Idan Ginsburg, a graduate student in Dartmouth's Department of Physics and Astronomy, studies some of the fastest moving objects in the cosmos. When stars and their orbiting plants wander too close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, their encounter with the black hole's gravitational force can either capture them or eject them from the galaxy, like a slingshot, at millions of miles per hour.
Heavens
PULLMAN, Wash. -- We have all heard of the smartphone and any day now, most of us will have one. Not far behind: the smart home.
Writing in the latest issue of the journal Science, Washington State University's Diane Cook says it won't be long before our homes act as "intelligent agents" that use sensors and software to anticipate our needs and tend to tasks that improve our health, energy efficiency, even social media.
Many homes are already halfway there, with computer chips helping microwave popcorn, record TV shows, and turn on coffee makers and thermostats.
Conventional wisdom tells us that in the business world, "you are who you know" — your social background and professional networks outweigh talent when it comes to career success. But according to a Tel Aviv University researcher, making the right connection only gets your foot in the door. Your future success is entirely up to you, says Prof. Yoav Ganzach of TAU's Recanati School of Management.
A new chemical analysis of lunar material collected by Apollo astronauts in the 1970s conflicts with the widely held theory that a giant collision between Earth and a Mars-sized object gave birth to the moon 4.5 billion years ago.
A new X-ray study of the remains of an exploded star indicates that the supernova that disrupted the massive star may have turned it inside out in the process. Using very long observations of Cassiopeia A (or Cas A), a team of scientists has mapped the distribution elements in the supernova remnant in unprecedented detail. This information shows where the different layers of the pre-supernova star are located three hundred years after the explosion, and provides insight into the nature of the supernova.
COLUMBIA, Mo. -- For more than a century and a half, scientists and tourists have visited massive animal-shaped mounds, such as Serpent Mound in Ohio, created by the indigenous people of North America. But few animal effigy mounds had been found in South America until University of Missouri anthropology professor emeritus Robert Benfer identified numerous earthen animals rising above the coastal plains of Peru, a region already renowned for the Nazca lines, the ruined city of Chan Chan, and other cultural treasures.
The first prototype of a new, ultra-compact motor that will allow small satellites to journey beyond Earth's orbit is just making its way out of the EPFL laboratories where it was built. The goal of the micro motor: to drastically reduce the cost of space exploration.
More than one billion stars in the Milky Way can be seen together in detail for the first time in an image captured by astronomers.
Scientists created the colour picture by combining infra-red light images from telescopes in the northern and southern hemispheres. Large structures of the Milky Way galaxy, such as gas and dust clouds where stars have formed and died, can be seen in the image.
Look at a middle school assembly – during their lifetime one in 50 of these kids will develop melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer that kills 48,000 people every year, worldwide. Now look at these kids again – which are at highest risk? You can't tell, but a study recently published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology shows that UV photography might provide important information about risk, not visible to the naked eye.
For the first time, instrumentation aboard two NASA missions operating from complementary vantage points watched as a powerful solar storm spewed a two million-mile-per-hour stream of charged particles and interacted with the invisible magnetic field surrounding Earth, according to a paper published today in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
This first direct estimate of the number of light planets around red dwarf stars has just been announced by an international team using observations with the HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile [1]. A recent announcement (eso1204 - http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1204/), showing that planets are ubiquitous in our galaxy used a different method that was not sensitive to this important class of exoplanets.
SAN DIEGO, March 27, 2012 — New research reported here today at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) provides further support for the idea that comets bombarding Earth billions of years ago carried and deposited the key ingredients for life to spring up on the planet.
About 15,000 scientists and others are expected for the meeting of the ACS — the world's largest scientific society. Being held this week, it includes more than 11,700 presentations on discoveries and advances in science.
HOUSTON -- (March 27, 2012) -- They look like fruit, and indeed the nanoscale stars of new research at Rice University have tasty implications for medical imaging and chemical sensing.
Starfruit-shaped gold nanorods synthesized by chemist Eugene Zubarev and Leonid Vigderman, a graduate student in his lab at Rice's BioScience Research Collaborative, could nourish applications that rely on surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS).
The research appeared online this month in the American Chemical Society journal Langmuir.
A low pressure system that has been lingering in the western North Pacific Ocean for several days appears to be coming together today in infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite.
NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the low pressure area called "System 96W" on March 27 at 0547 UTC (1:47 a.m. EDT) and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured an infrared and visible look at the storm.
Twenty years ago in Chicago, a small leak in an unused freight tunnel expanded beneath the Windy City and started a flood which eventually gushed through the entire tunnel system. A quarter-million people were evacuated from the buildings above, nearly $2 billion in damages accrued, and it took 6 weeks to pump the tunnels dry.
How much more costly – in lives and infrastructure – would a flood in a heavily used, underwater subway tunnel be today?