Would you believe that a broad range of human struggles can be understood by using a mathematical formula? From child-parent struggles to cyber-attacks and civil unrest, they can all be explained with a simple mathematical expression called a "power-law."
In a sort of unified theory of human conflict, scientists have found a way to mathematically describe the severity and timing of human confrontations that affect us personally and as a society.
Noble gas molecules have been detected in space for the first time in the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant, by astronomers at UCL.
Led by Professor Mike Barlow (UCL Department of Physics & Astronomy) the team used ESA's Herschel Space Observatory to observe the Crab Nebula in far infrared light.
Their measurements of regions of cold gas and dust led them to the serendipitous discovery of the chemical fingerprint of argon hydride ions, published today in the journal Science.
The findings support scientists' theories of how argon forms in nature.
A molecule containing a noble gas has been discovered in space by a team including astronomers from Cardiff University.
The find was made using a Cardiff-led instrument aboard Europe's Herschel Space Observatory. The molecule, argon hydride, was seen in the Crab Nebula, the remains of a star that exploded 1,000 years ago. Before the discovery, molecules of this kind have only been studied in laboratories on Earth.
As Tropical Cyclone Madi began its landfall in southeastern Tamil Nadu, India NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead and captured an image of the weakening storm. Several factors are responsible for Madi's quick weakening.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has discovered water vapour erupting from the frigid surface of Jupiter's moon Europa, in one or more localised plumes near its south pole.
Europa is already thought to harbour a liquid ocean beneath its icy crust, making the moon one of the main targets in the search for habitable worlds away from Earth. This new finding is the first observational evidence of water vapour being ejected off the moon's surface.
First discovered in 2007, "fast radio bursts" continue to defy explanation. These cosmic chirps last for only a thousandth of a second. The characteristics of the radio pulses suggested that they came from galaxies billions of light-years away. However, new work points to a much closer origin - flaring stars within our own galaxy.
"We propose that fast radio bursts aren't as exotic as astronomers first thought," says lead author Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
Maybe it happens tomorrow. Maybe in a billion years. Physicists have long predicted that the universe may one day collapse, and that everything in it will be compressed to a small hard ball. New calculations from physicists at the University of Southern Denmark now confirm this prediction – and they also conclude that the risk of a collapse is even greater than previously thought.
Those who travel to space are rewarded with a beautiful sight - planet Earth. But the effects of space travel on the human sense of sight aren't so beautiful. More than 30 percent of astronauts who returned from two-week space shuttle missions and 60 percent who spent six months aboard the International Space Station were diagnosed with eye problems. Two recent investigations examined mechanisms that may explain eye changes in spaceflight, help find ways to minimize this health risk to astronauts and eventually prevent and treat eye diseases on Earth.
Two detailed reports from the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) find that solar financing and other non-hardware costs — often referred to as "soft costs" — now comprise up to 64% of the total price of residential solar energy systems, reflecting how soft costs are becoming an increasingly larger fraction of the cost of installing solar.
After a year of observations, scientists waited with bated breath on Nov. 28, 2013, as Comet ISON made its closest approach to the sun, known as perihelion. Would the comet disintegrate in the fierce heat and gravity of the sun? Or survive intact to appear as a bright comet in the pre-dawn sky?
NASA's TRMM satellite spotted heavy rainfall and very high cloud tops in strong thunderstorms in the southern quadrant of Tropical Cyclone Madi on December 11 as it neared southeastern India's coast.
One of the most powerful tools for understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies has been the use of computer simulations--numerical models of astrophysical processes run on supercomputers and compared with astronomical observations. Getting computer simulations to produce realistic-looking galaxies has been a challenge, however, and different codes (simulation programs) produce inconsistent results.
Imagine playing a video game like Call of Duty or Battlefield and having the ability to lead your virtual army unit while moving freely throughout your house.
Gaming could become this realistic, thanks to new technology developed by Dina Katabi's research group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) that allows for highly accurate, 3-D motion tracking. The new system, dubbed "WiTrack", uses radio signals to track a person through walls and obstructions, pinpointing her 3-D location to within 10 to 20 centimeters — about the width of an adult hand.
Long online transactions can take a toll on a person's self-control, but adding more self-expression and personal identity to those processes can help restore control, according to Penn State researchers.
"Making a lot of choices leads to what researchers call ego-depletion and that can affect self-control," said S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory. "When a person makes a lot of choices, the ability to exert self-control begins to diminish with every choice."
"By causing the air to be stationary for extended periods, while continuing to radiate more heat away into space, you get the absolute lowest temperatures we're able to find," Scambos said. "We suspected that we would be looking for one magical site that got extremely cold, but what we found was a large strip of Antarctica at high altitude that regularly reached these record low temperatures."