In the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and in a presentation at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Liverpool, a team announced one of the largest 3D maps of the infant Universe.

And along with it almost 4,000 early galaxies, many of which will have evolved into galaxies like our own Milky Way. 


The COSMOS field in the constellation of Sextans, seen in infrared light. Credit:  ESO/UltraVISTA team. Acknowledgement: TERAPIX/CNRS/INSU/CASU

Looking back in time: 16 different epochs between 11 and 13 billion years ago

 If you have seen a face in the clouds or you have been part of a phenomenon called "pareidolia" - a willingness to recognize a non-face object as a human face.

Humans sometimes perceive an inherently meaningless object such as a pattern, landscape or object as another object, one that has meaning. It's why alternative science proponents, the Jeffrey Smith's and Pete Myers of the world, believe in spirit photographs. 

Some have even argued that pareidolia occurs in relatively low-level visual processing, and a new paper examines the relation between behavior when a face-like object is viewed and brain activity to reveal the level of visual processing at which face-likeness is recognized.

Bumblebee safety alert; don't put holograms in that meadow or near the urban beehive you probably regret buying.  A new study shows that bees, which are already confounded by lots of different things, are mystified by iridescent colors, colors that seem to change based on the angle you view them from. Like bubbles do.

You may have trouble finding a hotspot in that store you are visiting, but there is one place they are persistent: inside neutron stars. A new study shows that instabilities can create intense magnetic hot spots that survive for millions of years, even after the star's overall magnetic field has decayed significantly. 

When a massive star consumes its nuclear fuel and collapses under its own gravity in a supernova explosion, it can result in a neutron star. These very dense objects have a radius of about 10 kilometers and yet are 1.5 times more massive than the Sun. They have very strong magnetic fields and are rapid rotators, with some neutron stars spinning more than 100 times per second round their axis. 

In the 1980s, environmentalists and epidemiologists began to statistically correlate attention problems in children and lower scores on tests with flame retardants used in furniture, chemicals that had become popular because parents and fire departments wanted to prevent "flashover" events during house fires - explosions in closed rooms.

Though countries like the United States and Ireland have far more forest than they did a century ago, professional environmentalists insist there needs to be more. From butterflies to bees, some groups insist more of the modern world must be reverted to nature, even when it comes to formerly ecologic wins like hydroelectric dams. 

Large ecosystems bring stability, they insist. But that isn't really true. Instead, stability and diversity happen when the ecosystem is complex, not just because it is large. And he branching complexity of rivers are absolutely vital in affecting regional population stability and persistence in nature.