Setting the stage for quasars

An international team of astronomers has discovered a cosmic version of the Wonder Years, a period more than 10 billion years ago when bright adolescent galaxies and their central black holes underwent a phenomenal growth spurt.

During this period, gas in these galaxies formed into stars at a rate of about one per day, or 100 times the present rate in the Milky Way, the team reported last week in the journal Nature. Supermassive black holes inside the galaxies also grew at a similarly rapid rate.

These concurrent growth spurts may have set the stage for the birth of quasars, the distant galaxies with the largest and most active black holes in the universe.

The team included Niel Brandt of Penn State University and was headed by a former member of Brandt's lab, David Alexander of the University of Cambridge. The Keck Observatory and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, both in Hawaii, and the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory were used to study the universe in optical, submillimeter and X-ray wavelengths.

Plasticized humans

Unlike the boy in the movie "The Sixth Sense," you won't need any special powers of perception to see dead people this spring and summer. All you'll need is an admission ticket to the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland.

More than 200 authentic human specimens, including 20 whole bodies, are part of Body Worlds 2, an exhibit on anatomy, physiology and health that opened this weekend and will run through Sept. 18. The bodies have been preserved with special plastics that replace natural fluids ---- a technique called plastination developed at the University of Heidelberg by Dr. Gunther van Hagens.

For information, contact the science center at 1-216-694-2000 or at its Web site, www.GreatScience.com.

Stars come out for party

Saturday is National Astronomy Day, but members of the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh won't make you wait that long -- they will host public star parties on both Friday and Saturday nights.

The events begin at 8 p.m. Friday and 6 p.m. Saturday (early enough for solar observations) at the club's Wagman Observatory in Deer Lakes Regional Park, Frazer. For directions or to check weather conditions, call the observatory at 724-224-2510.

Wiring the mind's eye

Donald A. Glaser, a professor of physics and neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley, will discuss his ideas about how the human visual system works in a lecture at the University of Pittsburgh.

The study of the psychophysics of the visual system is the latest scientific pursuit for Glaser, 79. A Cleveland native, he won the 1960 Nobel Prize for physics for his invention of the bubble chamber used by high-energy physicists. He then became a molecular biologist and eventually founded one of the first biotechnology companies, Cetus Corp.

Glaser's talk begins at 4 p.m. Friday in room 343 of Pitt's Alumni Hall (the former Masonic Temple) in Oakland.

Red Team makes the cut

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has narrowed the field for its second Grand Challenge robotic race this October, selecting 118 teams for on-site evaluations from the 195 that submitted applications.

Two entries from Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team are among those scheduled for site reviews. Based on the reviews, DARPA will invite 40 of those teams to a qualification event in late September for the $2 million, winner-take-all race.

No more than 20 teams will qualify for the race, which pits autonomous robotic vehicles against each other over a 150-mile desert course. No team came close to finishing the inaugural event last year.