Astronomers using ESA's XMM-Newton space observatory have probed the gas-filled haloes around galaxies in a quest to find 'missing' matter thought to reside there, but have come up empty-handed – so where is it?
Sending a human into space and doing it efficiently presents a galaxy of challenges. Koki Ho, University of Illinois assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, and his graduate students, Hao Chen and ...
Southwest Research Institute scientists posit a violent birth of the tiny Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, but on a much smaller scale than the giant impact thought to have resulted in the Earth-Moon system. Their work shows ...
An Australian-led group of astronomers working with European collaborators has revealed the "DNA" of more than 340,000 stars in the Milky Way, which should help them find the siblings of the Sun, now scattered across the ...
Fragments of a meteorite that fell to Earth about a decade ago provide compelling evidence of a lost planet that once roamed our solar system, according to a study published Tuesday.
An international team of researchers has performed of extended X-ray emission in the radio source known as PKS 1718−649. The study, published April 11 in a paper on the arXiv pre-print repository, reveals more details about ...
In a paper published today by Nature Astronomy, a team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Rochester have provided the first ...
Can we tell black holes apart? Astrophysicists at Frankfurt, the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, and Nijmegen, collaborating in the project BlackHoleCam, answer this question by computing the first images ...
Somewhere in the vastness of the universe another habitable planet likely exists. And it may not be that far—astronomically speaking—from our own solar system.
SpaceX postponed the launch of NASA's new planet-hunting mission Monday in order to verify the Falcon 9 rocket's navigation systems, the California-based company said.
Imagine if, many millions of years ago, dinosaurs drove cars through cities of mile-high buildings. A preposterous idea, right? Over the course of tens of millions of years, however, all of the direct evidence of a civilization—its ...
University of Miami astrophysicist Nico Cappelluti studies the sky. An assistant professor in the Physics Department, Cappelluti is intrigued by the cosmic phenomena of super massive black holes, the nature of dark matter, ...
A "core-collapse" supernova occurs when the iron core of a massive star collapses under the force of gravity and then rebounds, generating pressure waves and shocks that propagate outward. A superluminous supernovae is a ...
Using radial velocity method a group of Japanese astronomers has found that two evolved stars, namely 24 Booties and Gamma Librae, are orbited by gas giant planets. They discovered that 24 Booties hosts one planet, while ...
NASA is poised to launch a $337 million washing machine-sized spacecraft that aims to vastly expand mankind's search for planets beyond our solar system, particularly closer, Earth-sized ones that might harbor life.
Thunderstorms in Earth's upper atmosphere remain something of a mystery. Scientists cannot reach them directly with instruments; they are too high for balloons and too low for weather satellites. Flying through thunderstorms ...
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a massive galaxy cluster glowing brightly in the darkness. Despite its beauty, this cluster bears the distinctly unpoetic name of PLCK G308.3-20.2.
There are potentially thousands of planets that lie just outside our solar system—galactic neighbors that could be rocky worlds or more tenuous collections of gas and dust. Where are these closest exoplanets located? And ...
Planets orbiting "short-period" binary stars, or stars locked in close orbital embrace, can be ejected off into space as a consequence of their host stars' evolution, according to new research from the University of Washington.
They are the most abundant form of life on Earth, but viruses – or their seed-like dormant state, known as virions – are outliers in our search for life on other planets. Now, one group of scientists are pushing for astrobiologists ...
With an instrument at the Very Large Telescope in Chile scientists of ETH Zurich observed planet-forming disks around young stars similar to the sun 4,5 billion years ago. Surprisingly, the disks are very different. The data ...
Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars and sometimes they abruptly increase their rotation rate. This sudden change of spin rate is called a "glitch" and I was part of a team that recorded one happening in the Vela Pulsar, ...
NASA's latest nail-biting drama was far from orbit as the Senate narrowly confirmed President Donald Trump's choice of a tea party congressman to run the space agency in an unprecedented party-line vote.
Los Angeles harbor commissioners have approved a permit for Space Exploration Technologies to build a facility on 19 acres of port land to manufacture a Mars rocket that will be so big it will require an oceangoing barge ...
This mayhem is all happening at the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery located 4,000 light-years away and visible in binoculars simply as a smudge of light with a bright core.
These NASA Hubble Space Telescope images compare two diverse views of the roiling heart of a vast stellar nursery, known as the Lagoon Nebula. The images, one taken in visible and the other in infrared light, celebrate Hubble's ...
When Elon Musk of SpaceX tweets something interesting, it generates a wave of excitement. So when he tweeted recently that SpaceX might be working on a way to retrieve upper stages of their rockets, it set off a chain of ...
SpaceX was poised Wednesday to try again to blast off NASA's newest planet-hunting spacecraft after a two-day delay to check out the Falcon 9 rocket's navigation systems.
The Danakil Depression in Ethiopia is a spectacular, hostile environment that may resemble conditions encountered on Mars and Titan – as well as in sites containing nuclear waste. From 20-28 January 2018, five teams of ...
The hazards of space flight are well known: freezing temperatures, the vacuum of space, radiation, isolation. But there's a lesser-known risk getting the attention of researchers - a possible danger to vision. Retired NASA ...
A new instrument that will provide a unique, space-based measurement of how plants respond to changes in water availability has arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin final preparations for launch to the ...
The Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph, or CHESS 4, was successfully launched on a NASA Black Brant IX sounding rocket at 12:47 p.m. EDT, April 16 (4:47 a.m. local, April 17) from the Kwajalein Atoll in ...
Step outside on a clear night, and you can be sure of something our ancestors could only imagine: Every star you see likely plays host to at least one planet.
As a species, we humans tend to take it for granted that we are the only ones that live in sedentary communities, use tools, and alter our landscape to meet our needs. It is also a foregone conclusion that in the history ...
It's one of the deepest 'swimming pools' in Europe, but for three years has been helping preparations for a human return to the moon. ESA's Neutral Buoyancy Facility at the European Astronaut Centre has been the site of the ...
In recent history, a very important achievement was the discovery, in 1995, of 51 Pegasi b, the first extrasolar planet ever found around a normal star other than the Sun.
Are we alone? NASA's new planet-hunting mission, poised to launch Monday, aims to advance the search for extraterrestrial life by scanning the skies for nearby, Earth-like planets.
The Advanced Plant Habitat (APH), a recent addition to the International Space Station, is the largest growth chamber aboard the orbiting laboratory. Roughly the size of a mini-fridge, the habitat is designed to test which ...
Two and a half years ago, a team of researchers led by groups at MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, and Boston University announced a milestone: the fabrication of a working microprocessor, built using only existing ...
Researchers playing with a cloud of ultracold atoms uncovered behavior that bears a striking resemblance to the universe in microcosm. Their work, which forges new connections between atomic physics and the sudden expansion ...
Evidence that humans can genetically adapt to diving has been identified for the first time in a new study. The evidence suggests that the Bajau, a people group indigenous to parts of Indonesia, have genetically enlarged ...
It's not often that you see 50-year-old equipment in a modern physics laboratory, let alone find it at the center of cutting-edge research. But then, most such labs aren't run by Ronald Walsworth.
To understand how a cell works, biologists like to take it apart. By removing genes from cells in diverse combinations, researchers have now uncovered how different genes work together to keep cells alive. The research will ...
Physicists at the University of Warwick have today, Thursday 19th April 2018, published new research in the fournal Science today 19th April 2018 (via the Journal's First Release pages) that could literally squeeze more power ...
Diamond is well-known as the strongest of all natural materials, and with that strength comes another tightly linked property: brittleness. But now, an international team of researchers from MIT, Hong Kong, Singapore, and ...
Swarms of tiny oceanic organisms known collectively as zooplankton may have an outsize influence on their environment. New research at Stanford shows that clusters of centimeter-long individuals, each beating tiny feathered ...
An experiment that, by design, was not supposed to turn up anything of note instead produced a "bewildering" surprise, according to the Stanford scientists who made the discovery: a new way of creating gold nanoparticles ...
People in industrialized countries spend more than 80% of their lives indoors, increasingly in air-tight buildings. These structures require less energy for heating, ventilating, and air conditioning, but can be hazardous ...
Researchers have developed a new way to improve our knowledge of the Big Bang by measuring radiation from its afterglow, called the cosmic microwave background radiation. The new results predict the maximum bandwidth of the ...
A protein that plays an important role in embryonic development and nervous system wiring in humans appears to have been borrowed from bacteria. In a study published April 19, 2018, in Cell, scientists from the University ...
Researchers reporting in Current Biology on April 19 show that male fruit flies find sex—and more specifically ejaculation—to be an inherently rewarding experience. The study is the first to show that the rewarding nature ...
UConn researchers have created a biodegradable composite made of silk fibers that can be used to repair broken load-bearing bones without the complications sometimes presented by other materials.
Amongst the countless fascinating plants and animals inhabiting the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia, there are the spectacular "exploding ants", a group of arboreal, canopy dwelling ants nicknamed for their unique ...
In a first for machine-learning algorithms, a new piece of software developed at Caltech can predict behavior of bacteria by reading the content of a gene. The breakthrough could have significant implications for our understanding ...
Scientists have developed a new class of crystalline porous organic salts with high proton conductivity for applications such as proton-exchange membranes for fuel cells. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, polar ...
Plant biologists from The University of Western Australia have made an important discovery about rising temperatures and wheat crops—and subsequently learned that the Romans suspected the effect more than 2000 years ago.
Scientists at Christiana Care Health System's Gene Editing Institute have developed a potentially breakthrough CRISPR gene-editing tool. It could allow researchers to take fragments of DNA extracted from human cells, put ...
A new blood test using gold nanoparticles could soon give oncologists an early and more accurate prognosis of how cancer treatment is progressing and help guide the on-going therapy of patients.
Light makes some materials conductive in a previously unforeseen way. In silicon solar cells, electrons flow when the sun shines. However, scientists at the Stuttgart-based Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research have ...
Using genetic samples and computer simulations, evolutionary biologists have made a glass-half-full forecast: Corals in the Great Barrier Reef have enough genetic variation to adapt to and survive rising ocean temperatures ...
Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and other recent human relatives may have begun hunting large mammal species down to size - by way of extinction - at least 90,000 years earlier than previously thought, says a new study published ...
From one stem cell to many differentiated body cells: Scientists from the MDC in Berlin, along with collaborating researchers in Munich, have published a comprehensive lineage tree of a whole adult animal in the journal Science. ...
All electronic devices consist of billions of transistors, the key building block invented in Bell Labs in the late 1940s. Early transistors were as large as one centimeter, but now measure about 14 nanometers. There has ...
Researchers from the University of Melbourne analysed the numbers of men and women authors listed on more than 10 million academic papers, allowing them to calculate the gender gap among researchers, as well as its rate of ...
Several fields of research have sprung up around the chemical drivers, called catalysts, at work in many industrial processes – including those that boost the production of fuels, fertilizers, and foods. These research ...
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