NASA's Messenger spacecraft has taken its first look at the unseen side of Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun. It has revealed the full extent of Mercury's gigantic Caloris Basin, one of the largest impact craters in the solar system and discovered its first Mercury mystery: unusual dark-rimmed craters.

Messenger flew past Mercury on Monday, making its closest approach at 1904 GMT. About 80 minutes afterwards, the spacecraft captured this image. Showing about half of the unseen side, the spacecraft was 27,000 kilometres away when it took the picture. Nevertheless, the image reveals surface details as small as 10 km across.

The Messenger probe travelled at about 25,700 kilometres per hour as it passed over Mercury on a mission designed to resolve some of the mysteries about the solar system's innermost planet, officials said.

"This was fantastic," Michael Paul, a mission engineer, said in a telephone interview. "We were closer to the surface of Mercury than the International Space Station is to the Earth."

Astronomers think the results will be spectacular when the cloud does hit the galaxy. "You have all these shock waves that go out — it's just like making a bomb go off in this area," Lockman says. "In the shock waves, you can trigger a ring or region of enhanced star formation. A few million years later, they'll start going off as supernovae."

The 10th annual report showed a global increase in surveillance and a decline in privacy safeguards during 2007, as concerns over immigration and border control continued to dominate national policy agendas

1. Minneapolis
2. Seattle
3. St. Paul
4. Denver
5. Washington
6. St. Louis
7. San Francisco
8. Atlanta
9. Pittsburgh
10. Boston

The 0.5sq-mm (0.01sq-in) nano-Bible was written on a silicon surface covered with a thin layer of gold (20nanometres thick — 0.0002mm).

It was written using a device called Focused Ion Beam (Fib).

"When we send the particle beam toward a point on the surface, the gold atoms bounce off of this point, thus exposing the silicon layer underneath," Ohad Zohar, one of the project's managers at Technion, said.

Despite the potential side effects, academics, classical musicians, corporate executives, students and even professional poker players have embraced the drugs to clarify their minds, improve their concentration or control their emotions.

"There isn't any question about it — they made me a much better player," said Paul Phillips, 35, who credited the attention deficit drug Adderall and the narcolepsy pill Provigil with helping him earn more than $2.3 million as a poker player.

The revised timing of the impact implies the terrestrial planets, such as the Earth and Mars, took longer to build up from the collision of smaller 'planetesimals' than previously thought. "The age of the Moon is also the age of Earth because the Moon-forming giant impact was the last major event in Earth's formation," says Touboul.

Alan Brandon, a scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, US, agrees. "It may mean that Earth and Mars took at least 50 million years, and possibly hundreds of millions of years, to reach their final mass," he comments.

The researchers also found that the composition of the Moon appears identical to that of the Earth's rocky mantle, "such that a major portion of the Moon must have been from proto-Earth", Brandon told New Scientist.

Six spacecraft around Earth and Mars detected a powerful volley of gamma rays lasting about a minute on 25 January 2007. Such explosions, called long gamma-ray bursts, are thought to be caused when massive stars explode and their cores collapse into black holes.

But follow-up observations by some of the world's most powerful telescopes failed to turn up any sign of a 'host' galaxy for the dying star. Spectral observations did show, however, that the burst, called GRB 070125, had exploded within a small pocket of dense gas.

A new weapon of intergalactic war has been found. A jet of hot gas and high-energy particles is shooting out from the core of a galaxy called 3C321 and hitting a neighbour, a new study reveals.

Galaxies have been known to ram into each other, but this is the first known example of attack by particle beam

The attorney looked into the matter and explained that the music industry has been filing these lawsuits in an effort to frighten people away from downloading music. A woman in Minnesota went to court and lost $120,000. That frightened me. I decided to accept the settlement offer. We had to pay the music industry $4,000.

I do not even know what downloading is.