This is incredible: For the first time, ever, astronomers have captured an optical image of a planet orbiting a star like our own. And that’s not all: we also have a second picture showing TWO planets orbiting a second star!
Diamonds are a girl's best friend, they say - and soon they could be every girl's best friend. A team in the US has brought the world one step closer to cheap, mass-produced, perfect diamonds. The improvement also means there is no theoretical limit on the size of diamonds that can be grown in the lab.
A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.
It looks like a lunar landscape but this remarkable photograph actually shows our Milky Way and the planet Jupiter in all their glory - viewed from a cave in America's Utah desert.
The Sun has been strangely unblemished this year. On more than 200 days so far this year, no sunspots were spotted. That makes the Sun blanker this year than in any year since 1954, when it was spotless for 241 days.
Hydrogen shapes up to become one of the most important fuels for the future, but scientists need to overcome substantial hurdles to enable an efficient production of hydrogen. We increasingly hear about ideas that suggest that future engines in fact may be able to run on water, breaking down water into oxygen and hydrogen right where it is needed. This process requires significant input energy, which, according to scientist could be provided by sunlight.
Could cyanobacteria eventually become a more popular biofuel than corn, sugarcane, or even algae? Quite possibly. According to Science Daily, cyanobacteria can convert up to 10 percent of the sun’s energy into biomass.
A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence (click here to check). Pink (or magenta, to use its official name) simply isn’t there. But if pink isn’t in the light spectrum, how come we can see it?
Neanderthals were not as stupid as they have been portrayed, according to a study showing their stone tools were just as good as those made by the early ancestors of modern humans, Homo sapiens.
GENEVA (Reuters) - Tests have cleared the way for the start-up next month of an experiment to restage a mini-version underground of the "Big Bang" which created the universe 15 billion years ago, the project chief said on Monday.
In the garage of his house, Frank Sanns spends nights tinkering with one of his prized possessions: a working nuclear-fusion reactor. Mr. Sanns, 51 years old, is part of a small subculture of gearheads, amateur physicists and science-fiction fans who are trying to build fusion reactors in their basements, backyards and home laboratories. Mr. Sanns, who owns a banquet hall here, believes he's on track to make fusion a viable power source.
Einstein's Letters of 1939 and 1945; Szilard's Petition of 1945; Groves' Letter to Cherwell Looking for Dirt on Szilard 1945; Cherwell's Unusual Response, 1945
A lost world has been found in Antarctica, preserved just the way it was when it was frozen in time some 14 million years ago.
The flag is probably gone. Buzz Aldrin saw it knocked over by the rocket blast as he and Neil Armstrong left the moon 39 summers ago. Lying there in the lunar dust, unprotected from the sun’s harsh ultraviolet rays, the flag’s red and blue would have bleached white in no time. Over the years, the nylon would have turned brittle and disintegrated.
Scientists from Australia’s Monash University have made what one professor is calling the most important development in fuel cell technology in the last 20 years. The scientists have managed to redesign fuel cells, so that in the future, they will make hybrid cars more reliable and cheaper to build.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer (17 mile) long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September - and the first planned particle collisions before the end of the year. The final step before starting is the chilling of the entire collider to -271.25 C (-456.25 F). Here is a collection of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over seven stories tall), over the past several years.
Over the last 150 years, carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have risen from 280 to nearly 380 parts per million (ppm). The fact that this is due virtually entirely to human activities is so well established that one rarely sees it questioned. Yet it is quite reasonable to ask how we know this.
SCIENTISTS using NASA's Spitzer Telescope have discovered a star that could be our galaxy's brightest. The Peony Nebula star, shining 3.2 million times as the sun, could be the brightest light if it was placed at equal distance with the current record holder, the Eta Carinae.
Mike Gering, CEO of the start-up Global Solar, picks his way along his factory floor, tracing the convoluted path that his thin-film solar panels follow from birth to shipping truck. The raw materials the workers carry are ultra-thin sheets of flexible plastic, which are then coated with a series of chemicals--indium, gallium, diselenide--that allows the module to turn sunlight into electricity.
Sumitomo Electric has developed what is being called the world’s first automobile powered by a superconducting motor. The electric passenger sedan (a modified Toyota Crown Comfort), which is powered by a high-temperature superconducting motor cooled by liquid nitrogen, was unveiled in Osaka on June 12 and will go on display at the Hokkaido Toyako G8 Summit on June 19.
The Ford Nucleon was a nuclear-powered concept car developed by Ford Motor Company in 1958. No operational models were built. The design did not include an internal-combustion engine, rather, a vehicle was to be powered by a small nuclear reactor in the rear of the vehicle. The vehicle featured a power capsule suspended between twin booms at the rear. The capsule, which would contain radioactive core for motive power, was designed to be easily interchangeable, according to performance needs and the distances to be traveled.
the water cycle video
By rights the world and its dog should now know the name Daniel Burd. For Daniel Burd has an eco-friendly solution for disposing of the plastic bag menace. About half a trillion plastic bags are produced globally each year, but they take up to 1000 years to decompose. In the meantime they can migrate to the oceans and be ingested by wildlife, with fatal results.
The long-sought after memristor--the "missing link" in electronic circuit theory--has been invented by Hewlett Packard Senior Fellow R. Stanley Williams at HP Labs (Palo Alto, Calif.) Memristors--the fourth passive component type after resistors, capacitors and inductors--were postulated in a seminal 1971 paper in the IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory by professor Leon Chua at the University of California (Berkeley), but their first realization was just announced today by HP. According to Williams and Chua, now virtually every electronics textbook will have to be revised to include the memristor and the new paradigm it represents for electronic circuit theory.
Researchers demonstrate 'avalanche effect' in solar cells Visualisation of avalanche effect. Credit: TU Delft Visualisation of avalanche effect. Credit: TU Delft Researchers at TU Delft (Netherlands) and the FOM Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter have found irrefutable proof that the so-called avalanche effect by electrons occurs in specific, very small semiconducting crystals. This physical effect could pave the way for cheap, high-output solar cells. The findings are to be published in scientific journal Nano Letters this week.
He has spent two decades and nearly $20 million in a quest to fly to the upper reaches of the atmosphere with a helium balloon, just so he can jump back to earth again. Now, Michel Fournier says, he is ready at last.
"Life finds a way." Thanks to a research time involving Princeton, Indiana University, and others, that isn't just a sappy Disney quote - it's an incredible fact. They found extremophile bacteria buried over two miles into solid rock, where the life-giving energy of the sun never reaches - the energy every other species on Earth depends on. Instead they found their own power source - radiation!
The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives contains ten never-before-published photographs illustrating the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing.
Microelectronic silicon computer “chips” have grown in capability from a single transistor in the 1950s to hundreds of millions of transistors per chip on today’s microprocessor and memory devices. From the first documented semiconductor effect in 1833 to the transition from transistors to integrated circuits in the 1960s and 70s, this website explores key milestones in the development of these extraordinary engines that power the computing and communications revolution of the information age.
Birds' ability to navigate huge distances while migrating has always been a source of natural wonder, and totally sweet long panning shots for nature documentaries. But now it seems that the avian autopilot is of interest to science, and possibly the X-Men - because the birds might have QUANTUM MAGNO-VISION.
Located in the Iranian desert, the Natanz uranium-enrichment facility has been shrouded in secrecy. Many of the buildings there, visible in the aerial image from September 2002 on the far left, are now out of site, buried underground, near left. The site is also protected by anti-aircraft guns and barbed wire.
How does our classical world emerge from the counterintuitive principles of quantum theory? Can we even be sure that the world doesn't 'go quantum' when no one is watching? Philip Ball talks to the theorists and experimentalists trying to find out.
Where's the glue? Scientists find a surprise when they look for what binds in superconductivity
A team of researchers at New York Medical College has discovered why birds, unlike mammals, lack a tissue that is specialized to generate heat. A new paper contains the surprising implication that the same lack of heat-generating tissue may have contributed to the extinction of dinosaurs.
A test satellite for the European Galileo global positioning system has been successfully launched from Kazakhstan.
George Johnson celebrates the great thinkers whose home-brewed experiments transformed our world
Scientists can now tell us what happened in nearly every millisecond of the big bang. Robert Matthews takes us through the first crucial moments
Make your own slide rule
We’ve compiled a list, below, of 27 (update: the list has reached 30; thanks for the comments) startups, listed according to their release date, with additional information on fuel type, range, top speed and price. Most haven’t yet taken venture funding, but where applicable, we’ve listed financial backing.
Researchers at the University of Michigan have focused microwaves to specks 20 times smaller than their wavelength and five times smaller than other devices have achieved.
In the late 18th Century, Captain Cook set out on a voyage of discovery clutching a pocket watch to help him keep track of his location. The timepiece, which he described as "our faithful guide", was accurate to a couple of seconds per month, and helped fix the position of his ship to a distance of two nautical miles. Two hundred years later, the general principle of using clocks to aid navigation still stands. But the latest generation of timepiece, to be launched into space onboard the Giove-B satellite, is a world away from Captain Cook's.
For more than 20 years, the only known superconductors that worked far above liquid-helium temperatures were a few dozen compounds—virtually all based on copper. Now scientists have discovered the first high-temperature superconductors based on iron. These novel materials could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries in science—how exactly the high-temperature versions work.
MOSCOW: The crew of the Soyuz capsule that landed in Kazakhstan hundreds of kilometers off-target after an unexpectedly severe descent was in serious danger, a Russian news agency reported Tuesday.
Normally, big discoveries in a given field come at the rate of a few a year, if that. However, the past six weeks have seen not one, but a series of announcements that may change the face of superconductivity research. Starting with a publication in the February 23rd edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society and ending with three separate announcements from various Chinese research groups, these last few weeks have given us the description of a previously unknown class of high temperature superconductors.
Toxoplasma gondii, a common parasite found in cats that can also infect humans may be affecting human behavior and culture on a mass scale, says a scientist from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Much like the creatures in the movie Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, the parasite would be manipulating our behavior to advance its own survival.
The parasite Toxoplasma gondii uses a remarkable trick to spread from rodents to cats: It alters the brains of infected rats and mice so that they become attracted to—rather than repelled by—the scent of their predators.
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