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For the first time in history, planetary systems much like our own have been photographically documented by human technology. The photographs show Fomalhaut, a star located 25 light-years away from Earth, being orbited by a single planet. Another system has also been discovered circling the star HR 8799, roughly 130 light-years away. While this may not mean much to some, for those in the astronomy community this news is Earth-shattering, so to speak. The existence of other planets beyond those in our solar system has been long considered a certainty, but for the first time ever planets have been found, photographed, and identified.

The NASA MESSENGER spacecraft made its second flyby past Mercury on Monday morning, getting closer to the planet than ever before.

One in four of the world’s 5,487 known mammal species face extinction, according to a new conservation “report card” unveiled today.

More than 80 million adults in the United States are estimated to use some form of alternative medicine, from herbs and megavitamins to yoga and acupuncture. But while sweeping claims are made for these treatments, the scientific evidence for them often lags far behind: studies and clinical trials, when they exist at all, can be shoddy in design and too small to yield reliable insights.

Now the federal government is working hard to raise the standards of evidence, seeking to distinguish between what is effective, useless and harmful or even dangerous.

An ancient fish sported something like fingers that were the precursors to our own digits, according to an analysis of a new fossil skeleton.
“It’s really the last piece of evidence to say fingers are not new. They were really present in fish,” said lead researcher Catherine Boisvert, an evolutionary biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden.
The [...]

A multibillion-dollar atom smasher on the Franco-Swiss border may help scientists treat diseases, improve the Internet, and open the door to travel through extra dimensions, according to physicists.
On Wednesday scientists cheered and champagne flowed as the first beam of protons lapped around the Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC) 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground tunnel at the European Organization [...]

An image released today of a distant star and its potential planetary companion could go down in history as the first picture of a planet outside our solar system orbiting a sunlike star. The possible planet—a hot, young body (upper left) about eight times more massive than Jupiter—sits roughly 330 times as far from its host star as Earth is from the sun. The pair lies about 500 light-years from Earth.

There’s a complex Web site that its continuosly monitoring the state of the whole world to check if it has been destroyed or not by the recently started hadron collider. When in doubt, you may check online at the following address:

http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

Astronomers at the MIT Haystack Observatory, in collaboration with a team of international specialists, have managed to take the closest look ever at a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

This was possible by using a “virtual telescope,” obtained by linking together radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California. The result was a telescope capable of capturing details 1,000 times finer than the Hubble Telescope.

Images from Google Earth have confirmed that cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction.
Wild deer also display this behaviour – a phenomenon that has apparently gone unnoticed by herdsmen and hunters for thousands of years.
In the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences, scientists say the Earth’s magnetic fields may influence the [...]