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Using two of the world’s largest telescopes, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) on La Palma in the Canary Islands, an international team of astronomers have found evidence of a collision between galaxies driving intense activity in a highly luminous quasar, SDSS J0123+00. Several types of galaxies, known as active galaxies, emit enormous amounts of energy from their central region or nucleus, with the most luminous objects known as quasars. Many scientists argue that quasars contain a central black hole, with a mass of at least several million Suns.

Retinitis pigmentosa are a diverse group of hereditary diseases that lead to incurable blindness and affect two million people worldwide. Though the causes are diverse, the manifestation of the disease is similar: highly sensitive rod photoreceptors, which allow us to see at dusk, die first  and the cones that operate during daylight and are responsible for high-resolution color vision follow. 

Theories of physics rest on fundamental assumptions and those assumptions are based on how the real world works, and often produce amazingly precise predictions. The most comprehensive theory of elementary particles to-date, Quantum Field Theory, explains nature's electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces (though not gravity).

An international team of scientists say a new  technique could turn pulsars into superbly accurate time-keepers.A pulsar is the spinning, collapsed core of a massive star that ended in a supernova explosion and was first discovered in 1967.   A pulsar weighs more than our Sun but can be the size of New York City and produces beams of radio waves which sweep around the sky hundreds of times a second. Radio telescopes receive a regular train of pulses as the beam repeatedly crosses the Earth so that the object is observed as a pulsating radio signal.

When light is used to transmit information,  modulated light pulses travel along optical fibers, which can become weaker due to optical attenuation in the fiber and so are refreshed in signal regeneration stations along the way, where the signals are amplified and filtered.But when light itself, or more precisely its optical frequency, is the information, and when this information is to be transmitted with extreme precision, conventional amplification techniques reach their limits.

A neutrino has a mass, physics says, but it is elusive to figure out and extremely hard to measure – a neutrino is capable of passing through a light year (about six trillion miles) of lead without hitting a single atom.

Meet Lucy's 'great-grandfather'.   Scientists from The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Kent State University, Case Western Reserve University, Addis Ababa University and Berkeley Geochronology Center were part of an international team that discovered and analyzed a 3.6 million-year-old partial skeleton found in Ethiopia. They say the early hominid is 400,000 years older than the famous Lucy skeleton and that their research on this new specimen indicates that advanced human-like, upright walking occurred much earlier than previously thought. 
The partial skeleton belongs to Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis. It was found in the Woranso-Mille area of Ethiopia's Afar region by a team led by first author Dr.

In the year since their 2008 preliminary ranking, Cell Stem Cell and Cell Host and Microbe saw their Impact Factors surge, according to new data released in the 2009 Journal Citation Reports(c) published by ThomsonReuters.   The Impact Factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The Impact Factor helps to evaluate a journal's relative importance, especially when compared with others in the same field.
In the report released June 17, Cell Stem Cell's rating rose to 23.563 - a growth of 40% from the journal's previous score. Cell Host and Microbe ranks 13.021 - boasting an increase of 75% from the journal's 2008 Impact Factor.

High-resolution images show that the solar corona is filled with large, banana-shaped magnetic structures called coronal loops. It is thought that these coronal loops, some over a few 100,000 km long, play a fundamental role in governing the physics of the corona and are even responsible for huge atmospheric explosions that occur in the atmosphere, what we call solar flares.

As if a vaguely distant coach and a missing striker who doesn't like his fans is not bad enough, a new study says Scots are more patriotic than those in England. Dr. Jackie Abell from Lancaster University, writing in the British Psychological Society's Journal of Social Psychology, said the study set out to understand the differences between how the Scottish and the English demonstrate their nationalism via support for the national football team.

One thing the film industry get right - and they don't get much right, since romantic comedy behavior in real life is likely to get you a restraining order - is that music evokes moods.French researchers (naturally) say they have determined that if you want to successfully ask a woman on a date, the right soundtrack could improve the odds. They found women were more prepared to give their number to an ‘average’ young man after listening to romantic background music.

Giant freak waves - seriously, that is what oceanographers and physicists call them - are called that because they can appear on the open sea out of nowhere.Researchers from the Ruhr- Universität Bochum and the University of Umeå, Sweden say they have developed a new statistical model for non-linear, interacting waves in computer simulations which will allow them to be theoretically calculated and modeled.