Black hole eats a star

Space is a hot topic these days.  Not even a full week has passed since spectacular lunar eclipse, and we already have more exciting news. Space.com reports an extremely rare event:

A powerful beam of energy has been spotted blasting out from the center of a massive black hole as it rips apart and devours a star in a rare sight that astronomers say likely happens only once every 100 million years, a new study finds.

This is pretty impressive!  They’ve also published a couple of artist impressions of what is going on.

Gene mutations unique to Cyprus

Cyprus Mail reports:

TWO Cyprus-specific gene mutations that increase the likelihood of breast cancer have been identified by the Institute of Neurology and Genetics.

The genetic changes – in genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 – “haven’t been found anywhere else in the world – not even Greece,” said head of electron microscopy and molecular pathology Kyriacos Kyriacou.

This reminded me of a DNA testing and profiling company 23andMe. Apparently, their prices decreased significantly since the last time I checked.  Now it is much more affordable with the price of $99 + 1 year commitment to $9/month or a $399 once off.  It used to be around $2000 if I remember correctly.

Day in brief – 2011-06-16

  • @asaliev Create public notebook. Add its RSS feed to TwitterFeed.com . Now you can share useful bookmarks and notes with the world. :) #
  • Google Chromebooks are now available from Amazon and BestBuy http://bit.ly/mzB2ft #
  • New note : Titanium Studio | Appcelerator http://bit.ly/lQPW8M #
  • New note : Oracle Resources for PHP (PHP and Oracle: Christopher Jones) http://bit.ly/iKNorT #
  • Merging all those changes to the stable branch … 1891 files changed, 214378 insertions(+), 207628 deletions(-). Huge deploy in a minute. #
  • Shared: Serious crime up 18.4 per cent http://bit.ly/krQ4ZU #
  • Shared: Biggest-ever swoop on illegal TV subscriptions http://bit.ly/kaLsps #
  • Shared: U.S. CIO Kundra leaving for Harvard post http://bit.ly/kWXtCc #