Science | WPN World People News

NASA's two small MarCO CubeSats will be flying past Mars in 2016 just as NASA's next Mars lander, InSight, is descending through the Martian atmosphere and landing on the surface. MarCO, for Mars Cube One, will provide an experimental communications relay to inform Earth quickly about the landing.

This is a cobalt II octahedral packing diagram as viewed in the (001) plane.

This is a cobalt II octahedral packing diagram as viewed in the (001) plane.

Customized organic molecules enable the production of lightweight, mechanically flexible electronic components that are perfectly adapted to individual applications are shown.

Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) resulted from the following steps: each type of gold nanoparticles was added to hMSCs, and the treated cells were cultured for 3 weeks. The cells received either alkaline phosphatase (ALP) staining or alizarin red staining (ARS) of calcium phosphate deposits, both of which are osteogenic differentiation indicators. Control experiments with unmodified gold nanoparticles and untreated hMSCs were also carried out for comparison. In the upper images, ALP positive cells were stained purple while agglomerates of gold nanoparticles were detected as blue dots. In the lower images, spider-web-like red stains represent calcium phosphate deposits while bluish purple dots indicate agglomerates of gold nanoparticles. All scale bars are 500 μm.

This image shows the principle of the sensor.

Colorized micrographs of platinum nanoparticles made at NIST. The raspberry color suggests the particles' corrugated shape, which offers high surface area for catalyzing reactions in fuel cells. Individual particles are 3 to 4 nanometers (nm) in diameter but can clump into bunches of 100 nm or more under specific conditions discovered in a NIST study.

These images show differential conductance through the quantum dot as a function of the gate voltage that controls the number of electrons in the dot (x-axis) and the applied magnetic field (y-axis). Blue regions have low differential conductance and a constant number of electrons; green, yellow, and brown show higher differential conductance, indicating a change in the number of electrons in the dot. The top panel shows the measured differential conductance; the bottom panel shows the theoretical calculation (which has no disorder). Both experiment and theory show splitting of the electron pairs with increasing field and reentrant pairing at higher fields (the merging of pairs of boundaries into vertical boundaries).