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Rice University researchers have determined that an odd, two-faced "Janus" edge is more common than previously thought for carbon nanotubes growing on a rigid catalyst. The conventional nanotube at left has facets that form a circle, allowing the nanotube to grow straight up from the catalyst. But they discovered the nanotube at right, with a tilted Janus edge that has segregated sections of zigzag and armchair configurations, is far more energetically favored when growing carbon nanotubes via chemical vapor deposition.

Water recycling, settling, purification by microorganisms at a municipal water station.

The biomining reactors will use bacteria to recover minerals and metals from rocks.

Hubble Snaps a Galactic Potpourri of Particles.

In this image, taken July 19, 2019, in the clean room of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL, the rover's 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) arm maneuvers its 88-pound (40-kilogram) sensor-laden turret as it moves from a deployed to a stowed configuration.

Too hot to handle.

By observing a single star orbiting around the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, a team of astronomers have tested Einstein’s one hundred-year-old theory of General Relativity in an unprecedented new regime. Unlike Sir Isaac Newton’s law of gravity, which states that matter pulls on other matter across empty space, General Relativity theory proposes that massive objects like supermassive black holes distort both space and time, which in turn affects the motions of objects around them. The team’s result: “Einstein’s right, at least for now,” said Andrea Ghez at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), a co-lead author of the research.

Earth's atmospheric glow is back-dropped by a starry Milky Way as the International Space Station orbits 258 miles above Myanmar during a nighttime pass on July 11, 2019. The ISS Progress 72 resupply ship and the Pirs docking compartment, with its lit airlock window, silhouette the background.

A SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft launches to the International Space Station on a Falcon 9 rocket at 6:01 p.m. EDT July 25, 2019, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at the orbiting laboratory July 27 with the station’s second commercial crew docking port and about 5,000 pounds of science investigations and supplies.