A man has been charged with defacing a Mark Rothko painting at London's Tate Modern gallery on Sunday, Scotland Yard has said.

Wlodzimierz Umaniec, 26, a Polish national of no fixed abode, will appear at Camberwell Green Magistrates' Court on Wednesday.

Mr Umaniec, also known as Vladimir Umanets, is charged with one count of causing criminal damage in excess of £5,000.

The artwork is a 1958 Seagram mural.

Don't get me wrong.  No one loves radio (and podcasting) more than me.  But sometimes you have to see a picture to believe it.  That's the case with the XDF, a mind-bending and spectacular image released on September 25 by the Space Telescope Science Institute.

You've probably seen the UDF or Ultra Deep Field.  It has become one of the most popular astronomical images of all time.  I have it hanging behind my desk.  I know a member of the US House of Representatives who has it mounted on the wall of his office.  Basically, astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) at one tiny patch of sky for a long time, revealing thousands of galaxies that stretch back through most of the history of our universe.

But the data for the UDF was gathered in 2003 and 2004.  The Hubble has been upgraded since then, primarily with the addition of the Wide Field Camera 3 during the 2009 servicing mission.  This gave the HST unprecedented infrared observing power.  That's particularly useful when you want to look into the distant past, as the inevitable "red shift" of light from early galaxies moves them out of the visible light range.

For part of its existence as an ancient temple, Stonehenge doubled as a substantial prehistoric art gallery, according to new evidence revealed yesterday.

A detailed laser-scan survey of the entire monument has discovered 72 previously unknown Early Bronze Age carvings chipped into five of the giant stones.

All of the newly discovered prehistoric art works are invisible to the naked eye - and have only come to light following a laser-scan survey which recorded literally billions of points micro-topographically on the surfaces of the monument's 83 surviving stones. In total, some 850 gigabytes of information was collected.

France's Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland from the United States on Tuesday won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on interaction between light and matter.

They were rewarded for "ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems, "announced Staffan Normark, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

"The Nobel Laureates have opened the door to a new era of experimentation with quantum physics by demonstrating the direct observation of individual quantum particles without destroying them," commented the academy in a statement.

Transcript by the Brisbane Times.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

Yes, another blog is now being launched into the world as I type these words.  Does the world really need yet another blog?  Obviously, there are lots and lots of them already out there--many, many bad ones, but some good ones as well.   There are even lots of good ones out there already dealing with economics and economic policy, which is the focus on this blog as well.  So why take up more cyperspace with this blog, on top of all the other ones already going strong?

The aim of this blog will be to develop, extend, and debate the themes that I present in my new little book, Back to Full Employment.  In my view, creating a full employment economy is absolutely crucial to creating a decent society--that is, a society in which everyone has the right to earn a reasonable living through their own efforts or the efforts of family members and friends.   It's that simple a point. But at the same time, it turns out to be not so simple.  There are large numbers of controversial economic issues around 1) how to get to full employment; 2) how to stay there, once there; and 3) whether full employment should be a basic goal of economic policy to begin with.

I tried to cover lots of territory around these questions in my book.  At the same time, I also tried to keep the book accessible to people who didn't necessarily have heavy technical backgrounds in economics and economic policy, and equally, to people who have lots of other things to think about and do in their lives.  As such, the book is quite short.  It comes in at less than 200 pages total.  But even that pretty low page count is misleading.  That is because my publisher, MIT Press and the Boston Review, decided to make the pages very small, and the book quite compact.  I happen to like the design a lot.  To me, it has the look and feel of something like the classics by Beatrix Potter, such as The Tales of Peter Rabbit, Mrs. Tiggle-Wiggle, Benjamin Bunny, Squirrel Nutkin, and on.  There are some figures in my book, though, unfortunately,  nothing that can compare with the Potter's brilliant illustrations in these books.