Calculations Show Mercury Has a Thin but Dense Crust
Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, and very little is really known about this hot rocky orb. So far, only two space probes have ever studied Mercury. NASA’s Mariner 10 flew past the planet three times between 1973 and 1974. The flybys allowed scientists to map about half the planet, discover its thin […]
SWARM Tracks the Ocean’s Magnetic Field
Earth’s magnetic fields protect us from deadly radiation from high-energy solar particles and cosmic rays. Most of this protective shield is produced by a vast amount of hot molten iron swirling around in our planet’s outer core. But there’s another little-known contributor to our geomagnetic field. It’s the salty and electrically conductive ocean. When salty ocean […]
Dark Matter Imaged; Shoe-String Theory; Metal in Mars Atmosphere
Dark Matter Filaments of Cosmic Web Imaged Two Canadian researchers say that they have constructed a composite image of dark matter filaments that make up what cosmologists call the cosmic web. Scientists have been finding evidence that our universe may be anything but random and that everything is actually organized and connected to each other […]
April 2016 Science Images
Jupiter’s Northern Lights; Watching Stars Explode & Too Much Sitting Kills
Astronomers Study Jupiter’s ‘Northern Lights’ Earth’s Auroras – Borealis in the northern polar region and Australis in the south – are among the most beautiful and haunting light displays in nature. Now, for the first time, scientists have been able to study Jupiter’s auroras, in x-ray wavelengths thanks to NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Auroras both […]
NASA’S MAVEN Solves Mars Atmosphere Mystery
Last month NASA dropped a bombshell when it announced it had found evidence of water flowing on Mars. Yesterday the space agency held a press conference at its Washington headquarters to announce that they may have solved a decades-old mystery of what happened to the Martian atmosphere and its water, when they presented new findings […]
Meteorite Reveals Early Solar System Information, Greenland’s Ice Sheet is Melting & Smart Keyboard Adds Layer of Cybersecurity
Meteorite’s Magnetic Memory Reveals its Secret Message A team of British geologists has developed a new way to learn something about the early days of our solar system. Since meteorites are fragmented pieces of asteroids that have fallen to Earth, testing the magnetic field of the meteorite can provide some information about its parent asteroid. […]
Science Scanner: All Systems ‘Go’ for Comet Touchdown, Cigarette Ash Removes Arsenic from Water, Is Earth’s Magnetic Field Ready to Flip?, Building the World’s Biggest Cosmic Ray Detector
Rosetta’s Philae Lander Given Green Light for Comet Touchdown in November The European Space Agency announced that all systems are ‘go’ for the Rosetta Mission to send its Philae lander to the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on November 12, 2014. This will the first-ever attempt of a soft touchdown landing on a comet. A month […]
Science Scanner: Ultra-Fast Data Transmission, Why Humans Look Different, Exoplanet Makes Young Sun Act Old, Scientists Find New Branch of European Family Tree
California Scientists Develop Radio Based Ultra-Fast Data Transmission System Back in 2012, an international team of scientists led by electrical engineering professor Alan Willner, of the University of Southern California, made news when they announced that they were able to transmit data at incredibly high speeds with a system that used eight twisted light beams. […]
Study Confirms Earth’s Magnetic Field is Weakening
Earth’s magnetic field is weakening, according to measurements taken over the past six months by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Swarm satellite constellation. The measurements–taken between January and June 2014–come from the first high-resolution results made by Swarm, and also indicate that the magnetic field has declined most dramatically in the Western Hemisphere while increasing […]