[VERSE 1]
Well I wonder could it be
When I was dreaming ’bout you baby
You were dreaming of me
Call me crazy, call me blindTo still be suffering is stupid after all of this time

[PRE-CHORUS 1]
Did I lose my love to someone better
And does she love you like I do
I do, you know I really really do

[CHORUS]
Well hey
So much I need to say
Been lonely since the day
The day you went away
So sad but true
For me there’s only you
Been crying since the day
The day you went away

[VERSE 2]
I remember date and time
September twenty second Sunday twenty five after nine
In the doorway with your case
No longer shouting at each other
There were tears on our faces

[PRE-CHORUS 2]
And we were letting go of something special
Something we’ll never have again
I know, I guess I really really know

[CHORUS]
The day you went away
The day you went away

[PRE-CHORUS 1]
[CHORUS]
[BRIDGE]
Why do we never know what we’ve got ’til it’s gone
How could I carry on
The day you went away
Cause I’ve been missing you so much I have to say
Been crying since the day
The day you went away
The day you went away
The day you went away

The childhood friend of John Lennon’s son who inspired the Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” has died aged 46 from the chronic disease Lupus.

Lucy Vodden was a classmate of Julian Lennon, who came home from school one day carrying a drawing of his 4-year-old classmate. “That’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” he told his father.

Lennon seized on the image and embellished it in a song along with “newspaper taxis” and a “girl with kaleidoscope eyes.”

The BBC later banned the track, which appeared on the 1967 album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” for its supposed drug reference with the words of the song spelling out LSD.

Lennon always claimed though that the title was suggested by Julian, not from any wish to spell out LSD, the chemical name for the drug, acid, in code.

Julian Lennon lost touch with Vodden when he left Heath House nursery school, near his parents’ home in Surrey following their divorce in 1968. But they were reunited in recent years when he heard she was suffering from the immune system disease and he lent his support to her.

Vodden’s death was announced on Monday by St. Thomas Lupus Trust in London, where she had been treated for more than five years.

“Julian and (his mother) Cynthia are shocked and saddened by the loss of Lucy and their thoughts are with her husband and family today and always,” the trust said on its Web site.

Angie Davidson, Campaign Director of the St. Thomas’ Lupus Trust said “everyone at the Louise Coote Lupus Unit was dreadfully shocked by the death of Lucy, she was a great supporter of ours and a real fighter, it’s so sad that she has finally lost the battle she fought so bravely for so long.”

Vodden, who was a housewife from Surbiton, southwest of London, cherished her link to the Beatles, but did not especially like the song she inspired.

“I don’t relate to the song, to that type of song,” she told The Associated Press in June, according to the Web site, PopEater.

“As a teenager, I made the mistake of telling a couple of friends at school that I was the Lucy in the song and they said, ‘No, it’s not you, my parents said it’s about drugs.’ And I didn’t know what LSD was at the time, so I just kept it quiet, to myself.”

Scientists are one step closer to knowing what you’ve seen by reading your mind.

Having modeled how images are represented in the brain, the researchers translated recorded patterns of neural activity into pictures of what test subjects had seen.

Though practical applications are decades away, the research could someday lead to dream-readers and thought-controlled computers.

“It’s what you would actually use if you were going to build a functional brain-reading device,” said Jack Gallant, a University of California, Berkeley neuroscientist.

The research, led by Gallant and Berkeley postdoctoral researcher Thomas Naselaris, builds on earlier work in which they used neural patterns to identify pictures from within a limited set of options.

The current approach, described this week in Neuron, uses a more complete view of the brain’s visual centers. Its results are closer to reconstruction than identification, which Gallant likened to “the magician’s card trick where you pick a card from a deck, and he guesses which card you picked. The magician knows all the cards you could have seen.”

In the latest study, “the card could be a photograph of anything in the universe. The magician has to figure it out without ever seeing it,” said Gallant.

To construct their model, the researchers used an fMRI machine, which measures blood flow through the brain, to track neural activity in three people as they looked at pictures of everyday settings and objects.

As in the earlier study, they looked at parts of the brain linked to the shape of objects. Unlike before, they looked at regions whose activity correlates with general classifications, such as “buildings” or “small groups of people.”

Once the model was calibrated, the test subjects looked at another set of pictures. After interpreting the resulting neural patterns, the researchers’ program plucked corresponding pictures from a database of 6 million images.

Frank Tong, a Vanderbilt University neuroscientist who studies how thoughts are manifested in the brain, said the Neuron study wasn’t quite a pure, draw-from-scratch reconstruction. But it was impressive nonetheless, especially for the detail it gathered from measurements that are still extremely coarse.

The researchers’ fMRI readings bundled the output of millions of neurons into single output blocks. “At the finer level, there is a ton of information. We just don’t have a way to tap into that without opening the skull and accessing it directly,” said Tong.

Gallant hopes to develop methods of interpreting other types of brain activity measurement, such as optical laser scans or EEG readings.

He mentioned medical communication devices as a possible application, and computer programs for which visual thinking makes sense — CAD-CAM or Photoshop, straight from the brain.

Such applications are decades away, but “you could use algorithms like this to decode other things than vision,” said Gallant. “In theory, you could analyze internal speech. You could have someone talk to themselves, and have it come out in a machine.”

A chip inside the eye that can help blind people see again is moving closer to reality as researchers at MIT work on a retinal implant that can bypass damaged cells and directly offer visual input to the brain.

Patients who receive the implant will wear a pair of glasses that has a tiny camera attached to it. The camera will send images to a microchip implanted in the eyeball that channels the input to the brain.

It won’t entirely restore normal vision, say the researchers, but it will offer just enough sight to help a blind person navigate a room.

“If they can recognize faces of people in a room, that brings them into the social environment as opposed to sitting there waiting for someone to talk to them,” says Shawn Kelly, a a researcher in MIT’s Research Laboratory for Electronics and a member of the project.

MIT’s latest quest should be of interest to people like Rob Spence, a Canadian film maker who is on a quest to put a tiny wireless video camera into his empty right eye socket. Spence is looking to capture the world around him and a retinal implant like that from MIT could actually help bring him closer to his quest.

Here’s how the implant works. The glasses that patients wear contains a coil that can wirelessly transmit power to receiving coils surrounding the eyeball. The eyeball holds a microchip encased in a sealed titanium case to avoid damage from water seepage. The chip receives visual information and activates electrodes that in turn fire the nerve cells that carry visual input to the brain.

A research team, led by MIT professor of electrical engineering John Wyatt, plans to start testing the prototype in blind patients within the next three years.

With feedback, researchers can configure the algorithm implemented by the chip to produce useful vision. Ultimately, the goal is to produce a chip that can be implanted for at least 10 years.

It’s a risky and challenging procedure as researchers have to design an implant that won’t damage the eye. In the October issue of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering journal, researchers have said they hope to attach the implant to the outside of the eye, and put the electrodes behind the retina.

The space shuttle Discovery will stay aloft another day after NASA mission managers scrubbed its second and final opportunity to land Thursday, citing bad weather near Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The next landing opportunity for Discovery will come shortly before 6 p.m. ET on Friday, officials said. That landing would also take place in Florida.

The shuttle initially was set to land at 7:05 p.m. ET Thursday.

After the crew woke up to the Beatles’ “Good Day Sunshine,” Discovery performed an evasive maneuver at 12:02 p.m. ET to avoid an unidentified piece of debris.

Although NASA officials didn’t know the precise nature of the object, the debris is believed to be from the mission’s third spacewalk.

The seven astronauts are wrapping up a 13-day mission to the international space station, where the crew made repairs and delivered supplies.

The crew executed three spacewalks and dropped off a Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, or COLBERT, named after comedian and TV host Stephen Colbert.

Weather and technical problems delayed Discovery’s launch three times before blast-off.

The space shuttle Discovery crew completed the second of three spacewalks scheduled for their 13-day mission to the international space station, NASA officials said Friday.

Mission specialists Danny Olivas and Christer Fuglesang installed a new ammonia tank on the international space station, completing the swap that began Tuesday.

The depleted tank assembly is being stowed in the shuttle’s cargo bay for return to Earth.

The tank is part of a cooling system, which cycles 600 pounds of ammonia through the space station to “get rid of excess heat generated by the station’s systems,” NASA said.

Flight engineer Nicole Stott and shuttle pilot Kevin Ford manned the shuttle’s robotic arm, helping Olivas and Fuglesang move the old and new tanks outside the station.

On Friday, debris from a European Ariane series rocket launched in 2006 is expected to move within 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) of the space station. NASA decided on Thursday the debris would not pose a danger to the space station and shuttle.

The mission’s third and final spacewalk is set for Saturday. Separately, the crew has unloaded about half of the 8 tons of supplies ferried to the station aboard Discovery, according to NASA. The astronauts have until Monday to complete the job.

Discovery lifted off a week ago and linked with the space station two days later. Weather and technical problems had delayed the shuttle launch three times.

What would you see if you could fly over Mars in a plane and look out the window?

It must be something like the thousands of curious, intriguing and spectacular images taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera mounted on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The University of Arizona, Tucson, which operates HiRISE, has just released a new batch of these photos taken in the last several months.

You can check out the full set here.

They reveal an alien landscape of craters, valleys, ridges, channels, weird surface patterns and other features in incredible detail.

Take the stunning image on the left, which shows the muffin-cup-like Victoria Crater, a site once explored by the Mars rover Opportunity.

The camera isn’t looking straight down, but is pointed 22 degrees east so we get a better view of the crater’s slopes, “comparable to a view from an airplane window,” the university says.

Looking at some of the photos, you feel like you’re flying over the Grand Canyon or the Sahara. Others are distinctly extraterrestrial in nature. In all cases, the images reveal lots of details about the surface of our neighbor in the solar system.

“Each full image from HiRISE covers a strip of Martian ground 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) wide, about two to four times that long, showing details as small as 1 meter, or yard, across,” according to NASA’s Web site.

It might be the closest thing to visiting Mars without leaving your chair.

Space shuttle Discovery launched just before midnight Friday on a mission to the international space station.

The crew of seven astronauts includes a Mexican-American and one from Sweden. Another of those seven, Nicole Stott, will remain on the station as a flight engineer, while astronaut Timothy Kopra is to return home aboard the shuttle.

Also on board: The Leonardo logistics module, science experiments and the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT), named for fake newsman Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.”

Colbert won an online poll conducted by NASA to name the newest space station compartment, but Colbert and the space agency compromised to give the moniker to the treadmill. The new compartment was given the name Tranquility.

NASA astronaut Cady Coleman said the treadmill is an essential addition to the space station.

“We have the treadmill now to keep them healthy, which is really part of being able to come home in one piece. So it is an essential part,” Coleman said. iReport.com: Discovery lights night sky

Discovery’s liftoff, originally set for Tuesday, had been postponed three times — first for bad weather, and twice more while mission managers checked out indications of a faulty valve.

The name is already taken, but “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” might be a fitting title for a new interactive view of the Milky Way unveiled this week by the European Southern Observatory.

The 800-million-pixel panorama shows an edge-on view of the plane of our galaxy, complete with points of interests such as the 12-billion-year-old, star-packed globular cluster Omega Centauri and the beautiful, reddish Rosette Nebula.

Want to stay closer to home?

The panorama also points out familiar landmarks such as Jupiter, noting it’s the third-brightest object in our night sky after the moon and Venus.

For a bit of a head-rush, you can choose to zoom in and click on “Tour Destinations,” which will take you on a trip from one end of the galaxy to another, stopping at your selected point of interest.

Users can explore the image in magnificent detail, uncovering millions of individual stars forming a dustlike haze, or superimpose a map of the different constellations in the sky.

The beautiful panorama is the first to be released as part of the GigaGalaxy Zoom project, which seeks to “link the sky we can all see with the deep, ‘hidden’ cosmos that astronomers study on a daily basis,” according to ESO.

The image is composed of almost 1,200 photos, which were taken by French astrophotographer Serge Brunier with a regular digital camera from ESO observatories at La Silla and Paranal in Chile and from one of the Canary Islands.

“I wanted to show a sky that everyone can relate to, with its constellations, its thousands of stars, with names familiar since childhood,” Brunier said.

The images were then crunched into the single panorama using special software, an effort that took about 340 computing hours to finish, according to the ESO.

You can chart your own trip across the Milky Way at GigaGalaxyZoom.org.

The next GigaGalaxy Zoom image will be released Monday.

Scientists have discovered the first confirmed Earthlike planet outside our solar system, they announced Wednesday.

“This is the first confirmed rocky planet in another system,” astronomer Artie Hatzes told CNN, contrasting the solid planet with gaseous ones like Jupiter and Saturn.

But “Earthlike” is a relative term.

The planet’s composition may be similar to that of Earth, but its environment is more like a vision of hell, the project’s lead astronomer said.

It is so close to the star it orbits “that the place may well look like Dante’s Inferno, with a probable temperature on its ‘day face’ above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius) and minus-328 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 200 degrees Celsius) on its night face,” said Didier Queloz of Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, the project leader.

Hatzes, explaining that one side of the body is always facing the star and the other side always faces away, said the side “facing the sun is probably molten. The other side could actually have ice” if there is water on the planet.

“We think it has no atmosphere to redistribute the heat,” Hatzes told CNN from Barcelona, Spain, where he is attending the “Pathways Towards Habitable Planets” conference.

The astronomers were stunned to find a rocky planet so near a star, he said.

“We would have never dreamed you would find a rocky planet so close,” he said. “Its year is less than one of our days.”

The planet, known as CoRoT-7b, was detected early last year, but it took months of observation to determine that it had a composition roughly similar to Earth’s, the European Southern Observatory said in a statement.

Astronomers were able to measure the dimensions of the planet by watching as it passed in front of the star it orbits, then carried out 70 hours of study of the planet’s effect on its star to infer its weight.

With that information in hand, they were able to calculate its density — and were thrilled with what they found, Hatzes said.

“What makes this exciting is you compare the density of this planet to the planets in our solar system, it’s only Mercury, Venus and Earth that are similar,” Hatzes, of the Thuringer observatory in Germany, told CNN.

They were helped by the fact that CoRoT-7b is relatively close to Earth — about 500 light years away, in the constellation of Monoceros, the Unicorn.

“It’s in our solar neighborhood,” Hatzes said. “The thing that made it easier is it’s relatively close, so it’s relatively bright. If this star was much much farther away, we wouldn’t have been able to do these measurements.”

At about five times Earth’s mass (though not quite twice as large in circumference), it is the smallest planet ever spotted outside our solar system.

It also has the fastest orbit. The planet whizzes around its star more than seven times faster than Earth moves, and is 23 times closer to the star than Mercury is to our sun.

The planet was first detected early in 2008 by the CoRoT satellite, a 30-centimeter space telescope launched by the European Space Agency in December 2006, specifically with the mission of detecting rocky planets outside the solar system.

At least 42 scientists at 17 institutions on three continents worked on the project.

They are publishing their findings in a special issue of the Astronomy and Astrophysics journal on October 22 as “The CoRoT-7 Planetary System: Two Orbiting Super-Earths.”