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Astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe in a quasar called APM 08279+5255 - enough water to fill Earth's oceans more than 100 trillion times.The distant quasar is one of the most powerful known objects in the universe and has an energy output of 1,000 trillion suns, about 65,000 times that of our Milky Way galaxy. The power of APM 08279+5255 comes from matter spiraling into the quasar's central supermassive black hole, estimated at some 20 billion times the mass of our sun. 

The Wiedemann-Franz Law, named after German physicists Gustav Wiedemann and Rudolf Franz, is a ratio of the thermal to electrical conductivities of metals.   In 1853, the two studied the thermal conductivity, a measure of a system's ability to transfer heat, of a number of elemental metals and found that the ratio of the thermal to electrical conductivities was approximately the same for different metals at the same temperature.

Though 2 percent of astronomers declared Pluto was no longer a planet, for not being a planet, it sure has a lot of moons.   Four so far.The Hubble Space Telescope discovered this fourth moon, cleverly designated P4, and astronomers say this newest, smallest one has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles.  By comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 648 miles (1,043 km) across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter (32 to 113 km).Distance: 3 billion miles.

Human-like features of the feet and gait were in existence almost two million years earlier than previously thought, according to recent analysis of ancient footprints in Laetoli, Tanzania.Earlier studies suggested that the characteristics of the human foot, like the ability to push off the ground with the big toe and a fully upright bipedal gait, emerged in early Homo approximately 1.9 million years-ago but researchers now say that footprints of a human ancestor dating back 3.7 million years ago show features of the foot with more similarities to the gait of modern humans than with the type of bipedal walking used by chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas.

Last month, Pluto passed in front of a star and cast a small shadow on the Earth - astronomers from Lowell Observatory were among the scientists and crew who observed the rare occultation event from NASA's newest airborne observatory, SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy).  SOFIA has a 100-inch (2.5-meter) telescope aboard a modified 747 SP aircraft, and can fly at an altitude of 45,000 ft., above most of the cloud cover and water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere.

Habituation is when people lose interest in something after being repeatedly exposed to it (insert your favorite joke about being married here).When it comes to diet, it is hypothesized that habituation can decrease caloric intake.    That also means caloric intake will increase if you get a lot of variety.   Of course, habituation is a no-no in the modern world of nutritional variety.   We're not 19th century Irish peasants, we shouldn't just eat potatoes every day in order to stay thin.

Researchers have captured the bioelectrical signals necessary for normal head and facial formation in an organism and  captured the process in a time-lapse video that reveals never-before-seen patterns of visible bioelectrical signals outlining where eyes, nose, mouth, and other features will appear in an embryonic tadpole. 
The biologists from Tufts University found that before the face of a tadpole develops, bioelectrical signals (ion flux) cause groups of cells to form patterns marked by different membrane voltage and pH levels. When stained with a reporter dye, hyperpolarized (negatively charged) areas shine brightly, while other areas appear darker, creating an "electric face."

New research has found that some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals and is found exclusively in people outside Africa. Neanderthals, whose ancestors left Africa somewhere in the range of 400,000 to 800,000 years ago, evolved in what is now France, Spain, Germany and Russia, and are believed to have lived until about 30,000 years ago.  Early modern humans left Africa about 80,000 to 50,000 years ago.

Larger portions mean we eat more food but bigger bites less intuitively lead to eating less in restaurants,  according to new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.The authors conducted their study in an Italian restaurant by using two sizes of forks to manipulate bite sizes and found that diners who used large forks ate less than those with small forks.The authors then began to investigate why this finding seems to contradict earlier research on portion sizes. "We observe that diners visit the restaurant with a well-defined goal of satiating their hunger and because of this well-defined goal they are willing to invest effort and resources to satiate their hunger goal," the authors write.

44 trillion watts of heat continually flow from Earth's interior into space. Where does it come from?Researchers can say with 97 percent certainly that 50 percent of the heat is due to radioactive decay and other sources, like primordial heat left over from the planet's formation, must account for the rest.

Knowing that radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth's crust and mantle is a principal source, in 2005 scientists in the Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) collaboration first showed that there was a way to measure the contribution directly.

Rice accounts for nearly half the daily calories for the world's population but crops are at risk from tsunamis and tidal surges and perhaps future unknown effects of climate change.   But naturally occurring fungi called endophytes might come to the rescue. In an effort to explore ways to increase the adaptability of rice to disasters that have already led to rice shortages, USGS researchers and their colleagues colonized two commercial varieties of rice with the spores of fungi that exist naturally within native coastal (salt-tolerant) and geothermal (heat-tolerant) plants. 

An unusual number of destructive storm surges along the East Coast during the 2009-2010 El Niño winter could be a taste of things to come - with more destructive storm surges in future El Niño years, according to a new study by NOAA. El Niño conditions are characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific that normally peak during the Northern Hemisphere 'cool season.' They occur every three to five years with stronger events generally occurring every 10-15 years. El Niño conditions have important consequences for global weather patterns, and within the U.S., often cause wetter-than-average conditions and cooler-than-normal temperatures across much of the South.