News: Molecule, DJ AM, China, Thai Boxer, Marvel Comics, Tel Aviv

Male Shanghai prostitute charged for knowingly spreading HIV.

100+ protest in Guangzhou, China over police crackdown on gay activity in public park.

Scientists image first close-up view of a single molecule: "To give some perspective, the space between the carbon rings is only 0.14 nanometers across, which is roughly one million times smaller than the diameter of a grain of sand."

DJ AM dead of drug overdose in NYC. Blink 182 offers tribute.

Gay ACLU counsel Larry Frankel found dead in D.C. park.

Former first daughter Jenna Bush joins the Today show.

Popbytes visits Liza at the Hollywood Bowl.

Disney to acquire Marvel Comics for $4 billion.

"Gravity tractor" to save the Earth from killer asteroids? "The spacecraft would intercept the asteroid and position itself to fly alongside it, just 160ft from its surface. From this position, the 10 tonne craft is able to exert a small gravitational force on the rock, pulling the asteroid towards it. By gradually modifying its course, over several years, the gravity tractor is able to slowly shift the asteroid's trajectory enough to ensure it misses the Earth."

Shalom Sesame: Jake Gyllenhaal to teach kids about Jewish culture.

Thai boxer suspended for three months for appearing in gay magazine photo shoot.

ED: NYT pushes the penis pump.

Lesbian couples having a child through fertility treatments can now place names of both parents on child's birth certificate: "It's brilliant that women in our situation will have full legal rights for the co-parent from the beginning. It's fantastically good news. We didn't conceive our children together, but we did conceive of them. Hopefully it will have a positive effect on society's view of lesbian and gay people, because the government are basically saying that we're OK, and perhaps people who are not gay will begin to think the same."

Two men in India sentenced to life terms for murder of gay man who threatened to expose them.

Lansing, Michigan gay man Shawn Bennett lied about gay bashing: "But investigators say Benett admits he tortured himself. Over and over he burned his own body with a lit cigarette."

Larry King: Chris Brown does not remember beating Rihanna.

FLASHBACK: Madonna's eulogy for Herb Ritts.

One month later, hundreds mourn Tel Aviv gay center shooting victims: "Last week, the manager of the youth center, Shaul Asa-el Gannon, opened a temporary center in an alternate location. He noted that there were more teenagers in attendance at the center's events than there were before the shooting. This week, the gay and lesbian youth center will return to its original location on Nachmani Street - the site of the attack - where it will remain under police and security surveillance."

Genetically-Bred Glowing Monkey Has Glowing Babies

Wired reports on transgenic advances that could benefit neuroscience and stem cell research:

"The marmosets, pictured above, express a green fluorescent protein in their skin. The gene for producing the glow was delivered to the first marmoset embryos via a modified virus. But now that modification method could become unnecessary. One male marmoset, number 666, fathered a child that also contained the transgenes. 'The birth of this transgenic marmoset baby is undoubtedly a milestone,' developmental biologists Gerald Schatten and Shoukhrat Mitalipov at the Pittsburgh Development Center and Oregon Stem Cell Center...wrote in a commentary accompanying the study Thursday in Nature. 'The cumbersome and often frustrating process of making a transgenic animal from scratch need now only occur with founder animals.'

'Missing Link' in Human Evolution Found, Say Scientists

A small monkeylike fossil scientists are calling 'Darwinius masillae' is the elusive "missing link" in human evolution, scientists say. The fossil, discovered in 1983, had been split in half and sold to private collectors, but was recently brought back together by researchers led by Jørn Hurum, of the University of Oslo Natural History Museum.

Said Hurum:

“This fossil will probably be pictures in all the textbooks for the next 100 years. This is the first link to all humans... truly a fossil that links world heritage. This fossil is so complete. Everything’s there. It’s unheard of in the primate record at all. You have to get to human burial to see something that’s this complete.”

The Times reports: "Darwinius masillae, a small monkey-like creature that lived 47 million years ago, illuminates a critical chapter in the human story when the primate family tree split into two branches, one of which ultimately led to us. The fossil could even mark the point at which the evolutionary lineage that gave rise to humans, apes and monkeys diverged from the one that produced more distant primate cousins such as lemurs, lorises and bushbabies. Its anatomical features suggest it lies close to the origin of the human branch and that the creature, or something rather like it, could be an ancient ancestor of humans and their closest animal relatives"

Towleroad Guide to the Tube #476

CONNIE CULP: First full face transplant recipient, shot in the face by her husband five years ago, speaks.

EVOLUTION VS SCIENCE: Indiana Congressman Mike Pence won't say he believes in evolution.

PET AIRWAYS: The first airline devoted to cats and dogs.

SLEEPYHEAD: Shot and edited in one weekend. Song by Passion Pit.

For recent Guides to the Tube, click HERE.

Stephen Hawking to Unveil Terrifying Reminder of Impending Death

The Times writes of the Corsum Clock, set to be unveiled in Britain today:

"The hour approaches. The beast's jaws gape, its tail quivers and then snap! Another minute has been devoured, and the hour strikes with the ominous clonk of a chain dropping into a coffin. The creature blinks twice in satisfaction. 'It is terrifying, it is meant to be,' said John Taylor, the creator and funder of an extraordinary new clock to be unveiled...by Stephen Hawking at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. 'Basically I view time as not on your side. He'll eat up every minute of your life, and as soon as one has gone he's salivating for the next. It's not a bad thing to remind students of. I never felt like this until I woke up on my 70th birthday, and was stricken at the thought of how much I still wanted to do, and how little time remained.'"

Watch Taylor explain the clock, AFTER THE JUMP...

First Hadron Collider Test Successful, World Doesn't End

The Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, was switched on today as scientists attempted to detect the tiny particles that make up so-called "dark matter" by recreating the conditions present moments after the 'Big Bang' that created the universe occurred.

The first test was successful.

News Factor reported: "The LHC is a 27-kilometer ring located in the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, around which high-energy protons will be smashed together in two counter-rotating beams. More than 1,000 magnets will keep the beams -- each containing millions of protons -- on a circular path around the collider, while hundreds more keep the beams focused. The beams will travel at almost the speed of light. What's the point? To replicate as closely as possible conditions in the universe immediately after the Big Bang, and to search for the elusive Higgs boson, an undiscovered particle that is required for physics' Standard Model to work. The Higgs boson -- popularized as 'God's particle' -- was theorized in 1964 by Peter Higgs and independently by a number of other physicists."

Physicist Stephen Hawking made a bet that scientists won't find the Higgs boson. Said Hawking: I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of 100 dollars that we won't find the Higgs." (at left, "the Large Hadron Rap")

Some amazing shots of the Hadron and its construction at the Big Picture.

Some theorized that the test would create a miniature 'black hole' that would begin to devour the Earth, sucking the planet into itself and leave it as a ball of glowing, dense dark matter.

A frightening apocalyptic animation of what a few people feared would happen and a video of how it works, AFTER THE JUMP...