Science | WPN World People News

As current passes through a strip of tantalum, electrons with opposite spins separate. Researchers used the resulting polarization to create a nanomagnetic switch that could one day replace computer transistors.

Alain Lamassoure

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) will lead a team of scientists and engineers to fly a Multi-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (MB-SAR) to gather information to aid in the search and recovery of unaccounted for aircraft losses in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) and Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) is sponsoring the mission. It is believed many of the downed aircraft sites are located in the Northern, Central, and Morobe provinces of PNG in austere terrain under triple canopy foliage. The goal of the mission is to highlight the effectiveness of remote sensing information to aid JPAC search and recovery efforts. Similar SAR technology was employed by Fugro Spatial Solutions GeoSAR system in 2006 which resulted in production of a 5m Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the entire mainland of Papua New Guinea.

The new AllWISE catalog will bring distant galaxies that were once invisible out of hiding, as illustrated in this image.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the best ever image of the globular cluster Messier 15, a gathering of very old stars that orbits the centre of the Milky Way. This glittering cluster contains over 100 000 stars, and could also hide a rare type of black hole at its centre.

Rice University theorists have discovered magnetic fields (blue) are created at grain boundaries in two-dimensional dichalcogenides. Dislocations along these boundaries, where atoms are thrown out of their regular hexagonal patterns, force electron spins into alignments that favor magnetism.

Yufeng Hao, postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas at Austin, demonstrates large, single graphene crystals grown on copper.

Black hole with disc and jets

A color-coded image of major ice types on Lake Superior, made from a RADARSAT1 radar backscatter image using a new NASA and NOAA-developed technique.