Science

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NASA Probe Observes Meteors Colliding With Saturn's Rings

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This photograph of the meteor streaking through the sky above Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013, was taken by a local, M. Ahmetvaleev. The small asteroid was about 56 to 66 feet (17 to 20 meters) wide.

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Smart science in the fight against malaria

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Female anopheles mosquito.

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How Could Light-emitting Monolayers Benefit Soldiers?

U.S. Army scientists want to make sense of the fascinating properties of novel layered materials that can exist in a single or a few atom-thick layers, such as graphene.

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Penn State researchers working with the Army Research Office showed that tungstenite formed from layers of sulfur and tungsten atoms has light-emitting properties that could be useful to plenty of Army applications, like optical sensors or even lasers.

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Hubble Captures Comet ISON

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Galaxy Goes Green in Burning Stellar Fuel

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The tiny red spot in this image is one of the most efficient star-making galaxies ever observed, converting gas into stars at the maximum possible rate. The galaxy is shown here in an image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), which first spotted the rare galaxy in infrared light.

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Scientists provide 'new spin' on emerging quantum technologies

An international team of scientists has shed new light on a fundamental area of physics which could have important implications for future electronic devices and the transfer of information at the quantum level.

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Images illustrate how collective spin excitations behave under the effect of the spin-orbit field, with and without external magnetic field.

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New material approach should increase solar cell efficiency

"When designing next generation solar energy conversion systems, we must first develop ways to more efficiently utilize the solar spectrum," explained Lane Martin, whose research group has done just that.

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The correlated electron metal SrRuO3 exhibits strong visible slight absorption. Overlaid here on the AM1.5G solar spectrum, it can be seen that SrRuO3 absorbs more than 75 times more light than TiO2. The structural, chemical, and electronic compatibility of TiO2 and SrRuO3 further enables the fabrication of heterojunctions with exciting photovoltaic and photocatalytic response driven by hot-carrier injection.

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NASA's HyspIRI Sees the Forest for the Trees and More

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The HyspIRI airborne campaign overflew California's San Andreas Fault on March 29, 2013. The three-color (red, green, blue) composite image of the fault (left), composed from AVIRIS data, is similar to what a snapshot from a consumer camera would show. The entirety of data from AVIRIS, however, spans the visible to the short-wavelength infrared part of the spectrum. Temperature information (right) was collected simultaneously by the MASTER instrument. Red areas are composed of minerals with high silica, such as urban areas, while darker and cooler areas are composed of water and heavy vegetation.

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Three Years of SDO Images

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This image is a composite of 25 separate images spanning the period of April 16, 2012, to April 15, 2013. It uses the SDO AIA wavelength of 171 angstroms and reveals the zones on the sun where active regions are most common during this part of the solar cycle.

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Physicists find right (and left) solution for on-chip optics

A Harvard-led team of researchers has created a new type of nanoscale device that converts an optical signal into waves that travel along a metal surface. Significantly, the device can recognize specific kinds of polarized light and accordingly send the signal in one direction or another.

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Two different devices based on the herringbone pattern were presented in the Science paper: a rectangular array and a ring-shaped array (both interpreted in this illustration). Circularly polarized light with waves that wind in opposite directions gets split by both devices, with its waves routed in opposite directions. For a ring-shaped coupler, this means that plasmons are channeled either toward or away from the center of the structure. Intensity at the center of the ring can therefore be switched on and off by manipulating the polarization of the incoming light.