Herschel Probes Huge Dog Star

The Herschel Infra-red Space Telescope, launched in May, is already giving good pay-off with the most in-depth imaging and spectrographic analysis of the hypergiant sun Canis Majoris.

Canis Majoris is, so far, the biggest star in the universe, first observed about two centuries ago, and it could go supernova, any millennium now! There is a good posting about it here at the BBC News website.

Info from Wikipedia states that, "If the Earth were to be represented by a sphere one centimeter in diameter, the Sun would be represented as a sphere with a diameter of one hundred and nine centimeters, at a distance of one hundred and seventeen meters. At these scales, VY Canis Majoris would have a diameter of approximately 2.25 kilometers."

So that's BIG, but big does not necessarily mean bright and it is often smaller stars that burn brighter and faster. Canis Majoris is also one of the coolest giant stars we know of and as a result is comparatively dim.

It's A New Darwin Wing Situation

The new Dawin Centre is open at London's Natural History Museum and is very informative, interactive and rewarding. Designed primarily as an educational resource it appeals to all ages of children and is fascinating for interested adults. During office hours you see the scientists at work in the laboritories and collection rooms and even have an opportunity to ask them questions about the work they are doing. They have a really useful system if you are pushed for time: you can pickup a special card and collect the interactive resources available in order to re-visit them at your leisure on-line. The system works.

Find out more about the Natural History Museum and what's on here.

It's A Darwin - Win - Situation

This year we are celebrating the courage and genius of Charles Darwin. It's been 200 years since his birth and 150 since he explained his revolutionary idea of evolution and the origin of species. So here are some cool Darwinian sites with lots of good graphics and info.

The BBC have been making some excellent programs and have been generous with on-line content at their BBC Darwin Pages.

You can also find the BBC's lovely visualisation of evolution on planet earth at the Wellcome Trust Darwin site.

Science News have produced a good evolution timeline. It has a slide bar control and some neat graphics. You may have to scroll down a bit to find the controls...

Project Steve: although we have been evolving for about 3.5 billion years and Darwin explaind his ideas one and a helf centuries ago, it seems that some people still haven't quite got the gist yet... Project Steve is a sort of serious 'joke' about a very important issue.

This is the first model of DNA as visualised by Crick and Watson in 1953. Fifty years later, the Human Gnome Project had mapped out our DNA, building upon, and further confirming the ideas first put forward by Darwin.

Go on, evolve. You know you want to!

A lovely illustrated edition of The Origin Of Species

Darwin's four major works in one volume

The Autobiographiues of Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life BBC DVD with David Attenborough

Hubble Trouble?

Space Shuttle Atlantis has ferried up the maintenance crew to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope. For more information on this mission go here.

For more on Hubble and the universe it reveals, including a fantastic gallery of images, go here.

It's Stem & Us

A new breakthrough in stem cell research means that the future is looking far brighter for some suffers of certain conditions and diseases such as Parkinson's and Multiple Sclerosis. There is good evidence that both these illnesses could be treatable with therapy using stem cells to replace the damaged or degenerating tissues. Unfortunately, research in this area of medical science has been hindered by ethical problems, because the only ready source of stem cells for this purpose has been from human embryo tissue.


The 'magic' property of stem cells is that, because all cells in the body stem from this type of cell, they can be manipulated into becoming and replacing any kind of tissue... and now a team, led by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, has managed to turn fibroblasts, common cells in our skins, back into their embryonic state so that the cells then behave like stem cells! The above image belongs to The New York Times.

This early research has so far been conducted with skin samples from mice, but there is no reason why this technique cannot be adapted to human cells of this type. Of course, there will need to be much more refinement and development before this technique could be tested safely in human subjects. However, this progress should help to speed up stem cell research and make it much more acceptable to those who have previously objected on moral grounds...

read more here:

bbc science news

and here:

Science Daily report

Iain M Banks Interview

Iain Menzies Banks is Scottish. He was born and raised in and around Dunfermline, Fife, educated at Sterling University. Along with fellow Scot, Irvin Welsh, Banks has become known as one of the most startling of modern British writers. Scotland seems to be producing more than its fair share of literary talent and recently that talent has began to make a notable impact on British SF, with Iain M Banks and Ken MacLeod pushing the vanguard.

The Culture is a broad concept that links the bulk of Banks’ widely read and acclaimed SF output. It is a vast intelligent culture of sentient machines, including giant living space vessels, which have become so advanced that they have exceeded the full understanding of humans and now look after the human population in a cosmos-spanning, multi-cultural future society... Is this a future that Iain thinks we may be heading towards, and would that be a good thing?

‘Is the Culture a possible future...’ Iain mused, ‘Probably, eventually, but not for us. It will be the future for another species perhaps, different from us as we are today. We’re too tied up in bigotry, hatred, war, economics, oppression, competition...

Read the rest of this interview.

Happy New Year

If you like The 5 Times, you may also like:

New Scientist
Scientific American
Nature

Enjoy.