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The near-field enhancement on the surface of ring-shaped gold nanostructure becomes homogeneous through circularly polarized light.

Pitted Terrain in Color
These enhanced-color views from NASA's Dawn mission show an unusual "pitted terrain" on the floors of the craters named Marcia (left) and Cornelia (right) on the giant asteroid Vesta.

Scientists want to understand what causes giant explosions in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, such as this one. The eruptions are called coronal mass ejections or CMEs and they can travel toward Earth to disrupt human technologies in space. To better understand the forces at work, a team of researchers used NASA data to study a precursor of CMEs called coronal cavities.

Researchers are brewing up icy, organic concoctions in the lab to mimic materials at the edge of our solar system and beyond. The laboratory equipment at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is seen at right, and a very young solar system, with its swirling planet-forming disk, is shown in the artist's concept at left.

Experimental setup schematic showing laser source, microscope, and imaging detector and spectrometer. The inset illustrates the two different sample configurations that were explored; red arrows correspond to the input polarization directions and black arrows depict the propagation vector.

Doxorubicin (Dox) is a drug used in cancer chemotherapy. It is an anthracycline antibiotic, closely related to the natural product daunomycin, and like all anthracyclines, it works by intercalating DNA, while most serious adverse effect being life-threatening heart damage.

The nanocatalysts can be used in controlling the gaseous pollutants emitted from chemical and petrochemical industries and the exhaust of the automobiles.

Astronomers have discovered two gas giant planets orbiting stars in the Beehive cluster, a collection of about 1,000 tightly packed stars.

Small spherical objects fill the field in this mosaic combining four images from the Microscopic Imager on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. The view covers an area about 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) across, at an outcrop called "Kirkwood" in the Cape York segment of the western rim of Endeavour Crater. The individual spherules are up to about one-eighth inch (3 millimeters) in diameter.