Giant Freakin Robot

Is this footage real or is it a deleted scene from Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life? Our Sun is one volatile star. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured glorious high-definition video of our Sun during two separate solar storms on November 16th.

We try to stay on top of all things robotic here at GFR, so this is the sort of story that puts a big stupid grin on our faces. Because, you see, the robots are coming. Scratch that; they’re already here. Yes, during the last couple of days a series of mysterious robot sightings have been reported in and around Los Angeles. Robots hailing cabs. Robots exiting the subway. Robots lurking around darkened parking lots. Why are they here? What do they want from us? Is there some reason they seem so keen on public transportation? And does anybody have an EMP bomb we can borrow for the GFR security bunker?

This is the kind of discovery that my grandmother would avoid knowing about, due to both the complications and implications involved. The Cluster Lensing and Supernova Survey with Hubble (CLASH) is a multi-wavelength census of 25 galaxy clusters with Hubble’s powerful Advanced Camera for Survey (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3(WFC3), using 17 wavelength filters, spanning near-ultraviolet to near-infrared. 20 of those 25 surveys have been completed, and in February, CLASH member Dan Coe, the lead author of this study, discovered MACS0647-JD, a 13.3 billion year-old galaxy formed just 420 million years into the formation of our universe. Word has it, when Keith Richards heard about it, he dropped to knees and wept, crying out, “Home at last!”

Science has helped in the curing and cessation of many diseases and deformities in our time, and I can only hope in wide-eyed naivete that all of the world’s ailments will one day be extricated from humanity’s timeline. I care, of course, for the millions in misery at this very moment, but mostly, it’s in hopes that Seth MacFarlane might shoot for some original jokes on Family Guy once in a while.

(Michael J. Fox cutaway gag.)

Virginia Lee, a neurobiologist from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, led a team in researching cellular travel of Parkinson’s disease. Published in Science, the study involved injecting the brains of mice with a misfolded synthetic version of the a-synuclein protein, which had already been shown to spread between neighboring cells, sometimes causing cellular death. Previous research also indicated that Parkinson’s might be spread from neuron to neuron via rogue protein. The injected mice almost certainly proved the causal relationship between protein and spread of disease, disproving previous beliefs that the disease spontaneously arises in the cells.