Andromeda is FULL of Black Holes!

And ones more from my little motorcycle dude..

Discovery.com website writes about a section of the Andromeda galaxy that has recently been under the scrutiny of NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope.

From the article:

• 26 new stellar-mass black hole candidates have been identified, adding to nine previously known and bringing the grand total to 35.

 The photo shows the core of Andromeda's X-Ray candidates and the core.

Check out the complete Discovery article here

Germs Taken Into Space May Come Back Deadlier

from USNews.com

Does this sound like the Andromeda Strain or what? "Deadly germs come back on a research space craft" Perfect B-movie plot , huh? What's even scarier is , it really happened. In a medical experiment, salmonella carried about the space shuttle in the fall of 2006 proved far more lethal to lab mice than the exact same microbe here on Earth. Just how much more deadly? 90% dead vs. 60% dead in twenty-six days. And that was with far less of the microbe in the oral dose. Apparently 167 genes in the space-evolved strain had changed. The likely cause: In zero G the force of fluids passing over the cells is low, similar to conditions in the gastrointestinal tract, and the cells adapted quickly to the new environment.

thanks to slashdot.com for the original article

Eureka & SG1 may have some faces in common

From SyFy Portal

It seems the cast of SG-1 has already started branching out. Amanda Tapping (Samantha Carter)
has moved over to Startgate Atlantis and others are taking on roles on some of the networks other programming. Michael Shanks, who played archaeologist Daniel Jackson for 10 years on the series, is set to enter the small town of “Eureka” as is his wife Lexa Doig. Doig, who is most known to genre fans as Rommie from “Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda,” as well as a recurring role on "SG-1" in the ninth and 10th seasons, will enter the series for a single episode, “Maneater,” playing a biologist who deals with sexual harassment cases for Global Dynamics. A week after her appearance on the series, her husband Shanks will take on the role of a suave artistic genius who discovers that one of his metal sculptures has been transformed into solid gold. The episode, “All That Glitters,” is set to air Sept. 25.

The Andromeda Strain is being developed as a miniseries

From Blackfish publishing via SF Signals:

Michael Crichton's first novel The Andromeda Strain has already spawned a decent movie version, directed by SF legend Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still The Haunting Star Trek: The Motion Picture) back in 1971. But now it's been snapped up by Ridley and Tony Scott who will produced a TV series of the story – the apocalyptic tale of an alien germ that comes to Earth and threatens to wipe out humanity. Planned as a four-to-six hour mini-series, it will be broadcast late next year on America's A&E network

Andromeda Galaxy Five Time Bigger Than Thought

The discovery of several large, metal-poor stars located far from the center of the Andromeda galaxy suggests our nearest galactic neighbor might be up to five times larger than previously thought.

"We're typically used to thinking of Andromeda as this tiny speck of light, but the actual size of the halo…extends to a very large radius and it actually fills a substantial portion of the night sky," said study team member Jason Kalirai of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Also known as M31, Andromeda is located only about 2.5 million light-years from Earth, making it our nearest galactic neighbor.

Like our own Milky Way, Andromeda is a classic spiral galaxy, which typically consists of three main parts: a flattened disk, a bright central bulge of densely packed stars and an extended spherical halo where stars are more sparsely distributed.