Science | WPN World People News

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.

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.

A new University of California/NASA study finds Southern California autumn wildfires driven by Santa Ana winds have been 10 times as costly in the past 20 years as summer wildfires, even though both types of fires have consumed about the same total acreage. Both types of fires are predicted to increase by midcentury, but non-Santa Ana fires are expected to increase more.

The discovery experimentally connects the worlds of classical and quantum mechanics and illuminates the mysterious nature of the Mott transition. It also could shed light on non-equilibrium physics, which is poorly understood but governs most of what occurs in our world. The finding may also represent a step towards more efficient electronics based on the Mott transition.

Rice University researchers have demonstrated an efficient new way to capture the energy from sunlight and convert it into clean, renewable energy by splitting water molecules.

Nanoporous gold contains tiny pores that can filter DNA from other biomolecules. The material can be used to make DNA detection devices for use in diagnostics.

The research holds potential for increased energy storage in high efficiency batteries and supercapacitors, increasing the efficiency of energy conversion in solar cells, for lightweight thermal coatings and more. The study is published on Sept. 4 in the online journal Science Advances.

Space is cold, dark, and lonely. Deadly, too, if any one of a million things goes wrong on your spaceship. It’s certainly no place for a computer chip to fail, which can happen due to the abundance of radiation bombarding a craft. Worse, ever-shrinking components on microprocessors make computers more prone to damage from high-energy radiation like protons from the sun or cosmic rays from beyond our galaxy.