Heavens

What causes the accelerating expansion of our universe?

Solve that mystery and you reconcile two successful, yet incompatible, theories that explain how our universe works: quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity. But it isn't that simple. It may be that space-time itself is relative and if we zoomed in – way in – on the universe, we would realize it’s made up of constantly fluctuating space and time.

An exotic binary star system 380 light-years away has been identified as a white dwarf pulsar – yet those were believed not to exist anywhere in the universe.

Which means we still don't even know what we don't know.

White pulsars were discovered in the 1960s and associated with neutron stars.

One of the big unknowns in predicting climate change is the billions of tons of carbon frozen in Arctic permafrost. As global warming causes soil temperatures to increase, some of this carbon will decompose and enter the atmosphere and accelerate climate change.

Mars' largest moon, Phobos, has captured public imagination and been shrouded in mystery for decades. But numerical simulations recently conducted at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have shed some light on the enigmatic satellite.

The nearby star Proxima Centauri hosts an Earth-sized planet (called Proxima b) in its habitable zone but the star seems nothing like our sun. It's a small, cool, red dwarf star only one-tenth as massive and one-thousandth as luminous as the sun. However, new research shows that it is sunlike in one surprising way: it has a regular cycle of starspots.

With one billion stars mapped in a thousand days, European researchers have shown that they are not afraid to tackle the most daunting tasks. The work was carried out by 450 researchers from 25 European countries, including around a hundred scientists from France, mainly at the CNRS, Observatoire de Paris and Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur[1], with major participation by the French space agency CNES.

NASA's Aqua satellite provided a visible image of Super Typhoon Meranti as it continued to move toward Taiwan and the northern Philippines.

Collaborative consumption is an expanding economic force in our country and globally, with consumers sharing everything from cars, bicycles and even agricultural equipment. It happens quickly and efficiently, with a simple click of a button or a swipe of a finger.

Many product-sharing transactions involve renters paying a fee to product owners through an online platform, reaping several inherent benefits to this consumer-to-consumer system: profits for the product owner; lower costs for the user; benefits to the environment.

Fabrics that can generate electricity from physical movement have been in the works for a few years. Now researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have taken the next step, developing a fabric that can simultaneously harvest energy from both sunshine and motion.

Combining two types of electricity generation into one textile paves the way for developing garments that could provide their own source of energy to power devices such as smart phones or global positioning systems.

Not too hot, not too cold - instead, water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean should be just around normal for the rest of 2016, according to forecasts from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, or GMAO. With these neutral conditions, scientists with the modeling center at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center say there is unlikely to be a La Niña event in late 2016.

The study, published today in Nature Microbiology, holds promise for a new treatment method against antibiotic-resistant bacteria (commonly known as superbugs).

The star-shaped structures, are short chains of proteins called 'peptide polymers', and were created by a team from the Melbourne School of Engineering.

An international team of astronomers using Hubble have been able to study stellar evolution in real time. Over a period of 30 years dramatic increases in the temperature of the star SAO 244567 have been observed. Now the star is cooling again, having been reborn into an earlier phase of stellar evolution. This makes it the first reborn star to have been observed during both the heating and cooling stages of rebirth.

Measurements of an element in Earth and Moon rocks have just disproved the leading hypotheses for the origin of the Moon.

Jamie Samson and Marta Manser from the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental 1Studies at UZH studied colonies of Cape ground squirrels (Xerus inauris) in the wild at the Kalahari Research Center in South Africa. The diurnal rodents temporarily store their food reserves in several hiding places. As their habitat is very arid and sparsely vegetated, points of reference in the environment, such as trees or bushes, are few and far between. The UZH researchers have now discovered how the social rodents orient themselves to find their way back to their temporary food stashes.

Urinary leakage whilst coughing and jumping is common in women. Using a self-administered treatment via a mobile app called Tät® for three months reduced symptoms, led to fewer leakages and improved quality of life. This according to a study within the project eContinence (in Swedish Tät.nu) at Umeå University published in Neurology and Urodynamics.