NGC 5194, also known as M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, is one of the most spectacular examples of a spiral galaxy, with two spiral arms curling into one another in a billowing swirl, this galaxy hosts over a hundred billion stars and is currently merging with its companion, the smaller galaxy NGC 5195.

Around 30 million light-years away, the Whirlpool Galaxy is close enough to be easily spotted even with binoculars. Using the best telescopes available both on the ground and in space, astronomers can scrutinize its population of stars in extraordinary detail.

Chapter 10 of the report on the 2013 community summer study held at Snowmass, titled "Communication, Education, and Outreach" is available since Jan 24th in the Cornell ArXiv. It is a 26-pages document describing the importance of outreach activities to foster the development of particle physics, and offering ideas and strategies to improve the communication between scientists and policy makers. This is none other than the problem I have often referred to as the one of "filling the gap" between science and the general media.

Prion proteins are "misfolded"and cause a group of incurable neurodegenerative diseases, including spongiform encephalopathies (for example, mad cow diseases) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. 

Prions are unique infective agents. Unlike viruses, bacteria, fungi and other parasites, prions do not contain either DNA or RNA. Despite their seemingly simple structure, they can propagate their pathological effects like wildfire, by "infecting" normal proteins.

PrPSc (the pathological form of the prion protein) can induce normal prion proteins (PrPC) to acquire the wrong conformation and convert into further disease-causing agents. 

In the late 19th century, classification of humans was in vogue and a lot of it was done based on languages and physical characteristics. Physical anthropology and ethno-linguistics created the Aryan classification among Caucasians, meaning people of Europe and western Asia whose language descended from a common root and who shared physical/biological characteristics also.

If you ever watched/read the advocacy cartoon/book/Darwinian morality play "FernGully: The Last Rainforest" you might think that ruining the rainforests is a modern phenomenon brought on by McDonald's hamburgers or guitar makers or whoever and ancient man lived in harmony with nature.

It's a great mythology but just that - nature does not live in harmony with anything. Since almost the moment the last Ice Age ended, prehistoric man has kept fighting nature, including rainforests in Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Thailand and Vietnam, which had been termed 'untouched by humans.'

Everyone with a sense of adventure wants to go to 'the final frontier' and explore strange new worlds.

But bring your medication. It might not be good for your immune system.

It's so surprise that spaceflight affects immune responses but the new paper clarifies that a bit and says that being born in and growing up on the Space Shuttle weakened a key arm of the immune system in Drosophila flies, while being in a centrifuge under hypergravity conditions improved resistance. 

A group of researchers say they have established a new biomarker for how stressed polar bears are about climate change.    

Last year, a team reported that fluctuations in climate and ice cover are closely related to stress among polar bears in East Greenland as indicated by levels of the stress hormone cortisol in hair samples. The team is hopeful this type of analysis will be beneficial once others learn that it can now be done with much greater reliability.