Chipping away at the secrets of ice formation

Making ice to chill our drinks is easy enough, but surprisingly, the details of that seemingly simple process are still not well understood. Now scientists report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society that they ...

Blue skies, frozen water detected on Pluto

Pluto has blue skies and patches of frozen water, according to the latest data out Thursday from NASA's unmanned New Horizons probe, which made a historic flyby of the dwarf planet in July.

Ocean life triggers ice formation in clouds

Researchers have shown for the first time that phytoplankton (plant life) in remote ocean regions can contribute to rare airborne particles that trigger ice formation in clouds. Results published this week (Wednesday 9 September) ...

Volcanic ash proves inefficient cloud ice maker

When tons of ash spewed into the atmosphere from a 2010 Icelandic volcano it caused havoc for vacationers across Europe. But did it also dramatically change clouds? Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found ...

What's important to know about planet Mercury?

Close by the Sun is Mercury, a practically atmosphere-like world that has a lot of craters. Until NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft arrived there in 2008, we knew very little about the planet—only part of it had been imaged! ...

New type of dust in Martian atmosphere discovered

A group of French and Russian scientists, including three specialists from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, has discovered a new peculiarity of the Martian atmosphere. The scientists had analyzed satellite-acquired ...

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