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It's time for a black hole to shine.

A dozing monster of a black hole lies at the heart of our galaxy, and a global group of astronomers wants to snap its picture. They expect to see a ring of hot plasma swirling around a blank spot, the death dance of gas clouds getting sucked into a sphere of no return, the so-called event horizon.

"The thing we will actually see is light just barely escaping from the black hole," said Dan Marrone, a University of Arizona astronomer involved in the new project, called the Event Horizon Telescope.

Astronomers call black holes the most baffling objects in the universe. The powerful gravity of the collapsed stars sucks in everything around them. And no one has ever taken a picture of one. The reason: No single telescope is powerful enough to spy one. The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is as wee in the sky as a baseball on the moon. To see it, astronomers will synchronize a network of telescopes into an Earth-size super-telescope.

Once the network is assembled, dozens of radio dishes from California to the South Pole will simultaneously peer at the Milky Way's center, each recording a bit of whatever's there.

Computer disks from each station will then be flown to Massachusetts, where a supercomputer at MIT's Haystack Observatory will collate the data and build an image. This picture won't reveal the core of the black hole, as nothing -- not even light -- can escape it. But the picture should reveal never-before-seen details of the action swirling around it.

SOME GOOD NEWS FOR FRIED FOOD LOVERS

Rejoice, those who love fried foods: eating them may not put you at higher risk for heart disease -- if you're frying those foods in olive or sunflower oils.

A study in the British Medical Journal analyzed data on 40,757 Spanish adults age 29 to 69 who were followed for an average 11 years. During that time, there were 606 events linked to coronary heart disease and 1,135 people died from all causes. However, eating fried foods was not associated with heart disease or death from all causes, even after adjusting for various factors such as calorie intake, age, sex, body mass index and high blood pressure. The types of oils used to fry foods -- olive, sunflower or other vegetable oils -- didn't change the outcome.

On average, participants ate about 5 ounces of fried food a day. About 62 percent said they used olive oil, and the rest said they used sunflower or other types of vegetable oil.

DEPRESSION LINKED TO WORKING LONG HOURS

Working 11 hours a day may not only make you more tired -- it could also make you more depressed.

A study of civil servants in England found that working excessive hours was linked with more cases of major depressive episodes. The 2,123 men and women observed in the study, published in the online journal PLoS One, were followed for an average 5.8 years and assessed for depression.

Working 11 or more hours a day was associated with a 2.3- to 2.5-fold increased risk of having a major depressive episode compared with those who worked a standard seven- to eight-hour day. The link between working long hours and depression, researchers said, may be because of conflicts between work and family, problems winding down after the work day, and increased amounts of the stress-related hormone cortisol.

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