Enhanced Image of Vesta Captured by Dawn on July 9, 2011 NASA's Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta on July 16, 2011. Dawn obtained the raw image of Vesta with its framing camera on July 9, 2011 - which has been enhanced and annotated here. It was taken from a distance of about 26,000 miles (41,000 kilometers) away from the protoplanet Vesta. Each pixel in the image corresponds to roughly 2.4 miles (3.8 kilometers). A massive ancient cosmic collision blasted away Vesta’s south pole - exposing deep and alluring secrets. What will Dawn discover ? Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA. Enhanced and annotated by Ken Kremer
NASA’s super exciting Dawn mission to the Asteroid Belt marked a major milestone in human history by becoming the first ever spacecraft from Planet Earth to achieve orbit around a Protoplanet – Vesta – on July 16. Dawn was launched in September 2007 and was 117 million miles (188 million km) distant from Earth as it was captured by Asteroid Vesta.
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Some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals and is found exclusively in people outside Africa, according to an international team of researchers led by Damian Labuda of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Montreal and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center. The research was published in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution.
Dramatic breakthroughs in paleontology don’t always come from the field where researchers unearth fossils. That’s a theory University of Alberta professor Michael Caldwell says he has always believed, and it was proven true with breakthrough research on a fossil from a 80-million-year-old marine lizard.
We want our electrical devices to have bright screens with low energy needs, so they can be used for a long time before recharge is required. Scientists are increasing the intensity of light by making nanometer scale patterns on surfaces. The nanoimprinting method will change devices’ optical properties, without making them demand more energy. Except for brighter mobile phone and computer screens, we may soon have the possibility to benefit from this nanotech solution while driving.
Quantum dots made from cadmium and selenium degrade in soil, unleashing toxic cadmium and selenium ions into their surroundings, a University at Buffalo study has found.
A new approach to growing graphene greatly reduces problems that have plagued researchers in the past and clears a path to the crystalline form of graphite's use in sophisticated electronic devices of tomorrow.
Using a technique known as thermochemical nanolithography (TCNL), researchers have developed a new way to fabricate nanometer-scale ferroelectric structures directly on flexible plastic substrates that would be unable to withstand the processing temperatures normally required to create such nanostructures.
Hundreds of physicists from around the world are making plans to shoot the world's most intense beam of neutrinos from Illinois, underground through Iowa, all the way to a former gold mine in South Dakota. And Iowa State University's Mayly Sanchez is part of the research team.
Yes! That's the answer scientists from OI Analytical and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory got from their experiments to see if the new IonCCDTM can detect negative ions and large ions. Furthermore, employing instruments at EMSL, the team used the detector to characterize the ion beam inside a mass spectrometer, a workhorse instrument for basic energy research. The results grace the cover of the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a paper published in the US journal Optical Materials Express this week, Macquarie University researchers show that even the earth's hardest naturally occurring material, the diamond, is not forever.
Physicists Moti Fridman and colleagues at Cornell University have successfully demonstrated a so-called time cloaking device that is able to “hide” time for 15 trillionths of a second. In a paper published on arXiv, the researchers describe how they were able to cause light passing through a fiber optic cable to compress, than decompress, causing a hole or void to exist, long enough for there to be a lag between the two.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Today, fiber optics technology transports information in the form of classical data to homes and businesses. But researchers are currently working on ways to combine quantum data with the classical data in fiber optics networks in order to increase security. In a new study, scientists have shown how quantum and classical data can be interlaced in a real-world fiber optics network, taking a step toward distributing quantum information to the home, and with it a quantum internet.
Six thousand seismic sensors, 200 volunteers and a University of Delaware researcher all have one thing in common – helping scientists study earthquakes.
The plot has the makings of a summer blockbuster: An asteroid on a potential collision course with our planet holds the power to destroy life on Earth but also holds clues to what seeded it with the ingredients for life. One of the people seeking to recover its precious planetary science clues, while at the same time learning enough to prevent any collision with Earth, is the University of Tennessee, Knoxville's own Josh Emery.
The Atlantis roars back to Earth this week ending America's vaunted space shuttle program and frustrating a generation of astronauts who see their chance to soar into the cosmos sharply limited.
Russia on Monday launched into space its Spektr-R radio telescope planned to be the most powerful ever, the first deep space observatory sent up by Moscow in a quarter of a century.
China will introduce a pilot scheme for carbon emissions trading and gradually develop a national market as the world's largest polluter seeks to reduce emissions and save energy, state media said.
(AP) -- NASA's orbiting astronauts detached a huge storage bin full of trash from the International Space Station on Monday and loaded it aboard Atlantis for the last shuttle ride back to Earth.
The GOES-13 satellite that monitors weather over the eastern U.S. recorded a movie of the birth and strengthening of the Atlantic Ocean season's second tropical storm. Tropical Storm Bret was born in the northwestern Bahamas and continues to strengthen.
(AP) -- The astronauts on NASA's final shuttle voyage floated out of the International Space Station for the last time Monday, leaving behind a historic U.S. flag and a commemorative shuttle model to mark the end of a 30-year era.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft on Saturday became the first probe ever to enter orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
(AP) -- NASA's mighty astronaut corps has become a shadow of what it once was. And it's only going to get smaller.
(AP) -- If the weather cooperates, Atlantis will close out the space shuttle era with wheels down in Florida. Shuttle homecomings didn't always end this way.
Until now, scientists were uncertain about how much and where in the world terrestrial carbon is being stored. In the July 14 issue of Science Express, scientists report that, between 1990 and 2007, the world's forests stored about 2.4 gigatons of carbon per year.
The most distant objects in the universe are also the oldest -- or at least that is how they appear to us, because their light has had to travel for billions of years to get here. They are also extraordinarily faint since they are so far away, and only in the last decade have astronomers been able to stretch their vision using the newest telescopes and clever techniques.
NASA’s super exciting Dawn mission to the Asteroid Belt marked a major milestone in human history by becoming the first ever spacecraft from Planet Earth to achieve orbit around a Protoplanet – Vesta – on July 16. Dawn was launched in September 2007 and was 117 million miles (188 million km) distant from Earth as it was captured by Asteroid Vesta.
Japan's March 11 Tohoku Earthquake is among the strongest ever recorded, and because it struck one of the world's most heavily instrumented seismic zones, this natural disaster is providing scientists with a treasure trove of data on rare magnitude 9 earthquakes. Among the new information is what is believed to be the first study of how a shock this powerful affects the rock and soil beneath the surface.
Taking another major step in sleuthing the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has determined what chemicals were contained in a deep, hydrocarbon-containing plume at least 22 miles long that WHOI scientists mapped and sampled last summer in the Gulf of Mexico, a residue of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Moreover, they have taken a big step in explaining why some chemicals, but not others, made their way into the plume.
Science from the space shuttle helped open Earth's eyes to the cosmos and sister planets. It created perhaps the most detailed topographical map of Earth. And it even is helping doctors understand, and sometimes fix, what's happening in our aging and ailing bodies.
A new family of contrast agents that sneak into bacteria disguised as glucose food can detect bacterial infections in animals with high sensitivity and specificity. These agents -- called maltodextrin-based imaging probes -- can also distinguish a bacterial infection from other inflammatory conditions.
Berkeley Lab researchers have found a way to make copper-catalyzed click chemistry biocompatible. By adding a ligand that minimizes the toxicity of copper but still allows it to catalyze the click chemistry reaction, the researchers can safely use their reaction in living cells.
Rice University scientists have defined the structure -- down to the atomic level -- of a virus that causes juvenile diarrhea. The research may help direct efforts to develop medications that block the virus before it becomes infectious.
Inhibiting a molecular process cells use to direct proteins to their proper destinations causes more than 90 percent of affected mosquitoes to die within 48 hours of blood feeding, a UA team of biochemists found.
