Voyager 1 passes 100 AU

Voyager 1, the nuclear powered spacecraft has just reached 100 AU (Astronomical Units = the distance from the Earth to the Sun or 93 million miles). That is a distance of around 9 thousand million miles from the Earth!
It is the outer most solar system, in a region called the heliosheath. If you imagine a vast bubble around the solar system, the heliosheath is the outer layer. The outmost layer of the bubble is the heliopause, the boundary to intersteller space.
The hubble space telescope has detected similar bubbles surronding other stars & solar systems.
So we have some frame of reference, easy as it is to imagine when looking at one of these hubble images, that you are looking at our solar system.
Both the Voyager probes will be travelling effortlessly through space for millions of years, possibly for thousands of millions of years, of even until the death of the universe.
They will, no doubt one day be the only evidence in the universe that human beings ever existed.
Voyager is an apt name for this amazing spacecraft and a reminder of what we can achievable through ambition, knowledge, resources, understanding and physics.

star dust

You, me, everyone who has ever lived and ever will live, your house, you car, your son, your daughter, even your dog are all made of star dust. So is this beautiful planet we call Earth. So are all the planets in the solar system and the sun itself.
Imagine the scene. some 6 thousand million years ago. A vast cloud of gas & dust is hit by the shockwave of a supernova (star death) and collapses under its own gravity, nuclear fusion is ignited and a star, in this case, our sun is born. Any material from the cloud that did not become our star, forms a disc around her and out of this disc the planets are born and we have our solar system.
So our entire solar system and everything in it was born out of a cloud of gas & dust. The trigger to the birth of our entire solar system was one of the most energetic things imaginable, a supernova.
Stars are factories. The very first stars were giant and made of the lightest element, hydrogen. These stars fused new elements inside their cores all through their life times, these new elements were subsequently blown into space when the star died in a supernova, helping to create the next generation of stars. Each generation of stars fused heavier and heavier (more & more complex) atoms together, until we finally reached things like oxygen & carbon.
All the complex elements in the universe, including the carbon we are made of, was made in the core and in the death throws of countless stars.

dark matter

Nasa's Chandra & Hubble space telescopes have contributed to the best evidence for the existence of dark matter by measuring the radiation given off by two distant, colliding galaxy clusters.
Dark matter is dark because it does not absorb or emit light, by its very nature it is impossible to observe directly, only its gravitational effects can be seen and it is these effects that have just been observed.
Without any dark matter surronding the clusters, the hot gas & dust between the galaxies and the galaxies themselves would quickly fly apart. Instead of this, observations showed the hot gas & dust was slowed by a drag force which must be from dark matter. Through it's effects, astronomers worked out that the dark matter itself was not slowing down because it only interacts graviationally.
For the first time, this seems to be direct evidence for the existence of dark matter in our universe.
Will our universe turn out to be, as thought by many scientists made up mainly of dark energy & dark matter, with only around 5% being baryonic (normal) matter?
Imagine that, if all of the stars in all of the galaxies in all of the galaxy clusters in all of the super galaxy clusters in all of the universe made up on 5% of everything in the universe.

inspired by the prgramme What makes us human?

It has long been a puzzle as to what caused the, in evolutionary terms, very rapid development of the cerebral cortex, which seems to have started 6 million years ago in our distant ancestors. (Human brains relative to the size of the body are huge, 3 times the size of a chimps brain). This rapid evolution of the brain allowed our ancestors and eventually ourselves to dominate our environment, through, amongst other things, the application of technology and it is also the reason why humans have an infinite ability to be creative/destructive.
Recently scientists have discovered a gene sequence which seems to play a significant role in giving humans their unique brain capacity. This sequence has gone through an amazing amount of evolution in the realitively short period of 6 million years. As an example, chickens & chimps (seperated by hundreds of millions of evolutionary years) share identical versions of this sequence, apart from two base pairs but humans & chimps have differences in 18 base pairs and we are only seperarated by six million years.
If this gene sequence is responsible for our very large brain capacity, how will we use the knowledge? Could this gene sequence and a few others like it be all that seperates us, all that it is that makes us human? Does this genetic inheritence manisfest itself in our potential to transcend our own biology? Am i talking utter bollocks?