Galaxies in gridlock

Nothing draws a crowd like a spectacular crash - whether it's a NASCAR auto race or a galactic collision. Over the past month, Internet users voted for a cosmic smash-up as their favorite target for a future close-up from the Hubble Space Telescope, and this week you can feast your eyes on two fantastic images of galaxies in gridlock.

The first "train wreck" comes from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. This is a biggie: Two huge galaxies, each anchored by a central black hole that's millions of times as massive as the sun, are moving toward an imminent pile-up. Exactly how imminent? Millions of years after the scene captured in this image - a time span that's a mereblink of the eye on the cosmic scale.

"One of the most exciting things about the image is that this object is unique," Stephanie Bush of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says in a news release about the observations. "Merging is a quick process, especially when you get to the train wreck that is happening. There just aren't many galactic mergers at this stage in the nearby universe."

Spitzer's image of NGC 6240, which is 400 million light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, highlights the bursts of infrared radiation as the dust and gas from the two galaxies slam together. All that pressure creates new generations of hot stars, blazing away in infrared wavelengths even though the radiation in visible wavelengths is obscured by dust clouds. Because of this phenomenon, these starry swirls are known as luminous infrared galaxies.

In the news release, the Spitzer science team point to the streams of stars being ripped off the galaxies - "tidal tails" that extend into space in all directions. And this is just the warmup act: Bush and her colleagues expect the galactic black holes to hit head-on. That would upgrade NGC 6240's status to that of an ultra-luminous infrared galaxy, thousands of times as bright in infrared as our own Milky Way.

The findings are detailed in The Astrophysical Journal. In addition to Bush, the paper's co-authors include Zhong Wang, Margarita Karovska and Giovanni Fazio, all of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

This week's other galactic crash was witnessed by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Two galaxies are piling into each other 70 million light-years away in the constellation Libra, and just as in the case of NGC 6240, the clashing clouds of gas and dust are sparking waves of stellar fireworks.

These galaxies, collectively known as Arp 261, aren't as big as the monsters in NGC 6240. They're on the scale of dwarf galaxies, similar to the Magellanic Clouds orbiting the Milky Way. In this week's image advisory, the ESO says the focus of research in this picture actually isn't the wide-screen view of smashing galaxies, but a detailed look at an unusually long-lasting, X-ray-emitting supernova. This image adds little white bars to highlight the location of the supernova.

The picture also includes other objects at a wide range of distances. If you click on a higher-resolution view, you'll be able to make out a sprinkling of background galaxies on the right side of the picture. Those galaxies may be 50 to 100 times farther away than Arp 261, the ESO says.

Toward the top left corner of the picture, you can see two red-green-blue streaks. Those are two small asteroids in our solar system's main asteroid belt. The streaks are multicolored because the ESO's picture was taken through different color filters - and the asteroids were moving through the telescope field even as the exposures were switched from one filter to the next.

If you're looking for more simply smashing pictures, don't miss today's report about Saturn's quadruple-moon transit, as well as our regular roundup of the best space views in the cosmos.

Correction for 3:30 p.m. ET March 18: I fixed a bad link to the Saturn transit story ... Sorry about that! After reading all the perceptive comments below, I've also edited the item to straighten something out about the timing of events at NGC 6240. We will likely see an even more spectacular pile-up there millions of years from now, but because the galaxies are so distant, and because the speed of light is finite, that phase of the pile-up will have happened hundreds of millions of years earlier.

Stressed Out? Snuggle Up!

From the hallowed halls of science comes another excuse to get close: New research shows that hugs and kisses slash stress. Loving touches — and the resulting gush of good feelings — can cut the level of stress hormones coursing through your body by 7 percent, according to a recent study in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. Anything from sex to holding hands can do the trick. You get calmer every minute you’re in contact. So go ahead: pop in a movie and spend the evening snuggling on the couch. You’ll be healthier for it.

The stress-snuggle connection was put to the test by Beate Ditzen, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who studied 51 couples for a week, asking them to record their activities and take saliva samples every three hours. The samples were analyzed for levels of the stress hormone cortisol. The results: "Intimacy reduced cortisol levels by improving mood," says Dr. Ditzen.



A Daily Dose

Every minute spent hugging, kissing, holding hands or having sex translated into a small decrease in stress. Every touch had the same power to soothe. In other words, the 20th hug or kiss worked just as well as the first, and 20 hugs generated 20 times as much stress relief as a single snuggle. Unfortunately, you can’t bank the benefits. Extra physical intimacy today won’t reduce your stress levels later this week. You’ve got to be "in touch" every day.

The benefits of loving touch do stick beyond the front door, however. Work-related stress doesn’t stand a chance if you’ve gotten a good dose of closeness, the researchers learned. Sure, a hug can erase the tension of a tough day on the job. But more than that, intimacy actually protects you from feeling work stress at all, whether you have a crummy office, bad manager, long hours, deadline pressure, interruptions or other job woes. So if the day looks like it has challenges ahead, make a date for a little kissing before or after work, or maybe even sneak some in at lunch.

Happily Ever After

The de-stressing effects of sex and snuggles may explain why happily married couples live longer and healthier lives. Studies have already proven that loving touch can reduce blood pressure and have other health benefits. Scientists have a number of theories about why intimacy is relaxing. For example, a hug can bring on a gush of the love hormone oxytocin, which floods the body and feels great.

Angry hugs don’t work, which might explain why unhappily married couples don’t live any longer than singles. Negative emotions seem to ruin the health benefits and de-stressing effect. So if you want to live happily ever after (and make it last), hold out for someone who makes you feel great.


Try This at Home

If you don’t have a mate handy for hugs, try getting the benefits from friends and family. While the couples in this study were all dual-income with kids, the researchers did not evaluate whether hugs and kisses from children, parents, friends or others might be just as good at scaring off stress. Other studies have linked friendship with good health, longevity and less stress. And Dr. Ditzen agrees that snuggling up to anyone who feels yummy might reduce stress levels.

Send free text messages

Send free text messages: Most carriers charge 20 cents per text message. And most teenagers exchange a gazillion text messages per month—on their parents’ dime. Gat’s some ugly math. You
could lower the rates by adding a messaging package to your service plan, to the tune of $5 to $20 per month. But we want your bill to go down, not up. If you are the sender and you’re near a PC, you can bypass your phone altogether and send messages gratis via GizmoSMS.com. Enter the recipient’s
phone number and your message, and click Send. For a two-way alternative, go to Cherple.com, hose free prore corded TV across the Net by plugging a Slingbox into your cable box or DVR, but the device is expensive. Amazingly, a free, sobware-only alternative exists: Orb.com’s Orb. Simply install the application on your system,and then connect from afar using any device that has a streaming media player (laptop, PDA, smart phone, or whatever). If your PC has a TV tuner, Orb can
even stream live and recorded shows. Estimated savings: $180 to $300. 24. Create diagrams online: You could shell out $559 for Microsob Visio 2007 Professional, $259 for Visio 2007 Standard—
or zero for GliMy (www.gliffy.com). Gis Web-based diagramming tool lets you build eow charts, eoor plans, and many other kinds of drawings. You can add colors, drop shadows, and gradient
flls to your shapes, and collaborate on drawings with other users. You may want to spring for an ad-free Premium account ($5/month), which provides e-mail support and security features.
Estimated savings: $259 to $559. 25. Read e-books without a Kindle: Much as I love e-books, I’m not a fan of Amazon’s $359 Kindle. Your PDA or smart phone can carry mainstream fction and
nonfction titles from services like Fictionwise. com, eReader.com, and Mobi- Netbook GOOD DEAL
Looking for a budget netbook for quick and easy mobility? The Acer Aspire One (find.pcworld.com/61821) could fit the bill. It’s not perfect— you might consider splurging for the
six-cell battery, since the three-cell battery it comes with won’t last much beyond 2 hours on a charge, and the 8.9-inch screen is small. But it has a great, adult-handsfriendly keyboard and a reasonably roomy 120GB hard disk. Finally, its irresistible $350 base price makes the Aspire One a solid candidate to tide you over until a future crop of this fast-evolving class of portables comes along later this year. gram for Mac and Windows lets you receive as well as send text messages. Gmail users can do likewise by enabling Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat (find.pcworld.com/62414), a new
Google Labs feature that adds texting capabilities to Gmail. If you’re an iPhone user, you should snap up SMS Touch, a $3 application that enables you to send unlimited messages (find.pcworld.com/62415). Replies land in your e-mail inbox. Estimated savings: $5 to $50 per month.

Reclaim Your Online Privacy

Do you remember a time before everyone knew your every move?
Maybe it’s our own fault. We live in an age where microblogs and social networks are all about keeping in touch—to the extreme. It’s fun to follow friends, so we forget that posting pictures of that drunken holiday party might not bode well for future relationships
with employers, friends, or even the law. We forget that, sometimes, giving just a little tells a lot. You can’t do anything online without signing up for an account, typically supplying your e-mail, at a minimum. End-user license agreements (EULAs) today are more invasive than ever. Disney put one out that’s over 50 pages long—for a DVD of Sleeping Beauty. Even “don’t be evil” Google took flack for the Chrome browser EULA, which proclaimed the corporation owned whatever you might post through it. Google changed that policy—eventually. But the company still hangs on to plenty of information about its users, the better to sell you stuff. All that sounds innocuous compared with full-blown identity theft, but identity theft wouldn’t be a plague if our personal data weren’t out there for the taking—and it’s definitely out there. Companies like PallTech, an
online service for investigators and collection agencies, have databases with just about every American’s name, address, date of birth, and Social Security number.
Have we as a culture abandoned our right to privacy? Absolutely not. While it’s easy to lose hold of, it’s also easier than ever to get back. The newest Web browsers take privacy seriously, and they’re just the beginning. We’ll show you how to go online and surf as stealthily as
can be, so the chances of your being ID’d without your consent, or having your ID stolen, are slim to none. All the major browsers for Windows—Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Chrome 0.2, Opera 9.6, and Safari 3.1.2—offer some kind of security and privacy settings, at the very least to give you control over cookies, cached files, and your stored surfing history. How it’s done is a
little different in each browser.