Earth safe

The Spacewatch Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, has ruled out the chance that a recently discovered asteroid, believed to be about 1,300 feet long, could hit the earth in 2029, reports NASA. Faint pictures of the asteroid in archival images allowed the scientists to redraw the asteroid's projected trajectory, clearly missing our planet and the moon on April 13, 2029.

Nose design

Our nose is much complexer than a jumbo jet engine or the blood vessel circuit in our heart. A 3D model of the nose developed by the researchers at the Imperial College London shows that it has got no straight lines or simple curves like we see in an aircraft wing. The air eddied, whirled and re-circulated in a structural nose map will help surgeons plan operations and find a cure for runny noses.

Nebulae shape

Why are 80 per cent of all planetary nebulae (expanding gas shells ejected by the dying Sun-like stars) not spherical' Using the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory, Chile, a team of astronomers has found the answer. They detected magnetic fields in the central stars of four nebulae which may indeed make them bipolar or elliptical, reports Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Salty bacteria

Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have found primitive bacteria in the extremely salty pockets of water at the bottom of the eastern Mediterranean sea. The researchers found abundant colonies of microbes in the oxygen-less 6,000,000-year-old salty lakes, reports the journal Science.