Nature Hub

        From - Sky & Telescope    By- AAS NOVA    Edited -  Amal Udawatta    A 1995 Hubble Space Telescope image of the brown dwarf Gliese 229 B next to its far brighter host star, the M dwarf Gliese 229 A. S. Kulkarni (Caltech), D.Golimowski (JHU) and NASA Astronomers recently discovered a companion to Gliese 229 B, the first confidently identified brown dwarf. This discovery resolves the conflict between Gliese 229 B’s observed mass and the predictions of evolutionary models, potentially illuminating the nature of other poorly understood brown dwarf systems as well. An illustration of a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs aren’t actually brown, likely spanning a range of colors from reddish-orange to nearly black. NASA / JPL-Caltech In 1995, Gliese 229 B became the first object to be unambiguously classified as a brown dwarf: an object that bridges the gap between planets and stars. At roughly 13–80 times the mass of Jupiter, brown dwar...

      From - BBC World News Edited by -Amal Udawatta Getty Images When many people struggled to eat a healthy diet, odd-tasting oils were touted as a fix-all. It turns out one of them did indeed pack a vitamin punch. These days, the words "cod liver oil" are vaguely sepia-tinged. They conjure up an image of a murky spoonful of something, brandished by a school nurse or a Dickensian headmaster. So many remedies from the 18th and 19th Centuries have not stood the test of time. We no longer, for instance,  routinely give crying babies opiates . Syrup of figs and  castor oil are no longer considered cure-alls , though they take care of constipation perhaps a little too well. And when was the last time you stopped by the chemist's for  brimstone and treacle ? But cod liver oil is one of those rare remedies from the age of snake oil and patent medicine that actually had something to it. Made from heating the livers of codfish and catching the oil that leaks out, ...

 From - BBC News By -Sophie Hardach  ,   Editted by - Amal Udawatta Getty Images Researchers are unlocking the ancient secrets of the world's most diverse marine habitat. Could their discoveries help us save our oceans? In an office wing of the Natural History Museum in London, two researchers slide open a plain storage cupboard door to reveal a hidden treasure: shelves of fossilised corals, up to  30 million years old , from the world's most diverse marine habitat. Some look like petrified brains, others like rocks with filigrane patterns. "I like to look at things in the past and see if we can learn lessons from them," says Ken Johnson, with an eye on the fossils. Johnson is a palaeontologist and principal researcher at the museum's Earth Sciences department. Next to him stands Nadia Santodomingo, a marine biologist and geoscientist, and curator at the museum. They and their team collected the fossils in Indonesia more than a decade ago, working with colleague...

         From =BBC News        Devon Van Houten Maldonado -  Features correspondent        Edited by  Amal Udawatta Museo Nacional de Arte de Mexico The colour survives in the work of 17th Century Spanish colonial painters, a symbol of the wealth that ultimately doomed the Maya, writes Devon Van Houten Maldonado. In 17th Century Europe, when Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens painted their famous masterworks, ultramarine blue pigment made from the semi-precious lapis lazuli stone was mined far away in Afghanistan and cost more than its weight in gold. Only the most illustrious painters were allowed to use the costly material, while lesser artists were forced to use duller colours that faded under the sun. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution in the 19th Century that a synthetic alternative was invented, and true ultramarine blue finally became widely available. During colonisation Maya b...