Ever been tempted to do something silly to your badly behaved computer? David Block was. Until he saw the (online) light...

"What is essential is invisible to the eye", as Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote.

This is certainly true for starburst galaxies, which are undergoing a kind of 'baby boom', creating new, young stars faster than many Milky Way-like galaxies put together. The dusty 'ash' left over by successive generations of stars blocks out much of the starlight, rendering them invisible to optical telescopes. The bulk of the radiative energy of starbursts emerges instead at longer wavelengths in the infrared.

Now, Japan's Subaru telescope has been used to produce a new view [1] of the most famous of starbursts, Messier 82. Messier 82 is the nearest of such systems, at about 11 million light years from us. Located just above the front end of the Big Dipper, it is easily visible under dark northern skies to amateur astronomers equipped with a decent pair of binoculars.

Imagine that you have been hurtling though the universe for millions of years, at very close to the speed of light. That you can pass through pretty much anything that got in your way, like a planet for example. But then you have the misfortune to bump into a plastic encased 'dome of gubbins' that looks like something out of the special effects department of the BBC circa 1985. Then, as the elusive Neutrino, you may just feel that this is not your lucky day. Because your presence has been captured by giant detector buried 1.5 miles under the South Pole.     http://www.icecube.wisc.edu/

William Woollard was 'The Reluctant Buddhist' who wrote a best-selling book of that name to chart his experience of hesitant toe-dipping to full immersion. In this new book aimed at those with scant interest in Buddhism, he focuses his microscope on something that interests us all: Happiness.

Well this photographer is either very skilled or very lucky. What a great photo!

New research published in the journal Nature has settled decades of scientific debate about 'space weather'.