National Geographic October 17, 2012 They're calling it the planet next door, but even our fastest craft would take 40,000 years to reach this Earth-size neighbor. October 16, 2012 Step aside Tatooine. October 15, 2012 Solar wind sparked creation of lunar water, a new study says—a whole new explanation for water in the inner solar system. October 14, 2012 "I'm coming home," Felix Baumgartner radioed from 24 miles up Sunday, just before falling farther and faster than any human on record. Watch right here as Felix Baumgartner attempts to break the sound barrier—65 years to the day after Chuck Yeager did the same in a plane. October 12, 2012 As Endeavour hits L.A. streets Friday, zoomable, ultrahigh-resolution pictures offer a last spin around the flight deck, button by button. October 11, 2012 The universe just got a bit richer with the discovery of a diamond-rich exoplanet orbiting a nearby star, a new study says. October 10, 2012 October 8, 2012 Slime molds have evolved a way of remembering where they've been.
Science Daily: News & Articles in Science, Health, Environment & Technology Science News, Articles and Information | Scientific American Is Dark Energy "Antigravity" Leakage from an Adjacent Universe? We Might Know Soon. New results from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Anglo-Australian Telescope atop Siding Spring Mountain in Australia confirm that dark energy is a smooth, uniform force that now dominates over the effects of gravity. The observations follow from careful measurements of the separations between pairs of galaxies. But what causes that "smooth, uniform force" that rules over gravity? Astronomers have known for years that something unknown apears to be "pulling" our Milky Way and tens of thousands of other galaxies toward itself at a breakneck 22 million kilometers (14 million miles) per hour. One of the most fascinating discoveries of our new century may be imminent if the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva produces nano-blackholes. Burt Ovrut, most famous for his work on string theory, currently Professor of Theoretical High Energy Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, imagined two branes, universes like ours, separated by a tiny gap as tiny as 10-32 meters.
Mars Rover Beginning To Hate Mars PASADENA, CA—NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists overseeing the ongoing Mars Exploration Rover Mission said Monday that the Spirit's latest transmissions could indicate a growing resentment of the Red Planet. Spirit completes a diagram of an erect human penis on the planet's dusty surface. "Spirit has been displaying some anomalous behavior," said Project Manager John Callas, who noted the rover's unsuccessful attempts to flip itself over and otherwise damage its scientific instruments. "And the thousand or so daily messages of 'STILL NO WATER' really point to a crisis of purpose." The "robot geologist," as NASA describes Spirit, has been operating independently for over 990 Martian sols—nearly the equivalent of three Earth years. According to Callas, Spirit was operating normally until the onset of the Martian winter, whose shorter days and frigid temperatures typically mean a slower pace for exploratory rovers. Project leaders receive data from the Mars rover Spirit.
Astronomy Magazine - Interactive Star Charts, Planets, Meteors, Comets, Telescopes Mars' Tyrrhena Terra --Proof of Ancient Water Systems The 621 mile-by-1,240 mile (1,000 by 2,000-kilometer) region of Tyrrhena Terra (outlined by the white box in the inset) sits between two regions of low altitude in Mars' southern hemisphere, as shown in this global topography map. Hydrated minerals were found in 175 locations associated with impact craters in Tyrrhena Terra. In a new study, ESA’s Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter zoomed in on craters in on these ancient southern highlands to learn more about the history of water in this region. By studying rocks blasted out of impact craters, ESA’s Mars Express has found evidence that underground water persisted at depth for prolonged periods during the first billion years of the Red Planet’s existence. Impact craters are natural windows into the history of planetary surfaces – the deeper the crater, the further back in time you can probe. The Daily Galaxy via ESA Mars Express
The 100-Million-Year Sleep --Earth's Longest Hibernation Cycle With a hibernation period of up to 100 million years, bacteria discovered on the Arctic sea floor may have longest life cycle of any known Earthly organism. Casey Hubert from the Geosciences Group at Newcastle University, UK, and colleagues discovered the bacteria while studying biological activity in sediment samples from the sea floor off the Norwegian island of Svalbard. Hubert's theory proposed that rising currents thrust some cells out of their deep hot niche and into the cold Arctic seawater, where they lie dormant. The team expected to find organisms that flourish in the cold, but are killed at higher temperatures. A look at the genetic sequences of the thermophiles revealed that they are most closely related to bacteria from ecosystems in the warm, oxygen-depleted depths of oceanic crust or subsurface petroleum reservoirs. "It's like there's a seed bank in the sediment of diverse thermophiles," says Hubert. Casey Kazan via New Scientist
Welcome to Explorations in Science with Dr. Michio Kaku NewsAlert: Start of a "Space Wars Era"? Chinese Journalists Were Barred From Endeavour Shuttle Launch Chinese journalists were denied access to this week's space shuttle launch in what was the first application of a congressional ban on interactions between NASA and the Chinese government. The 16 May launch of the Endeavor was a major news story for China because its scientific payload, the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, whose goal is to search for clues to dark matter and the fate of the universe, was built in part by Chinese scientists. But journalists seeking to cover the iconic event were barred from access into the Kennedy Space Center. A NASA spokesperson says the agency was simply following instructions in last month's 2011 spending bill that averted a government-wide shutdown. The language was written into law by Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA), chair of a House of Representatives spending panel that oversees NASA's budget -- a powerful critic of China's human rights record and what he believes are government-sanctioned cyberattacks on U.S. institutions and businesses.
Science Codex | Science news, science articles, all day, every day Weekend Feature --A Radical Theory Asks: Are Stars at the Edge of the Hubble Universe Being Consumed by a Universe-in-Mass Black Hole? In August of 2007, astronomers at the University of Minnesota located a gigantic hole in the Universe. This empty space, stretching nearly a billion light-years across, is devoid of any matter such as galaxies, stars, and gas, and neither does it contain the strange and mysterious dark matter, which can be detected but not seen. Empty places in the Universe are not uncommon. “Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,” explains Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota. Rudnick and his team studied data from a survey of the entire sky imaged by the Very Large Array radio telescope. The area of sky in which the hole exists lies in the direction of the constellation Eridanus. But the hole is not a part of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, which is a remnant of the Big Bang. Dark energy, which appears to have been verified this week, can be seen as the opposite of gravity. Casey Kazan Sources: cosmology.com
NASA Space Telescope Takes Its First X-Ray Photos of a Black Hole | NuSTAR NASA's newest space telescope has opened its X-ray eyes to take its first pictures of the high-energy universe, including a glimpse at a well-known black hole. The space observatory, called the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, launched June 13 on a mission to observe high-energy, short-wavelength X-ray light from some of the most dynamic objects in space, such as black holes and supernova remnants. The observatory extended a 33-foot (10 meters) mast on June 21 to separate its light-gathering optics from their focal point. The $165 million telescope took its first photos June 28, directing its gaze toward a nearby black hole that is eating up a neighboring giant star. "Today, we obtained the first-ever focused images of the high-energy X-ray universe," said Fiona Harrison, the mission's principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., in a statement. Black Hole Quiz: How Well Do You Know Nature's Weir... 0 of 9 questions complete
"The Human Species Will One Day Migrate to a Parallel Universe" --Michio Kaku Like many physicists, Michio Kaku thinks our universe will end in a "big freeze." However, unlike many physicists, he thinks we might be able to avoid this fate by slipping into a parallel universe. "i One of the most fascinating discoveries of our new century may be imminent if the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva produces nano-blackholes when it goes live again. "The multiverse is no longer a model, it is a consequence of our models," says Aurelien Barrau, particle physicist at CERN While it hasn’t been proven yet, many highly respected and credible scientists are now saying there’s reason to believe that parallel dimensions could very well be more than figments of our imaginations. "The idea of multiple universes is more than a fantastic invention—it appears naturally within several scientific theories, and deserves to be taken seriously," stated Aurelien Barrau, a French particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).