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This still image and animation shows the final flight path for NASA's twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission spacecraft, which will impact the moon on Dec. 17, 2012, around 2:28 p.m. PST.

Animated illustration show the precise arrangement of atoms in dislocations in two-dimensional molybdenum/sulfur. Dislocations happen when two growing blooms of material come together at different angles in chemical vapor deposition. At a specific angle, the lines along which these dislocations form can become conductive.

MeRAM bit

This still image and animation shows the final flight path for NASA's twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission spacecraft, which will impact the moon on Dec. 17, 2012, around 2:28 p.m. PST.

An artist's depiction of the GRAIL twins (Ebb and Flow) in lunar orbit. During GRAIL's prime mission science phase, the two spacecraft will orbit the moon as high as 31 miles (51 kilometers) and as low as 10 miles (16 kilometers).

Chemical processes can be activated by light without the need for bulk heating of a material through a process developed by researchers at Rice University. The technique involves coating nanorods with thermophilic enzymes that are activated at high temperatures. Lighting the plasmonic gold nanorod causes highly localized heating and activates the enzyme.

Stress-induced deformation of nanocrystalline nickel reflects the dislocation activity observed by researchers at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source using a radial diamond-anvil-cell X-ray diffraction experimental station.

On the 84th and 85th Martian days of the NASA Mars rover Curiosity's mission on Mars (Oct. 31 and Nov. 1, 2012), NASA's Curiosity rover used the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) to capture dozens of high-resolution images to be combined into self-portrait images of the rover.