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It's a dust bunny of cosmic proportions. Astronomers used images from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, to locate an aging star shedding loads of dust (orange dot at upper left). Only one other star, called Sakurai's object, has been caught erupting with such large amounts of dust. The process is a natural part of aging for stars like our sun. As they puff up into red giants, they shed dust that is later recycled back into other stars, planets, and in the case of our solar system, living creatures.

Aquilia Area in Color
These composite images from the framing camera aboard NASA's Dawn spacecraft show three views of a terrain with ridges and grooves near Aquilia crater in the southern hemisphere of the giant asteroid Vesta.

Saturn's third-largest moon Dione can be seen through the haze of its largest moon, Titan, in this view of the two posing before the planet and its rings from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have revealed half-mile-sized (kilometer-sized) objects punching through parts of Saturn's F ring, leaving glittering trails behind them. These trails in the rings, which scientists are calling "mini-jets," fill in a missing link in our story of the curious behavior of the F ring.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned that thousands of web users worldwide could lose Internet access after a hackers 'adverting scam infected computers.

In the graphene liquid cell, opposing graphene sheets form a sealed liquid nanoscale reaction chamber that is transparent to an electron microscope beam. The cell allows nanocrystal growth, dynamics and coalescence to be captured in real time at atomic resolution via a transmission electron microscope.

This illustration shows how a DNA origami nanoplate with a central aperture can serve as a smart lid or "gatekeeper" for a solid-state nanopore sensor. Researchers at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen have demonstrated that this arrangement can be used to filter biomolecules by size or to "fish" for specific target molecules by placing single-strand DNA receptors inside the aperture as "bait." With further research, they suggest, it might be possible to use such single-molecule sensors as the basis of a novel DNA sequencing system.

Britain's Department for Transport is likely to approve installation of a new generation of airport scanners, which would lift the ban on carrying liquids by passengers.

Russia says it will join the European Space Agency to launch a mission to Mars to sample dirt for signs of life.

The peculiar galaxy Centaurus A as seen in longer infrared wavelengths and X-rays. Inner structural features seen in this image are helping scientists to understand the mechanisms and interactions within the galaxy, as are the jets seen extending over thousands of light years from the black hole believed to be at its heart. Newly discovered clouds co-aligned with the jets can also be seen in the infrared data, which are colored red and orange.