Times of India

The novel idea is being aired by two US physicists, who at­tack the notion that the uni­verse, believed to have been cre­ated in the "Big Bang" some13.7 billion years ago, will go on, well, forever. In fact, the poor old cosmos is in a rather deli­cate state, they say. Until re­cently, a common idea was that the energy unleashed in the Big Bang happened when a "false vacuum" - a bubble of high energy with repulsive gravity - broke down into a safe, zero ­energy "ordinary" vacuums. But recent evidence has emerged that places a cosmic question-­mark over this cozy thought. For one thing, cosmologists have discovered that the uni­verse is still expanding. And, they believe, a strange, yet-to ­be-detected form of energy call­ed dark energy pervades the universe, which explains why the sum of all the visible sour­ces of energy fall way short of what should be out there. Dark energy, it is said, is a result of the Big Bang and is aiding the universe's expansion. If so, the Universe is not in a nice, stable zero-vacuum state but simply another "false vac­uum" state that may abruptly decay again - and with cata­clysmic consequences.

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 2500-year-old advanced civili­zation at the bottom of Lake Issyk Kul in the Kyrgyz Moun­tains in Russia . The expedition resulted in sensational finds, including the discovery of major settlements, presently buried underwater. The data and artifacts ob­tained, which are currently un­der study, apply the finishing touches to the many years of exploration in the lake, made by seven previous expeditions. The discovery consisted of formidable walls, some stretch­ing for 500 meters-traces of a large city with an area of sev­eral square kilometers. Other findings included Scythian burial mounds, erod­ed by waves over the centuries, and numerous well preserved artifacts-bronze battleaxes, ar­rowheads, self-sharpening dag­gers, objects discarded by smiths, casting molds, and a faceted gold bar, which was a monetary unit of the time. All these discoveries suggest that the ancient city was a metropolis in its time. Some artifacts are in fact so stun­ning that they point towards an advanced civilization. For example, a 2,500 year­ old ritual bronze cauldron was found on the lake. The subtlety of its crafts­manship is amazing. Such ex­cellent quality of joining de­tails together can only be ob­tained presently by metalwork in an inert gas. Also of superb workman­ ship are bronze mirrors, fes­tive horse harnesses and many other objects.

The solar wind, which whips off the sun and blows past Earth and through the solar system, is unleashed by powerful magnetic waves in electrically charged gas around the sun,' scientists said. The mechanisms that cause the solar wind had baffled sci­entists for decades, but were re­vealed in observations by a Japanese satellite called Hin­ode orbiting Earth, the scien­tists said in research published in the journal 'Science'. "The magnificent thing about the success of Hinode is its unprecedented view of the dynamics of the sun," Jonathan Cirtain, a solar physi­cist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre, Huntsville , Al­abama , who helped in the re­search, said. The research was conducted by Japanese, Euro­pean and US scientists. The solar wind is a stream of electrically charged gas - most­ly hydrogen - blown outward from the sun in all directions at a speed of about 1.6 million kph. It buffets planetary atmospheres. On Earth, it can disrupt satel­lites, power grids and commu­nications, under certain cir­cumstances. Earth's magnetic field protects against the solar wind, creating a bubble around which the wind must flow. Driving the solar wind are so-called Alfven waves – strong magnetic waves - that ripple through the plasma of the sun's atmosphere, or corona, trans­ferring energy from the star's surface and into the solar wind, the researchers said.