If you could include the dimension of time in this picture you might get a rough idea of why things appear to accelerate towards a massive object - even though they do not themselves experience any acceleration.
From a photon’s point of view, it is emitted and then instantaneously reabsorbed. This is true for a photon emitted in the core of the Sun, which might be reabsorbed after crossing a fraction of a millimetre’s distance. And it is equally true for a photon that, from our point of view, has travelled for over 13 billion years after being emitted from the surface of one of the universe’s first stars.
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Shape and alignment are everything. How nanometer-sized pieces fit together into a whole structure determines how well a living cell or an artificially fabricated device performs. A new method to help understand and predict such structure has arrived with the successful use a new imaging tool.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Microfluidic systems for the easy production of multiphasic emulsion drops and multishelled polymer capsules. Under a microscope they look like miniature onions, in fact, they are new microcapsules introduced by David A. Weitz and Shin Hyun Kim in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
Physicists at UC San Diego have developed a new kind of X-ray microscope that can penetrate deep within materials like Superman's fabled X-ray vision and see minute details at the scale of a single nanometer, or one billionth of a meter.
What is common to blood, ink and gruel? They are all liquids in which tiny particles are suspended – so called “colloids”. In some of these liquids, the particles form groups (clusters), which form regular structures, much like atoms in a crystal. A team of researchers from TU Vienna and Vienna University has now managed to study the remarkable properties of these crystal-like substances in computer simulations. Under mechanical strain, the crystalline pattern can change into a different structure, or it can vanish completely.
More than a decade ago, the frequency comb technique was developed at the Max Planck In-stitute of Quantum Optics by Professor Theodor W. Hänsch. The new tool has stimulated fun-damental research as well as laser development and its applications because it gave rise to a major increase in the accuracy of measuring optical frequencies. Already a couple of years ago, a team of scientists around Dr. Tobias Kippenberg, formerly Leader of the Max Planck Research Group “Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements” at MPQ, who has since then become Associate Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), succeeded for the first time in generating optical frequency combs using chip-based quartz glass toroids with diameters on the micrometer scale. Now the scientists made a big step further: their new microresonators produce light over a range of more than an octave and are at the same time precisely tunable (PRL 107, 063901, 1 Augus! t 2011). This achievement brings a variety of applications into reach, such as optical telecommunications or the precise calibration of spectrographs in astrophysics.
European Union member states are obliged to monitor the water quality and the effects of their manure policy on that quality, and to report on these aspects to the European Commission. It appears that the countries concerned interpret this obligation differently due to a lack of specific provisions or regulations.
The NASA National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Preparatory Project (NPP) has successfully completed its most comprehensive end-to-end compatibility test of the actual satellite and all five scientific instruments at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp's production and test facility in Boulder, Colo.
South Africa's preparations to host the next major round of climate talks have met with scepticism from activists critical of what they say is the country's lack of leadership on environmental issues.
For years, astronomers have set their sights on launching a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope-one with 100 times its power-that could peer back to the earliest light of the universe. But funding for the costly James Webb Space Telescope is now under a cloud, targeted for the chopping block.
An exploding meteor was believed to be responsible for a huge bang that reverberated around the Pacific island nation of Niue last week, police said Monday.
Heavy metal pollution of lakes has a seriously detrimental impact on people and ecosystems that rely on such bodies of water. According to a study published in the current issue of Interdisciplinary Environmental Review, researchers have focused on the physicochemical properties and toxicology of water from and around Thane City of Maharashtra.
University of Guam ecologist Thomas Marler recently mobilized efforts to characterize the vegetation that has recovered following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, Philippines. "My interest was sparked by the paradox that this volcano's cataclysmic 1991 eruption was so powerful it changed global climate, yet after a full 15 years the biology of the recovering ecosystem had not been studied," said Marler.
(AP) -- In a muddy pile of sand where a pond once flowed in the Texas Panhandle, dead fish, their flesh already decayed and feasted on by maggots, lie with their mouths open. Nearby, deer munch on the equivalent of vegetative junk food and wild turkeys nibble on red harvester ants - certainly not their first choice for lunch.
Former Tropical Storm Emily made a brief comeback this weekend after degenerating over the mountains of Hispaniola late last week, and NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of Emily just after her "rebirth."
Researchers from a team funded by the National Science Foundation have examined some of last spring's massive tornado damage and conclude in a new report that more intensive engineering design and more rigorous, localized construction and inspection standards are needed to reduce property damage and loss of life.
Chicago's first round of testing for a toxic metal called hexavalent chromium found that levels in local drinking water are more than 11 times higher than a health standard California adopted last month.
Australia holds the largest claim to Antarctica but risks losing it in any race to unlock the frozen continent's potentially vast mineral and energy resources, an influential thinktank said Monday.
(AP) -- Months after the death of the Mars rover Spirit, its surviving twin is poised to reach the rim of a vast crater to begin a fresh round of exploration.
Hot on the heels of confirming one Kepler planet, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope announces the confirmation of another planet. Another observatory, the Nordic Optical Telescope, confirms its first Kepler planet as well, this one as part of a binary system and providing new insights that may force astronomers to revisit and revise estimations on properties of other extrasolar planets.
It is our general understanding of solar system composition that planets fall into two categories: gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus… and rocky bodies that support some type of atmosphere like Earth, Mars and Venus. However, as we reach further into space we’re beginning to realize the Solar System is pretty unique because it doesn’t have a planetary structure which meets in the middle. But just because we don’t have one doesn’t mean they don’t exist. As a matter of fact, astronomers have found more than 30 of them and they call this new class of planet a “Super-Earth.”
A research team of astronomers from the University of Tokyo and the National Astronomical Society of Japan (NAOJ) has identified the location of red star-forming galaxies around a galaxy cluster situated four billion light years distant from Earth. A panoramic observation with the Subaru Telescope yielded the result. Scientists surmise that such "red-burning galaxies" are in a transitional phase from a young generation of galaxies to older one; they may demonstrate the dramatic evolution of galaxies in the environment surrounding the cluster.
Tropical Storm Muifa is filling up the Yellow Sea on NASA satellite imagery as it continues moving north today to a landfall in East China's Shandong province. NASA's Aqua satellite captured visible and infrared imagery that shows Muifa's cloud cover stretches across the Yellow Sea, from China to the west to South and North Korea to the east.
A NASA scientist and her colleagues were able to observe for the first time the power of an earthquake and tsunami to break off large icebergs a hemisphere away.
Athens, Ga. – Increased seawater temperatures are known to be a leading cause of the decline of coral reefs all over the world. Now, researchers at the University of Georgia have found that extreme low temperatures affect certain corals in much the same way that high temperatures do, with potentially catastrophic consequences for coral ecosystems. Their findings appear in the early online edition of the journal Global Change Biology.
Meteorites hold a record of the chemicals that existed in the early Solar System and that may have been a crucial source of the organic compounds that gave rise to life on Earth. Since the 1960s, scientists have been trying to find proof that nucleobases, the building blocks of our genetic material, came to Earth on meteorites. New research, published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that certain nucleobases do reach the Earth from extraterrestrial sources, by way of certain meteorites, and in greater diversity and quantity than previously thought.
In Anna Gudmundsdottir's laboratory at the University of Cincinnati, dedicated researchers endeavor to tame the extremely reactive chemicals known as radicals.
A Los Alamos National Laboratory research team has harnessed neutrons to view for the first time the critical role that an elusive molecule plays in certain biological reactions. The effort could aid in treatment of peptic ulcers or acid reflux disease, or allow for more efficient conversion of woody waste into transportation fuels.
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