Science

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NASA’s Kepler Reborn, Makes First Exoplanet Find of New Mission

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The artistic concept shows NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft operating in a new mission profile called K2. Using publicly available data, astronomers have confirmed K2's first exoplanet discovery proving Kepler can still find planets.

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Instant-start computers possible with new breakthrough

To encode data, today's computer memory technology uses electric currents - a major limiting factor for reliability and shrinkability, and the source of significant power consumption. If data could instead be encoded without current - for example, by an electric field applied across an insulator - it would require much less energy, and make things like low-power, instant-on computing a ubiquitous reality.

A team at Cornell University led by postdoctoral associate John Heron, who works jointly with Darrell Schlom, professor of Industrial Chemistry in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Dan Ralph, professor of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has made a breakthrough in that direction with a room-temperature magnetoelectric memory device. Equivalent to one computer bit, it exhibits the holy grail of next-generation nonvolatile memory: magnetic switchability, in two steps, with nothing but an electric field.

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NASA's Spaceborne Carbon Counter Maps New Details

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This map shows solar-induced fluorescence, a plant process that occurs during photosynthesis, from Aug. through Oct. 2014 as measured by NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2.

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Creation of 'Rocker' protein opens way for new smart molecules in medicine, other fields

Human cells are protected by a largely impenetrable molecular membrane, but researchers have built the first artificial transporter protein that carries individual atoms across membranes, opening the possibility of engineering a new class of smart molecules with applications in fields as wide ranging as nanotechnology and medicine.

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Rocker (blue ribbons and yellow sticks) is an artificially designed protein that transports zinc ions (green) across biological membranes (gray sticks) by binding zinc ions it at one end of the molecule and rearranging ('rocking') to pass them onto the other end. The protein was built by researchers from Dartmouth College and other institutions.

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Signs of Europa Plumes Remain Elusive in Search of Cassini Data

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Jupiter's icy moon Europa displays many signs of activity, including its fractured crust and a dearth of impact craters. Scientists continue to hunt for confirmation of plume activity.

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India Launches its Largest Rocket into Space

India has successfully launched its largest rocket and an unmanned capsule which could send astronauts into space.

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Switching to spintronics: Berkeley Lab reports on electric field switching of ferromagnetism at room temp

In a development that holds promise for future magnetic memory and logic devices, researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Cornell University successfully used an electric field to reverse the magnetization direction in a multiferroic spintronic device at room temperature. This demonstration, which runs counter to conventional scientific wisdom, points a new way towards spintronics and smaller, faster and cheaper ways of storing and processing data.

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This is a conceptual illustration of how magnetism is reversed (see compass) by the application of an electric field (blue dots) applied across gold capacitors. Blurring of compass needle under electric field represents two-step process.

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Unraveling the light of fireflie

Fireflies used rapid light flashes to communicate. This "bioluminescence" is an intriguing phenomenon that has many potential applications, from drug testing and monitoring water contamination, and even lighting up streets using glow-in-dark trees and plants. Fireflies emit light when a compound called luciferin breaks down. We know that this reaction needs oxygen, but what we don't know is how fireflies actually supply oxygen to their light-emitting cells. Using state-of-the-art imaging techniques, scientists from Switzerland and Taiwan have determined how fireflies control oxygen distribution to light up their cells.

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This detailed microimage shows larger channels branching into smaller ones, supplying oxygen for the firefly's light emission. The smallest channels are ten thousand times smaller than a millimeter and therefore invisible to other experimental probes: this has prevented scientists so far to unlock the mystery of firefly light flashes.

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Scientists trace nanoparticles from plants to caterpillars: Rice University study examines how nanoparticles behave in food chain

In one of the most comprehensive laboratory studies of its kind, Rice University scientists traced the uptake and accumulation of quantum dot nanoparticles from water to plant roots, plant leaves and leaf-eating caterpillars.

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The buildup of fluorescent quantum dots in the leaves of Arabidopsis plants is apparent in this photograph of the plants under ultraviolet light.

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Pb islands in a sea of graphene magnetise the material of the future

Researchers in Spain have discovered that if lead atoms are intercalated on a graphene sheet, a powerful magnetic field is generated by the interaction of the electrons' spin with their orbital movement. This property could have implications in spintronics, an emerging technology promoted by the European Union to create advanced computational systems.

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In the sea of graphene (over an iridium crystal), electrons' spin-orbit interaction is much lower than that created by intercalating a Pb island.