Johnald's Fantastical Daily Link Splurge

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• NASA’s Contest to Design the Last Shuttle Patch
• Galactic Dwarf’s Stardust Shines in Infrared
• star [Flickr]
• baris-gurbuz-6 [Flickr]
• Ben-Hattenbach1_1383888i [Flickr]
• Akhmetsafin-Ruslan_1383897i [Flickr]
• Epic_by_casperium [Flickr]

NASA’s Contest to Design the Last Shuttle Patch Posted: 06 Jan 2010 03:00 AM PST << previous image | next image >> The space shuttle program is on its way out, but the core of people who built and maintained it will live on. To honor them, NASA gave its employees the chance to design the patch that will commemorate the shuttle program, which is slated to end in September, after STS-133 flies. From the designs of 85 current and former employees, the Shuttle Program Office has selected 15 finalists. The prospective patches, presented here, will be voted on internally by NASA employees and judged by a small panel. The program patch will help mark the end of the shuttle era. Begun rather enthusiastically in the late 1970s, the program almost didn't have mission patches, said Robert Pearlman, the space history and memorabilia enthusiast who brought the internal contest to the public eye. "In 1976, the Space Shuttle program designed a patch, called the Space Shuttle Program logo, which was a single triangle, blue and white. It's very iconic," Pearlman said. "And the original idea was that since the space shuttle as of 1976 was going to fly so many times and so often — every couple weeks — you wouldn't want or need crew mission patches any longer. The idea was we'd do away with mission patches." But astronauts and other mission members dissented. By then, the patches had become a popular tradition within NASA, even though they'd only been used for a little more than a decade. In the wake of NASA's 1965 decision not to allow astronauts to name their own vehicles, one astronaut decided that his Gemini V mission needed a patch. "Gordon Cooper, looking for a way to keep a personal touch to the mission, borrowed something from the military, and created and fought for a patch," Pearlman said. His design, prominently featuring a covered wagon, became the first of hundreds of NASA patches. So, after some wrangling, NASA decided the shuttle missions could have their own patches after all. The first patch, for STS-1, was designed by Robert McCall, a well-known space artist, Pearlman said. Subsequent works have come together in a variety of ways. Some have been drawn by the astronauts themselves, others by hangers-on or friends. Together, they form an odd pictographic record of a program that has been at the center of the world's premiere space agency for more than 30 years. One of the 15 entries you see here will be the final installment in the series. In the patch design at the top of this post, the sunrise/sunset represents the start and finish of the shuttle program, and the stars honor the astronauts who died on Challenger and Columbia. The artist wrote, "I picked the most dramatic angle of the Shuttle I could find to highlight the magnificence of the most complicated space vehicle in the world." Captions are summaries of the artists' explanations. For full captions, go to CollectSpace.com. Images: NASA.

Galactic Dwarf’s Stardust Shines in Infrared Posted: 05 Jan 2010 11:40 AM PST The Small Magellanic Cloud isn't much to look at with the naked eye, even for visitors to the International Space Station. Former astronaut John Grunsfeld told reporters Tuesday about a stargazing experience he had on the station. "At one point, I complained about a small greasy smudge on the window… That was the Small Magellanic Cloud," Grunsfeld, who was appointed deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute three days ago, said during a teleconference at the American Astronomical Society annual meeting. But now, Spitzer Space Telescope's incredible infrared camera has transformed the little smudge into a beautiful space photo. In the image above, old stars are blue while young stars are lighting up the dust around them green and red. The new images ofthis neighboring dwarf galaxy, which is located about 200,000 light-years away, are part of an effort to better understand the lifecycle of galaxies through tracking stardust. "We're tracing how a galaxy evolves through the dust," said Karl Gordon, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, who is leading the effort to study the formation of the Small Magellanic Cloud. In the optical wavelengths, as Gordon noted, the Cloud is just "this kind of faint cloud, but in the infrared all the pieces of the galaxy come out." That's because infrared light has a longer wavelength than visible light. It can pass through dusty parts of the universe without being scattered. The upshot is that infrared astronomy lets scientists see through regions that would be nearly opaque to our eyes. "Observations in the infrared give us a view into the birthplace of stars, unveiling the dust-enshrouded locations where stars have just formed," Gordon said in a release. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI. XXL 8.9 megabyte version. See Also: New Milky Way Image Shows Best of All Spectra Violent Star-Forming Nebula Caught by Spitzer Telescope Spitzer Spots Swirling Stars at the Center of the Galaxy Strange Eye-Shaped Galaxy Has Black-Hole Iris Infrared Telescope Warms Up to Star-Forming Cloud Cosmic-Ray Mystery Traced to Star-Birth Frenzy The Facts About Obama's $3 Million Projector WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

star [Flickr] Posted: 08 May 2009 05:35 PM PDT johnald_chaffinch posted a photo: This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

baris-gurbuz-6 [Flickr] Posted: 20 Apr 2009 11:32 PM PDT johnald_chaffinch posted a photo: This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Ben-Hattenbach1_1383888i [Flickr] Posted: 17 Apr 2009 02:17 AM PDT johnald_chaffinch posted a photo: This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Akhmetsafin-Ruslan_1383897i [Flickr] Posted: 17 Apr 2009 02:17 AM PDT johnald_chaffinch posted a photo: This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Epic_by_casperium [Flickr] Posted: 17 Apr 2009 02:17 AM PDT johnald_chaffinch posted a photo: This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

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• Hubble Finds Farthest, Oldest Galaxies Ever Seen
• Elusive Supermassive-Black-Hole Mergers Finally Found
• New Exoplanet Hunter Makes First 5 Discoveries

Hubble Finds Farthest, Oldest Galaxies Ever Seen Posted: 05 Jan 2010 09:43 AM PST By pushing the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope to its very limits as a cosmic time machine, astronomers have identified three galaxies that may hail from an era only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The faint galaxies may be the most distant starlit bodies known, each lying some 13.2 billion light-years from Earth. Detecting galaxies at such a distance is at the very edge of what current technology can accomplish, comments Richard Ellis of Caltech, who was not part of the new study. It's uncharted territory, he says. If the researchers are correct in the preliminary determination, then Hubble is seeing light that reveals the galaxies as they first appeared just 480 million years after the birth of the universe. (That light traveled for billions of years to reach Earth.) The radiation from such early galaxies played a crucial role, theorists believe, in reionizing the universe. That process breaks apart neutral atoms into electrons and ions, a process that enabled light from the first generation of stars to stream freely into space. The astronomers caution that because the galaxies they found with Hubble are seen at only one wavelength, it's not certain that the bodies are extremely distant; they could just be red and faint. "We certainly don't have smoking gun evidence," says study coleader Rychard Bouwens of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "We just have tantalizing evidence that suggests we may be identifying a few [extremely distant] galaxies." Bouwens and Garth Illingworth, also of UC Santa Cruz , along with several collaborators, posted their findings online December 23at the physics arXiv.org site (http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.4263). The team, like several others, went hunting for distant galaxies using Hubble's newly installed Wide Field Camera 3, which in August took a long look in infrared wavelengths at a patch of sky known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Another Hubble camera had examined that field five years earlier in visible light, revealing many faint, faraway galaxies, but not the most remote galaxies, which can only be seen in infrared. Ultraviolet and visible light emitted by the youthful stars in the earliest, most distant galaxies is shifted to much longer wavelengths — the infrared part of the spectrum — by the expansion of the universe. The more remote the galaxy, the greater the redshift. In September, two teams, including Bouwens', reportedfinding galaxies with redshift values of seven to eight, corresponding to an era about 700 million years after the Big Bang. Now, the researchers estimate that another three galaxies imaged by the camera have a redshift of about 10, which if confirmed would be the largest redshift ever measured. Bouwens says that several tests, including observations with the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, indicate that the galaxies they spotted are likely to be truly remote, reducing the possibility that his team is being fooled by intrinsically faint, infrared-emitting galaxies that lie much closer to Earth. Other teams, notably a group that includes Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University in Tempe and Haojing Yan of Ohio State University in Columbus, reporting earlier on arXiv.org (http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.0077), claimed to have found 20 galaxies at that same high redshiftusing the same data from the refurbished Hubble. Garth and Illingworth note that most of the candidate distant galaxies identified by the Windhorst team lie near known, bright galaxies. They suggest that the team may have been confused by stray light from these bright galaxies. Other astronomers say it would be surprising if all 20 galaxies were from the same early era, since the Ultra Deep Field encompasses a narrow strip of sky. That would indicate that the early universe had a surprisingly high density of such galaxies. Although the race is on to find more-convincing examples of distant galaxies, "redshift-10 galaxies are about the very edge that our current technology can push to," notes Yan. It's likely that none of the distant galaxy candidates can be confirmed until the launch of Hubble's powerful infrared successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, around 2014, astronomers agree. Image: NASA/ESA /Z. Levay (STScI) See Also: Hubble Goes Deep, Finds Farthest Galaxies Yet Hubble Snaps Image of Triple Galaxy, as Ordered by the People … Hubble Catches Galaxies Stripping — Ram Pressure Stripping, That … Hubble Snaps Fantastic Galaxy Collision Hubble Captures Image of Strange Giant Galaxy Hubble's New Camera Delivers Another Stunner 'When Galaxies Collide'- 59 New Hubble Images Released

Elusive Supermassive-Black-Hole Mergers Finally Found Posted: 05 Jan 2010 02:30 AM PST WASHINGTON — The universe is one big dance party for black holes. New observations from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope found 33 merged galaxies in which pairs of supermassive black holes are "waltzing" around the galactic centers. "Our result shows that such waltzing black holes are much more common than we previously knew," said Julie Comerford of the University of California, Berkeley. Comerford presented her results on January 4 at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Finding pairs of black holes moving in a certain way can help estimate how often galaxy mergers occur in the universe. Observations have shown that nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole — a black hole with a mass of one million to one billion times that of the sun — at its center and that galaxies often collide and merge to create larger galaxies. Astronomers have expected to find many mid-merge galaxies by focusing on the two supermassive black holes, which should be orbiting each other in the middle. But so far, the dance floor has pretty much been empty. "We expect the universe to be littered with these waltzing black holes," Comerford said. "But until recently, only a few had ever been found." Those missing black hole pairs posed problems for theories of how galaxies merge and grow. Now, using two new observational techniques, Comerford and her colleagues have found 33 galaxies with dual supermassive black holes. The first technique found 32 black hole pairs in the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey conducted on the Keck II Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea, by determining whether each black hole is moving toward or away from Earth. Black holes are visible only when they can accrete gas and other material from the surrounding environment. Energy from the black hole heats the gas, lighting the gas up in visible wavelengths. When the black hole is moving away from Earth, the light from the accreted gas appears to be at a longer wavelength, or redshifted. When the black hole dances toward Earth, its light is blueshifted — meaning it has a shorter wavelength. The team identified waltzing pairs by looking for instances when one black hole was blueshifted and the other redshifted. "It's kind of the disco ball that tells you where the party is, where the black holes are dancing," Comerford said. The waltz is quick — both black holes are moving at velocities of about 200 kilometers per second. But the black holes are keeping "a chaste distance," Comerford said. They are separated on average by about 3,000 to 8,000 light-years, or one-eighth to one-third the distance from the sun to the center of the Milky Way. For the population of galaxies Comerford and her colleagues observed, which were mostly gas-poor galaxies 4 billion to 7 billion light years from Earth, galaxy mergers occur three times every billion years, Comerford said. The final black hole duo was found serendipitously in a Hubble image of a galaxy called COSMOS J100043.15+020637.2. The galaxy sports a tidal tail of stars, gas and dust, a sure sign of a recent galaxy merger. "It's like a black eye, a sign that this galaxy has recently gone through a collision with another galaxy," Comerford said. The galaxy also has two bright nuclei, each of which could be a supermassive black hole surrounded by glowing dust and gas. Follow-up observations with the Keck II Telescope showed the telltale velocity shifts of dancing black holes. But the black holes might not be two waltzers. Instead, the data could point to one black hole that is fleeing the galaxy. When two black holes merge together, they produce gravitational waves that carry momentum away from the resulting larger black hole. Gravitational waves pointed mostly in one direction can "kick" the black hole in the opposite direction. Black holes could wander through their host galaxies, or, if the kick is large enough, leave the galaxy behind. Observations of the same galaxy by Francesca Civano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and colleagues suggest that the two bright sources are flying apart at a velocity of about 1,300 kilometers per second. Civano also presented her results at the American Astronomical Society meeting on January 4. "For a merger, that is a bit high," Civano said. "But this number is completely normal for a gravitational wave kick." "Whether this thing is a dual pair of waltzing black holes or an ejected black hole, this is definitely a merger," Comerford said. "It's just whether you're seeing it before the black holes merge [with each other] or after." See Also: Supermassive Black Holes Collide to Become Even More Super and Massive Yo Galaxy's Mama Is a Black Hole Naked Black Hole Builds Future Galactic Dream Home Strange Eye-Shaped Galaxy Has Black-Hole Iris Spectacular New Image of Black Hole Jets Hubble Monitors Spectacular Black Hole Flare New Class of Black Holes Discovered

New Exoplanet Hunter Makes First 5 Discoveries Posted: 04 Jan 2010 01:23 PM PST The Kepler Space Telescope, a designated planet-hunting satellite, has found its first five planets, among them an odd, massive world only as dense as styrofoam. The number of planets now known outside the solar system has risen to over 400, but none is yet Earth-like enough to harbor life. Right now, Kepler can only detect large planets orbiting close to their stars, which means that these first planets are too hot to hold liquid water, a requirement for life as we know it. But over the next year, the mission's scientists will be honing in on ever more life-friendly places. "We expected Jupiter-size planets in short orbits to be the first planets Kepler could detect," said Jon Morse, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA in a release. "It's only a matter of time before more Kepler observations lead to smaller planets with longer period orbits, coming closer and closer to the discovery of the first Earth analog." Kepler is pointed at a single field of stars in the constellation Cygnus. By watching the same stars over time, the mission can detect the periodic dimming of those stars,a possibleindication that a planet has passed in front of the star. Finding an Earth-like planet will probably take quite a while, though, because if it has an Earth-like orbit, it will take around a year to cross in front of its star just one time. The current set of Kepler planets are not much likeours at all. The smallest is 0.4 times the size of Jupiter, while the largest is 1.5 times the largest planet in our solar system. They are all very hot, too, running between 2,200 and 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit. They have been given the catchy names Kepler 4b, Kepler 5b, Kepler 6b, and Kepler 7b. (Kepler 1b-3b were assigned to previously known exoplanets in the telescope's field of view.) Still, the planet detections show that Kepler is in great working order as it monitors its sample of the sky. The precision of the instrument has astounded scientists since its first light. "This exquisite data is just the tip of the iceberg," MIT astronomer Sara Seager said back then. "We're going to see a new world of exoplanet exploration where discoveries will come much more rapidly than they've come in the last 10 years." The mission, championed by Bill Borucki, a NASA extrasolar planet specialist, for more than a decade, looks like it will be capableof completing all of its scientific goals. That means it's just a matter of time before we find an Earth twin or two out there in the light-years beyond. Image: NASA exoplanet rendering. See Also: Most Earth-Like Extrasolar Planet Found Right Next Door Kepler Shows Exoplanet Is Unlike Anything in Our Solar System Extreme Exoplanet's Wild Ride Smallest Exoplanet Is Most Earth-like Yet Astronomers Find Hidden Exoplanet in Hubble's Dustbin Stellar Lithium Points Way for Exoplanet Hunters Aack, No Brakes! Giant New Exoplanet Goes the Wrong Way WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

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Wired Science’s Most Popular Space Stories of 2009 Posted: 04 Jan 2010 02:30 AM PST << previous image | next image >> We love space, and so do you. This is a fact, well established by our Christmas-morning-level anticipation every time Hubble or Cassini or Spitzer release a new image, and your happy, clicky, tweetyresponses to virtually anything we post that has to do with space. Sowe were surprised to find that there was just one space story among our most popular stories for 2009. Our "Earth from space" galleries and posts did well, but we don't think those qualify as space stories.The sole celestial finalistwas just a simple reminder that the annual perseids meteor shower was peaking, with some viewing tips. The perseids are great and all, but we couldn't let space bethis underrepresented in our 2009 roundups, so here are the rest of our most popular spacy offerings of the year. 10 Saturn's MysteriousHexagon Space + mystery = awesome. And we think this is the coolest mystery in the solar system.(Take that, Jupiter. Youand your red spot.) Why?Why would the jet stream around Saturn's north pole turn sharp corners in the shape of a hexagon? Why? Scientists have been unable to answer this since the strange, persistentweather pattern was first discovered by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980's. Now, thanks to our favorite spacecraft, Cassini, we have the best view yet of this crazy planetary puzzle.The Cassini imaging teamalso assembled a series of images into a movie so you can see the motion. Image: NASA/JPL/CICLOPS

Age of Solar System Needs to Be Recalculated Posted: 03 Jan 2010 09:01 PM PST A trusted equation for calculating the age of the solar system may need rewriting. New measurements show that one of the equation's assumptions — that certain kinds of uranium always appear in the same relative quantities in meteorites — is wrong. "Since the 1950s, or even before that, no one had been able to detect any differences" in the quantities of uranium, says Gregory Brennecka of Arizona State University, coauthor of a paper describing the work published online December 31 in Science. "Now we're able to measure slight differences." Those differences could mean that current estimates of the age of the solar system overshoot that age by 1 million years or more. Historical estimates place the age at about 4.5 billion years—a number that is not precise enough to show a difference of one million—but more finely honed recent calculations place the age at more like 4.5672 billion years. One million years is still an eyeblink at this scale, representing the difference between 4.566 and 4.567, but this difference is important in understanding the infant solar system. "The building blocks of planets all formed within the span of 10 million years at most," says coauthor Meenakshi Wadhwa, also of Arizona State. "When you start to try to unravel the sequence of events within that 10 million years, it becomes important to resolve the time scales within a million years or less." The study also finds evidence bolstering the idea that a low-mass supernova exploded nearby shortly before the solar system was born, providing heavy elements to build planets. Geochemists measure the ages of rocks by measuring the abundance of radioactive isotopes — versions of the same element that have different atomic masses — in parts of meteorites called calcium-aluminum–rich inclusions. These inclusions are thought to be the first solids to have condensed from the cooling cloud of gas that gave birth to the sun and planets. Because a radioactive element decays from a parent isotope to a daughter isotope at a specific rate, scientists can infer the age of a rock by comparing the amounts of each isotope. The currently accepted calculation of the solar system's age is derived from comparing lead-206, a daughter isotope of uranium-238, to lead-207, a daughter isotope of uranium-235. That comparison relies on knowing the ratio of uranium-238 to uranium-235. Earlier calculations of the ratio all came up with the same number, 137.88. The assumption that the ratio was constant simplified calculations greatly — it allowed scientists to combine both uranium values into a single number, eliminating one variable from the equation. Lead isotopes are easier to measure with high precision than uranium isotopes, so an age-estimation system based only on lead values was thought to be extremely precise. "Everybody was sitting on this two-legged stool claiming it was very stable," comments Gerald Wasserburg, emeritus professor of geology at Caltech who was involved in much of the early work in measuring uranium ratios. "But it turns out it's not." There were reasons to doubt that the uranium ratio was constant. For one thing, no theoretical reasoning supports the assumption. What's more, measurements that relied on other, less precise radioisotopes disagreed with the age derived from lead — but agreed with each other. "It's kind of been a black eye for a few people in geochronology," Brennecka says. "To really say we know the age of the solar system based on the age of the rock, it's essential that they all agree." To test whether the uranium ratio really was constant, Brennecka and colleagues took samples from calcium-aluminum–rich inclusions in the well-studied Allende meteorite and measured how much uranium-235 and uranium-238 they held. Technological innovations made their measurements more precise than previous efforts. Measurements at Brennecka's lab and at a collaborator's lab in Frankfurt, Germany, both showed an excess of uranium-235. This excess means that future geochemists will have to first measure the quantities of uranium-235 and uranium-238 in early solar system materials before determining their ages. "It's not as if this age dating process doesn't work anymore," says coauthor Ariel Anbar, also of Arizona State. "But if you want to push this isotope system to get ages that are really precise, suddenly we realize that there's this variation you need to take into account." The team also determined that the extra uranium-235 comes from trace amounts of a radioactive element called curium present in the early solar system and formed only in certain types of supernova explosions. "It's an important step forward," comments Andrew Davis of the University of Chicago. "There have been so many unsuccessful experiments in the past, but this one succeeded. I think it will be an important piece of the puzzle." Image: NASA/JPL See Also: Edge of Solar System Is Not What We Expected Pieces of Infant Solar System Found in Comet's Wake Pluto 2015: Journey to the Rim of the Solar System Nearby Solar System Looks Like Our Own at Time Life Formed Saturn's Hexagon May Be Solar System's Coolest Mystery

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Tasmanian Devil Cancer Culprit Revealed Posted: 01 Jan 2010 05:24 PM PST Scientists have discovered the true identity of a contagious form of cancer that is killing Tasmanian devils. The cancer, called devil facial tumor disease, stems from cells that normally insulate nerve fibers, a new study shows. Genetic analysis of tumors taken from infected devils in different parts of Tasmania reveals that these insulating cells, known as Schwann cells, became cancerous in a single Tasmanian devil and have since passed to other devils, an international group of researchers reports in the Jan. 1 Science. Previously, scientists had suspected that a virus might be the source of the infection, but the new study confirms that cancer cells themselves are transmitted from devil to devil. Knowing the origin of the contagious tumors could help conservationists diagnose the disease more accurately and may eventually lead to a vaccine that would target tumor proteins, says Katherine Belov, a geneticist at the University of Sydney who was not involved with the project. A vaccine against the facial tumor disease, "while now pie in the sky, in 10 years might not be," says Gregory Hannon, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. "Ten years might be enough time" to save the devils from extinction, he says. About 70 percent of the Tasmanian devil population has disappeared as a result of the disease, and if the current rate of decline continues, devils could become extinct in the wild in 30 to 50 years, says Elizabeth Murchison, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England. Murchison, a native of Tasmania who grew up seeing devils in the wild, led the project while working in Hannon's lab at Cold Spring Harbor. "I didn't want to sit back and let the devils disappear," she says. Genetic data about Tasmanian devils has been lacking, says Belov. An effort to decode the species' genome is underway but is not yet complete. The new study provides the largest genetic data set collected to date for the species. "It really does move us so much further ahead to have all of this genetic information," Belov says. Murchison and her team analyzed patterns of gene and microRNA activity in facial tumors and in healthy tissue. MicroRNAs are small genetic molecules that help regulate the activity of genes. All of the 25 tumors the team analyzed were genetically identical, indicating that they came from a single source — most likely a devil that lived about 20 years ago. Researchers characterized microRNA signatures of both tumors and healthy devil tissues. Analyses of these signatures and gene activity patterns indicated that the tumor cells most closely matched Schwann cells, a type of cell that forms a waxy sheath called myelin around nerve fibers. A protein called periaxin, which is normally found only in Schwann cells, is also present in devil facial tumor cells and might be a good diagnostic marker for the disease, the researchers report. How the cancerous Schwann cells became contagious is still a mystery, though. "Devils are known to be prone to cancers," Belov says. "I think it was just some sort of freak of nature that allowed this cancer to be stable and transmitted." Tasmanian devils are so genetically similar to one another that their immune systems don't recognize infectious cancer cells from another individual as foreign (SN Online: 1/12/09). Belov hopes to learn whether the infectious cancer cells have also evolved other methods for evading the animals' immune systems. Images: 1) Healthy tasmanian devil./A/Prof Geoff Shaw, Department of Zoology, University of Melbourne. 2) Facial tumors./Save the Tasmanian Devil Program. 3) Healthy tasmanian devil./Flickr/Nancy_Carels.See Also: Evolution Races Cancer to Save Tasmanian Devils The Extreme Mammal Hall of Fame

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Top Scientific Breakthroughs of 2009 Posted: 31 Dec 2009 12:05 PM PST << previous image | next image >> With so many incredible scientific advances and discoveries this year, Wired Science had a tough time choosing which 10 were the biggest. So, we went withthe onesthat stood out for us. From the amazing collective power of jellyfish, to a new human ancestor, to a cancer-detecting breathalyzer test, these stories made our list of kick-ass science in 2009. No. 10 Element 114 Confirmed In a cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a beam of calcium atoms slammed into a plutonium target, producing a pair of element 114 atoms for the second time in human history. Years earlier, a Russian team made similar claims, but their accomplishment remained in doubt. It turns out that the Russians were right. But their results were somewhat disappointing. Each atom lasted for only tenths of a second. An older generation of scientists had hoped that humanity would someday find a way to make extremely heavy elements that last a long time. That search continues. Image: The backside of the 88-inch cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory./LBNL

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