BLACK holes are black because they eat up even the light that comes out of the matter being crushed into nothingness under its fearsome gravitational pull. However, it is from their pull on other objects outside them that black holes' presence can be known. While black holes themselves are invisible, their surroundings are dominated by powerful magnetic and gravitational forces. Those forces produce extremely bright radiations. Those radiations include cosmic rays, plasma jets and gamma-ray bursts that travel across the universe. It is very recently that scientists have started to unlock the mysteries of how those radiations are generated.

IN this age of imported baby foods of a hundred and one brands, we have about forgotten our Shoti, an indigenous baby food made from the root of a perennial green plant. In the past, traditional doctors such as a Kaviraj, who practiced age-old Ayurvedic medicine, would invariably prescribe the white powdered root of shoti (scientific name 'curcuma zedoaria'), also called 'white turmeric' in English, for convalescing patients as a substitute for barley. It usually grows in the wild, but villagers in the past might also leave a fallow piece of land to cultivate it along with other similar plants.

NICO Strydo, a Jatropha farmer in Mozambique looks out over the 10-month-old, 1,000-hectare farm he runs for Sun Biofuels, a British-based company that hopes jatropha will turn African farmland into a fuel source for the 21st century.

Suddenly, the moon looks exciting again. It has lots of water, scientists said a thrilling discovery that sent a ripple of hope for a future astronaut outpost in a place that has always seemed barren and inhospitable.

THIS NASA handout illustrates the two types of spiral galaxies that populate our universe--those with plump middles, or central bulges (upper left), and those lacking the bulge (foreground). New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope provide strong evidence that the slender, bulgeless galaxies can, like their chubbier counterparts, harbour supermassive black holes at their cores. Previously, astronomers thought that a galaxy without a bulge could not have a supermassive black hole. In this illustration, jets shooting away from the black holes are depicted as thin streams. The findings are reshaping theories of galaxy formation, suggesting that a galaxy's "waistline" does not determine whether it will be home to a big black hole.