A monster black hole has been detected.  With 17 billion solar masses, it is significantly heavier than models predict and could be the most massive black hole known to date. 

 Astronomers believe there is a super-massive black hole at the heart of every galaxy and its mass ranges from several hundred thousand solar masses to a few billion. The black hole that has been best investigated  sits at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and has around four million solar masses.

Merck Serono, a division of Merck, has donated its 100 millionth praziquantel tablet to the World Health Organization (WHO).

People follow patterns. If you were projecting a future for New York City in the early 1980s, you would have rightfully anticipated a Kurt Russell movie where the city is walled off from the rest of the country because the crime problem was rampant. Homicide moves through a city in a process similar to infectious disease, according to a new study that may give police a new tool in tracking and ultimately preventing murders.

Does one’s skull vibrate when chewing biscuits?  The answer is yes, up to a point – that’s according to a recentl experimental study performed by the Department of Oral-Maxillofacial Surgery, Prosthodontics and Special Dental Care Oral Physiology Group, at the University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands, along with the Department of Prosthetic Dentistry, Faculty of Dentistry, Lutheran University of Brazil, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Evolutionarily speaking, most of the harmful mutations that still exist in people are recent, which makes the case that nature is still out to get us, even in modern times.

A study dated the age of more than 1 million single-letter variations in the human DNA code and revealed that 86 percent of the harmful protein-coding mutations of this type arose in humans just during the past 5,000 to 10,000 years. These kinds of mutations change one nucleotide – an A, C, T or G – in the DNA sequence. 

There are lots of diagnostic tests available outside of the conventional medical system and those include tests for food intolerance, like vega testing, kinesiology, hair "body field analysis" testing, cytotoxic and live blood testing. 

Doctors and medical practitioners can be justified in assuming the worst and dismissing test results that originate from services such as 'mail order laboratory testing services', as there is no way for them to distinguish between those results which have an evidence basis with clinical data and those that claim results without any real evidence. 

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been orbiting Saturn since 2004 so it has seen a lot - but it recently saw something that has not happened since 1997.

Seasonal atmospheric circulation direction changes on Titan, technically only a moon but bigger than the planet Mercury, happen only once every 15 years and are never observable from Earth. Titan is the only known moon to have a significant atmosphere and is one of only four terrestrial atmospheres in our Solar System - the others being Venus, Mars and obviously Earth. Since Titan's rotation axis is tilted similar to Earth, it experiences seasons in a similar way, they just take a lot longer, because Saturn takes 29.5 Earth years to orbit the Sun.

A few years ago, my wife had a milestone birthday and decided she wanted to run a marathon.  Now, I don't even like to drive 26 miles much less run that far - that Greek guy is famous because he died doing it and there are some experiments I don't need to replicate in order for them to have my full acceptance.

But my wife wanted to do it. I had never seen her so much as walk fast but she signed up with a group called Team In Training and off she went (1) - they have various morale-building events, including dinners, and at one of those I met a fellow marathon husband and he said, "You kind of look like that guy on "Burn Notice".

Astronomers have discovered vast comet belts surrounding two nearby planetary systems – GJ 581 and 61 Vir – known to host only Earth-to-Neptune-mass worlds.   Previously, scientists found that the dusty belt surrounding nearby star Fomalhaut must be maintained by collisions between comets. 

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a fleet of early-19th century ships and ancient harbor structures from the Hellenistic period at the city of Akko (Acre), one of the major ancient ports of the eastern Mediterranean and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, they revealed at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research.