What are your true colors? The palette that brings out your natural beauty     
 
Just because you love a color, that doesn’t mean it loves you back. The fact is some hues complement your features better than others. A refined makeup palette can enliven your eye color, refine bone structure and reinvent your all-around beauty. Pair your made-up face with a complementary dress and you’re Golden Globe-ready. It’s the kind of classified information relegated to wealthy celebrities, their stylists, and Leatrice Eiseman. As director of the Pantone Color Institute, Eiseman’s job is to consult with industry leaders in fashion, design, and marketing to choose colors that will best enhance their brands.    Her expertise also extends to individuals. Eiseman's "color-time" system uses mother nature to decode flattering palettes for every skin type.

“The best way to judge your coloring is to think in terms of how color appears in nature at various times of the day,” says Eiseman, author of the palette-pleasing color guide More Alive With Color. She divides skin tones into three categories: sunrise, sunset, and sunlight. The color range reflected off the sun at different times of the day dictate which hues are most flattering for each skin tone. That, in turn, informs your wardrobe and makeup choices. To check which category you fall into, look at the veins in your wrist. If they’re green consider yourself a "sunset", if they’re blue you’re a "sunrise". If you’re a mix of both you’re in the "sunlight" palette.

Sunrise: “In the morning, the sunrise palette colors are clear, clean and crisp,” says Eiseman. “Primarily blue undertones evolve into jewel tones.”
Coloring: Fair-skinned, dark-haired brunettes; fair-skinned silver-haired women; fair-skinned cool blondes; dark, blue-black skin tones with dark hair; and olive skin with dark hair.
Palette: Shimmering jewel-tones like emerald, sapphire, aquamarine and amethyst.

Sunset: An earthier, darker selection of colors reflect the waning day.
Coloring: Tawny redheads with fair to medium skin; golden blondes or brunettes with golden skin-tones; brunettes with mocha-colored skin.
Palette: Warm gold, russets, hot pinks, red-violets and twilight blues.

 
Sunlight:“Between the two extremes is the sun-drenched palette, when sun or reflected light is strongest and colors are very subtle, muted and soft,” explains Eiseman.
Coloring: Light to mid skin-tones with hair that is medium in hue.
Palette: Peony pinks, hazy violets, placid blue and cameo greens.

   

By reconstructing the brains of extinct birds, researchers could shed light on when birds evolved into creatures of flight.

 
Overwhelming evidence suggests birds evolved from dinosaurs some 150 million years ago, but one of the missing pieces to the evolutionary puzzle is how such birds took to the air.

 
Scientists in Scotland are focusing on changes in the size of a part of the rear of the brain. This part of the cerebellum, known as the flocculus, is responsible for integrating visual and balance signals during flight, allowing birds to judge the position of other objects in midflight. [ 3-D Image of Raven Brain]

 
"We believe we can discover how the flocculus has evolved to deal with different flying abilities, giving us new information about when birds first evolved the power of flight," said project leader Stig Walsh, senior curator of vertebrate palaeobiology at National Museums Scotland.

 
In collaboration with the University of Abertay Dundee, investigators are scanning fossils of at least a half-dozen extinct species and the skulls of roughly 100 modern birds in unusual detail. "Unlike medical scanners, which take a series of slice images through an object that may be up to 1.5 millimeters apart, the 3-D scanner at Abertay University can be accurate up to 6 microns," Walsh said. (The width of a strand of hair is about 100 microns.)

 
[Photos: More incredible images of dinosaurs and fossils]

 
When it comes to the modern birds, "we are particularly interested in species that are closely related where there are flying and flightless examples, such as cormorants, pigeons, parrots and ducks," Walsh told LiveScience.

 
This could reveal whether the flocculus became smaller with the loss of flight.

 
In addition, the researchers are investigating birds that are particularly fast fliers, such as peregrine falcons; those with acrobatic talents, such as swifts and house martins; those that can hover through powered flight, such as kingfishers; and birds that can fly backward, such as hummingbirds.

 
The extinct birds the researchers are scanning include recently vanished species such as the dodo, which died out in the late 17th century, as well as fossils of three species from the lower Eocene roughly 55 million years ago, a flightless sea bird from the Cretaceous Period around 100 million years ago, and the oldest known flying bird, Archaeopteryx.  
 
Those prehistoric fossils, which retain their original shape, are extraordinarily rare, since most bird fossils are flattened by the earth under which they are buried.

 
[Related: Fossil records reveal 'explosion' of life]

 
The researchers are looking for a link between a larger flocculus and a greater ability to process the visual and balance signals during flight. If the relationship is proven, it could mark a major step forward in understanding bird evolution, and even might help resolve the controversy over whether some ancient bird-like fossils were truly those of dinosaurs or simply of birds that lost the power of flight.

 
"With the heated debate about these animals, this would be an excellent finding, though I'm sure the debate won't end there," Walsh said.

 
The project is scheduled to run until early 2012.

• Image Gallery: Rare and Exotic Birds
• Avian Ancestors: Dinosaurs That Learned to Fly
• Flightless Birds: Gallery of All 18 Penguin Species

• Original Story: Fossilized Bird Brains May Yield Secret of First Flights    

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110101/sc_livescience/fossilizedbirdbrainsmayyieldsecretoffirstflights    

It turns out our sun may be a cosmic thief that's stolen most of its comets from other stars, a new study suggests. 

Comets are small icy bodies that flare up when they near the sun as solar radiation vaporizes their ice to create a glowing tail.

 
New computer simulations of the billions of comets crisscrossing the solar system suggest that most of them originated beyond our local neighborhood, but got grabbed and pulled in by our sun's gravity later.

 
Such a scenario goes against the long-standing model for comet evolution, which holds that most of our local comets come from the same region where the sun and its planets formed. This region, known as the Oort cloud, encircles the solar system and extends far beyond Pluto.

 
According to researcher Hal Levison, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., however, "the standard model can't produce anywhere near the number of comets we see."

 
"This model says the comets are dregs of our own solar system's planetary formation and that our planets gravitationally booted them to huge distances, populating the cloud," Levison explained. Such a process would likely have occurred around other stars as well, with each giving rise to their own cloud of comet debris.

But stars may not have held on to their initial clouds.

 
Like many other stars, the sun was birthed in an open star cluster that disintegrated over time. These clusters, typically containing between ten and a thousand stars jammed into a tiny space, have an average radius not much different from the present day Oort cloud. The close proximity of stars within these clusters could have allowed stars to "steal" fledgling comets from one another.

 
And a star wouldn't have had to have been the biggest in order to be the most successful thief. If a comet moved far enough away from its parent star and close enough to the sun, for example, the sun's gravity could trap it even if the parent star was significantly more massive.

 
When it doesn't add up

The distance of the Oort cloud from Earth makes it difficult to observe – much less pin down the exact number of comets it contains. The amount of comets that exist there must be inferred from observations of those comets that light up as they pass near the sun.

 
But based on this data, Levison and his team say there seem to be around 400 billion comets hovering just beyond Pluto. In comparison, the conventional model predicts only 6 billion.

 
"That's...a huge discrepancy," Levison said. "Too huge to be explained by mistakes in the estimates. There's no way we could be that far off, so there has to be something wrong with the model itself."

 
The orbits of many long-period comets seem to support that finding. Their highly oblong orbits take them far out into the depths of space.

 
"So they couldn't have been born in orbit around the sun," Levison said. "They had to have formed close to other stars and then been hijacked here."

 
Comets are generally regarded as excellent snapshots of the early solar system, because they spend much of their lives encased in ice. But if some of these comets come from outside our solar system, then they can tell us about their parent stars, as well.

 
"We can study the orbits of comets and put their chemistry into the context of where and around which star they formed," Levison said. "It's intriguing to think we got some of our 'stuff' from distant stars. We're kin."

• 5 Reasons to Care About Asteroids
• New Comet Finding May Alter Theories About Life on Earth
• Video - Collision Watch: Scientists Track Comets That Could Slam Earth    

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20101223/sc_space/wantedfortheftsunstoleitscometsfromotherstars    

Yes, the Naga Viper, the latest claimant to the world's-hottest-pepper crown, outdistances its predecessor, the Bhut Jolokia, or  "ghost chili," by more than 300,000 points on the famous Scoville scale of tongue-scorching chili hotness. Researchers at Warwick University testing the Naga Viper found that it measures 1,359,000 on the Scoville scale, which rates heat by tracking the presence of a chemical compound. In comparison, most varieties of jalapeño peppers measure in the 2,500 to 5,000 range -- milder than the Naga Viper by a factor of 270.     
 

You might think the Naga Viper would hail from some part of the world with a strong demand for spicy food, such as India or Mexico. But the new pepper is actually the handiwork of Gerald Fowler, a British chili farmer and pub owner, who crossed three of the hottest peppers known to man -- including the Bhut Jolokia -- to create his Frankenstein-monster chili.

 
"It's painful to eat," Fowler told the Daily Mail. "It's hot enough to strip paint." Indeed, the Daily Mail reports that defense researchers are already investigating the pepper's potential uses as a weapon.

 
But Fowler -- who makes customers sign a waiver declaring that they're of sound mind and body before trying a Naga Viper-based curry -- insists that consuming the fiery chili does the body good.

 
"It numbs your tongue, then burns all the way down," he told the paper. "It can last an hour, and you just don't want to talk to anyone or do anything. But it's a marvelous endorphin rush. It makes you feel great."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20101203/sc_yblog_thelookout/worlds-hottest-pepper-is-hot-enough-to-strip-paint    

This story has been corrected to reflect that Neptune will actually complete its first orbit around the sun, since being discovered, in 2011.

The planet Neptune will be in opposition — when the sun, Earth, and a planet fall in a straight line on Aug. 20. The planet will be exactly opposite the sun in the sky, being highest in the sky at local midnight. Usually this is also the point where the planet is closest to the Earth.

This opposition is special because Neptune will be returning close to the spot where it was discovered in 1846, marking its first complete trip around the sun since its discovery. Neptune is close, but still not quite at the finish line of its first orbit since being discovered yet. That will occur in 2011, according to NASA.

Coincidentally, opposition in 1846 also fell on Aug. 20, although the planet wasn't actually spotted until over a month later, on Sept. 23.

This Neptune sky map shows where to find the planet as it completes it hits opposition this year.

Strange path to discovery

The discovery of Neptune has an interesting prehistory.

The planet Uranus was discovered more or less by accident in 1781 by Sir William Herschel, in the course of his search for deep sky objects. As time went by, Uranus' position wasn't quite what astronomer's predicted, and mathematical astronomers began to suspect that there was another planet out there whose gravity was influencing Uranus' motion.

In the mid-1840s an Englishman named John Couch Adams and a Frenchman named Urbain Le Verrier independently calculated where this new planet would have to be located to have the observed effect on Uranus, but both had trouble getting observational astronomers interested in looking for it.

Finally the German astronomer Johann Galle actually looked at the predicted location and discovered the tiny blue-green disk of the planet that eventually came to be known as Neptune. The date was Sept. 23, 1846. This led to a drawn out battle between French and English astronomers as to who pointed to Neptune first; in the end, a three-way tie was declared and Adams, Le Verrier, and Galle share the honor of discovering Neptune.

Ironically, Galle was not the first person to observe Neptune. That honor goes to none other than Galileo Galilei, who twice observed Neptune but mistook it for a star, on Dec. 28, 1612, and Jan. 27, 1613. Galileo had two strikes against him: first, the small size and poor quality of his telescopes, and secondly he happened to observe Neptune when it was stationary, as happens to all planets from time to time because of the relative motions of the planet and Earth.

For nearly a century Neptune was the planet farthest from the sun, only losing that honor when tiny Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. Now that the International Astronomical Union has downgraded Pluto's status, Neptune is once again the farthest known planet from the sun — at least in our solar system.

Because of its great distance from the sun, 30 astronomical units out (1 AU is the distance from the sun to Earth), and its relatively small diameter (30,800 miles/49,500 km), Neptune is a dim and tiny object in amateur telescopes. While Uranus can just be glimpsed with the naked eye under perfect dark sky conditions, Neptune requires binoculars or a small telescope to be seen.

Finding Neptune now

For somewhat seasoned backyard astronomers, this Neptune map can help to locate the planet.

Around 1 a.m. this week look for the large but faint triangle of Capricornus, to the left of Sagittarius and the Milky Way. The two stars at the left end of the triangle point the way to Neptune, just a little bit short of and above the star Iota in the neighboring constellation Aquarius.

In a small telescope, Neptune will look just like a star; what gives it away is its distinctive blue-green color.

Although tiny in a telescope and dwarfed by giants Jupiter and Saturn, Neptune is still four times the diameter of the Earth. Like all the gas giant planets, it shows only an atmosphere, in this case fairly featureless. When the Voyager 2 passed by in 1986 it photographed a huge "Blue Spot" in Neptune's upper atmosphere, perhaps similar to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. Like all the gas giants, Neptune has a system of rings, but these are far fainter than Saturn's famous rings.

Although Neptune's face appears serene, its atmosphere boasts winds which travel almost at supersonic speeds. Its 13 moons range in size from what are little more than boulders up to Triton, 1,680 miles (2,700 km.) in diameter.