Is the Power of Pyramids Just to Fascinate

Here are some excerpts from an article about new research at the Great Pyramid of Giza.

...
The last great mystery of the pyramids could be closer to being found thanks to a robot built in Leeds.
Images captured by a new 'micro snake' camera travelling deep within the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt reveal small hieroglyphs written in red paint on the floor of a small, hidden chamber.
Egyptologists believe that if deciphered the markings could unlock the secrets of why tunnels, doors and secret chambers were built within pyramids such as this one....
...The images revealed could be numbers or graffiti which were common in Giza at the time of the pyramid's construction. Egyptologists believe the marks could be the work of stone masons or work gangs, and could denote names, numbers or dates.
....the Great Pyramid was the tallest man-made structure in the world for over 3,800 years.

Not everyone believes the mystery of a hidden chamber is about to be revealed. Although

Zahi Hawass, ... says no other pyramid has a tunnel and door like this, suggesting that it may well contain a hidden room.

Others disagree:

Egyptologist Kate Spence of Cambridge University says the tunnels may purely be symbolic and relate to the stars. Although she is not involved directly in the study of the Giza pyramid, Spence does not believe there is a further, hidden chamber behind the door, suggesting instead that the shafts could have been built to allow the Pharoah's spirit to cross to the afterlife

Headline--: Engineering student cracks major riddle of the universe

My interest here is really in the headline, and the story, which you should read, is as much a human interest story as it is one of scientific discovery.But mainly this is evidence for the way popularizers distort science.
Note the link--http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/24/oz_undergrad_finds_the_missing_matter/.

Undergrad finds the missing matter. AND Eng ineering student cracks major riddle of the universe, AND Aussie undergrad, 22, finds the 'missing mass' 

But the smaller print says: An engineering undergraduate in Australia has made a major step forward in solving one of the greatest riddles of the universe: that is, where most of it is.

Just a bit of the article---
Boffins know from observing the universe that it must have a certain amount of mass, otherwise it would have failed to hold itself together as well as it has. Argument continues as to just how well it has or is doing so, but in general astrophysicists are agreed that all the mass we can see – observed galaxies of stars, dust, gas etc – is not enough to account for what's going on. There must be a whole lot more mass out there in some form or another. It is this "missing mass" – or anyway a good chunk of it – that 22-year-old undergraduate student Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, studying Aerospace Engineering at Melbourne's Monash uni, has tracked down.

Symmetry

From an article Wired reports on:

 A newly discovered star-forming arm at the fringes of the Milky Way may be a vast, outer extension of the arm Scutum-Centaurus. The finding suggests that the Milky Way has a rare symmetry, with one half of the galaxy the mirror image of the other half. 

Billuon and billions of ----- planets

Some scientists are surprised to find evidence for many more loose planetary bodies, not connected with a stellar system, than they had assumed existed. The rest of this post is excerpts:

...a new study, published in today's [May 20, 2011]  issue of Nature,[and reviewed by Sky and Telescope] suggests that a complete census of "big bodies" drifting loose in our galaxy might actually total nearly one trillion — because Jupiter-mass "planets" in interstellar space might well outnumber the stars themselves....

Theorists are chuckling, "We told you so!" They've argued for years that the galaxy should teem with unbound planets. Some have proposed that objects with masses almost as low as Jupiter's form the way normal stars do, directly from collapsing clouds of gas and dust. Think of these as undersized brown dwarfs. Others point out that the chaos that seems to prevail in many just-formed solar systems must cause many close encounters among planets that yield "winners" (those that remain in orbit) and "losers" (those that get flung out of the system entirely).
...statistics imply that most of the loose planet-mass objects aren't just low-mass stellar wannabes — there are too many of them. Instead, the researchers believe they're finding bodies that have been ejected from unstable planetary families — and, by extension, that planetary systems should be the norm, not the exception, for the Milky Way's hundreds of billions of stars.

This also implies that early chaos in planetary systems is common. Exoplanet researchers had already concluded that this is the case from the large number of explanets that have been left in highly eccentric orbits, which they could not have formed with. 

Mysterious stellar explosion the strongest ever recorded

A gamma ray event "mystifies astronomers", according to a BBC report. Below are a few quoted details about this event which lasted 6 days, and was 5 times stronger than any other similar phenomenon, even counting that gamma ray bursts are the strongest phenomenon recorded in our universe.

...The cause of the 12 April gamma-ray flare, described at the Third Fermi Symposium in Rome, is a total mystery.It seems to have come from a small area of the famous nebula, which is the wreckage from an exploded star...The gamma-ray emission lasted for some six days, hitting levels 30 times higher than normal and varying at times from hour to hour...

At the heart of the brilliantly coloured gas cloud we can see in visible light, there is a pulsar ... But so far none of the nebula's known components can explain the signal ...What has perplexed astronomers is that these variations in gamma rays are not matched by changes in the emission of other light "colours"..."If you look in optical light, the Crab is very steady; in radio emission, it's very steady; in very, very high-energy gamma rays it's very steady. Only in this part between do we see it varying," [one scientist]... told BBC News...

"To have something that puts almost all of its energy into gamma rays is an unusual thing," he said. "We're looking at a big puzzle and are probably going to need a couple of years to understand it."...

The best guess so far is that in a region near the neutron star, intense magnetic fields become opposed in direction, suddenly re-organising themselves and accelerating close-by particles to near the speed of light....

"It's just so extraordinary that so many telescopes over so many years have been looking at the Crab and it's been constant all that time, and suddenly we discover that it's not," ...[another scientist] told BBC News....

WHAT -- Big -- Crunch??

I love the way scientific writers (not scientists themselves I suspect) introduce things in a casual way that suggests the reader skipped a chapter in some book on the topic being discussed ---- Here is physorg's reference to some theories about what came before the Big Bluster:

New theory suggests some black holes might predate the Big Bang
(PhysOrg.com) -- Cosmologists Alan Coley from Canada's Dalhousie University and Bernard Carr from Queen Mary University in London, have published a paper on arXiv, where they suggest that some so-called primordial black holes might have been created in the Big Crunch that came before the Big Bang, which lends support to the theory that the Big Bang was not a single event, but one that occurs over and over again as the universe crunches down to a single point, then blows up again, over and over.

Flowers can be glowful too

Scientists can track some gene activity by using a phosphorescent marker. When the gene is activated, a glow is visible, in, in this case, the plant. The following quote is from a review of an upcoming article in Nature Cell Biology, a professional journal.

The scientists used a bioluminescent 'reporter' to follow the activity of the Early Flowering gene (ELF4) in plants so when the gene was activated the plants would glow. The plants showed a daily rhythm of luminescence and the academics were able to determine how the cycle of ELF4 activity was regulated.

"In almost all organisms there exists a daily clock known as the circadian clock which regulates many metabolic, development and physiological processes,"..."Rather than just responding to dawn or dusk, the circadian clock is an internal rhythm which allows anticipation of these changes.

"Our own body's daily rhythms are one example but plants can also 'tell the time'. They can prepare their metabolism for photosynthesis before the sun rises or for the chill of night before the sun sets. Many plants also use their circadian clock to measure day length and so determine when to flower."