The next time you wake up with morning breath, you can take pride that though it smells bad, no one else’s is quite like yours. According to a recent study, you’ve got a “breathprint” that is not only unique to you, but could also predict diseases. More »
Unless it’s been brought to life by Disney or Pixar, it’s hard to feel much empathy for robots, particularly the emotionless cyborg experiments being developed around the country. But not this little guy. Designed to stay on its feet no matter what happens, you can’t help but feel a little sad as you watch these researchers push, prod, and bully it like a nerdy fifth grader. More »
Our planet had kind of a rough year in 2012, but thanks to its array of satellites and a certain floating lab, NASA documented every divine and terrifying moment from afar. On top of the usual beauty shots and time-lapses rendered by the ISS and true-color satellites, NASA also showed some spectacular data and modeling visualizations of atmospheric movement, storms and ocean salinity. That helps even the densest of us understand how hurricanes form, gulf streams flow and arctic ice breaks off and drifts seaward. But enough talk — if a picture equals a thousand words, there are three million of them in the two minute video, after the break.
Filed under: Cameras, Science, HD
Via: Gizmodo
Source: NASA
Back in August of 2012, NASA successfully landed the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. The massive rover had a highly complicated system designed to bring it safely to ground inside Gale Crater. One of the primary devices used to slow the Curiosity rover’s decent to the surface of Mars was a gigantic parachute.
The giant parachute use by Curiosity was 51-feet in diameter and once Curiosity was on the ground the parachute ended up about 673 yards away from the rover. Curiosity has been taking photographs of all sorts of things on the surface of Mars ever since it landed, including its own litter. We’ve always known that Mars has an atmosphere, but that atmosphere is significantly thinner than the atmosphere on Earth.
This is why Curiosity required such a large parachute to slow its fall towards the surface of Mars. Recently, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking some interesting photographs of the parachute lying on the surface of Mars. Photographs released by NASA recently show the parachute over the course of five months. The photograph showed that between September 8, 2012 and November 30, 2012 there was some sort of major change that moved the parachute extension from the southeast inward.
Scientists also noted during the same time interval that some “dark ejecta” around the backshell that brightened indicating the deposition of airborne dust. Another significant wind event on the surface of Mars again changed how the massive parachute was laying between December 16, 2012 and January 13 of 2013. This wind event shifted the parachute to the southeast. The scientists say that while seeing the parachute move is a minor curiosity, these windy flapping events could help explain why parachutes on the surface of Mars from the Viking Landers, which landed 1976, are still visible. These wind events help to dust off the bright parachute material.
[via Discovery]
Photos show Curiosity’s parachute flapping in the Martian wind is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Here’s everything you need to know about the Internet’s favorite animal: cats. All the things you ever wondered about your furry friend? Right here. ASAP Science explains why they like catnip, how they can always fall on their feet, why they purr and how their eyes work. Did you know they spend 85% of the day doing nothing and that drinking, eating and mating only takes up 4% of the day. The question: what kind of catty things are they doing the other 11%? [ASAP Science] More »
When you think about it, scientists and cowboys have a lot in common. Both are frontiersmen of a sort, both wear clothes that make them easy to identify and now they both count lassos among their essential tools. Researchers at the University of Bristol and the University of Dundee have wrangled small particles and cells by using a sonic (or ultrasonic) vortex. The whirl of sound waves allowed the teams to catch, move and orient microscopic particles, all without actually contacting them physically, which makes the solution ideal for handling delicate material. Professor Bruce Drinkwater from Bristol even suggested it could one day be used to assemble human tissue (custom assembled livers, anyone?). The sonic lasso is quite a bit more complex and less portable than its rope-based cousin, involving a circular device with 16 sources of acoustic waves. If you’re looking for more technical details you’ll find a link to the recently published paper titled, Dexterous manipulation of microparticles using Bessel-function acoustic pressure fields at the source.
Via: Phys.org
Source: University of Bristol
Have you ever had one of those days where you thought to yourself “Boy, I sure wish I didn’t have this sexy yet expensive cocaine addiction”? Fortunately for you, there could be a new solution on the horizon, and all you have to do is fry your brain with lasers. Equally sexy. More »
We’ve been waiting with bated breath all afternoon to find out what NASA, MIT and the Department of Energy has observed with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Well, we still don’t quite understand the exact nature of dark matter, but highly precise measurements of positron fraction (the ratio of positrons to electrons and protons) do bring us a small step closer to proving the existence of the theoretical material. The AMS found a small excess of positrons coming from all directions instead of a single source. That could indicate the presence of dark matter, which is believed to generate the antimatter particles when it collides and annihilates itself. As usual though, this is far from conclusive. The excess of positrons could be caused by a number of cosmic phenomenon, including pulsars, but researchers are hopeful that further testing will narrow down the possibilities. Those of you hoping for direct and obvious evidence of dark matter may be a little disappointed, but let’s be honest — you were being overly optimistic. Besides, don’t you want some mysteries left to solve? For more information, check out the PR after the break.
Today a briefing was held at Europe’s CERN laboratory which had experiment chief Samuel Ting of MIT announcing what may be the first official detection of dark matter. Ting is a Nobel-prize winning physicist and made it clear that though “more statistics” are going to be needed to be entirely certain of the results, theses findings are the most compelling evidence of dark matter yet.
Dark matter particles are what science loosely defines as invisible space-filling matter. This matter outweighs normal matter (what we’re all made of) and is suggested to exist based on astronomers observations of gravitational tugs on galaxies. To detect the existence of dark matter, a lovely Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer detector was installed aboard the International Space Station approximately two years ago.
The announcement today suggests that the AMS detector has shown evidence of cosmic rays colliding with dark matter particles across the universe. Over the past 18 months, the AMS detector has recorded a massive 25 billion cosmic ray signals – from this, Ting says, dark matter may have been detected. As each cosmic ray collides with dark matter, it throws off antimatter particles – positrons – recorded by the AMS.
[image above via HubbleSite]
Unfortunately as this is indeed a scientific experiment, we won’t have enough certainty of the results to say, without a scientific doubt, that dark matter has been detected without further tests. According to Ting, over the next two decades the experiment should – if everything goes smoothly – produce enough data that we’ll be able to say for sure whether or not they’ve actually found dark matter.
[via USA Today]
Dark Matter detection suggested aboard ISS is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
The universe is thought to be composed of stuff, non-stuff and maybe some other stuff. We’re referring, of course, to matter, anti-matter and as-yet illusive dark matter. While we know a fair amount about matter and its opposite, dark matter is still largely theoretical. That might change in around half an hour, though, as folks from NASA, MIT and the US Department of Energy hold a press conference to explain exactly what the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) strapped to the ISS has been seeing during almost two years of space-scanning. Samuel Ting from MIT, who will be on the panel, implied back in February that today’s results will provide the first evidence of dark matter’s existence — if that’s the right term. The press conference is due to start at 1:30PM EDT, so make sure to tune in to the NASA TV livestream embedded below for what could be the biggest scientific news since Higgs and his boson.
[Image Credit: NASA]
Filed under: Announcements, Science, Alt
Via: Space.com
Source: NASA
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