Finding clouds of water floating in the atmosphere of an alien world is a significant find. Now, astronomers have reported preliminary findings that water clouds have been detected in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf, a mere 7.3 light-years from Earth. (Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, O’neil)
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NASA mechanical engineer, Brian Trease, worked with Brigham Young University doctoral student Shannon Zirbel, and collaborated with origami expert Robert Lang, who has long been active in promoting it in science, and BYU professor Larry Howel, to combine different traditional folds for an 82-foot solar array that whirls down to 8.9 feet. (Credit: BYU, Meier)
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“If we find a noise we can’t get rid of, we might be detecting something fundamental about nature – a noise that is intrinsic to space-time,” said Physicist Aaron Choi, the holometer project’s lead scientist. (Credit: NASA, ESA)
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In this picture, which combines views from Hubble and the Keck-II telescope on Hawaii (using adaptive optics), you can see a foreground galaxy that is acting as the gravitational lens. The galaxy resembles how our home galaxy, the Milky Way, would appear if seen edge-on. But around this galaxy there is an almost complete ring — the smeared out image of a star-forming galaxy merger far beyond. (Credit: NASA, ESA)
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With a circumference of 52km, the “Higgs Factory” would be almost twice the size of Europe’s equivalent, and significantly more powerful. The Chinese said it is due to be completed by 2028. Image above is the Large Hadron Collider. (Credit: Getty)
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This diagram shows how the effect of gravitational lensing around a normal galaxy focuses the light coming from a very distant star-forming galaxy merger to created a distorted, but brighter view. (Credit: ESA/ESO/M. Kornmesser)
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As seen under an optical microscope, the heterostructures have a triangular shape. The two different monolayer semiconductors can be recognized through their different colors. (Credit: U of Washington)
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“It’s the most distant object for which the spin has been directly measured. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old, so this is going significantly back towards when the epoch of furious galaxy formation was happening,” says, Astrophysicist, Mark Reynolds.
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Scientists have discovered mineral-rich structure on Mars that might be the evidence of niche environment on the planet’s subsurface that could support life. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
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In Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravity is nothing more than the curvature of spacetime. A massive object, such as the sun, causes a deformation of the spacetime grid, while another object such as a planet or a light beam follows the shortest path (a “geodesic”) on this grid. To an observer, this looks like a deflection of the trajectory caused by gravity. (Bottom) A collapsing star can form a black hole so dense and massive that it creates a region of infinite curvature (a “singularity”) so that—inside the event horizon—light cannot escape. Current research in gravitation is attempting to modify general relativity to account for such objects consistent with quantum theory. (Credit: Carin Cain)
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European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers, Expedition 30 flight engineer, prepares vials in the Columbus laboratory of the International Space Station for venous blood sample draws during an immune system investigation. (Credit: NASA)
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Shown above is part of one of the most imaged parts of the night sky, the Orion Nebula. Since the angular size of Orion’s Nebula is so large on the sky, only a portion is shown here. Located just below “Orion’s Belt” this star-forming region is dominated by four young, massive O stars (known as the Trapezium, not pictured here). The wispy blue, green gas seen above is composed mostly of hydrogen, the main element used in forming stars. The Orion Nebula is an astrophysical laboratory, providing an up-close view of the birth of stars. (Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey)
Greased Lighning (GL10) project 10 engine electric prototype remote control plane. Photo taken 8/14/14 (Credit: NASA Langley/David C. Bowman)
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The Kori nuclear power plant in Busan, southeast of Seoul, is seen in this picture released by the plant to Reuters. South Korea needs to quickly find additional space where it can store its spent nuclear fuel because some of its temporary storage capacity will be full by 2016, (Credit: Reuters/Kori Nuclear Power Plant/Handout)
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CDF physicist Petar Maksimovic, professor at Johns Hopkins University, presented the discovery to the particle physics community at Fermilab. He explained that the two types of Sigma-sub-b particles are produced in two different spin combinations, J=1/2 and J=3/2, representing a ground state and an excited state, as predicted by theory. (Credit: Fermilab)
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This image, taken by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity in August 2014, looks across the northeastern end of sandy “Hidden Valley” to the lower slopes of Mount Sharp on the horizon. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
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Scientists of the early 20th century argued that tidal forces had caused the sun to spit out the planets when a rogue star passed too close. It was a kind of drive-by shooting theory of planetary formation known as the “Planetesimal Hypothesis.” (Credit: NASA, M. Strauss)
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An illustration of the extent to which the atoms, in a small cluster of atoms, vibrate. The spheres represent the range of motion of the atoms, rather than the atoms themselves – the spheres have been exaggerated in size by 45 times in order to ease visualisation. The atoms on the surface have larger ranges of motion than those in the middle of the cluster. (Credit: University of York)
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The ExoLance Concept: “Arrows” fall from a spacecraft, penetrate the ground, and expose the life-detecting equipment inside. (Credit: Explore Mars Inc.)
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NASA engineers have built four robots nicknamed “Swarmies” to test whether a group of robots can autonomously and effectively scout an area for resources, and they’ve model the software design after how ants do the same thing. (Credit: NASA/D. Gerondidakis, G. Tickle)
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The quantum system studied at TU Wien (Vienna): a black diamond (center) contains nitrogen atoms, which are coupled to a microwave resonator. (Credit: TU Wien)
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This could be a classic win-win solution: A system proposed by researchers at MIT recycles materials from discarded car batteries—a potential source of lead pollution—into new, long-lasting solar panels that provide emissions-free power. (Credit: Christine Daniloff/MIT)
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Angelo Mosso’s “human circulation balance” machine worked like a seesaw to measure blood flow changes to the brain. (Credit: Stefano Sandrone et al.)
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Scientists may have identified the first known dust particles from outside our Solar System, in samples returned to Earth by a Nasa space mission. (Credit: NASA)
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Here’s an awesome photo to start your day: The International Space Station currently has five spacecraft docked to it — the most that can be currently attached. If any of the world’s space agencies, or private companies like SpaceX were to send up another spacecraft today, they’d need to circle until another parking space becomes available. (Credit: NASA)
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NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted the trail from an oblong boulder that rolled down a slope on the Red Planet. The image was taken on July 3, 2014. (Credit: NASA)
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“This piece of information, that has always been a dream, and never was thought of as being within human grasp. But here in the year 2014 on finds that perhaps this mission is going to be telling us how the universe started,” said Harwit, who is an expert in infrared astronomy and works as a member of the ESA’s Submillimeter Wave Astronomical Satellite, as well as on the Herschel Telescope. (Credit: East News/ Science Photo Library)
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Plot of CPU transistor counts against dates of introduction. Note the logarithmic vertical scale; the line corresponds to exponential growth with transistor count doubling every two years. The curve shows Moore’s law – the doubling of transistor counts every two years. The y-axis is logarithmic, so the line corresponds to exponential growth. (Credit: Wgsimon)
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These images show a diamond sample with a hemispherical lens (right and lower left), and the location of a single electron spin/quantum state visible through its light emission (upper left). The scale bar on the image at upper left measures five microns, the approximate diameter of a red blood cell. (Credit: Courtesy of Awschalom Lab/University of Chicago)
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This plot of data captured by NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, shows X-ray light streaming from regions near a supermassive black hole known as Markarian 335. (Credit: NASA)
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This artist’s representation shows the Fermi bubbles towering above and below the galaxy. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. (Credit: NASA)
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Space agency officials unveiled seven instruments they plan to put on a Martian rover that would launch in 2020, including two devices aimed at bigger Mars missions in the future. (Credit: NASA)
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Light enters a two-dimensional ring-resonator array from the lower left and exits at the lower right. Light that follows the edge of the array (blue) does not suffer energy loss and exits after a consistent amount of delay. Light travels into the interior of the array (green) suffers energy loss. (Credit: Sean Kelley/JQI)
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ESA’s Haptics-1 body-mounted astronaut joystick will be used to investigate telerobotics for space aboard the International Space Station. (Credit: European Space Agency)
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CERN’s website was the first to be hosted on the World Wide Web, at info.cern.ch. It was a simple page that contained a lot of links, which was essentially what the WWW was for at that time. It was dedicated to the Internet itself, describing the basic features of the web, accessing documents and setting up servers. (Credit: Beth A. Balen)
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Celestis has expanded their services to include animals, called Celestis Pets. And now you can even send your family pet in Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s footsteps by launching them to the moon. (Credit: Celestis Pets)
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