Heavens

PULLMAN, Wash.—Two university researchers say environmental restrictions have become unnecessarily restrictive and expensive—on Mars.

Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, astrobiologists Alberto Fairén of Cornell University and Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University say the NASA Office of Planetary Protection's "detailed and expensive" efforts to keep Earth microorganisms off Mars are making missions to search for life on the red planet "unviable."

All stars begin their lives in groups. Most stars, including our Sun, are born in small, benign groups that quickly fall apart. Others form in huge, dense swarms that survive for billions of years as stellar clusters. Within such rich and dense clusters, stars jostle for room with thousands of neighbors while strong radiation and harsh stellar winds scour interstellar space, stripping planet-forming materials from nearby stars.

For most terrestrial life on Earth, oxygen is necessary for survival. But the planet's atmosphere did not always contain this life-sustaining substance, and one of science's greatest mysteries is how and when oxygenic photosynthesis—the process responsible for producing oxygen on Earth through the splitting of water molecules—first began.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Engineers at Oregon State University are studying a new approach to organize and route truck transportation that could save millions of dollars, improve the quality of life for thousands of truck drivers and make freight transportation far more efficient.

The findings, published recently in Transportation Research Part E, show the feasibility of the new system. More research is still needed before implementation, but there's potential to revolutionize the way that truck transportation is handled in the United States and around the world, some experts say.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Many researchers around the world are seeking ways to "scrub" carbon dioxide (CO2) from the emissions of fossil-fuel power plants as a way of curbing the gas that is considered most responsible for global climate change. But most such systems rely on complex plumbing to divert the steam used to drive the turbines that generate power in these plants, and such systems are not practical as retrofits to existing plants.

A CSIRO radio telescope has detected the raw material for making the first stars in galaxies that formed when the Universe was just three billion years old — less than a quarter of its current age.

This opens the way to studying how these early galaxies make their first stars.

Our present understanding of thermodynamics is fundamentally incorrect if applied to small systems and needs to be modified, according to new research from University College London (UCL) and the University of Gdańsk. The work establishes new laws in the rapidly emerging field of quantum thermodynamics.

The findings, published today in Nature Communications, have wide applications in small systems, from nanoscale engines and quantum technologies, to biological motors and systems found in the body.

An international team of astronomers has found that a nearby star previously thought to host two or three planets is in fact orbited by six or seven worlds, including an unprecedented three to five "super-Earths" in its habitable zone, where conditions could be right for life.

This is the first time that so many super-Earths — planets more massive than Earth but less than 10 times more massive — have been detected in the same system.

A team of astronomers, including Carnegie's Paul Butler, has combined new observations with existing data to reveal a solar system packed full of planets. The star Gliese 667C is orbited by between five and seven planets, the maximum number that could fit in stable, close orbits. A record-breaking three of these planets are super-Earths found in the so-called habitable zone around the star—the zone where liquid water could exist. This makes them good candidates for the search for life.

Traditional methods of marking larger farm animals rely on branding with hot irons or on ear-tagging. Dogs and cats are instead identified by the implant of a microchip transponder. With very few exceptions, it is now mandatory within the European Union to mark horses by means of transponders. Nevertheless, some sport-horse registries oppose the use of microchips because they believe that the rate of identification failure is unacceptably high. To date, no systematic examinations to see whether chips are easy to decode, have been conducted.

Launch Update: The launch of two sounding rockets from the Wallops Flight Facility was scrubbed on Monday, June 24 due to high cirrus clouds. The next attempt for these two rockets is currently scheduled for Tuesday, June 25, with a window of 9:30-11:30 a.m.

The two rockets, a Black Brant V and a Terrier-Improved Orion, will launch 15-seconds apart in support of the Daytime Dynamo experiment, which is a joint project between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA.

On June 22, 2013, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this image of the Jaroso fire burning in northern New Mexico. Thick smoke billowed east from the southwestern corner of the fire's burn scar. Lightning ignited the fire northeast of Santa Fe on June 10, 2013, and it had burned through nearly 4,500 acres (1,800 hectares) of conifer forests by June 24.

On June 22, 2013, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite captured this image of the West Fork fire complex burning in the San Juan and Rio Grande National Forests of southwestern Colorado. Red outlines indicate hot spots where MODIS detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fire. The fires were burning in rugged terrain with large amounts of beetle-killed spruce forests. South Fork, a nearby town with about 400 people, has been evacuated.

Gliese 667C is a very well-studied star. Just over one third of the mass of the Sun, it is part of a triple star system known as Gliese 667 (also referred to as GJ 667), 22 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion). This is quite close to us — within the Sun's neighbourhood — and much closer than the star systems investigated using telescopes such as the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope.

Researchers from Brown University modeled the stickiness of cells associated with sickle cell anemia. The models suggest that squishy SS2 cells are more likely to get stuck to vessel walls than the rigid, crescent-shaped cells that are most commonly associated with the disease. Once the SS2 cells get stuck, the rigid cells pile up behind them, leading to sickle cell crisis, a painful blockage of blood flow in capillaries.

(Photo Credit: Karniadakis Lab / Brown University)