Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Decontamination system turns space station into life science laboratory

NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio prepares to test the ultraviolet light decontamination hardware (Credit: NASA)
Hubble telescope on the lookout for Kuiper belt as it pasts Pluto
via news.sciencemagFormer NASA Physicist Disputes Einstein’s Relativity Theory

A diagram depicting gravitational lensing, a phenomenon by which light bends around some objects in space. (Credit: NASA, ESA; J. Richard, CRAL; and J.-P. Kneib, LAM)
We owe our lives to instability

Rayleigh Taylor Instability: carbon mass fraction ρ=107 gm/cm3 12C→24Mg nuclear flame. Gravity 109 cm/s2 (Credit: Wiki Commons)
Space giants join forces to battle SpaceX: This is how cheap space travel begins

The SpaceX Dragon capsule is making its third trip to the International Space Station, following a demonstration flight in May 2012 and the first resupply mission in October 2012 (Credit: SpaceX)
Opportunity peers out from ‘Pillinger Point’ – Honoring British Beagle 2 Mars scientist

Opportunity Mars rover peers into vast Endeavour Crater from Pillinger Point mountain ridge named in honor of Colin Pillinger, the Principal Investigator for the British Beagle 2 lander built to search for life on Mars. Pillinger passed away from a brain hemorrhage on May 7, 2014. This navcam camera photo mosaic was assembled from images taken on June 5, 2014 (Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken)
The Continuing Saga of Planet X: Could More Massive Planets Hide Beyond Pluto?

An artist’s impression of Eris, the most massive dwarf planet known to date, with an aphelion of 97 AU from the Sun. Could bigger Super-Earth-type planets be orbiting even farther out? (Credit: ESO/L. Calçada and Nick Risinger)
Trapping light: A long lifetime in a very small place

The top layer shows a simulation of the nanostructure confining the light in the tiny red regions. The second layer is the design generated by an approach that mimics evolutionary biology. The bottom two layers show electron micrographs of the realized nanostructure in silicon. The sharp peak on the left is the trace of the long trapping of light. (Credit: Fabio Badolato)