Submariners should brace for some crazy science to match those Crazy Ivan maneuvers. A physicist says that ghost-like neutrinos that pass easily through just about everything could provide a future method of communication with deep sea submarines.

Neutrinos represent the ghost particles of the physics world that typically pass through about every form of matter without a trace. That solves one half of the problem in communicating underwater, where radio waves travel poorly and even very low frequency (VLF) waves can only go so far. But it leaves open the other half of the issue in that submarines have no way of receiving communications via neutrinos.

When the universe was young, at least one stellar factory was churning out 1,000 sun-like stars every year, according to a new study. Using an array of telescopes in the French Alps, researchers carefully scrutinised a distant galaxy whose light has taken so long to reach Earth that it appears as it was just 870 million years after the big bang.

The Milky Way currently forms about one sun per year, says study coauthor Chris Carilli, indicating that massive galaxies may have formed very quickly in the universe’s early days.The immense scale of the stellar factory is probably due to the fact that there was a lot more gas around in the early universe, Carilli says. Matter in the universe was indeed much denser soon after the big bang, since space itself has expanded over time.

Some 60 million light years from Earth is the monster galaxy M87. It’s a massive elliptical galaxy, one of the largest such in the nearby Universe… if you count 600 quintillion kilometers away as "nearby".

And when it comes to the Universe, I do.

It sits in the center of the Virgo cluster, a collection of roughly 1500 galaxies all bound to each other by gravity. At the heart of M87 is one of the biggest black holes ever seen: something like 6 billion times the mass of the Sun (the Milky Way has one as well, but it’s a paltry 4 million solar masses). It’s called a supermassive black hole, and it’s active. That means it’s a sloppy eater: as matter falls in to the hole, it piles up outside and forms a giant disk, which gets hot… millions of degrees hot.

PARIS (AFP) - Astronomers poring over a young star 180 light years from Earth have found evidence that stellar birth can lead to the formation of a planet only millions of years later, a mere blink on the cosmic timescale.

The mainstream theory is that planets are forged from a disc of gas and dusty debris that is left over from the creation of a star.

How long this process takes is a matter of debate, though.

Earth is believed to be about 4.5 billion years old, and the Sun around 100 million years older.

I'm in a community hall, on the outskirts of Celle, a north German town. On the walls are pictures of dark blue peacocks. Sitting at various tables around the room are dozens of Devil worshippers. At least, that's what some people call them.

Though we don't know it yet, right now several suicide bombs are going off near Mosul in Iraq, killing maybe 400. The victims belong to the same faith as those gathered here today.

They are Yezidi. And I'm here to unearth the reality of their fascinating religion. Why do they have such troubled relations with outsiders? Do they really worship the Devil?

The Yezidi of Celle are one of the largest groups of their sect outside the homeland of Kurdish Iraq. There may be 7,000 in this small town. Yezidi across the world number between 400,000 and 800,000.

Buried for centuries in a field in central England, this finely worked, 1,300-year-old fragment of gold plate was revealed today as part of the largest Anglo-Saxon hoard ever found.

Showing two eagles flanking a fish, the Dark Ages treasure was one of more than 1,500 scattered gold and silver artifacts unearthed in July by metal detector enthusiast Terry Herbert on his friend's farm near the town of Burntwood.

A group of German scientists has deciphered the meaning of one of the most spectacular archeological discoveries in recent years: The mystery-shrouded sky disc of Nebra was used as an advanced astronomical clock.

The purpose of the 3,600 year-old sky disc of Nebra, which caused a world-wide sensation when it was brought to the attention of the German public in 2002, is no longer a matter of speculation.

A group of German scholars who studied this archaeological gem has discovered evidence which suggests that the disc was used as a complex astronomical clock for the harmonization of solar and lunar calendars.

"This is a clear expansion of what we knew about the meaning and function of the sky disc," said archeologist Harald Meller.

Faster-than-light particles, or "tachyons", may be fundamentally impossible, according to two mathematical physicists. If they're right, their new theory would also imply that time – seemingly one of the most fundamental facets of nature – is no more than a mirage.

Although it is commonly believed that Einstein's theory of relativity says nothing can go faster than light, that is not quite true. Relativity does forbid ordinary matter from ever reaching the speed of light, because it would require infinite energy.

But the theory does not rule out a realm of particles that can only travel faster than light. Named "tachyons" by physicists in the 1960s, these subatomic speedsters would actually need an infinite amount of energy to slow down to the crawl of light-speed.

Deer mice have pulled off the opposite trick to the famous peppered moth, evolving a light coat to disguise themselves from predators. What's more, they did it even though their ancestors had no genes for light coats.

Most deer mice have dark fur, which would stand out vividly against the pale-coloured Sand Hills of Nebraska. The hills formed around 10,000 years ago, but genetic analysis performed by Catherine Linnen of Harvard University and colleagues found that back then the deer mouse genome didn't contain the genes for light fur. That means the trait arose from a new mutation which rapidly spread through the local deer mouse population.

On the seafloor near the Bahamas, researchers have discovered a single-celled organism about the size of a grape, and they say the unusual organism raises interesting questions about the evolution of complex, multicellular animals. The oversized protists were found at the end of long, linear tracks that appear to have been made by the slowly rolling amoebas; lead researcher Mikhail Matz says the tracks resemble fossilized impressions from over 1 billion years ago, which scientists had assumed were made by multicellular worms. “We were looking for pretty animals that have eyes, are coloured, or glow in the dark; instead, the most interesting find was the organism that was blind, brainless, and completely covered in mud,” he said

Mysterious clouds of gas hovering above the plane of the Milky Way may be the fractured remnants of superbubbles blown by stellar winds and exploding stars.

“There’s a fundamental, interesting connection between gas far away from the Milky Way and the amount of star formation below it in the galactic plane,” F. Jay Lockman of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory told Wired Science in a phone interview. The results could provide insight into how heavy elements traverse the galaxy and get incorporated into later generations of stars, planets and, perhaps, life.

The bulk of the matter in the Milky Way, including stars, hot star-forming regions and the gas and dust between stars called the interstellar medium, lies in a relatively flat disk called the galactic plane.

It would be tough to stick it to your refrigerator, but an ultra-cold gas magnetizes itself just as do metals such as iron or nickel, a team of atomic physicists reports. That cool trick shows that the messy physics within solids can be modeled with pristine gases, the researchers say. But others are skeptical that the team has actually seen what they claim.

Condensed matter physicists can tell you essentially all there is to know about how common metals carry electricity and heat. Why some of them are magnetic is a trickier question. Physicists know the basics: The electrons that flow through iron, nickel, and other magnetic materials act like little bar magnets. Below a certain temperature the electrons align so that they all point in the same direction, at least within relatively large "domains" in the crystalline material. The question is why do the electrons align themselves?.

If you wanted to hide something away for all eternity, where could you put it? Black holes might seem like a safe bet, but Stephen Hawking famously calculated that they leak radiation, and most physicists now think that this radiation contains information about their contents. Now, there may be a way to make an "eternal" black hole that would act as the ultimate cosmic lockbox.

The recipe for this unlikely object was discovered by looking at an even more abstruse entity, the white hole. White holes are black holes that run backwards in time, throwing out matter instead of sucking it in. Where a black hole might form from a collapsing star, a white hole would explode and leave a star in its place. White holes have never been observed, though general relativity predicts they could exist in principle.

LIKE a giant pale blue eye, the Earth stares at the centre of our galaxy. Through the glare and the fog it is trying to catch a glimpse of an indistinct something 30,000 light years away. Over there, within the sparkling starscape of the galaxy's core... no, not those giant suns or those colliding gas clouds; not the gamma-ray glow of annihilating antimatter. No, right there in the very centre, inside that swirling nebula of doomed matter, could that be just a hint of a shadow?

The shadow we're straining to see is that of a monstrous black hole, a place where gravity rules supreme, swallowing light and stretching the fabric of space to breaking point. Black holes are perhaps the most outrageous prediction of science, and even though we can paint fine theoretical pictures of them and point to evidence for many objects that seem to be black hole-ish, nobody has ever actually seen one.