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Using the sensors, the researchers hope to design lightweight, inexpensive radio-frequency identification (RFID) badges to be used for personal safety and security. Such badges could be worn by soldiers on the battlefield to rapidly detect the presence of chemical weapons -- such as nerve gas or choking agents -- and by people who work around hazardous chemicals prone to leakage.

Astronomers are using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study auroras — stunning light shows in a planet's atmosphere — on the poles of the largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter.
Auroras are formed when charged particles in the space surrounding the planet are accelerated to high energies along the planet's magnetic field. When the particles hit the atmosphere near the magnetic poles, they cause it to glow like gases in a fluorescent light fixture. Jupiter's magnetosphere is 20,000 times stronger than Earth's. These observations will reveal how the solar system's largest and most powerful magnetosphere behaves.

JUGENE (Jülich Blue Gene) -- a supercomputer built by IBM for Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany.

This illustration depicts NASA's Juno spacecraft at Jupiter, with its solar arrays and main antenna pointed toward the distant sun and Earth.

Imaging with the multispectral chiral lens forms two images of the beetle, Chrysina gloriosa, on the color camera. The left image was formed by focusing left-circularly polarized light reflected from the beetle and the right image was formed from right-circularly polarized light. The left-handed chirality of the beetle's shell can clearly be seen.

Getting spacecraft ready for launch may have more to do with medical research than you think. For a new study on microbes that may be associated with a history of breast cancer, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, employed the same sequencing and analysis methods used for examining bacteria in spacecraft assembly rooms. Those techniques were designed for planetary protection -- ensuring that NASA spacecraft do not contaminate other worlds.

A new imaging technique allows researchers to image both the position and orientation of single fluorescent molecules attached to DNA.