Heavens

Neutron stars have been called the zombies of the cosmos, shining on even though they're technically dead, and occasionally feeding on a neighboring star if it gets too close.

They are born when a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses under its own gravity, crushing the matter in its core and blasting away its outer layers in a supernova explosion that can outshine a billion suns.

SANTA CRUZ, CA--The presence of magnetized rocks on the surface of the moon, which has no global magnetic field, has been a mystery since the days of the Apollo program. Now a team of scientists has proposed a novel mechanism that could have generated a magnetic field on the moon early in its history.

Astronomers at the universities of Southampton and Oxford have found evidence that neutron stars, which are produced when massive stars explode as supernovae, actually come in two distinct varieties. Their finding also suggests that each variety is produced by a different kind of supernova event.

Neutron stars are the last stage in the evolution of many massive stars. They represent the most extreme form of matter: the mass of a single neutron star exceeds that of the entire sun, but squeezed into a ball whose diameter is smaller than that of London.

Wildfires kill and, too often, fatalities are caused by a lack of situational awareness, said Kelly Cohen. Timely information can prevent wildfire deaths, especially among first responders, said Cohen, associate professor of aerospace engineering & engineering mechanics at the University of Cincinnati (UC).

GREENBELT, Md. -- NASA engineers have produced a material that absorbs on average more than 99 percent of the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared light that hits it -- a development that promises to open new frontiers in space technology.

Researchers from the Georgia Tech College of Computing, working in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have developed a digital data tracking system to assist low-resource clinical laboratories in developing countries.

Good balance and mobility are essential to help you perform most activities involved in every-day life, as well as many recreational pursuits. Keeping your balance is a complex task, involving the co-ordination between a person's muscles and sensors which detect balance and are part of the nervous system. In older people many factors such as reduced muscle strength, stiff joints, delayed reaction times and changes in the sensory system all add up to reduce a person's ability to keep in balance.

The latest news and discoveries from the science of fluid motion will be featured at the 64th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD), held November 20-22, 2011, at the Baltimore Convention Center near the scenic Inner Harbor section of Baltimore, Md. Researchers from around the globe will present noteworthy research covering the intricacies of flight, the workings of the human heart, the spread of disease, explosions, wine swirling, and more.

Two Pioneer probes left our solar system carrying plaques about humankind, and two Voyager probes will soon join them to gather information about places far out in our galaxy. We can and will send more autonomous probes into outer space, but why have we never found evidence of other civilizations doing the same? A pair of postdoctoral researchers at Penn State, approaching the problem mathematically, shows that we have not looked in enough places to ensure that no extraterrestrial artifacts exist in our solar system.

International sports federations would like to be able to follow the movements of individual athletes more easily during televised matches, even when they're hidden from view. Today, EPFL's Computer Vision Laboratory announces an innovative system that accomplishes this task -- and the implications go far beyond sports.

At the UrbanTec Trade Fair in Cologne from Oct. 24 -26, 2011 in Hall 7, Booth A029. Fraunhofer researchers are demonstrating which of the technologies shown can already be implemented today.

In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, astronomers have hunted for radio signals and ultra-short laser pulses. In a new paper, Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Edwin Turner (Princeton University) suggest a new technique for finding aliens: look for their city lights.

"Looking for alien cities would be a long shot, but wouldn't require extra resources. And if we succeed, it would change our perception of our place in the universe," said Loeb.

-- An international team of scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a surprisingly powerful millisecond pulsar that challenges existing theories about how these objects form.

At the same time, another team has located nine new gamma-ray pulsars in Fermi data, using improved analytical techniques.

An international team of astronomers has used a new technique to study the bright disc of matter surrounding a faraway black hole. Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, combined with the gravitational lensing effect of stars in a distant galaxy [1], the team measured the disc's size and studied the colours (and hence the temperatures) of different parts of the disc. These observations show a level of precision equivalent to spotting individual grains of sand on the surface of the Moon.