A team of researchers has identified seven dust particles that were returned to Earth in 2006 by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft, which might have originated in the interstellar medium. This false-color image shows a diffraction pattern created by one of these particles, named Orion. Image (Credit: Zack Gainsforth)
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“While it may sound a bit odd, we actually learned a great deal about this supernova by detecting absolutely nothing,” said Raffaella Margutti of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study. “Now we can essentially rule out that the explosion was caused by a white dwarf continuously pulling material from a companion star.” (Credit: NASA)
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When parasitic plants such as dodder attack plants like the sugar beet shown here, there is a vast exchange of genetic information between the plants, a Virginia Tech researcher has discovered. (Credit: Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sceinces)
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The fragmentation of the Novato meteorite on Oct. 17, 2012, as depicted in a horizontally mirrored image to show the progression of the event (from left to right). (Robert P. Moreno Jr., Jim Albers and Peter Jenniskens/NASA-SETI)
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Engineering PhD student Willem Olding aims to take out the tedium in creating mapping systems to free-up time for more important work. (Credit: Richard Jupe)
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NASA’s International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 spacecraft, which launched in 1978, flew by the moon on Aug. 10, 2014 and is heading toward the sun. (Credit: SpacecraftforAll.com)
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The influence of the Higgs boson and its field (inset) on cosmological inflation could manifest in the observation of gravitational waves by the BICEP2 telescope (background). (Credit: EPFL)
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A bit of heat. Two parallel, thin plates that exchange heat via thermal radiation can form a thermal “bit” that changes rapidly between “one” and “zero.” One of them is made of a material like VO2 that switches between two states with different thermal properties, depending on its temperature. (Credit: P. Ben-Abdallah/Univ. of Paris-Sud)
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Cygnus Orb-2 spacecraft ‘Janice Voss’ bids farewell to the ISS at 6:40 a.m. EDT, Friday, Aug. 15, 2014. It’s set to reenter the atmosphere on Aug. 17. (Credit: NASA TV)
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Novae typically originate in binary systems containing Sun-like stars, as shown in this artist’s rendering. NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope discovered that a nova in a system like this likely produces gamma rays (magenta) through collisions among multiple shock waves in the rapidly expanding shell of debris. (Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger)
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Beam out: elongated “Landau” states – Instead of rotating uniformly at a particular frequency, an international team of researchers has found that electrons in a magnetic field are capable of rotating at three different frequencies, depending on their quantum properties.
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Asteroid 1950 DA. “Following the February 2013 asteroid impact in Chelyabinsk, Russia, there is renewed interest in figuring out how to deal with the potential hazard of an asteroid impact,” said Rozitis. “Understanding what holds these asteroids together can inform strategies to guard against future impacts.” (Credit: NASA)
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“The puzzle has been how these ‘seed’ black holes grew into the monsters that we now see within the time available, a few billion years at best,” says Priyamvada Natarajan, who proposes that early quasars took in a “super boost,” feasting from large reservoirs of gas that were part of early star clusters. (Credit: Lollito Larkham/Flickr)
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Lighting Science created special lightbulbs for the ISS. There are daylight bulbs with bluer light to encourage energy and activity during what would be daytime hours, and then there are lightbulbs that dial back on the blue to boost astronauts’ production of melatonin for a good night’s sleep. (Credit: Lightning Science)
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WISE thermal-infrared images of (29075) 1950 DA. The image scale is 2.75 arcsec per pixel for the W1, W2 and W3 bands and 5.53 arcsec per pixel for the W4 band. White pixels are ‘bad’ pixels that do not contain data. The object seen in the red circle is (29075) 1950 DA. (Credit: Rozitis, MacLennan, Emery)
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From objects as small as Newton’s apple to those as large as a galaxy, no physical body is free from the stern bonds of gravity, as evidenced in this stunning picture captured by the Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. (Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Luca Limatola)
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Alissa Wiengarten, PhD student at the TUM Department of Physics, heats a porphine powder in a vacuum chamber. (Credit: Thorsten Naeser/Munich-Centre for Advanced Photonics)
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Dr Rosolem with the cosmic-ray soil moisture sensor installed at the the Federal University of Santa Maria SulFlux site in Brazil. (Credit: Univ Bristol)
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The STAR detector, used in the researchers’ experiment, measures the energy and angle of the electron from the W boson decay produced in the proton collision. (Credit: STAR Collaboration)
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Experimental arrangement. A tip is approached to a distance of micrometres from a grounded highly ordered pyrolytic graphene (HOPG) surface carrying Ag nanostructures (illustrated in the inset). Electrons are field-emitted from the tip when a negative tip voltage Vt of hundreds of volts is applied, and the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) of the Ag nanostructures is excited by the field-emitted electrons under a strong electric field introduced by the tip–sample bias. The backscattered electrons are collected and analysed by the TEEA. (Credit: Nature Physics (2014) doi:10.1038/nphys3051)
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Because of that alacrity, and the fact that they had repeat observations at roughly a decade’s detach, the Russian scientists were able to single out stars that dimmed by at least tenfold. They’ve been named 1RXS J114727.1 + 494302, 1RXS J130547.2 + 641252, and 1RXS J235424.5-102053. (Credit: Davies, NASA)
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Could a mystery signal that has been detected be proof of dark matter? While searching through the fundamental structures of various galaxy clusters, astrophysicists located at Harvard University found a bizarre discharge line they are having trouble in identifying. (Credit: Kimberly Ruble)
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New data from the Hubble Space Telescope and computer simulations have revealed that the universe has much less ultraviolet light than previously thought. (Credit: Ben Oppenheimer and Juna Kollmeie)
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Now, a mathematician has announced the completion of an epic quest to formally prove the so-called Kepler conjecture. “An enormous burden has been lifted from my shoulders,” says Thomas Hales of the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who led the work. “I suddenly feel ten years younger!” (Credit: Ray Tang/Rex)
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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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