Young stars ejecting plasma could give us clues into the Sun’s past Kyoto, Japan — Down here on Earth we don’t usually notice, but the Sun is frequently ejecting huge masses of plasma into space. These are called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). They often occur together with sudden brightenings called flares, and sometimes extend far enough to disturb Earth’s magnetosphere, generating space weather phenomena including auroras or geomagnetic storms, and even damaging power grids on occasion. Scientists believe that when…
From a baby's first blurted “bowl!'” for the word “ball” to the whispered goodbye of a beloved elder, the capacity for complex vocalizations is one of…
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a medical imaging technology used to image organs and soft tissues, may hold the key to improving the efficiency of jet…
Jump ropes are used by kids for fun and by athletes for training. But what about the underlying physics? How do jump ropes work? Can important engineering…
Hummingbirds rank among the world's largest and most accomplished hovering animals, but how do they manage it in gusty winds? A team of researchers at New…
For centuries, hunters have imitated their avian prey by whistling through their fingers or by carving wooden bird calls. Now a team of physicists at Harvard…
Airplanes do not look much like birds — unless you were to imagine a really weird bird or a very strange plane — but should they? This question is exactly…
Nine supercomputers have been tested, validated and ranked by the new “Graph500” challenge, first introduced this week by an international team led by Sandia…
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, news about 20-somethings becoming billionaires from the sale of their software companies flooded the media, giving the…
Over the last 15 years, astronomers have detected nearly 500 exoplanets orbiting ordinary stars in our cosmic neighborhood. Now, for the first time,…
But new observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are helping to show that elliptical galaxies still have some youthful vigor left, thanks to encounters…
The resulting images and data shed new light on the nature and composition of comets, according to the University of Maryland-led EPOXI science team, which…
Scientists have simulated, for the first time, the merger of two black holes of vastly different sizes, with one mass 100 times larger than the other. This…
The molecular chaperone heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90) couples ATP hydrolysis
to conformational changes driving a reaction cycle that is required
…
The University of New Hampshire is now home to a wind tunnel that is the largest of its type in the world. At 300 feet long, the new Flow Physics Facility…
As electronics become smaller and smaller the need to understand nanoscale phenomena becomes greater and greater. Because materials exhibit different…
ALPHA stored atoms of antihydrogen, consisting of a single negatively charged antiproton orbited by a single positively charged anti-electron (positron). While…
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