Karen Masters Map Universe

A new map of the local universe is available to download, presented by Karen Masters from the University of Portsmouth, UK. The most complete map of the universe ever was presented at a press conference at the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

The 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS) has catalogued more than 43,000 galaxies within 380 million light-years from Earth (z<0.09). In this projection, the plane of the Milky Way runs horizontally across the center of the image. 2MRS is notable for extending closer to the Galactic plane than previous surveys – a region that’s generally obscured by dust.

“The 2MASS Redshift Survey is a wonderfully complete new look at the local universe – particularly near the Galactic plane,” Masters said. “We’re also honoring the legacy of the late John Huchra, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was a guiding force behind this and earlier galaxy redshift surveys.”

Redshifts happen when the light from a galaxy is stretched to a longer wavelength due to the expansion of the universe. Scientists can measure redshifts as a way to map the universe, because the further galaxies are away, the greater their redshifts will be. 2MRS mapped galaxies according to images made by the Two-Micron All-SkySurvey (2MASS).

The entire sky was scanned in this survey, in three near-infrared wavelength bands. Without mapping redshifts, 2MASS can only make a 2D image, so they are crucial to getting a comprehensive 3D account of the local universe. Huchra started measuring redshifts in the late 1990s, and the last observations were completed shortly after his death in October 2010.

Robert Kirshner, Huchra’s colleague at the Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said: “John loved doing redshift surveys and he loved the infrared. He had the insight to tell when infrared technology, formerly the province of the experts, was ripe for routine use in a big project. It’s a wonderful tribute to John that his colleagues have finished the infrared-selected galaxy redshift survey that John started.”

Courtesy of NASA. Composite image of Tycho's Supernova Remnant, showing the aftermath of a Type Ia supernova that may help unravel the mysteries of dark energy.

The future of the cosmos is hidden within dark energy, the invisible substance that constitutes more than 70 percent of the universe.

A study released Thursday by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics moves scientists closer to measuring and understanding the mechanics of dark energy and its impact on the expansion of the universe.

“Dark energy is the most profound problem in all of science,” said astrophysicist Michael Turner, a professor at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the study. “And it’s a very hard problem.”

The new study proposes a relatively simple method for enhancing the accuracy of dark energy observations by changing scientists’ understanding of supernovae, huge exploding stars that cast light across galaxies.

“Before this, people assumed these supernovae were intrinsically just one color,” said study author Ryan Foley, Clay Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center. But this is not the case, according to Foley.

Scientists need to use extremely bright and extremely distant points in the universe to observe the push of dark energy. The explosion of stars 40 percent more massive than the sun (type 1a supernovae) fits the bill. These supernovae are called “standard candles,” and scientists can measure distance by comparing the intrinsic brightness of the explosion with the brightness caught by astronomical instruments.

Like approaching a streetlight on a dark road, it’s possible to gauge distance by how bright the light appears to be.

“They allow us to map out the expansion of the universe, back across time, with essentially no assumptions,” Turner said.

But, according to Foley, most astrophysicists operated on the assumption that a perceived range of color in these supernovae was the product of cosmic dust acting like a filter on the starlight. If dust provided the color, it must also diminish the light of the exploding star, creating the impression of greater distance.

The new study, however, recognizes the color as intrinsic quality to the way individual supernovae burn, replacing a false assumption with more accurate methodology.

Now scientists can use the brightness and the natural color of the explosion to calculate a more exact measurement of the distance between supernovae. Comparing these relative distances provides information on the way the universe’s expansion changes over time. This, in turn, gives indispensable information on the effects of dark energy, believed to be generating the expansion.

Part of the challenge for astrophysicists studying dark energy rests in the sheer scale on which the invisible force operates. Observing dark energy would have been impossible 20 years ago, Foley said, and relies heavily on advanced technology.

“It’s not something you can measure even within the solar system,” Foley said. “You have to look at it between clusters of galaxies, or something even larger.”

Even then, astrophysicists are just watching the effects of dark energy, so named for its own intrinsic invisibility. Foley likened it to observing the wind, which we only recognize by its effect rather than its own visible signature. Dark energy’s influence on space manifests most clearly on the distances measured between exploding stars.

“Improving the precision will be a very powerful way of getting at why the universe is speeding up,” Turner said. That acceleration, first determined 12 years ago by measuring supernovae, is precisely why dark energy matters.

“The universe should be slowing down,” Turner said. “But it’s speeding up.”

Matter in the universe pulls things together, Foley said, and this is the attractive force of gravity. If that were the only force, the expansion of the universe would be slowing down. But some force must be driving the universe apart, what Foley called a “cosmic anti-gravity,” and this is dark energy.

Mapping and understanding dark energy may provide a kind of roadmap for the future of the cosmos. “The current expectation is that the universe will expand forever,” Foley said. “But that won’t necessarily happen.”

There are two particularly extreme alternatives, according to Foley. The universe may collapse in on itself in what’s called the Big Crunch; or it may expand so rapidly that all matter will be torn apart in the Big Rip.

Neither of these cataclysmic scenarios will occur in our lifetimes, but the chances for either apocalypse happening in the distant future may be determined by an understanding of dark energy.

Foley described the depth of the mystery on a more familiar scale. “Seventy percent of the surface of the earth is covered in water. Now imagine if you knew it existed, but had no idea what it was.”

This study moves astrophysics toward better measurements of the way dark energy affects cosmic distances.

The discovery of dark energy in 1998 created a paradigm shift in astrophysics, one massive enough to threaten the cohesion of Einstein’s famous Theory of Relativity. Foley’s work may help harmonize the cosmos, or it may predict the final destruction of everything.

“Dark energy controls the fate of the universe,” Turner said. – BY JUSTIN EURE

Asteroid

The object, known as 596 Scheila, is about 70 miles (113 kilometers) wide and has a faint, wispy tail that suggests it may actually be a comet, researchers said. If that’s the case, then 596 Scheila would be only the sixth known comet to reside in the main asteroid belt, a vast region of space rocks that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The asteroid-turned-comet discovery was somewhat serendipitous. On the night of Dec. 11, astronomer Steve Larson, a scientist with the Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, Ariz., was searching for potentially hazardous asteroids when he came across an object with a bright core and a faint tail.

Four images taken in a span of 30 minutes revealed the object was moving relative to the background stars, researchers said.

“Its brightness of a total magnitude of 13.4 visual, which is about 900 times fainter than the faintest star you can see in a clear, dark sky, led me to suspect that it was a known comet, but I checked the comet database and got nothing,” Larson said in a statement.

Further investigation revealed that the object was actually 596 Scheila, which astronomers first discovered in 1906. Scheila tumbles through space alongside thousands of similar objects in the main asteroid belt, but orbits slightly out of the ecliptic plane in which most planets and asteroids travel, researchers said.

Previous studies of 596 Scheila’s color have suggested that it is composed of primitive carbonaceous material left over from the formation of the solar system and might be an extinct or dormant comet. These bodies have already ejected most of their volatile ices and therefore have lost their cometary tails. Dormant comets retain some subsurface volatiles and may start outgassing once again as they near the sun.

“Scheila, along with several other bodies in the past few years, have created a new class of solar system objects: main-belt comets,” Bill Cooke, of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center, wrote in a blog post after Larson’s find. “These bodies are an anomaly and a mystery since an object this close to the sun should have had its ices vaporized away.”

After Larson reported his discovery, many other astronomers pointed their telescopes at 596 Scheila to determine if its tail consists of ice and gases — as would be expected for a comet — or if it is merely dust left behind from a collision with another asteroid.

Preliminary findings of the outburst show that 596 Scheila’s tail is composed of dust, but more observations will be needed to understand just what is happening with the object, researchers said.

- SPACE

With solar power, it's Green vs. Green

When Mike Peterson jumped into a colleague’s single turboprop Pilatus and flew over the remote central California valley that he now hopes to turn into a solar plant, he saw sunshine, flat land that would require little grading and two big transmission lines to tap into. “Wow,” he remembers thinking at the time. “God made this to be a solar farm.”

But when Kim Williams looks out at that same land from her lowslung ranch house, she sees an area rich with wildlife that is helping support her grass-fed chicken farm, her neighbor’s cattle operations and her peaceful way of life. She supports solar energy on a small scale — the electric fence around her chicken coop is powered by solar — but says when she learned about the solar plant she felt shock and disbelief. Now, she’s suing to block it.

The push to create an alternative to carbon-based fuel has hit an unlikely snag: environmentalists.

The split between Peterson and Williams illustrates this awkward state of affairs. To a growing number of environmental advocates, the dozens of large solar plants that are springing up in vast areas of the western wilderness are more scourge than savior.

The upshot is that those who on paper seem to be perfect allies for solar are turning into its biggest enemies.

That includes the Sierra Club, which last week filed what senior attorney Gloria Smith says is its first suit against a solar plant, a giant 664-megawatt project called Calico that is slated to go up in the desert near Barstow, California. It would lie smack in the middle of habitat for rare plants and animals, in an area Smith calls “a very unfortunate site.”

The legal brawl comes as the U.S. is racing to adopt renewables. In the United States, renewable energy, including solar, makes up just 8 percent or so of electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That figure was expected to jump to 13 percent by 2035 — but that was before the Green vs. Green feud.

Even though Williams and her cohorts support the broad goal of reducing dependence on fossil fuels, they say it comes at too high a cost if it means building on undeveloped land. Helping their case: the proposed plants are often slated for areas with threatened or endangered animals, including kit foxes, kangaroo rats, rare lizards, and others.

Now, the groups have gone from complaining to litigating. That means solar companies must take funds and management time that would have been spent on developing their plants and spend them instead on fighting lawsuits. For some companies, the likely result is that plants won’t be built.

LET THE SUN SHINE

For the solar industry overall, the situation marks a fundamental shift in attitude. Where previously almost any bare patch of desert seemed like a prospective solar plant, now the reality is that much of the nation’s most fertile ground for alternative power and energy independence may well remain undeveloped.

And the backlash is likely to slow down the number of big plants developers will try to get through. Some 142 U.S. solar plants are under development, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association, up from just 28 two years ago. Many of these are well over 500 megawatts; a handful are over 1,000 megawatts, meaning they would cover hundreds of acres of land and power at least 300,000 homes each.

The big plants give the U.S. a chance to gain ground in the solar power industry, where it lags countries like Spain, which has around 30 large-scale solar plants in the construction phase. China, which dominates the solar panel business, is also racing ahead, with an aggressive renewable-energy policy and big loans to companies.

Solar energy is among the strategic industries in which China is considering investing up to $1.5 trillion over five years to cement its position as a provider of high-value technologies.

In one major project, China’s Shandong Penglai Electric Power Equipment Manufacturing Co. is working with Burbank, California-based eSolar to build a series of plants totaling 2,000 megawatts of electricity in the deserts of Northern China. Some 60 miles away, Tempe, Arizona-based First Solar is working on the first stage of its own China plan, a 2,000-megawatt project.

Analysts say the prevailing view in China is that the good done by solar plants outweighs any damage they may do to the environment, and concerns about plants and animals are minimal. Not so in the United States.

STATE OF SOLAR

California lies at the center of the U.S. solar industry, thanks to a confluence of sunlit land and a legal requirement for 33 percent of its electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020. More than 40 solar utility plants are in development, according to the state’s public utilities commission. Almost all of them have or will run into problems with environmentalists or people who simply don’t want the plants in their backyard — plants like Peterson’s Solargen.

The company was born in 2006, as the government was bolstering its support for the solar sector through tax credits and loan-guarantee programs. Peterson, the company’s chief executive, was among those who bought in. Previously, he had advised high-net worth individuals at Goldman Sachs, and later founded and managed an alternative-energy investment firm.

But the Solargen executives weren’t the only ones who had spied opportunity. The Solargen team figured it could never compete with the hordes of developers focusing on the deserts, where too many projects were chasing too few power lines to carry all the electricity they would generate. Fewer companies were looking in central California.

When Peterson first saw Panoche in 2008, he said he felt he had hit the jackpot: a 20,000-acre valley with few inhabitants that seemingly no other developers had their eye on. While most other utility-scale plants are planned for government-owned property, this land was privately owned — which Peterson assumed would make the permitting process easier.

He quickly moved in, figuring out who owned the land he would need — both for the plant and a preserve to mitigate loss of habitat for animals and plants on the site — and enlisting local movers-and-shakers to help him get it. He recalls negotiating with one rancher who kept a shotgun at his side for the entire meeting; another unsuccessfully kept trying to ply Peterson, a Mormon who doesn’t drink, with spirits.

Meanwhile, he was trying to nail down funds. That’s been tough for almost all solar energy companies, particularly startups, in a climate where investor cash has slowed to a trickle. The more innovative the technology, the harder it has been to line up financing. Many companies are trying to tap into loan guarantees on offer from the U.S. Department of Energy, but the application process is lengthy and rigorous. Peterson says his application was turned down.

Trips to Silicon Valley’s fabled Sand Hill Road got him nowhere. Venture capital investment has declined overall, but clean technology has been particularly hard hit. Just $625 million was invested in the sector in the third quarter of 2010, the National Venture Capital Association says, compared to $1 billion two years ago.

Peterson’s then limited experience in solar energy didn’t help. And the founder of Solargen, Eric McAfee, had landed in hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which found he had caused drilling company Verdisys to make misleading disclosures about its expenses and revenues. In 2006, McAfee agreed to pay a $25,000 civil penalty without admitting or denying the SEC’s allegations. Peterson calls McAfee, chairman and CEO of ethanol company AE Biofuels, “a leading thinker in renewable energy” who regularly addresses forums such as Milken Institute conferences, and adds that the SEC never filed any restrictions against McAfee.

Desperate for financing, Peterson finally dusted off the Mandarin he had learned as a Mormon missionary to Taiwan in the early 1980s, and went back for several visits. He can still rattle off the greeting with which he began each meeting — describing how much he enjoyed his time in Taiwan, how glad he was this project has brought him back, and how sorry he was about his rusty language skills.

One company he hit up was UMC, which had founded NexPower Technology Corp., a thin-film solar manufacturer. To seal the deal with its investment arm, Peterson agreed to buy some panels from NexPower for the plant as long as he can find a lender willing to finance a project using those panels.

The gambit worked. He won investments from UMC Capital, his largest backer, and Chinatrust Venture Capital, amounting to $6.5 million. Altogether, Solargen has raised close to $12 million, Peterson says. Building the plant will cost a total of $1.3 billion, he estimates.

While Peterson was lining up financing, however, some Panoche Valley residents were lining up against the plant, which they learned about in the summer of 2009 after a Pacific Gas & Electric representative mentioned it to Ron Garthwaite, a local dairy farmer.

“It was kind of hard to get our minds around,” says Williams, who moved to the Valley from San Francisco a few years ago after reading sustainable-agriculture bestseller “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and deciding she too could raise chickens.

Solargen’s plans to put the plant on just a small portion of the valley, allow sheep to graze beneath the panels and buy property and easements to set aside 20,000 acres of land in and near the valley as nature reserves did nothing to alleviate her concerns.

1) Launch of the iPad: The iPad jump-started the tablet market in the big way. Sure, there were early pioneers in the market, like Apple’s Newton in the mid-1990s and Microsoft’s (MSFT) tablet launch in 2001, but it was the iPad that drew a flood of other me-too tablets to the market, from Dell’s Streak to Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. As James Ragan, senior equity analyst of Crowell, Weedon & Co., puts it: “The iPad launched the whole tablet segment and proved groundbreaking.”

2) E-Readers Take Off: At least partly thanks to the iPad launch, e-readers like Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s (BKS) Nook gained far more traction in 2010. “We were so early in the S-curve of e-readers that the iPad helped increase interest,” says Mark Mahaney, a Citigroup analyst. “The iPad exploded interest in e-readers, and that benefited Amazon.” Jeff Bezos says the latest generation Kindle became the top-selling product in the company’s history during the critical holiday selling season. Research firm Gartner predicts worldwide e-reader sales will soar 79.8% to 6.6 million units in 2010.

3) Cell-Phone Firms Develop Tablets: Cell-phone manufacturers have begun morphing into computer makers with the development of their own tablets. Samsung officially launched its Galaxy Tab in September. Motorola Mobility’s CEO Sanjay Jha said his company is coming out with a tablet computer in the new year, as is Research in Motion (RIMM), which is planning to release its BlackBerry PlayBook in the first quarter.

4) It’s All About the Apps: Still talking about the hardware features on your cell phone? That’s so 2009. The bells and whistles of cell phones today are all about the software. The trend became even more apparent when the world’s largest handset maker, Nokia, pushed out its longtime CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in favor of former Microsoft executive and software veteran Stephen Elop in September.

5) Android Beats Apple iOS: Google’s (GOOG) Android mobile operating system pummeled Apple’s iOS this year, demonstrating how quickly things can change in the world of smartphones. During the third quarter, Android-powered phones jumped to the No. 2 spot in worldwide smartphone sales. Android captured 25.5% of the market, up from a mere 3.5% a year ago. Apple’s iOS, which ranked No. 3, saw its market share fall to 16.7% that quarter from 17.1% in the year-ago quarter. That marked the first time Apple’s iOS posted a year-over-year decline.

6) Wireless Goes Everywhere: Smartphones, notebooks and tablets made “mobility” a buzzword in 2010. “It was the year you could access the Internet over the wireless infrastructure from anywhere,” analyst Raglan says.

7) Internet Stocks Boom: The year saw an Internet supernova as stocks exploded with triple-digit gains, leaving investors awestruck. From Jan. 4 through Wednesday’s close, movie-rental site Netflix (NFLX) had soared 237% to $180.27 a share. “Netflix captured the greatest gains during the year, as consumption of video streaming took off,” analyst Mahaney says. OpenTable (OPEN) blew up with a 190% gain to $71.88 a share, and Chinese search giant Baidu (BIDU) flagged a 141.7% gain to close at $99.11 a share.

Google Leaves China: Google’s exit from mainland China captured headlines earlier this year, after the search giant and the Chinese government butted heads over censorship issues. In the end, Google lost the battle. The search giant created a landing page for Chinese users to access information from its Hong Kong site.

9) Companies Head for the Cloud: Cloud computing demonstrated strong growth in 2010, Ragan notes. Indeed. Earlier this year, research firm Gartner forecast that worldwide cloud services would see revenues jump 16.6% to $68.3 billion by the end of 2010. And by the time 2014 rolls around, those revenues are expected to reach $148.8 billion.

10) IPO Letdown: The prospect of hot IPOs from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn kept investors on edge for most of the year, but these companies left folks with long faces as none of them filed an S-1 IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission

Lead researcher Dr. Jeff Lichtman, with a 3-D image of a section of mouse brain. (NYT)

Cambridge: Dr. Jeff Lichtman likes his brains sliced thin — very, very thin.

Dr. Lichtman and his team of researchers at Harvard have built some unusual contraptions that carve off slivers of mouse brains as part of a quest to understand how the mind works. Their goal is to run slice after minuscule slice under a powerful electron microscope, develop detailed pictures of the brain’s complex wiring and then stitch the images back together. In short, they want to build a full map of the mind.

The field, at a very nascent stage, is called connectomics, and the neuroscientists pursuing it compare their work to early efforts in genetics. What they are doing, these scientists say, is akin to trying to crack the human genome — only this time around, they want to find how memories, personality traits and skills are stored.

They want to find a connectome, or the mental makeup of a person.

“You are born with your genes, and they don’t change afterward,” said H. Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is working on the computer side of connectomics. “The connectome is a product of your genes and your experiences. It’s where nature meets nurture.”

The task is arduous and years from fruition, and even the biggest zealots acknowledge that their work may not pay off. But connectomics has gotten some meaningful financing: In September, the National Institutes of Health handed out $40 million in grants to researchers at Harvard, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Minnesota and the University of California, Los Angeles, to pursue connectomics. Together, their research efforts comprise the Human Connectome Project.

Since the 1970s, researchers have only had one connectome to play with — that of a worm with a measly 300 neurons. Now they are trying a mouse brain, with its 100 million neurons. So far the notion of creating a human-scale connectome — which would illuminate all of the connections among more than 100 billion neurons and unravel the millions of miles of wires in the brain — has proved too daunting.

The task at hand is somewhat similar to trying to untangle a bowl of spaghetti. Each individual spaghetti strand may touch tens of other strands as it weaves in a contorted fashion through the bowl. In this case, the researchers want to do the equivalent of seeing where all the strands connect at the atom level.

And because the brain’s wiring is so densely packed, building a connectome stands as one of the most formidable data collection efforts ever concocted. About one petabyte of computer memory will be needed to store the images needed to form a picture of a one-millimeter cube of mouse brain, the scientists say. By comparison, it takes Facebook about one petabyte of data storage space to hold 40 billion photos.

“The world is not yet ready for the million-petabyte data set the human brain would be,” Dr. Lichtman said. “But it will be.”

Neuroscientists say that a connectome could give them myriad insights about the brain’s function and prove particularly useful in the exploration of mental illness. For the first time, researchers and doctors might be able to determine how someone was wired — quite literally — and compare that picture with “regular” brains. Surgeons armed with a connectome might also be able to make more calculated cuts in the brain.

“The connectome project is going to show where all the white matter — all the connecting fibers — are,” said Stanley Klein, a professor of optometry and vision science at the University of California, Berkeley. “The whole goal in something like a surgery for epilepsy is to delicately slice out some of the white matter without removing any cortex.”

Dr. Klein says he has “zero question” that this type of surgery could benefit from developing a connectome.

Other scientists doubt that the results will match the effort. The comparisons to the genome prove haunting, and critics suggest that the connectome fans are wasting valuable research dollars and setting themselves up for a huge letdown.

“There are people that argue we still just don’t know enough about the brain to know where to look for insights,” said Bradley Voytek, a researcher at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “They also contend that there is no possible way you can build a full connectome in any realistic time frame.”

What’s more, even if the researchers succeed, they will only produce a static picture of a brain frozen in time, rather than something that shows how a brain responds to different types of stimuli.

Scientists around the world, including Stephen J. Smith, a neuroscience professor at Stanford, and Gerald M. Rubin, a researcher with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have pushed past the naysayers and developed varying techniques for mapping the brains and nervous systems of human as well as other creatures.

“There are some people who say, ‘Maybe you don’t need this information, and given the expense of it, maybe you should put it off,’ ” said Dr. Lichtman, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. “It’s a fair controversy.”

Harvard recruited Dr. Lichtman to push the connectome quest to its limits by tackling an entire mouse brain at the finest scale and allowed him to set up his own connectome research laboratory, staffed with four other people.

In the basement quarters that house Lichtman Lab, the researchers go to work anesthetizing mice, slicing open their rib cages and using the animals’ circulatory systems to spread concoctions that preserve the flesh and tune it for the electron microscope. Now and again, a researcher will reach into a box of mouse food pellets littered around the lab for sustenance during the tedious work.

“They’re not too bad,” said Bobby Kasthuri, one of the researchers.

With the body prepared, the slicing can begin.

Machines built by Kenneth J. Hayworth, another one of the researchers, can sheer off slices of a mouse brain just 29.4 nanometers thin using a diamond knife blade. To provide a sense of the accomplishment, the researchers liken the cutting to shaving off the entire surface of a football field at a thickness of one-hundredth of an inch.

Mr. Hayworth devised techniques for floating the brain slivers across a tiny puddle of water where surface tension carries them to a clear plastic tape. The tape backing adds some sturdiness to the slivers and makes it possible to place scores of them on a silicon wafer that then goes under the electron microscope.

At Lichtman Lab, the researchers are marching across a mouse brain in linear fashion, gathering the slices, imaging them and then putting the puzzle back together. Once assembled by a computer, the images of the brain are beautiful.

Dr. Lichtman and his colleagues give individual brain cells unique colors, making it easier to follow the wiring of a single neuron’s extensive axon and dendrite branches. The microscopes and computers they use can twist and turn these psychedelic images and zoom in and out at will.

It takes about three days for the researchers to carve 7,000 sections of a mouse’s cerebral cortex.

“The cutting is easy,” Dr. Lichtman said. “The big time sink is imaging.”

Dr. Lichtman estimates it will be several years before they can contemplate a connectome of a mouse brain, but there are some technological advances on the horizon that could cut that time significantly. Needless to say, a human brain would be far more complex and time-consuming.

“Hopefully, we are returning with a burst of new energy to the question of how the brain is wired up,” said Gary S. Lynch, a well-known brain researcher at the University of California, Irvine. “Lacking a blueprint, we’re never going to get anywhere on the most profound and fun questions that drew everyone to neuroscience in the first place: what is thought, consciousness?”

A connectome would provide a far more detailed look at the brain’s inner workings than current techniques that measure blood flow in certain regions. The researchers contend that it would literally show how people are wired and illuminate differences in the brains of people with mental illness.

As Mr. Kasthuri, the Harvard researcher, put it: “It will either be a great success story or a massive cautionary tale.”

An image released by Eutelsat shows a computer-generated image of the European satellite Ka-Sat of Eutelsat Communications that has been successfully lofted into orbit by a Proton rocket late on December 26.

Russia on Monday put into orbit the European Ka-Sat satellite launched overnight by a Proton-M rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, space officials said.

“The satellite was successfully put into orbit at 10:03 Moscow time (0703 GMT),” the Khrunichev space centre said Monday in a statement.

This was Proton’s first successful launch after a failure on December 5 of three Russian navigation satellites, Glonass, to reach orbit. They fell into the Pacific some 1,500 kilometres (937 miles) from Hawaii.

After the incident, Russia has temporarily suspended Proton launches. Some experts have said programming errors caused failures.

Ka-Sat will ensure access to broadband Internet for poorly served terrestrial networks in Europe and Mediterranean basin. The satellite was constructed by EADS Astrium for Eutelsat, Europe’s leading satellite operator.

FILE - In this March 25, 2010 file photo, a Chinese flag blows in the air below the Google logo outside the Google China headquarters in Beijing. The classified diplomatic cables released by online whistle-blower WikiLeaks and reported on by The New York Times cited a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing that included allegations from a Chinese contact that China's Politburo directed a cyber intrusion into Google's computer systems as part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws.

BEIJING — Links to the WikiLeaks website were blocked within China on Wednesday amid potentially embarrassing claims made in leaked U.S. diplomatic cables posted to the site.

Attempts to access wikileaks.org and cablegate.wikileaks.org were met with a notice saying the connection had been reset. That’s the standard response when a website is being blocked by Chinese authorities who exert rigid controls over Internet content.

It wasn’t clear when the blocks were imposed, although a vast swath of the Internet is inaccessible behind China’s firewall, including social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Human rights and political dissent-themed sites are also routinely banned, although technologically savvy users can easily jump the so-called “Great Firewall” with proxy servers or other alternatives.

WikiLeaks may have been singled out because of some of the assertions made in the leaked cables, including some sent from the U.S. Embassies in Seoul and Beijing focusing on China’s ally North Korea.

Those included suggestions that North Korea’s communist regime would likely collapse within three years of the death of ruler Kim Jong Il, and that Chinese leaders were prepared to accept South Korea’s eventual rule over the entire Korean peninsula.

In one, a Chinese diplomat is quoted describing North Korea as a “spoiled child” for attempting to win U.S. attention with a provocative missile test.

The leaks also claimed that China’s Politburo directed a cyber intrusion into Google’s computer systems, and expressed concern over attempts by Iranian front companies to obtain Chinese nuclear technology.

China’s government has taken a low-key approach to the leaks, with the Foreign Ministry saying it would not comment on specific assertions in the cables.

“China takes note of relevant reports. We hope the U.S. side will properly handle the relevant issue. As for the content of the documents, we do not comment on that,” ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Tuesday.

The Global Times, a provocative tabloid published by the ruling Communist Party mouthpiece Peoples Daily, labeled the disclosure a “nefarious slander against China” on Wednesday.

It also questioned the U.S. government’s perceived inability to block the posting of the leaks, saying it raised questions as to whether it had reached some form of tacit understanding with WikiLeaks.

Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Beijing’s Renmin University, said Beijing shared Washington’s concern about the release of sensitive diplomatic communications. But he said the WikiLeaks’ blocking was motivated more by the need to stifle further rumor mongering, rather than suppressing specific revelations.

“The website is blocked because the information is both unprovable and sensitive,” Shi said.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said that WikiLeaks acted illegally in posting the documents. Officials around the world have said the disclosure jeopardizes national security, diplomats, intelligence assets and relationships between foreign governments.

The massive leaks were “embarrassing” and “awkward,” but the consequences for American foreign policy should be limited, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday.

This artist’s impression shows HIP 13044 b, an exoplanet orbiting a star that entered our galaxy, the Milky Way, from another galaxy.

European astronomers scanning the Milky Way have discovered a planet near a star of extragalactic origin, implying that it came from outside our own galaxy.

The finding, which challenges current understanding about how planets are formed and survive, was made in the so-called Helmi stream — a group of stars that originally belonged to a dwarf galaxy that was devoured by the Milky Way in what the astronomers called “an act of galactic cannibalism.”

“As far as I know this is the first time a planet like this has been discovered. It came to our galaxy about 6 to 9 billion years ago, so it’s like a visitor,” said Johny Setiawan at the Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, who led the team who made the discovery.

Over the last 15 years, astronomers have detected nearly 500 planets orbiting stars in our cosmic neighborhood, but none from outside our Milky Way galaxy has yet been confirmed.

“This discovery is very exciting,” said Rainer Klement, also of the Max Planck Institute. “Because of the great distances involved, there are no confirmed detections of planets in other galaxies. But this cosmic merger has brought an extragalactic planet within our reach.”

The host star is called HIP 13044 and the planet is known as HIP 13044b. It lies around 2,000 light years from Earth in the southern constellation of Fornax, or the Furnace, the scientists said in a study in the journal Science Express Thursday.

It was detected using a high-resolution spectrograph attached to a 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla European Southern Observatory in Chile.

The scientists said the finding raised questions about accepted theories of planet formation since it is the first time a planet has been found around an old star that contains very few elements apart from hydrogen and helium.

“According to the widely-accepted planet formation model, it is actually not possible to form a planet around such a very metal-poor star,” Setiawan said in a telephone interview.

His team were also surprised to discover that the planet had gone past what is known as the “red giant phase” of stellar evolution, when stars like the Sun expand up to many times their original size.

What is unusual is that HIP 13044b has survived that process, when astronomers would normally have expected it to have been swallowed up by its host star as it expanded.

“This discovery is particularly intriguing when we consider the distant future of our own planetary system, as the Sun is also expected to become a red giant in about 5 billion years,” Setiawan said.

Although the HIP 13044b planet has escaped being engulfed so far, its host star will expand again in the next stage of its evolution, meaning it may be doomed after all, the scientists said. This could also foretell the demise of our outer planets, such as Jupiter, as the Sun approaches the end of its life. – (Reuters)

This composite image provided by NASA, taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, shows a galaxy where a recent supernova probably resulted in a black hole in the bright white dot near the bottom-middle of the picture.

Astronomers may have lucked into the ultimate in cosmic baby pictures: a voracious black hole fresh from its violent birth.

After watching a nearby star that exploded into a supernova in 1979, astronomers now believe the star’s death wasn’t an ordinary one. The star’s explosion was big enough to cause a black hole to develop in its wake. They think it’s a black hole because they see something steadily consuming the gassy remnants of the exploded star, which is a tell-tale sign of a black hole. It sucks up everything in sight.

And in this case it’s a lot. In the past 30 years since this star exploded, this baby black hole has eaten about the equivalent of the Earth in mass, which is about as big as black hole appetites can get, said Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. He’s co-author of a new paper in the journal New Astronomy and he discussed the findings at a NASA news conference Monday. On a cosmic scale the mass of the Earth is not an awful lot to eat, but from Earth’s point of view, it’s kind of awesome, said NASA astrophysicist Kimberly Weaver. “It’s like the planet eater in ‘Star Trek,”‘ she said.

Black holes are warped regions in space where it is so dense that nothing — not even light — escapes. Scientists in this case see energy bursts from matter as it is sucked in. That matter is heavy gas from the exploded star, and possibly a partner star that may have been next to it, Weaver said.

“It’s the first time we’re seeing a black hole being born in a normal supernova,” Loeb said. “We’re able to learn about environments that cannot be reproduced in the lab and can only be observed in the universe.”

While black holes are seen throughout the universe, it is unusual to witness one from near birth that “evolves and changes into its youthful stages,” said Weaver. And unlike other black holes, thanks to the keen eye of a Maryland schoolteacher who witnessed the supernova in 1979, astronomers know exactly when this black hole was born, Weaver said.

By continuing to follow the black hole — which is about 50 million light years away — future astronomers will learn just how much material is left over from the star’s explosion, said Dan Patnaude of Harvard, a study co-author. This black hole is about five times more massive than our sun and the star that exploded to give it birth was maybe 20 times bigger than our sun.

“This is certainly eating as much as it can,” Patnaude said. “This is working as hard as it can to gobble up that material, exactly like a teenager or a toddler.”

The images were captured by NASA’s Chandra X-Ray space telescope. There is one other possible explanation for what scientists have seen: They could be watching the birth instead of a pulsar wind nebula, like the famous and beautiful crab nebula. But Patnaude said a black hole is more likely.

Either way, this is a great chance to observe a cosmic event from the start, said Alex Filippenko of the University of California at Berkeley who didn’t take part in the research. He agrees that the discovery is most likely a black hole.