Plant gravity

How do plants know which way is up? This image shows a lentil seedling root that grew on the International Space Station before being preserved in resin and cut along its length for ...


How strong is gravity on other planets?

However, thanks to its high density – a robust 5.427 g/cm3, which is just slightly lower than Earth’s 5.514 g/cm3 – Mercury has a surface gravity of 3.7 m/s2, which is the equivalent...


How Green is Your State?

Sustainable business practices and environmental impact via engineering renewable energy are keys to naming 10 of the greenest states in America, according to Olivet Nazarene Univers...


Best of Opensource.com: Government

Each year, I reflect on Opensource.com’s top government stories of the year. We saw that investment theme echoed in articles from Europe, including Croatia’s proposal for an open sou...


Principia liftoff

ESA astronaut Tim Peake, NASA astronaut Tim Kopra and commander Yuri Malenchenko were launched into space 15 Decemeber 11:03 GMT from Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. The launch mark...


Shaking bosons into fermions

This transmutation is an example of emergent behavior, specifically what’s known as quasiparticle excitations—one of the concepts that make condensed matter systems so interesting. T...