Nasa’s Curiosity rover has ground to a halt on Mars after a glitch forced the termination all of its science experiments, following one of the biggest Martian dust storms on record, which at its peak covered 14 million square miles (36 million sq km), knocking out Nasa’s solar-powered Opportunity rover for three months. Curiosity weathered the storm as it runs on a nuclear-powered battery and so does not rely on the sun’s rays to fuel its operations.
“This is one of the last great mysteries of the early universe,” said Kirk S. S. Barrow with Georgia Tech’s School of Physics. “We hope this study provides a good step toward figuring out how these supermassive black holes formed at the birth of a galaxy.”
“One of the Great Findings of “Galactic Archaeology”–A team led by researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB, UB-IEEC) and the University of Groningen has found, through the analysis of Gaia data, substructures in the Milky Way that were previously unknown. The findings, which appeared when combining positions and speed of 6 million stars from the galactic disk, have been published in the journal Nature.
“There is so much information in an ivory seizure — so much more than what a traditional investigation can uncover,” said Samuel Wasser, director of the UW Center for Conservation Biology and a professor of biology. “Not only can we identify the geographic origins of the poached elephants and the number of populations represented in a seizure, but we can use the same genetic tools to link different seizures to the same underlying criminal network.”
In the bleak, almost pristine land at Antarctica’s bottom of the world, there are the frozen remains of human bodies – and each one tells a story of humanity’s relationship with this harsh, unforgiving continent.
Famed science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick asked “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” which was adapted into the film Blade Runner. Getting inside the head of a human baby, wrote the science journalist Angela Saini in a 2013 piece for The Guardian, “is like deciphering the thoughts of a kitten.”
“The new planet is a ‘super-Earth’ orbiting the star HD 26965, which is only 16 light years from Earth, making it the closest super-Earth orbiting another Sun-like star,” says University of Florida (UF) astronomer Jian Ge, leader of the Dharma Planet Survey. “We may have discovered what may be Star Trek’s famed planet Vulcan. The planet is roughly twice the size of Earth and orbits its star with a 42-day period just inside the star’s optimal habitable zone.”
“I think I know how the universe was born,” said Andrei Linde, Russian-American theoretical physicist and the Harald Trap Friis Professor of Physics at Stanford University. Linde is one of the main authors of the inflationary universe theory, as well as the theory of eternal inflation and inflationary multiverse.