Science

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A Window into Europa's Ocean Right at the Surface

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Based on new evidence from Jupiter's moon Europa, astronomers hypothesize that chloride salts bubble up from the icy moon's global liquid ocean and reach the frozen surface where they are bombarded with sulfur from volcanoes on Jupiter's innermost large moon Io.

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High mass X-ray binaries trace the Milky Way's spiral arms

Our Galaxy is littered with pairs of massive stars, many of which contain the remnants of supernova explosions. A new study of these X-ray emitting binary systems, using data from ESA's INTEGRAL space observatory, has made it possible to reconstruct the locations of the Milky Way's spiral arms many millions of years ago.

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Artist's impression of a highly obscured high-mass X-ray binary.

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Gravitational Lens Creates Cartoon of Space Invader

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Renewable energy: Nanotubes to channel osmotic power

The salinity difference between fresh water and salt water could be a source of renewable energy. However, power yields from existing techniques are not high enough to make them viable. A solution to this problem may now have been found. A team led by physicists at the Institut Lumière Matière in Lyon,has discovered a new means of harnessing this energy: osmotic flow through boron nitride nanotubes generates huge electric currents, with 1,000 times the efficiency of any previous system. To achieve this result, the researchers developed a highly novel experimental device that enabled them, for the first time, to study osmotic fluid transport through a single nanotube.

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

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What Lies Beneath: NASA Antarctic Sub Goes Subglacial

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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.

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Hubble Observes Glowing, Fiery Shells of Gas

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New Nano-Based Method Found for Early Diagnosis of Prostate Cancer

Immunosensors based on the nanocomposite of carbon nanotubes and ionic liquids were produced by the Iranian researchers fat Kurdistan University in order to diagnose prostate cancer. The immunosensor can be used in clinical and medical diagnoses.

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Getting around the Uncertainty Principle: Physicists make first direct measurements of polarization states of light

Researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Ottawa have applied a recently developed technique to directly measure for the first time the polarization states of light. Their work both overcomes some important challenges of Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle and also is applicable to qubits, the building blocks of quantum information theory.

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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.

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Five Major Mental Disorders Share Genetic Roots

Overlap Blurs Diagnostic Categories – NIH-funded Study

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.

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Supermassive Black Hole Spins Super-Fast

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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.

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