Imagine yourself in orbit, your spacecraft flying backward with its small window facing down toward the surface of the moon. You peer out, scouring the ash-colored contours of the cratered landscape for traces of ancient volcanic activity. Around you, the silent, velvety blackness of space stretches out in every direction.
Heavens
DETROIT – While mood disorders like depression or anxiety tend to negatively affect treatment for allergies and chronic rhinosinusitis, the same cannot be said for patients with nasal obstructions such as deviated septum, according to researchers at Henry Ford Hospital.
The new study shows mood disorders are not linked to either nasal obstructive symptoms or the failure of nasal obstruction surgery.
As any city dweller knows, buses are rarely on time. It's typical to wait a while, only to have several buses show up one after another – a phenomenon known as bus bunching.
Fortunately, researchers and students at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a possible solution for bus bunching that provides better service to riders, simplifies the job of drivers and reduces work for management.
WASHINGTON, April 19, 2012 — Just in time for Sunday's celebration of Earth Day, the American Chemical Society (ACS) today released a video revealing the journey that recyclable materials take beyond those blue curbside bins. In the latest episode of ACS' award-winning Bytesize Science series, viewers take a tour of a typical recycling center to see how these facilities sort the mountains of recyclables they receive every day. The video is available at www.BytesizeScience.com.
Optics Industry: Telescopes, Cameras and More
The optics industry has been the beneficiary of a new stitching technique that is an improved method for measuring large aspheres. An asphere is a lens whose surface profiles are not portions of a sphere or cylinder. In photography, a lens assembly that includes an aspheric element is often called an aspherical lens. Stitching is a method of combining several measurements of a surface into a single measurement by digitally combining the data as though it has been "stitched" together.
Autonomous, self-replicating robots -- exobots -- are the way to explore the universe, find and identify extraterrestrial life and perhaps clean up space debris in the process, according to a Penn State engineer, who notes that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence -- SETI -- is in its 50th year.
The IceCube neutrino telescope encompasses a cubic kilometer of clear Antarctic ice under the South Pole, a volume seeded with an array of 5,160 sensitive digital optical modules (DOMs) that precisely track the direction and energy of speeding muons, massive cousins of the electron, which are created when neutrinos collide with atoms in the ice.
A new type of quantum bit called a "phase-slip qubit", devised by researchers at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute and their collaborators, has enabled the world's first-ever experimental demonstration of coherent quantum phase slip (CQPS). The groundbreaking result sheds light on an elusive phenomenon whose existence, a natural outcome of the hundred-year-old theory of superconductivity, has long been speculated, but never actually observed.
A team using the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory, along with other telescopes, has mapped the motions of more than 400 stars up to 13 000 light-years from the Sun. From this new data they have calculated the mass of material in the vicinity of the Sun, in a volume four times larger than ever considered before.
Several million young stars are vying for attention in a new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a raucous stellar breeding ground in 30 Doradus, a star-forming complex located in the heart of the Tarantula nebula.
The new image comprises one of the largest mosaics ever assembled from Hubble photos and includes observations taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys. NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore released the image today in celebration of Hubble's 22nd anniversary.
New research suggests that billions of stars in our galaxy have captured rogue planets that once roamed interstellar space. The nomad worlds, which were kicked out of the star systems in which they formed, occasionally find a new home with a different sun. This finding could explain the existence of some planets that orbit surprisingly far from their stars, and even the existence of a double-planet system.
"Stars trade planets just like baseball teams trade players," said Hagai Perets of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (04/17/2012) —American women today are more likely to earn college degrees than men with women receiving 57 percent of all bachelor's and 60 percent of all master's degrees. But are there consequences to having more women than men in college?
Research from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and University of Minnesota has found the ratio of men to women dramatically alters women's choices about career and family. When men are scarce, women delay having children and instead pursue high-paying careers.
30 Doradus is the brightest star-forming region in our galactic neighbourhood and home to the most massive stars ever seen. The nebula resides 170 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small, satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. No known star-forming region in our galaxy is as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus.
New research has analysed the mood of Twitter users in the UK and detected various changes in the mood of the public. In particular, the researchers observed a significant increase in negative mood, anger and fear, coinciding with the announcement of spending cuts and last summer's riots together with a possibly calming effect during the royal wedding.
The study by academics at the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory is presented at the International Workshop on Social Media Applications in News and Entertainment (SMANE 2012) held in Lyon, France.
Unintentional poisonings from medicines cause more emergency room visits for young children each year than do car accidents.
One key reason may be that nearly 1 of every 4 grandparents says that they store prescription medicines in easy-access ways, according to a new poll.
The University of Michigan Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health recently asked parents and grandparents of children aged 1 to 5 years about the presence of medicines in their homes and how they arestored.