Science | WPN World People News

The sinuous rock feature in the lower center of this mosaic of images recorded by the NASA Mars rover Curiosity is called "Snake River." The images in the mosaic were taken by Curiosity's Navigation Camera during the 133rd Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission on Mars (Dec. 20, 2012).

Dynamic computer simulations of molecular systems depend on finite time steps, but these introduce apparent extra work that pushes the molecules around. Using models of water molecules in a box, researchers have learned to separate this shadow work from the protocol work explicitly modeled in the simulations.

An assortment of planets beyond our solar system is depicted in this artist's concept.

Scanning electron microscope images show two different designs of cantilever tip used by Ando and co-workers for high-speed atomic force microscopy.

This composite shows the alignment of the satellite galaxies of Andromeda, in relation to the view that we see from Earth (the top left panel shows a true-color image of the center of the Andromeda galaxy taken with the Canada France Hawaii Telescope). New distance measurements allow us to ascertain the three-dimensional positions of the satellite galaxies, which together with new velocity measurements, reveal their true nature as part of a gigantic rotating structure (side view: bottom left panel; front view: top right panel).

Illustration shows the layered structure of the new device, starting with a flexible layer of graphene, a one-atom-thick carbon material. A layer of polymer is bonded to that, and then a layer of zinc-oxide nano wires (shown in magenta), and finally a layer of a material that can extract energy from sunlight, such as quantum dots or a polymer-based material.

Rice University researchers found that pulsed (or "nonstationary") lasers could narrow the response spectra of 60-nanometer-wide gold nanoshells to a very narrow spectral band (red peak), as opposed to continuous ("stationary") excitation by laser (green peak). The discovery opens new possibilities for the use of metallic nanoparticles in medical and electronic applications.