Science | WPN World People News

Diagram of the experimental principle: the osmotic transport of water through a transmembrane boron nitride nanotube.

A video camera on a NASA-designed-and-funded mini-submarine captured this view as it descended a 2,600-foot-deep (800-meter-deep) borehole to explore Antarctica's subglacial Lake Whillans. The international Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project was designed to gain insights into subglacial biology, climate history and modern ice sheet behavior.

Weak measurement: as light goes through a birefringent crystal the horizontally and vertically polarized components of light spread out in space, but an overlap between the two components remains when they emerge. In a “strong” measurement the two components would be fully separated.

Five major mental disorders share some of the same genetic risk factors, the largest genome-wide study of its kind has found. Evidence for such genetic overlap had previously been limited to pairs of disorders.

In this artist's conception a supermassive black hole is surrounded by a hot accretion disk, while some inspiraling material is funneled into a wispy blue jet. New measurements show that the black hole at the center of galaxy NGC 1365 is spinning at close to the maximum possible rate. This suggests that it grew via "ordered accretion" rather than by swallowing random blobs of gas and stars.

The E-ELT will make huge strides toward our understanding of the Universe, the effects of dark matter and energy and planets outside of the solar system. Its 39 metres in diameter mirror will collect 15 times more light than any existing telescope and it will produce images 16 times sharper than the Hubble space-based telescope.

Future soldiers will have plastic electronic sensors embedded in their helmets and uniforms. Research has brought electronics to flexible plastic through the combined efforts of industry, academia and Army scientists.
The Army’s goal was to get this amazing technology into the hands of soldiers.

Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have obtained what is likely the first direct observation of a forming planet still embedded in a thick disc of gas and dust. If confirmed, this discovery will greatly improve our understanding of how planets form and allow astronomers to test the current theories against an observable target.