Gizmorama - May 8, 2013

Good Morning,

I don't care what is on HDTV, I'd rather have NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory and watch two large, colliding galaxies. It must be amazing to witness such a sight.

Learn about this and other interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

P.S. EVTV1 is back and better than ever! This video portal was created to weed through the online clutter to bring you the best animal video clips...funniest videos...most popular...PLUS the most unusual. New videos are added daily! It's the future of entertainment available today, all in one place.

Visit and Enjoy: EVTV1.com

***
*-- Orbiting telescope observes effects as giant galaxies collide --*
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Scientists say NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory has yielded details of an enormous cloud of hot gas enveloping two large, colliding galaxies. With as much mass as 10 billion suns, the large reservoir of gas spans about 300,000 light years and radiates at a temperature of more than 12.5 million degrees F. This giant gas cloud, dubbed a "halo," surrounds two large spiral galaxies similar in size to the Milky Way, each with a supermassive black hole at its center, a release from Smithsonian's Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., which hosts the Chandra X-ray Center, said Tuesday. The black holes are spiraling toward one another and may eventually merge to form a larger black hole, the scientists said. A violent stirring of the surrounding gas caused by the merging of the galaxies had created a baby boom of new stars that has lasted for at least 200 million years, they said. Chandra X-ray Observatory scientist say the collision offers the opportunity to witness a relatively nearby version of an event that was common in the early Universe when galaxies were much closer together and merged more often.


*-- Cell study research targets ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease --*
EVANSTON, Ill. - U.S. scientists say dressing brain neurons in fluorescent "jackets" could improve understanding of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig's disease. A small group of neurons in the brain's cortex play a big role in the neurodegenerative disease that paralyzes its victims, but they've proved hard to study because they are few in number and look similar to other neurons in the cortex, the researchers said. Of about 2 billion cells in the brain, a mere 75,000 motor neurons are affected in ALS. Now a medical researcher at Northwestern University has isolated the neurons that die in ALS and "dressed' them in a green fluorescent jacket that makes them stand out for scientists to study, a university release reported Tuesday. The cells take on their neon "jackets" when they are born and wear them as they age and become sick, allowing researchers to observe what goes wrong in the cells to cause their deaths, knowledge that may help in the search for effective treatments. "We have developed the tool to investigate what makes these cells become vulnerable and sick," Northwestern neurology Professor Hande Ozdinler said. "This was not possible before." The technique also allowed Ozdinler and colleagues to identify the motor neurons that don't die so scientists can attempt to learn what protects them. "Now we have a model of one motor neuron population that dies and one that is resistant," Ozdinler said. "That's the perfect experiment. You can ask what does this neuron have that makes it resistant and what does the other one have that makes it vulnerable? That's what we will find out."


*-- Telescope probes mystery of radiation throughout the universe --*
SOCORRO, N.M. - U.S. astronomers observing the sky with a multidish radio telescope say they've identified sources for nearly all radio waves coming from distant galaxies. Fixed on one small patch of sky for more than 50 hours, the Very Large Array telescope near Socorro, N.M., determined about 63 percent of the cosmic background radio emission comes from galaxies with black holes feeding at their centers, and the remaining 37 percent comes from galaxies rapidly forming stars. While previous studies had measured the amount of radio emission coming from the distant universe, they had not been capable of attributing all the radio waves to specific objects. "The sensitivity and resolution of the VLA, following its decade-long upgrade, made it possible to identify the specific objects responsible for nearly all of the radio background emission coming from beyond our own Milky Way Galaxy," Jim Condon of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory said in a release Tuesday. "Before we had this capability, we could not detect the numerous faint sources that produce much of the background emission," he said. "The VLA now is a million times more sensitive than the radio telescopes that made landmark surveys of the sky in the 1960s."

***
Missed an Issue? Visit the Gizmorama Archives