The MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope has captured an image of NGC 6744, a spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Pavo (The Peacock).

And in the image, NGC 6744 looks a lot like our Milky Way.

We see NGC 6744 almost face on, meaning we get a bird’s eye view of the galaxy’s structure. If we had the technology to escape the Milky Way and could look down on it from intergalactic space, this view is close to the one we would see, striking spiral arms wrapping around a dense, elongated nucleus and a dusty disc. There is even a distorted companion galaxy — NGC 6744A, seen here as a smudge to the lower right of NGC 6744, which is reminiscent of one of the Milky Way’s neighboring Magellanic Clouds.

Bigpoint Inc. today released a teaser trailer and game site for its upcoming action-adventure title, The Mummy Online.  Developed in collaboration with Universal Partnerships&Licensing, The Mummy Online brings the blockbuster film franchise to the free-to-play MMOG space. 

The 3D action-adventure game will include original storylines, battles and opportunities to explore mysterious and exotic locales.  The game will be free-to-play directly via your web browser.

Game Setting - Amarna

Well-known jeweler Tiffany&Co. has introduced a new website and iPhone(R) App for people who fall in love and simply must see other stories about people in love.    How well known is Tiffany's?    There's the rather famous "Breakfast at Tiffany's",  from a novella by Truman Capote that was made into a Blake Edwards film starring Audrey Hepburn, but they likely aren't showing it in the store today because Mickey Rooney's buck-toothed Mr. Yunioshi comes across as racist to a modern crowd.

A new study finds that stress does not appear to increase a person's risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS). 

Researchers studied two groups of women nurses from the Nurses' Health Study. The first group of 121,700 nurses between the ages of 30 and 55 were followed starting in 1976. The second group of 116,671 nurses between the ages of 25 and 42 were followed from 1989. Participants were asked to report general stress at home and at work, including physical and sexual abuse in childhood and as teenagers. Of the first group, 77 people developed MS by 2005.

There is water inside the moon.  A lot, it turns out, according to the first measurements of water in lunar melt inclusions, which show that some parts of the lunar mantle have as much water as the Earth’s upper mantle.

Lunar melt inclusions are tiny globules of molten rock trapped within crystals that are found in volcanic glass deposits formed during explosive eruptions. The new findings show lunar magma water contents are 100 times higher than previous studies have suggested.

Contrary to what you might think by the name, Greenland is rather frigid and Iceland is often quite nice.    Nice for Vikings, anyway.  But for a time Greenland became so miserable even Scandinavians had enough.