Science | WPN World People News

This pair of images covers one of the hundreds of sites on Mars where researchers have repeatedly used the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to study changes in gullies on slopes.

Thin film in contact with an uneven surface

Oxford University technology can draw images 70 micrometers across, each image is smaller than the width of a human hair. The researchers have shown that using this technology they can create 'nano-pixels' just 100 nanometers in size that could pave the way for extremely high-resolution and low-energy thin, flexible displays for applications such as 'smart' glasses, synthetic retinas, and foldable screens.

A solar flare erupted on the far side of the sun on June 4, 2011, and sent solar neutrons out into space. Solar neutrons don't make it to all the way to Earth, but NASA's MESSENGER, orbiting Mercury, found strong evidence for the neutrons, offering a new technique to study these giant explosions.

A group of astronomers has been able to follow stardust being made in real time — during the aftermath of a supernova explosion. For the first time they show that these cosmic dust factories make their grains in a two-stage process, starting soon after the explosion, but continuing for years afterwards. The team used ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in northern Chile to analyse the light from the supernova SN2010jl as it slowly faded.

Schematic showing how sand is turned into pure nano-silicon.

This gif of membrane-anchored Ras (red) and SOS molecules (green) shows individual SOS molecules corraled in nanofabricated patches where all the Ras molecules they activate can be trapped.

Yaoyi Li (foreground) and Mingxing Chen, UWM physics postdoctoral researchers, display an image of a ribbon of graphene 1 nanometer wide. In the image, achieved with a scanning-tunneling microscope, atoms are visible as "bumps."