modern times in a way Sherlock Holmes has not - at least until the new Robert Downey movie comes out with him in the starring role.

In 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched experiments designed to combine the H5N1 virus and human flu viruses and then see how the resulting hybrids affected animals so that they could assess the chances that such a "reassortant" virus might emerge and determine how dangerous it would be.

Their reasoning was that the worst fears of infectious disease experts - that the H5N1 avian influenza virus  circulating in parts of Asia might combine with a human-adapted flu virus, namely if someone with a flu virus also contracted the avian virus - might result in a deadly new flu virus that could spread around the world.   A pandemic of the kind not seen in almost a hundred years.

WASHINGTON, April 28 /PRNewswire/ --

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced that it has inked two framework agreements valued USD 1.7 billion in total with China Mobile and China Telecom, to provide network upgrades, integration and maintenance services in 2009. As the leading operators in China, China Mobile and China Telecom were granted 3G licenses in January 2009, for TD-SCDMA and CDMA/EV-DO technologies, respectively. The agreements were secured through Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell, Alcatel-Lucent's Chinese flagship company.

In a previous article, I discussed the controversies associated with anthropological research and debunked myths regarding the true intentions of molecular anthropologists.  Furthermore, I also provided examples of Native American communities willing to work with researchers in order to reconstruct their ancestral heritage.   Native Americans, for the most part, are rational and scientists, for the most part, are respectful.

Graduate education in the humanities may have its problems, but don't try to tar science with the same brush. In a NY Times Op-Ed, by Dr. Mark Taylor, the chairman of Columbia's religion department, we're told that graduate education in general is in need of a major overhaul.

Graduate programs train students for jobs that most of them won't get:

OXFORD, England, April 27 /PRNewswire/ --

Can an airplane fly around the Earth powered only by solar energy? How can we observe what we can't see? Can we save the Internet? How does the brain create the mind? Can we back-up biodiversity?

These are just some of the questions that will be answered at the upcoming TEDGlobal conference, which will take place in Oxford, UK, on 21-24 July 2009.

PLEASANTON, California, April 27 /PRNewswire/ --

- One Size Doesn't Fit All

Today, Trapeze Networks, a Belden brand (NYSE: BDC), announced U.S. availability of its MP-82, an 802.11n dual-radio 2x3 MIMO indoor access point. With a list price of US$745.00, the MP-82 is a high-value access point ideally-suited for work spaces with a high number of computers, wireless handsets or PDAs needing Wi-Fi connectivity. The MP-82 is the newest member of Trapeze Networks line of NonStop Wireless network line of products.