Neutrinos are about the tiniest things in existence, but developing a greater understanding of what they are and how they function is likely to have a huge impact in the next few years.
The subatomic particles, created in the nuclear furnaces of the sun and other stars, have no electrical charge and only recently has it been found that they have any mass at all, yet billions pour through each human body every second with no discernable effect or interaction.
Still, the very slight
After a 7-year interplanetary voyage, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will reach Saturn this July and begin what promises to be one of the most exciting missions in planetary exploration history.
After years of work, scientists have just completed plans for Cassini’s observations of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
“Of course, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” said Ralph Lorenz, an assistant research scientist at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Plan
A spectroscopy technique that offers advances in detection of toxic chemicals and counting of molecules has been demonstrated by a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) scientist and collaborators. Described in the Feb. 8 issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics, the NIST-patented technique may be useful for development of miniaturized chemical sensors, as well as for fundamental surface science studies.
The technique (a variation on cavity ring-down spectroscopy) relies on
An international team of astronomers may have set a new record in discovering what is the most distant known galaxy in the Universe. Located an estimated 13 billion light-years away, the object is being viewed at a time only 750 million years after the big bang, when the Universe was barely 5 percent of its current age.
The primeval galaxy was identified by combining the power of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and CARA’s W. M. Keck Telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. These great obs
Looking into the night sky you may see a few stars and the moon. Astronomers, however, are looking for more than this – they are looking for Earth-like planets, which, with a little help from Cranfield University, they may be able to find.
As part of a four-year collaborative project, Cranfield University professors Paul Shore, Dave Stephenson and John Nicholls, together with Dr David Walker and Dr Peter Doel, both of University College London, and OpTIC Technium, are set to establish a uniq
Research using M&Ms sheds light on particle-packing problem
For most people, a regular lunch of M&M’s and coffee would lead to no good. For Princeton physicist Paul Chaikin and collaborators, it spurred fundamental insights into an age-old problem in mathematics and physics.
Chaikin and Princeton chemist Salvatore Torquato used the candies to investigate the physical and mathematical principles that come into play when particles are poured randomly into a vessel. While
Like the delicate form of an icicle defying gravity during a spring thaw, patterns emerge in nature when forces compete. Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found a hidden pattern in cuprate (copper-containing) superconductors that may help explain high-temperature superconductivity.
Superconductivity, the complete loss of electrical resistance in some materials, occurs at temperatures near absolute zero. First observed in 1911 by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlin
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found a way to significantly improve the performance of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers by drilling holes in their surfaces. Faster and cheaper long-haul optical communication systems, as well as photonic integrated circuits, could be the result.
Low-cost VCSELs are currently used in data communication applications where beam quality is of little importance. To operate at higher speeds and over longer distances, the
If comets hitting the Earth could cause ecological disasters, including extinctions of species and climate change, they could also disperse Earth-life to the most distant parts of the Galaxy.
The “splash-back” from a large comet impact could throw material containing micro-organisms out of the planet’s atmosphere, suggest scientists from Cardiff University Centre for Astrobiology.
Although some of this outflowing material might become sterilised by heat and radiation, they believ
View from overhead of the the complex caldera (summit crater) at the summit of Olympus Mons on Mars, the highest volcano in our Solar System.
Olympus Mons has an average elevation of 22 km and the caldera has a depth of about 3 km. This is the first high-resolution colour image of the complete caldera of Olympus Mons.
The image was taken from a height of 273 km during orbit 37 by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA’s Mars Express on 21 January 2004. The view is centred
Lead sulfide — also known by its mineral name, galena — is a naturally occurring mineral found in Missouri, other parts of the world, and now … other parts of the solar system.
That’s because recent thermodynamic calculations by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis provide plausible evidence that “heavy metal snow,” which blankets the surface of upper altitude Venusian rocks, is composed of both lead and bismuth sulfides.
The findings — by Laura Schaefer, resea
Although there are numerous telescopes – both large and small – examining the night sky at any one time, the heavens are so vast and so densely populated with all manner of exotic objects that it is extremely easy to overlook a significant random event. Fortunately, a new generation of scientific instruments is now enabling UK astronomers to prepare for the unexpected and become leaders in so-called “Time Domain Astrophysics”.
Exciting new observations of many different, time-variable celest
ESA PR 08-2004. With just 21 days to the launch of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta comet mission, the spacecraft’s lander has been named “Philae”. Rosetta embarks on a 10-year journey to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from Kourou, French Guiana, on 26 February.
Philae is the island in the river Nile on which an obelisk was found that had a bilingual inscription including the names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy in Egyptian hieroglyphs. This provided the French historian Jean-Franço
Dutch researcher Arjan Lock has investigated the behaviour of vibrating water molecules. Using ultra-short laser pulses, he found that hydrogen atoms in water molecules vibrate for longer at higher temperatures. This is abnormal because in the majority of substances a vibration lives shorter at higher temperatures.
Lock studied the OH-stretch vibration in water. He found that the lifetime of the OH-stretch vibration, a vibration of a hydrogen atom with respect to the oxygen atom, is extremel
RIT professor researches black-hole mergers
When black holes collide, look out! An enormous burst of gravitational radiation results as they violently merge into one massive black hole. The “kick” that occurs during the collision could knock the black hole clear out of its galaxy.
A new study describes the consequences of such an intergalactic collision.
Astrophysicist David Merritt, professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, and co-authors Milos Milosavljevic
Undergraduates’ work blames comet for 6th-century ’nuclear winter’
Scientists at Cardiff University, UK, believe they have discovered the cause of crop failures and summer frosts some 1,500 years ago – a comet colliding with Earth.
The team has been studying evidence from tree rings, which suggests that the Earth underwent a series of very cold summers around 536-540 AD, indicating an effect rather like a nuclear winter.
The scientists in the School of Physics and
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