Science

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Mars Panorama from Curiosity Shows Petrified Sand Dunes

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Large-scale crossbedding in the sandstone of this ridge on a lower slope of Mars' Mount Sharp is typical of windblown sand dunes that have petrified.

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Funky Light Signal From Colliding Black Holes Explained

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This simulation helps explain an odd light signal thought to be coming from a close-knit pair of merging black holes, PG 1302-102, located 3.5 billion light-years away.

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Cellulose Nanopaper Produced by Optical Nanosensors

A group of researchers from Iran and Spain produced laboratorial sample of sensors made of nanopaper to introduce bacterial cellulose nanopaper as a biological substrate for the production of optical transparent nanosensors.

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Inexpensive Method Reduces Costs to Produce Light Sorbent Nanostructured Layers

The need for green and sustainable energies has resulted in many researches on light absorbing layers in solar cells in recent decades.

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Inexpensive Method Reduces Costs to Produce Light Sorbent Nanostructured Layers

The need for green and sustainable energies has resulted in many researches on light absorbing layers in solar cells in recent decades.

Researchers have tried to synthesize and study new nanostructured absorbing layers made of cheap and available elements with desirable physical properties because indium and gallium are very rare and expensive.

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Making 3-D objects disappear: Berkeley Lab researchers create ultrathin invisibility cloak

Invisibility cloaks are a staple of science fiction and fantasy, from Star Trek to Harry Potter, but don't exist in real life, or do they? Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have devised an ultra-thin invisibility "skin" cloak that can conform to the shape of an object and conceal it from detection with visible light. Although this cloak is only microscopic in size, the principles behind the technology should enable it to be scaled-up to conceal macroscopic items as well.

Working with brick-like blocks of gold nanoantennas, the Berkeley researchers fashioned a "skin cloak" barely 80 nanometers in thickness, that was wrapped around a three-dimensional object about the size of a few biological cells and arbitrarily shaped with multiple bumps and dents. The surface of the skin cloak was meta-engineered to reroute reflected light waves so that the object was rendered invisible to optical detection when the cloak is activated.

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Removal of Heavy Metals from Wastewater by Electromagnetic Superabsorbent Nanocomposites

Pollution caused by heavy metals is one of the serious concerns in the field of environmental protection and; therefore, researchers from University of Mazandaran, Iran, produced magnetic nanosorbent at laboratorial scale to purify the contaminated waters.

This research deals with the production of biocompatible electromagnetic superabsorbent nanocomposites, and their application in the removal of pollutants, including lead, cadmium and cobalt, from drinking water. The nanosorbent has been produced through a simple and cost effective method, and it has good performance. After the removal of heavy metals, the produced nanosorbent can be separated from the cycle by using a magnetic field and it can be reused.

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NASA Completes Key Milestone for Orion Spacecraft in Support of Journey to Mars

NASA’s mission to send astronauts to deep space destinations where no other human has traveled has taken another important step forward with the completion of a critical milestone for the Orion spacecraft currently in production.

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Funky Light Signal From Colliding Black Holes Explained

Entangled by gravity and destined to merge, two candidate black holes in a distant galaxy appear to be locked in an intricate dance. Researchers using data from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have come up with the most compelling confirmation yet for the existence of these merging black holes and have found new details about their odd, cyclical light signal.

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Mysterious, massive, magnetic stars

A Canadian PhD student has discovered a unique object – two massive stars with magnetic fields in a binary system. Matt Shultz of Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada found the system – Epsilon Lupi – and will publish the new result in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.