NASA’s Juno spacecraft prepares to probe Jupiter’s mysteries
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot also reveals a mosaic of currents that swirl through the planet’s atmosphere. Picking up where Galileo left off, Juno is designed to answer basic questions a...
NASA’s Juno and JEDI: Ready to unlock mysteries of Jupiter
On board NASA’s Juno spacecraft – set to enter Jupiter orbit on July 4 – are instruments that will help scientists answer fundamental questions not just about the solar system’s larg...
Major breakthrough in understanding Alzheimer’s disease
Alzheimer’s disease is characterized, in part, by the build-up of a small protein (‘amyloid-beta’) in the brains of patients. Unlike blood vessels anywhere else in the body, those in...
Juno spacecraft breaks solar power distance record
Launching from Earth in 2011, the Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter in 2016 to study the giant planet from an elliptical, polar orbit. Launched in 2011, Juno is the first solar-...
Harvesting clues to GMO dilemmas from China’s soybean fields
China’s struggle - mirrored across the globe – to balance public concern over the safety of genetically modified (GM) crops with a swelling demand for affordable food crops has left ...
Fruit and vegetables aren’t only good for a healthy body; they protect your mind too
Participants used a scoring system to measure their adherence to the selected diet, i.e. the higher the dietary score indicated that the participant was eating a healthier diet. Lead...
CaSSIS sends first image of Mars
The pictures are a part of the mission’s preparations for arriving at its destination in October. It was launched with the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in ...
Synthetic biology needs robust safety mechanisms before real world application
Synthetic biology involves engineering microbes like bacteria to program them to behave in certain ways. Synthetic biology has now reached a stage where it’s ready to move out of the...
Solar Observatory discovers its 3,000th comet
This is the 3,000th comet discovered in the data from that space telescope since it launched in 1995. Red represents the Kreutz family of comets, which count for 85 percent of all th...
NASA’s Juno spacecraft enters Jupiter’s magnetic field
This chart presents data the Waves investigation on NASA’s Juno spacecraft recorded as the spacecraft crossed the bow shock just outside of Jupiter’s magnetosphere on July 24, 2016. ...
NASA pushes first flight of Orion spacecraft with crew to 2023
Managers set 2023 as the new official launch date for the capsule, although they said they haven’t entirely given up yet on 2021. The 11-foot capsule will blast off atop a megarocket...
Forest-mapping instrument for space station passes major milestone
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech A laser-based instrument for mapping the 3-D structure of Earth’s forests has passed a major milestone toward deployment on the International Space Station ...
Quantum computer simulates fundamental particle interactions for the first time – Physics World
Gauge theories Peter Zoller, Rainer Blatt and colleagues at the University of Innsbruck and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) have created a digital q...
Explainer: What is the molecular clock?
Dating the origin of species Sometimes known as the evolutionary clock or gene clock, the molecular clock has foundations in the biological concept of heredity: all life inherits in...
Artificial leaf: New efficiency record for solar hydrogen production is 14 percent: 17 year old record value finally exceeded
One especially interesting solution for storing this energy is artificial photosynthesis. These use the electrical power that sunlight creates in individual semiconductor components ...
What are asteroids?
According to NASA, the average distance between objects in the asteroid belt is greater than 1-3 million km. Even though there may be millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt, most...
What are asteroids made of?
The platinum group metals are some of the most rare and useful elements on Earth. The various elements that are found in asteroids. The force of the impact briefly turned the ice int...
The moons of Saturn
Saturn’s Inner Large Moons, which orbit within the E Ring (see below), include the larger satellites Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, and Dione. Large Outer Moons: The Large Outer Moons, w...
Sweeping over the south pole of Mars
This sweeping view by ESA’s Mars Express extends from the planet’s south polar ice cap and across its cratered highlands to the Hellas Basin (top left) and beyond. The image was crea...
Russian cosmonaut back after record 879 days in space
Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, pictured entering the International Space Station in March, has spent a total of 879 days in space over five separate trips Russian cosmonaut Genn...
Researchers test speed of light with greater precision than before
Researchers from The University of Western Australia and Humboldt University of Berlin have completed testing that has effectively measured the spatial consistency of the speed of li...
New Pluto images from NASA’s New Horizons
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering v...
New Horizons probes the mystery of Charon’s red pole
Charon’s polar regions are very cold, and I mean VERY cold! These temperatures (especially with Charon’s extremely thin atmosphere) are too cold to support surface liquid: gases are ...
New directions in mental health care for older adults
The aging of the population, shifting diagnostic criteria, and new health care policy initiatives are some of the factors driving changes in mental health treatment for older America...
Mapping wood production in European forests
The map shows predicted wood production (in cubic meters per ha of land per year) in Europe averaged over the period 2000-2010. Credit: 2015 Elsevier B.V. The benefits that forests p...