bystander wrote:http://www.astronomy.com/asy/objects/images/nursery.jpg
Provided by ESO, Garching, Germany
New image reveals glowing stellar nurseries
Sub-millimeter light is vital in studying the earliest stages of the birth and life of stars.
Astronomy.com
November 11, 2008
http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=7593
Illustrating the power of sub-millimeter-wavelength astronomy, an Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope image reveals how an expanding bubble of ionized gas about 10 light-years across causes the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps that are the birthplaces of new stars. Sub-millimeter light is the key to revealing some of the coldest material in the universe, such as these cold, dense clouds.
The region, called RCW120, is about 4,200 light-years from Earth, towards the constellation Scorpius. ...
Female ticks have market on gluttony
Credit: Professor Frans Jongejan, University of Utrecht, Netherlands,
and University of Pretoria, Republic of South Africa.
<<Sex makes you fat. If you're a female tick, that is.
The "truly gluttonous" female ixodid tick increases her weight an astounding 100 times her original size after she mates, so a University of Alberta researcher investigated what it is about copulation that triggers such a massive weight gain.
In a new research paper reported in the Journal of Insect Physiology, Dr. Reuben Kaufman, from the Department of Biological Sciences, suggests several differences between the ixodid tick and her blood-sucking counterparts that help explain the weight gain. Using mosquitoes, tsetse flies, bed bugs and kissing bugs as comparison, Kaufman observed that no one in comparison to this female African tick when it came to weight gain following mating.
Kaufman suggests that the ixodid tick displays a significant difference in lifestyle from the other insects and that it is adaptive for the virgin to remain small before mating.
First, this species of tick remain on the host for many days, rather than minutes. "In this family of ticks, mating takes place on the host," says Kaufman. "Most other insects mate before or after their brief blood meal -the two acts are totally separate, but not with these ticks."
Female ticks require six to 10 days to engorge fully. First, she attaches herself to the skin. Then she feeds to 10 times her unfed weight and finally, after copulation she increases her weight a further tenfold......... >>