A map of distant galaxies? This puts it in perspective!

Whoa, and I remember when the "little blue dot" used to refer to EARTH.  Nope, here the blue dot is the entire MILKY WAY GALAXY. But this really puts all the quadrant rivalries into perspective!

(Though I hope you still find this little reference to be of help…)



By Ken Croswell at ScienceMag.org ...

How to find your way home from deep space

If aliens ever abduct you to a galaxy far, far away, this map might help you find your way back home. Presented online today in Nature, the map spans more than 1.5 billion light-years, coloring the densest concentrations of observed galaxies red and areas with the fewest galaxies blue. 

Your home galaxy, the Milky Way, is the blue dot at the center. The red region above the Milky Way includes Virgo, the closest galaxy cluster, about 55 million light-years from Earth. The orange curve illustrates the key finding of the new work: It encircles galaxies that would fall toward one another along the curved white lines if space weren't expanding; the astronomers have named this huge assemblage Laniakea, after Hawaiian words for "spacious heaven." It is 100 quadrillion times as massive as the sun—equivalent to 100,000 Milky Ways—and stretches across more than half a billion light-years of space. 

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Shields up! A better "invisibility cloak" unveiled

More treknology, folks:

I don't know what's more amazing—that science has already made more major strides in this area, or that the lead paragraph uses Harry Potter instead of Romulans:

'Perfect' Invisibility Cloak Uses Metamaterials To Bend Light

The days when invisibility cloaks were confined to the world of "Harry Potter" may soon be over. Physicists at Duke University announced Monday that they had successfully cloaked an object with "perfect" invisibility. ...

...So how did they keep these reflections out of the new design?

"Landy's new microwave cloak is naturally divided into four quadrants, each of which have voids or blind spots at their intersections and corners with each other," explains io9. "Thus, to avoid the reflectivity problem, Landy was able to correct for it by shifting each strip so that is met its mirror image at each interface."

Ah. Well, at least we got a Clue about the quadrants in there: "Secret passage to Gamma Quadrant: one wormhole move."

The pods are still *not* overloadin'—but getting there

Did you hear?

Now instead of mere nano-seconds, scientists had figured out how to capture and sustain real anti-matter for... longer.

Here's a more mainstream layman's take on this breakthrough—actually, just another step toward Cochrane's engine....

...And here's a more in-depth piece from Nature.com.


I just hope those CERN scientists have their core ejector systems in better shape than Starfleet usually did.