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An image of the Curiosity Explorer badge that can be earned by Foursquare users who check into a NASA visitor center or a venue categorized as a science museum or planetarium.

This image shows polarized light interacting with a particle injected into a liquid crystal medium.

Artist's impression of the hypergiant HR 8752 traversing the Yellow Evolutionary Void. The graph shows the star's surface temperature (log Teff) as observed over the last 100 years. It increased from ~5000 to ~8000 degrees between 1985 and 2005, while the hypergiant's radius decreased from 750 to 400 times that of the Sun.

Left: Schematic picture of the Z CMa system. The primary Herbig Be-type star is surrounded by an irregular dust cocoon. There is a 3.6-pc jet associated with this star. The secondary FU Ori star is known to drive a jet, at a position angle of ~20 degrees with respect to the primary's jet. The whole system is surrounded by a massive envelope. Right: ExPo image of Z Cma in (linearly) polarised light. The positions of the primary and secondary jets are indicated by black and green lines, respectively. The two stars are unresolved in the ExPo images, and their position is indicated by a green cross at the center of the image. The polarised features labelled as 1 and 2 coincide in position with the primary (black) and secondary (green) jets. The third polarised feature can be explained in terms of polarised light escaping through a hole in the dust cocoon.

One of the most powerful supercomputers in the world has now been fully installed and tested at its remote, high altitude site in the Andes of northern Chile. This marks one of the major remaining milestones toward completion of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the most elaborate ground-based telescope in history. The special-purpose ALMA correlator has over 134 million processors and performs up to 17 quadrillion operations per second, a speed comparable to the fastest general-purpose supercomputer in operation on Friday.

Cross-section of a prototype pFEL, with the free electron source on the right and the photonic crystal inside the red part.

A novel microfluidics platform allowed viewing of structural details of rotavirus double-layered particles; the 3-D graphic of the virus, in purple, was reconstructed from data gathered by the new technique.

This false-color composite image, constructed from data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, shows Saturn's rings and southern hemisphere. The composite image was made from 65 individual observations by Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer in the near-infrared portion of the light spectrum on Nov. 1, 2008. The observations were each six minutes long.