This mosaic of images from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile shows two dramatic star formation regions in the southern Milky Way. (Credit: ESO/G. Beccari)
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Boeing in among three companies bidding for the next NASA contract to take astronauts into space. The company is offering its CST-100 space capsule in the competition. (Credit: Boeing)
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Carlo Rovelli: “Theoretical physics has not done great in the last decades. Why? Well, one of the reasons, I think, is that it got trapped in a wrong philosophy.” (Credit: Horgan)
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The scientists reported a 40-times-larger effect than previously achieved in semiconductor materials, with the largest value measured comparable to a record high value of the spin-Hall effect observed in heavy metals such as Platinum. (Credit: UCL London Centre for Nanotechnology)
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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)
via discovery
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)
via mysteriousuniverse
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)
via quantumlah
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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CDF physicist Petar Maksimovic, professor at Johns Hopkins University, presented the discovery to the particle physics community at Fermilab. He explained that the two types of Sigma-sub-b particles are produced in two different spin combinations, J=1/2 and J=3/2, representing a ground state and an excited state, as predicted by theory. (Credit: Fermilab)
via newswise
This image, taken by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity in August 2014, looks across the northeastern end of sandy “Hidden Valley” to the lower slopes of Mount Sharp on the horizon. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
via space.com
Scientists of the early 20th century argued that tidal forces had caused the sun to spit out the planets when a rogue star passed too close. It was a kind of drive-by shooting theory of planetary formation known as the “Planetesimal Hypothesis.” (Credit: NASA, M. Strauss)
via io9
An illustration of the extent to which the atoms, in a small cluster of atoms, vibrate. The spheres represent the range of motion of the atoms, rather than the atoms themselves – the spheres have been exaggerated in size by 45 times in order to ease visualisation. The atoms on the surface have larger ranges of motion than those in the middle of the cluster. (Credit: University of York)
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The ExoLance Concept: “Arrows” fall from a spacecraft, penetrate the ground, and expose the life-detecting equipment inside. (Credit: Explore Mars Inc.)
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NASA engineers have built four robots nicknamed “Swarmies” to test whether a group of robots can autonomously and effectively scout an area for resources, and they’ve model the software design after how ants do the same thing. (Credit: NASA/D. Gerondidakis, G. Tickle)
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The quantum system studied at TU Wien (Vienna): a black diamond (center) contains nitrogen atoms, which are coupled to a microwave resonator. (Credit: TU Wien)
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This could be a classic win-win solution: A system proposed by researchers at MIT recycles materials from discarded car batteries—a potential source of lead pollution—into new, long-lasting solar panels that provide emissions-free power. (Credit: Christine Daniloff/MIT)
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Angelo Mosso’s “human circulation balance” machine worked like a seesaw to measure blood flow changes to the brain. (Credit: Stefano Sandrone et al.)
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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)
via americaspace
“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)
via techtimes
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)
via themercury
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)
via tvtechnology
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)
via phys.org
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)
via physics.aps
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)
via universetoday
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)
via americaspace
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.
via physicsworld
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)
via tntoday
“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)
via futurity
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)
via cnet
