Dark matter and dark energy continue to be cosmological conundrum for physicists worldwide. Nobel prize winner Brian Schmidt offers his perspective in an interview. The image shown here is of the ALMA antennas and the constellations of Carina (The Keel) and Vela (The Sails). The dark, wispy dust clouds of the Milky Way streak from middle top left to middle bottom right. (Credit: ESO, B. Tafreshi)
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“Our model predicts different fracture patterns on the surface of Charon depending on the thickness of its surface ice, the structure of the moon’s interior and how easily it deforms, and how its orbit evolved,” said Alyssa Rhoden of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. (Credit: NASA)
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Open network environments have become essential in the sciences, enabling accelerated discovery and communication of knowledge. Yet, the real revolution began when open community databases allowed researchers to build on existing contributions and compare their results to established knowledge. (Credit: King, Uhlir)
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Indian physicists propose a tabletop experiment that will provide scientists their first opportunity to measure the probability that particles can move through slits in a twisted path, depicted by the purple ray. (Credit: Aninda Sinha and Urbasi Sinha)
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Physicists in the US have compressed a synthetic diamond to pressures of 50 million Earth atmospheres to recreate conditions in the cores of giant planets. (Credit: National Ignition Facility)
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. A novel class of electronic materials – the so-called transition-metal oxides – hold promise for exciting, new applications. Where layers of this novel class of electronic materials touch, often a unique, and unprecedented phenomenon occurs: for instance, the interface between two insulators can become superconducting, or a strong magnetic order can build up between two non-magnetic layers.
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In a conversation with Mashable via Twitter, McGregor resident @EthansMommy17, who tweeted the above image of the explosion, claimed cows had been killed by debris from the explosion. She was unable to provide images or other confirmation of the affected livestock, however. (Credit: @EthansMommy17)
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The space specialist said that the ISS surface was polluted very strongly due to operation of space engines and other factors. “We are conducting special works to polish somehow and put illuminators in order. This is particularly needed during long space flights,” Solovyev added. (Credit: Tracy Caldwell Dyson)
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Although they are gigantic, ranging from one to a few hundred lightyears in size, the physical process that causes these nebulae to emit their own light (rather than merely reflect light from nearby stars) occurs at the atomic level. It is the same process that makes familiar florescent lights shine here on Earth. (Credit: NASA, Prozesky)
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On July 29th, the the Automated Transfer Vehicle launched carrying samples of the stuff to the ISS, where it docked on August 12th. There, astronauts will conduct tests on the paint, which absorbs 99.5 percent of visible light (and 99.8 percent of longer wavelength light). (Credit: NASA, Campbell-Dollaghan)
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Google Inc. has conducted more than 300,000 miles of driverless car testing with vehicles. They navigate by collecting real-time sensor data and comparing it to pre-loaded maps that specify exact locations for roads and signs, while adapting to obstacles such as people and cars. (Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images, Kearns)
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A patterned 3-D grid of tiny whirlpools, called quantum vortices, populate a nanoscale droplet of superfluid helium. Researchers found that in a micron-sized droplet, the density of vortices was 100,000 times greater than in any previous experiment on superfluids. An artistic rendering of a wheel-shaped droplet can be seen in the distance. (Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
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The suturing tool demonstrates image-guided anastomosis, which means the connecting of parts such as vessels. The target on the top of the tool is used to lead the tool’s tip. This is the same technology used to track the robotic systems on the space shuttle and the International Space Station. (Credit: MDA and CIGITI)
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An aurora dances in the atmosphere on Aug. 20, 2014, as the International Space Station flew over North America. This image was captured by astronaut Reid Wiseman from his vantage point on the ISS. (Credit: NASA/Handout/QMI Agency)
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Natalie Hinkel gives a plenary talk at the Cool Stars 18 meeting in Flagstaff, Arizona, about her paper on the Hypatia Catalog. (Credit: Natalie Hinkel)
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The US Department of Energy has cancelled visits by Russian scientists to key US labs, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Credit:NC-ND/Los Alamos National Laboratory)
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A star in a galaxy passes by a black hole closely enough to be destroyed once every 10,000 years. It is possible to detect the death of a star in a fairly distant galaxyas the destruction of a star generates a bright X-ray flare; it is only necessary to distinguish such a flare from other types of X-ray radiation. Because flares occur in a variety of astrophysical processes, the task of finding stars destroyed by black holes is quite complicated. (Credit: Sergei Sazonov)
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The recent finding of an intermediate-mass black hole provides evidence that could support some theories of how supermassive black holes form. (Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)
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Some of the best evidence for parallel worlds actually arrives courtesy of an enigmatic oddity within deep-space, careening toward the Milky Way at an incredible 200,000 miles per hour. Though it’s more than 2 million light years away, the Andromeda galaxy, appears to engage in anomalous behavior which suggests a strange gravitational phenomenon. Specifically, gravity that could be draining from another universe, as yet invisible to us, could be the impetus behind such anomalous phenomena. (Credit: Micah Hanks)
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Having a single point in contact with the ground lets a ballerina spin. In the same way, a quantum state is dynamic because it can turn about a point thanks to quantum uncertainty, say CQT and Oxford researchers. (Credit: Michael Garner, courtesy English National Ballet)
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A cross-section of the Earth’s ozone layer as measured by the limb profiler, part of the Ozone Mapper Profiler Suite that’s aboard the Suomi NPP satellite. (Credit: NASA/NOAA)
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A simulation of two colliding black holes. Colors reflect the variation of gravitational waves. (Credit: Werner Benger/NASA Blueshift)
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Every once in a while I think that there maybe is no fundamentally smallest unit of length; that all these arguments for its existence are wrong. I like to think that we can look infinitely close into structures and will never find a final theory, turtles upon turtles, or that structures are ultimately self-similar and repeat.(Credit: Sabine Hossenfelder, Sanghyuk Moon)
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The International Space Station’s robotic arm, Canadarm2, grapples the Orbital Sciences’ Cygnus cargo craft, as seen in this still image taken from NASA TV July 16, 2014. (Credit: Reuters/NASA TV/Handout via Reuters)
This is a schematic of a plasma torus around an exoplanet, which is created by the ions injected from an exomoon’s ionosphere into the planet’s magnetosphere. (Credit: UT Arlington)
“As NASA continues to push the boundaries of human imagination and innovation, we have seen the value in utilizing a citizen-based professional crowd to complement our internal efforts and solve complex real-world challenges,” Jason Crusan, director of NASA’s Tournament Lab. (Credit: NASA/Don Davis)
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NIST researcher Kevin Dwyer with the silicon enrichment apparatus. The process begins at the left, where natural-abundance silicon in the form of silane gas (SiH4) is ionized. The ions pass through a magnetic field (top left), which causes their paths to curve to different degrees based on their mass. The silicon-28 ions, now separated from the other silicon isotopes, are decelerated through an ultra-high vacuum chamber (top center) and into the deposition chamber (top right) (Credit: Pomeroy, NIST, Dwyer)
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This artist’s concept illustrates a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun. Supermassive black holes are enormously dense objects buried at the hearts of galaxies. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
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A protein folding funnel, the product of algorithms created by Rice’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, is a graphic representation of the energy landscape a protein navigates as it goes from its initial floppy state to a folded, functional unit. The funnel shows smooth slopes as well as outcroppings where parts of a protein may pause while others catch up, and also traps that could cause a protein to misfold. New Rice research shows how the interplay between evolution and physics developed the skills necessary to conserve useful proteins. (Credit: Center for Theoretical Biological Physics/Rice University)
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In this concept image, the robotic vehicle deploys an inflatable bag to envelop a free-flying small asteroid before redirecting it to a distant retrograde lunar orbit. (Credit: NASA)
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Researchers from Three Perimeter Institute have a new idea, and have claimed that what is perceived as the big bang, could be the three-dimensional ‘mirage’ of a collapsing star in a universe profoundly different than our own. (Credit: NASA, ANI)
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The International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3) will have the closest view of the moon at 11:16 a.m. PDT. Members of the rebooted mission partnered with Google to create a website, where they will host a video hangout beginning at 10:30 a.m. PDT. (Credit: ISEE3, NASA)
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our known universe could be the three-dimensional “wrapping” around a four-dimensional black hole’s event horizon. In this scenario, our universe burst into being when a star in a four-dimensional universe collapsed into a black hole. (Credit: Perimeter Institute)
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Scientists have developed a method to bend sound waves as they travel through open air, and can even create an acoustic “bottle” that can trap and hold tiny particles. (Credit: Xiang Zhang Group)
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At the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), experiments with nitrogen atoms in diamonds are already being carried out. (Credit: TU Wien)
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