Science | WPN World People News

This is an artist's interpretation of how bacteria cells on a nanoporous gold disk array are killed after exposure to near-infrared light.

The Soyuz TMA-20M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Saturday, March 19, 2016 carrying Expedition 47 Soyuz Commander Alexey Ovchinin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Flight Engineer Jeff Williams of NASA, and Flight Engineer Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos into orbit to begin their five and a half month mission on the International Space Station.

Comet 252P/LINEAR will safely fly past Earth on March 21, 2016, at a range of about 3.3 million miles (5.2 million kilometers). The following day, comet P/2016 BA14 will safely fly by our planet at a distance of about 2.2 million miles (3.5 million kilometers).

Nanowires are believed to be important elements in several different areas, such as in future generations of transistors, energy efficient light emitting diodes (LEDs) and solar cells.

The center of an artificial cornea (on glove) is coated with tiny pillars that impale and kill bacterial cells (inset).

Adding eggshell nanoparticles to a bioplastic (shown above) increases the strength and flexibility of the material, potentially making it more attractive for use in the packaging industry.

A team of scientists from Hokkaido University and the multinational electronics company TDK Corporation in Japan has developed a method to improve the insulating properties of the oxynitride perovskite SrTaO2N for potential use as a ceramic capacitor.

Quantum dots are fluorescent crystals in which the color of the emitted light is dependent on the size of the crystal.

Figure illustrates puddles of localized quasi-condensates found using a quantum Monte Carlo simulation of trapped atoms in a disordered lattice. Individual puddles, consisting of 10-20 particles each, are incoherent relative to each other. The Bose glass is composed of these puddle-like structures.