Colliding stars will light up the night sky in 2022
A team of astronomers is making a bold prediction: In 2022, give or take a year, a pair of stars will merge and explode, becoming one of the brightest objects in the sky for a short period. It’s notoriously hard to predict when such stellar catastrophes will occur, but this binary pair is engaged in a well-documented dance of death that will inevitably come to a head in the next few years, they say.

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The periods of mass extinction on Earth
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‘Alien megastructure’ signal may be due to star eating a planet
When you are a messy eater, it can take a long time to clean up after a meal. The slow dimming of Tabby’s star and the sudden dips in its light may be caused by an orbiting cloud of debris left over from when it partially gobbled a planet.

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Scientists think they've uncovered the 'missing element' inside Earth's core
It’s well known that the innermost part of Earth is made mostly of iron (about 85 percent). Nickel accounts for about 10 percent. That last 5 percent however, has remained a bit of a mystery.

A Japanese research team has been searching for that missing element for decades, and now believes that the final 5 percent is most likely made from silicon, reports the BBC

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A Machine Astronomer Could Help Us Find the Unknowns in the Universe
What have pulsars, quasars, dark matter and dark energy got in common? Answer: each of them took the discoverer by surprise. While much of science advances carefully and methodically, the majority of truly spectacular discoveries in astronomy are unexpected.

Many of our telescopes are built to discover the known unknowns: the things we know we don't know, such as identifying the stuff that makes up dark matter.

But the real breakthroughs are the unknown unknowns. These are the things we don't even suspect are out there until we accidentally find them.

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Could Dark Streaks in Venus' Clouds Be Signs of Alien Life?
The question of life on Venus, of all places, is intriguing enough that a team of U.S. and Russian scientists working on a proposal for a new mission to the second planet — named Venera-D — are considering including the search for life in its mission goals.

If all goes as planned, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) could one day be cruising the thick, sulfuric-acid clouds of Venus to help determine whether dark streaks that appear to absorb ultraviolet radiation could be evidence of microbial life.

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Your appendix might serve an important biological function after all
One of the first things you learn about evolution in school is that the human body has a number of 'vestigial' parts - appendix, wisdom teeth, tailbone - that gradually fell out of use as we adapted to more advanced lifestyles than our primitive ancestors.

But while our wisdom teeth are definitely causing us more pain than good right now, the human appendix could be more than just a ticking time bomb sitting in your abdomen. A new study says it could actually serve an important biological function - and one that humans aren’t ready to give up.

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‘Mars’ Event Series Renewed For Season 2 By National Geographic | Deadline
http://deadline.com/2017/01/mars-event-series-renewed-season-2-national-geographic-tca-1201885744/

For past and future episodes join:
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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will deliver 10 satellites to low-Earth orbit for Iridium, a global leader in mobile voice and data satellite communications. The 10 satellites are the first of at least 70 satellites that SpaceX will be launching for Iridium’s next generation global satellite constellation, Iridium NEXT.

SpaceX is targeting launch of Iridium-1 from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The instantaneous launch window opens on January 14 at 5:54:39 pm UTC.
The satellites will begin deployment about an hour after launch.


NOTE: The official LIVE webcast will begin in 11 hours on following links:
Iridium-1 Hosted Webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTmbSur4fcs
Iridium-1 Technical Webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WimRhydggo


And the discussions for the same will be held in:
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Be sure to join us there!

Mini fire extinguishers inside lithium batteries may stop blazes
How do you stop your smartphone from bursting into flames? Implant a tiny fire extinguisher inside the battery.

Lithium-ion batteries are used in phones, laptops and other portable devices because they are lightweight and highly efficient. However, they also carry a fire risk due to their flammable liquid components.

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SpaceX lands its Falcon 9 rocket at sea, following first launch since August
Following today’s rocket launch, SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 on the company’s drone ship in the Pacific Ocean. It’s the first landing SpaceX has done since August, and the fifth time one of these vehicles has landed at sea. However, this marks SpaceX’s first launch in the Pacific and the first landing for the drone ship “Just Read The Instructions.” The feat brings the total number of recovered SpaceX rockets to seven, as two other Falcon 9 vehicles have successfully touched down on solid ground after a launch.

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We now know bacteria can communicate electrically, and we should be worried
We already have a lot to worry about when it comes to bacteria, as more and more strains becoming resistant to our dwindling arsenal of antibiotics. Last year, a woman in the US was killed by a superbug resistant to every antibiotic available.

But scientists continue to discover more worrying facts about the apparently simple, single-cell organisms we call bacteria: such as the way they beam out electrical signals to recruit other species to join their communities.

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We know we are – but what else is conscious too?
WHEN I was a psychology student in the 1970s, there was a widespread view that the study of consciousness was a passport to irrelevance. Now many scientists grapple with it and anyone who cracks the problem can certainly expect a call from Stockholm.

Philosophers have pondered the issue for millennia and, understandably, are not going to be shoved aside by newcomers armed with electrodes and MRI scanners. Michael Tye, however, is not a neuroscientist, but a physicist turned philosopher, who for the last decade or so has been considering the evidence we use to determine whether other organisms are conscious.

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To the Moon! Private Team Fully Funded for Google Lunar X Prize Race
One of the teams vying to win a $30 million race to the moon has locked up all the funding needed for its lunar mission, team members said.

The GLXP is offering $20 million to the first privately funded team that lands a spacecraft on the moon, moves the vehicle at least 1,640 feet (500 meters) on the lunar surface and has the craft beam high-resolution imagery back to Earth. The second team to do all this gets $5 million. An additional $5 million is available for various special accomplishments, bringing the total purse to $30 million.

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Global sea ice is at lowest level ever recorded

It’s a new low point. The area of the world’s oceans covered by floating sea ice is the smallest recorded since satellite monitoring began in the 1970s. That means it is also probably the lowest it has been for thousands of years.

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Electronic gene control could let us plug bacteria into devices

We don’t usually welcome bugs in digital technology, but that’s about to change. Researchers have developed a way to control bacterial genes at the flick of a switch using electricity.

Synthetic biologists are eager to find ways to connect engineered organisms to electronics, so we can make living components for devices.

The ability of custom-made microbes to sense the environment and make biological molecules would be particularly valuable for devices that work inside the body, says William Bentley at the University of Maryland.

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Drug-resistant "nightmare bacteria" are quickly spreading through US hospitals
Uh oh

Researchers have found evidence that drug-resistant superbugs, which have been labelled "nightmare bacteria", are spreading faster and more stealthily inside US hospitals than previously thought.

In the US, the bacteria, known as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), infect roughly 9,300 people per year, and kill around 600. And now researchers think they might spread from person to person asymptomatically - which explains why doctors are often unable to detect it.

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