New observations from ESO's Very Large Telescope show for the first time a gas cloud being ripped apart by the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy. The cloud is now so stretched that its front part has passed the closest point and is travelling away from the black hole at more than 10 million km/h, whilst the tail is still falling towards it. 

In 2011 ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) discovered a gas cloud with several times the mass of Earth accelerating towards the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. This cloud is now making its closest approach and new VLT observations show that it is being grossly stretched by the black hole's extreme gravitational field.

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"The gas at the head of the cloud is now stretched over more than 160 billion kilometres around the closest point of the orbit to the black hole. And the closest approach is only a bit more than 25 billion kilometres from the black hole itself -- barely escaping falling right in," explains Stefan Gillessen (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany) who led the observing team . "The cloud is so stretched that the close approach is not a single event but rather a process that extends over a period of at least one year."

As the gas cloud is stretched its light gets harder to see. But by staring at the region close to the black hole for more than 20 hours of total exposure time with the SINFONI instrument on the VLT -- the deepest exposure of this region ever with an integral field spectrometer  -- the team was able to measure the velocities of different parts of the cloud as it streaks past the central black hole .

"The most exciting thing we now see in the new observations is the head of the cloud coming back towards us at more than 10 million km/h along the orbit -- about 1% of the speed of light," adds Reinhard Genzel, leader of the research group that has been studied this region for nearly twenty years. "This means that the front end of the cloud has already made its closest approach to the black hole." The origin of the gas cloud remains mysterious, although there is no shortage of ideas . The new observations narrow down the possibilities.

"Like an unfortunate astronaut in a science fiction film, we see that the cloud is now being stretched so much that it resembles spaghetti. This means that it probably doesn't have a star in it," concludes Gillessen. "At the moment we think that the gas probably came from the stars we see orbiting the black hole."

The climax of this unique event at the centre of the galaxy is now unfolding and being closely watched by astronomers around the world. This intense observing campaign will provide a wealth of data, not only revealing more about the gas cloud , but also probing the regions close to the black hole that have not been previously studied and the effects of super-strong gravity.

A robotic bird created in conjunction with U.S. Army could be developed into an unsuspecting future war agent.The Robo-Raven's manoeuvres are so realistic that other birds are fooled into thinking it is one of them.Its ability to hide in plain sight and light weight could prove valuable in military operations, claim Army Research Laboratory researchers. It weighs just 9.7 grams and has a wingspan of 34.3 cm. 

'It already attracts attention from birds in the area which tends to hide its presence,' said John Gerdes, a mechanical engineer at Aberdeen Proving Ground.Seagulls, songbirds and sometimes crows tend to try to fly in a formation near the bird during testing, but birds of prey, like falcons and hawks take a much more aggressive approach.
 
'Generally we don't see them coming,' Gerdes said. 'They will dive and attack by hitting the bird from above with their talons, then they typically fly away.’Scientists at the University of Maryland made Robo-Raven out of carbon fibre, thermal-resistant plastic, Mylar foil and foam. 

It has the unique ability to flap its wings completely independently of each other, enabling the bird to perform extreme aerobatic manoeuvres.Using two actuators for the wings required a bigger battery and an on-board micro controller, which initially made Robo-Raven too heavy to fly.To reduce the weight, engineers turned to advanced manufacturing processes such as 3D printing and laser cutting.The system now weighs just 9.7 grams and has a wing span of 34.3cm. It can carry a payload of almost six grams.The system is much quieter than the helicopter or propeller and can get much closer to an adversary without revealing its presence.
'We use hollow stiffeners to provide a stiff and light-weight structure, and our wing spars have been arranged in a fan pattern to create the desired airfoil shape during the flapping motions,' said Gerdes.

'At any time, we can transition between these behaviours with total control over the wings.'Robo-Raven’s aerobatics could someday prove vital in stealth reconnaissance and surveillance missions.Its potential has been recognised by the U.S Army who is funding research into small and micro scale unmanned aerial systems that could allow Robo-Raven to fly autonomously.Currently Robo-Raven cannot fly with sensors due to a very restricted payload, but advanced research is expected to improve their understanding of how a soldier could use it.

The team at Maryland University are also working on developing solar cell wings so that the Robo-Raven can land and charge before resuming a mission.The project builds on work by Dr SK Gupta, a professor in mechanical engineering at Maryland University, who began working on flapping-wing robotic birds nearly a decade ago.upta first successfully demonstrated a flapping-wing bird in 2007. This bird used one motor to flap both wings together in simple motions.

By 2010 the design had evolved over four successive models. The final bird in the series was able to carry a tiny video camera, could be launched from a ground robot, and could fly in winds up to 10 mph.‘Robotic birds are expected to offer advances in many different applications such as agriculture, surveillance, and environmental monitoring,’ said Gupta.‘Robo-Raven is just the beginning. Many exciting developments lie ahead. The exotic bird that you might spot in your next trip to Hawaii might actually be a robot.’

Cayan Tower, the 75-storey residential tower that spirals in a smooth curve by an astonishing 90 degrees to give every apartment a stunning view of the sea or marina.
Upon its opening on 10 June 2013, the tower has become world's tallest high rise building with a twist of 90 degrees Cayan Tower's dynamic twisting shape challenges conventional architecture and redefines standards of luxury.
Cayan Tower is situated in a key location at the mouth of Dubai Marina thus enjoying great views on to the marina, sea and The Palm.Cayan Tower is a truly architectural vision, certain to take its place as an icon not only in Dubai but in the world through winning the international property award more than once.

Designed by world-renowned Skidmore Owings and Merrill, otherwise known for projects such as Burj Khalifa, Trump Tower in Chicago, Jin Mao in Shanghai among many others.The units are special in its spacious rooms, big court yards with lots of sunlight that will enhance the feeling of space and freedom inside the unit.

The Indian Regional Navigational Satellite System (IRNSS) is an autonomous regional satellite navigation system being developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)which would be under complete control of the Indian government. The requirement of such a navigation system is driven by the fact that access to Global Navigation Satellite Systems, GPS, is not guaranteed in hostile situations. The IRNSS would provide two services, with the Standard Positioning Service open for civilian use and the Restricted Service, encrypted one, for authorised users.
As part of the project, ISRO opened a new satellite navigation center within the campus of ISRO Deep Space Network (DSN) at Byalalu near Bangalore in Karanataka on 28 May 2013. A network of 21 ranging stations located across the country will provide data for the orbit determination of the satellites and monitoring of the navigation signal.

The first satellite IRNSS-1A of the proposed constellation, developed at a cost of 16 billion (US$280 million),was launched on 1 July 2013 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre while the full constellation is planned to be realized by end of 2014.A goal of complete Indian control has been stated, with the space segment, ground segment and user receivers all being built in India. Three satellites will be in geostationary orbit over the Indian Ocean. Missile targeting could be an important military application for the constellation.

The proposed system would consist of a constellation of seven satellites and a support ground segment. Three of the satellites in the constellation will be placed in geostationary orbit. These GEOs will be located at 34 East 83 East and 132 East longitude. Two of the GSOs will cross the equator at 55 East and two at 111 East.Such an arrangement would mean all seven satellites would have continuous radio visibility with Indian control stations. The satellite payloads would consist of atomic clocks and electronic equipment to generate the navigation signals.IRNSS signals will consist of a Special Positioning Service and a Precision Service. Both will be carried on L5 (1176.45 MHz) and S band (2492.08 MHz). The SPS signal will be modulated by a 1 MHz BPSK signal. The Precision Service will useBOC(5,2).The navigation signals themselves would be transmitted in the S-band frequency (2–4 GHz) and broadcast through a phased array antenna to maintain required coverage and signal strength. The satellites would weigh approximately 1,330 kg and their solar panels generate 1,400 watts.The system is intended to provide an absolute position accuracy of better than 10 meters throughout Indian Landmass and better than 20 meters in the Indian ocean as well as a region extending approximately 1,500 km around India.

The ground segment of IRNSS constellation would consist of a Master Control Center (MCC), ground stations to track and estimate the satellites' orbits and ensure the integrity of the network (IRIM), and additional ground stations to monitor the health of the satellites with the capability of issuing radio commands to the satellites (TT&C stations). The MCC would estimate and predict the position of all IRNSS satellites, calculate integrity, makes necessary ionospheric and clock corrections and run the navigation software. In pursuit of a highly independent system, an Indian standard time infrastructure would also be established.

An international team of researchers has announced the discovery of the world’s oldest known fossil primate skeleton representing a previously unknown genus and species named Archicebus achilles.

The fossil was unearthed from an ancient lake bed in central China’s Hubei Province, near the course of the modern Yangtze River. In addition to being the oldest known example of an early primate skeleton, the new fossil is crucial for illuminating a pivotal event in primate and human evolution—the evolutionary divergence between the lineage leading to modern monkeys, apes and humans (collectively known as anthropoids) on the one hand and that leading to living tarsiers on the other. The scientific paper describing the discovery appears today in the prestigious journal Nature.

The fossil was recovered from sedimentary rock strata that were deposited in an ancient lake roughly 55 million years ago, during the early part of the Eocene epoch. This was an interval of global “greenhouse” conditions, when much of the world was shrouded in tropical rainforests and palm trees grew as far north as Alaska. Like most other fossils recovered from ancient lake strata, the skeleton of Archicebus was found by splitting apart the thin layers of rock containing the fossil. As a result, the skeleton of Archicebus is now preserved in two complementary pieces called a “part” and a “counterpart,” each of which contain elements of the actual skeleton as well as impressions of bones from the other side.

The skeleton of Archicebus is about 7 million years older than the oldest fossil primate skeletons known previously, which include Darwinius from Messel in Germany and Notharctus from the Bridger Basin in Wyoming. Furthermore, Archicebus belongs to an entirely separate branch of the primate evolutionary tree that lies much closer to the lineage leading to modern monkeys, apes and humans. Darwinius and Notharctus, on the other hand, are adapiform primates that are early relatives of living lemurs, the most distant branch of the primate family tree with respect to humans and other anthropoids.

Statistical analyses aimed at reconstructing how much an adult Archicebus would have weighed in life show that it was slightly smaller than the smallest living primates, which are pygmy mouse lemurs from Madagascar. Archicebus would have weighed about 20-30 grams (~ 1 ounce).Dr. Marian Dagosto notes that, “Even though Archicebus appears to be a very basal member of the tarsier lineage, it resembles early anthropoids in several features, including its small eyes and monkey-like feet. It suggests that the common ancestor of tarsiers and anthropoids was in some ways more similar than most scientists have thought.”

The new fossil takes its name from the Greek arche (meaning beginning or first; the same root as archaeology) and the Latin cebus (meaning long-tailed monkey). The species name achilles (derived from the mythological Greek warrior Achilles) highlights the new fossil’s unusual heel bone.

For the first time, scientists have mapped the structure of a metallic glass on the atomic scale, bringing them closer to understanding where the liquid ends and the solid begins in glassy materials. The findings could help explain the mystery of why glasses, or disordered solids form.

At the liquid-glass transition, the melt doesn't become solid at a distinct point, but becomes gradually more viscous until it is rigid. When crystalline solids - such as graphite, salt and diamonds - form they become abruptly rigid as the atoms form a regular, periodic arrangement. Glass never develops into an ordered atomic arrangement,but seems to retain the disordered structure of the liquid, despite its solidity.

This disordered structure gives glasses unique properties. Metallic glasses have a higher strength-to-weight ratio than aluminium and titanium alloys and are extremely promising structural materials with unique applications as biomaterials and microelectromechanical systems.

Led by Dr Amelia Liu from Monash University's School of Physics and the Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy, the researchers found that the structure of this Zr-based glass was not random, but composed in large part by efficiently arranged 13-atom icosohedral clusters. cosahedra have 20 faces, 12 vertices and 12 axes of five-fold symmetry, which means they cannot be packed into an ordered three dimensional, crystalline structure.

“It has long been theorised that icosahedra were a key atomic motif in the structure of metallic glasses and could, in fact, underlie glass formation. We have provided the first experimental confirmation of this,” Dr Liu said.“Our findings also point the way towards understanding the glass transition from liquid to solid – a grand challenge in modern condensed matter physics.”

The researchers - from Monash, the University of Melbourne, the Australian Synchrotron, Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University in the US – developed a new electron scattering technique. By analysing the diffraction patterns from nano-scale volumes in the glass, they were able to identify symmetries in individual atomic clusters in the Zr-glass. Previous techniques had not provided sufficient detail to do this.Dr Liu said that the new technique can now be used to understand the structure of other glasses and help progress the study of disordered materials.

Scientists will retrace Sir Douglas Mawson's 1911-1914 expedition to Antarctica in November, the University of New South Wales  announced Tuesday.A team of 46 researchers and would-be explorers will set out from Hobart, the capital of Australia's southern Tasmania island state, for a six-week journey to repeat measurements made by Mawson's team 100 years ago, including observations of the ocean, wildlife, weather, geology and ice cover.

"Antarctica remains one of the last, great unexplored regions on Earth. It is a unique place to monitor the health of our planet. We want to discover just how much has changed since Mawson's time, " said Chris Turney, professor at the UNSW Climate Change Research Center. The 1.5 million AU dollars (1.46 million U.S. dollars) privately-funded expedition also aims to recapture and share the excitement of scientific exploration and discovery, using the latest technologies to communicate with school children and the public back home in Australia.

The researchers will take measurements of the ocean water, visit sub-Antarctic islands where they will collect sediment cores from lakes and peat bogs, and study the wildlife.They will also drill ice cores and take geological samples to study the changing shape of the ice sheet. A drone will survey from the air and some adventurous scientists hope to venture under the ice.

Phosphorus is a precious element, with all life depending on it. It is an essential nutrient for plant growth and an important constituent of fertilizer used in agriculture.Phosphorus is often removed during waste water treatment because it can lead to algal blooms in waterways. It is traditionally removed from waste water streams using chemical or biological processes before the water is discharged to the environment.

Waste water streams typically contain low concentrations of phosphorus, making direct recovery of phosphorus both technically and economically challenging. However, a team from CSIRO has developed a technique that can recover phosphorus from these low concentrations to provide a valuable resource.The conventional biological treatment process known as enhanced biological phosphorus removal removes phosphorus from waste water by selectively enriching a group of bacteria known as polyphosphate accumulating organisms.

CSIRO’s novel approach, termed enhanced biological phosphorus removal and recovery, exploits this unique characteristic of the organisms to ‘carry’ the phosphorus from the diluted waste water stream over to a concentrated recovery stream.

The phosphorus concentration in the recovery stream was approximately four times that of the concentration in the original waste water.The result was a phosphorus concentration in the recovery stream that was approximately four times that of the phosphorus concentration in the original waste water.The novel approach has applications for waste water treatment utilities and fertilizer producers alike.Further research is underway to increase the phosphorus concentration in the recovery stream.This research is being delivered through the Urban Water Technologies Stream of CSIRO’s Water for a Healthy Country Flagship.

The Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, is a remarkable structure. Designed by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos of the Dutch firm UN Studio, the building received rave reviews when it opened in May of 2006.The architects needed a bit of magic to bring the museum’s open plan into compliance with fire codes. Like in the Guggenheim, the interior is one continuously unfolding space that spirals around a central atrium.

As a consequence there could be no fire doors to contain smoke if a blaze broke out in one section of the building. To solve the problem, UN Studio hired the engineering firm Imtech to design a system that would draw smoke away from all areas of the museum, allowing people to escape.The result is the world’s largest man-made air vortex, a 112-foot-high tornado that automatically activates in the event of a fire, drawing smoke into the center of the atrium and moving it upward through an axial fan in the ceiling. An array of 144 outlets in the surrounding walls emit powerful jets of air to generate a central region of low pressure, just like in a real tornado. Imtech engineers perfected the design using computational fluid dynamic simulations and laboratory models. The firm has created similar systems for airports in several German cities, including Düsseldorf and Hamburg.

The whereabouts of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – the fabled Hanging Garden of Babylon – has been one of the great mysteries from antiquity. The inability of archaeologists to find traces of it among Babylon's ancient remains led some even to doubt its existence.

Now a British academic has amassed a wealth of textual evidence to show that the garden was instead created at Nineveh, 300 miles from Babylon, in the early 7th century BC.After 18 years of study, Stephanie Dalley of Oxford University has concluded that the garden was built by the Assyrians in the north of Mesopotamia – in modern Iraq – rather than by their great enemies the Babylonians in the south.She believes her research shows that the feat of engineering and artistry was achieved by the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, rather than the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar.

The evidence presented by Dalley, an expert in ancient Middle Eastern languages, emerged from deciphering Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform scripts and reinterpreting later Greek and Roman texts. They included a 7th-century BC Assyrian inscription that, she discovered, had been mistranslated in the 1920s, reducing passages to "absolute nonsense".

She was astonished to find Sennacherib's own description of an "unrivaled palace" and a "wonder for all peoples". He describes the marvel of a water-raising screw made using a new method of casting bronze – and predating the invention of Archimedes' screw by some four centuries. Dalley said this was part of a complex system of canals, dams and aqueducts to bring mountain water from streams 50 miles away to the citadel of Nineveh and the hanging garden. The script records water being drawn up "all day".

Recent excavations have found traces of aqueducts. One near Nineveh was so vast that Dalley said its remains looked like a stretch of motorway from the air, and it bore a crucial inscription: "Sennacherib king of the world … Over a great distance I had a watercourse directed to the environs of Nineveh …"

Having first broached her theory in 1992, Dalley is now presenting a mass of evidence in a book, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, which Oxford University Press publishes on 23 May. She expects to divide academic opinion, but the evidence convinces her that Sennacherib's garden fulfills the criteria for a wonder of the world – "magnificent in conception, spectacular in engineering, and brilliant in artistry".

The seven wonders appear in classical texts written centuries after the garden was created, but the 1st-century historian Josephus was the only author to name Nebuchadnezzar as creator of the Hanging Garden, Dalley said. She found extensive confusion over names and places in ancient texts, including the Book of Judith, muddling the two kings.