Science | WPN World People News

The challenge of delivering to the brain a continuous regimen of antibiotics in case of infection could be met with plastic nanofibers that release medication directly to the affected site.

A Perseid meteor (at left) seen in August 2010 above the four enclosures of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile.

Schematic of thermal management in electronics: Local temperature increases occur as a result of current flow in active regions of devices and can lead to degradation of device performance. Materials with high thermal conductivities are used in heat spreading and sinking to conduct heat from the hot regions.

The 2-D tessellation pattern known as the "semiregular snub square tiling" stands out clearly in this image, which combines scanning tunneling microscopy with computer graphics. The pattern, observed in a surface architecture just one molecule thick, was formed by self-assembly of linear organic linkers, imaged as rods, and lanthanide cerium centers, visualized as bright protrusions. The area shown measures less than 25 nanometers across.

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have solved the 40-year-old mystery of the origin of the Magellanic Stream, a long ribbon of gas stretching nearly halfway around the Milky Way. New Hubble observations reveal that most of this stream was stripped from the Small Magellanic Cloud some two billion years ago, with a smaller portion originating more recently from its larger neighbour.