Science

ESO has released a striking new image of a nearby galaxy that many astronomers think closely resembles our own Milky Way. Though the galaxy is seen edge-on, observations of NGC 4945 suggest that this hive of stars is a spiral galaxy much like our own, with swirling, luminous arms and a bar-shaped central region.

These resemblances aside, NGC 4945 has a brighter centre that likely harbours a supermassive black hole, which is devouring reams of matter and blasting energy out into space.

Space shuttle Discovery launched just before midnight Friday on a mission to the international space station

Discovery's liftoff, originally set for Tuesday, had been postponed three times -- first for bad weather, and twice more while mission managers checked out indications of a faulty valve.

Some people suspect that a multitasking lifestyle has changed how they think, leaving them easily distracted and unable to concentrate even when separated from computers and phones. Their uneasiness may be justified.

In several benchmark tests of focus, college students who routinely juggle many flows of information, bouncing from e-mail to web text to video to chat to phone calls, fared significantly worse than their low-multitasking peers.

Despite their popularity in the science fiction genre, there is much to be learned about black holes, the mysterious regions in space once thought to be absent of light. In a paper published in the August 20 issue of Physical Review Letters, Dartmouth researchers propose a new way of creating a reproduction black hole in the laboratory on a much-tinier scale than their celestial counterparts.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Tesla Motors turned profitable for the first time in July, when the electric car manufacturer shipped a record 109 vehicles, the company said Friday.

A surge in sales and reduced manufacturing costs of Tesla's Roadster 2 sports car helped boost the company to $1 million in earnings and $20 million in revenue.

WILL sticky tape ever cease to amaze? Peeling it can generate terahertz radiation, raising the possibility of a cheaper alternative to lasers for medical imaging.

Peeling sticky tape has already been shown to produce X-rays, so Joseph Horvat and Roger Lewis of the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, tried to see if it could create lower-frequency terahertz radiation. "We were rather pleasantly surprised to obtain a clear signal in our first attempt," says Horvat.

A new strain of HIV has jumped from gorillas to humans. So far, only one person, a 62-year-old French woman from Cameroon, has been found to be infected with the virus, which closely resembles strains of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) recently discovered in western gorillas in the wild.

"It would be surprising if there aren't some more" human cases, says David Robertson, a bioinformaticist at the University of Manchester, UK who analysed the virus's DNA along with colleagues in France. "We don't think this is a direct gorilla-to-human transmission."

In an unusual step, NASA scientists interrupted testing of the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope to aim the orbiter's camera at Jupiter and capture an image of the planet's mysterious new scar. The resulting picture, taken Thursday, is the sharpest visible-light photo of the dark spot and Hubble's first science observation since astronauts repaired and upgraded it in May, NASA said.

For the second time in a year, a total eclipse of the sun is about to cross China. But unlike the moon's hard-to-reach shadow path last August, the celestial spectacle on Wednesday will darken major cities, densely populated countryside, and a vast expanse of tropical ocean.

And the eclipse itself will be a monster, with totality – when the sun is completely covered by the moon – lasting more than 6.6 minutes at maximum. That makes this the longest totality until 2132.

Our brains can rewire themselves in just seconds to compensate for a break in incoming data, suggesting they are even more flexible than previously thought.

We already knew that the brain is constantly adapting throughout our lives, for example by generating new neurons well into adulthood. But just how quickly can it adapt – and does it always involve creating new circuits?