Thus far, no one knows what this asteroid looks like, which makes the event rare and exceptional due to the relatively close distance by which it will pass. At such a distance, it is possible for NASA to snap images as detailed as 12-feet across, a remarkable result considering that the space rock will be millions of miles away and is about 2-miles in length/diameter.

Said NASA astronomer Lance Benner: “Whenever an asteroid approaches this closely, it provides an important scientific opportunity to study it in detail to understand its size, shape, rotation, surface features, and what they can tell us about its origin. We will also use new radar measurements of the asteroid’s distance and velocity to improve our calculation of its orbit and compute its motion farther into the future than we could otherwise.”

The imaging will be done via the NASA Deep Space Network antenna in California, as well as the Arecibo Observatory located in Puerto Rico. When combined, the information gathered by each telescope will be combined to create as many details about the asteroid as possible, aiding researchers in their efforts to learn about the space rock that has been flying around for quite some time.

While learning about this particular asteroid is interesting enough, the details provided by the images will help provide researchers with information about asteroids in general. Such knowledge is essential for future NASA missions, including one that will involve the redirection of an asteroid, followed by human exploration of it.

SOURCE: Astronomy

According to Khare, she’s been contacted by Google with interest of some type or another – she’s not being too open at the moment with the specific details. As Google is primarily a services group at the moment, they’re pushing in with hardware with such devices as the Chromebook Pixel and collaborating with groups like ASUS for the Nexus 7. It could be that this interest shows additional faith in their own ability to create without 3rd-party manufacturers.

Imagine if Google introduced the first smartphone with a battery able to be charged in less than a minute? Certainly such an impact on the mobile industry would want to be accessed by whichever group had first dibs.

You’ll find that Khare’s project: “Design and Synthesis of Hydrogenated TiO2-Polyaniline Nanorods for Flexible High-Performance Supercapacitors”, also won more than a few categories at this year’s event. Have a peek at the full winners list to see category after category dominated by Khare.

Khare is currently preparing to evolve the technology and continue research into the future, and has not yet announced any plan to sell her work to any group. As the technology she’s working with right this minute already works to hold 10,000 charge-recharge cycles, it wouldn’t be surprising for her to continue to show up in the news as a sort of Tony Stark-like name as she continues to kick the technology universe to its knees: a conventional rechargeable battery lasts for around 1,000 cycles.

This technology Khare is working on has been used to power an LED thus far, and is flexible – it’ll be able to be used in fabric and in bendable displays in the future as well. Khare’s solution is also solid-state, this meaning great things for the future in environmentally-friendly states – no worries about battery juice spilling all over your hands and face any more!

BELOW: B-Roll footage of the event, specifically surrounding Khare and her presentation of her battery technology.

NASA’s specifically looking for impacts that form craters that are at least 12.8 feet across. The investigation has led researchers to identify 248 new impact sites on different portions of the surface of Mars in the past decade. NASA scientists used images from the MRO to determine when the craters appeared.

NASA arrived at the conclusion that more than 200 small asteroids or little pieces of comets impact the surface of Mars each year by calculating a number based on the actual number of craters found in a systematic survey of a smaller portion of the red planet. NASA used the MRO’s Hi Resolution Science Experiment camera to take pictures of fresh craters at sites where before and after images by other cameras were available.

NASA says that Mars is struck with a significantly higher number of asteroid and comet fragments than Earth because Mars has a much thinner atmosphere, therefore these smaller fragments don’t burn up during entry. The asteroid or comet fragments that hit the planet are usually in the area of 3 to 6 feet in diameter according to NASA scientists.

NASA also notes that the meteor that created such a sensation when it entered the Earth’s atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February was about 10 times bigger than the chunks of asteroid and comet fragments causing these craters on the surface of Mars. NASA says that its new estimates on the rate at which new craters appear on the surface of the planet will be used to estimate the ages of exposed landscape features on Mars and other planets. Mars gets an average of one new crater each year on each portion of its surface measuring approximately the size of the state of Texas.

SOURCE: NASA

The biggest difference between the coronal mass ejection unleashed last month and these two, however, is that April’s CME was an M-class, while these two are X-class. An X-class solar flare is approximately ten times more powerful than an M-class flare, obviously bringing with it potential for higher damages. The first flare, occurring on May 12, was an X1.7, while the second flare, occurring on May 13, was an X2.8, making it 2013′s strongest thus far. Both resulted in coronal mass ejections.

The X1.7 solar flare reached its peak at about 10PM at night, and earned the designation of 2013′s first X-class solar flare. The coronal mass ejection that followed was not directed towards Earth, but the radiation resulting from the flare did cause some radio blackouts, which have since been restored. According to NASA, this particular CME left the sun going 745 miles per hour.

A couple hours later, just after midnight, the X2.8 solar flare was unleashed, coming out twice as powerful as the first one and making it the biggest so far this year. The coronal mass ejection that followed was launched at 1200 miles per second and aimed towards NASA’s STEREO-B, Spitzer, and Messenger spacecrafts. While there was a risk of damage, the agency said the crafts could be switched into safe mode if necessary.

Solar flares are currently happening at a more rapid rate than typical because the sun’s activity cycle, which lasts 11 years, is nearing its solar maximum, which is slated to happen later this year. NASA assures readers that the solar flares are normal, and that these are the first this year of a cycle that began back in early 2011, with the one that happened on May 13, 2013 being the 15th in the cycle.

SOURCE: NASA

NASA had a space station in orbit around the Earth in the early 70s called Skylab. The 40th anniversary of the launch of Skylab is today. You may be wondering exactly where Skylab is, and the answer to that is that not only is it no longer and space, but most of it isn’t in the United States. NASA placed crews aboard the Skylab space station from 1973 through 1974.

Skylab crews consisted of three astronauts and between May 1973 in February of 1974 three different crews lived briefly aboard the space station. Skylab was later abandoned, but NASA had hoped to possibly reactivate the station using the space shuttle fleet which was then in development. The problem for Skylab was that it was in an orbit that was too low and NASA was unable to boost the space station into a higher orbit.

In 1979, Skylab reentered the Earth’s atmosphere over the southern Indian Ocean. Skylab was large enough that several pieces of the space station survived reentry and ended up impacting along the south coast of Western Australia. The reentry of Skylab was said to be mostly uncontrolled and created a media sensation at the time.

Another problem with the reentry for NASA was that the Skylab reentered the atmosphere several minutes earlier than predicted and on a slightly different course than predicted. Some sections of Skylab ended up getting the ground in the Australian outback near Balladonia on Australia’s Nullarbor Plain. The largest pieces of Skylab reportedly recovered include the oxygen tanks that supply breathable air Astronauts living on the space station. The surviving components now reside in the town of Esperance, which boasts 10,000 residents and is about 450 miles from Perth. Other components that survived reentry included the space station storage freezer, water tank, nitrogen spheres, and a portion of the hatch used to enter the space station.

SOURCE: Space.com

According to NASA, which announced the safe arrival on its Google+, Expedition 35′s crew landed in a remote area located outside of the tongue-twister of a city, Dzhezkazgan, after having spent nearly half a year on the International Space Station. The crew, listed from left to right in the image above, is: Commander Chris Hadfield from Canada, Flight Engineer Roman Romanenko from Russia, and Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn of NASA.

Hadfield, in particular, has become quite the popular individual, having actively engaged with an on-Earth audience multiple times from his position above, such as back in April when he answered a question on camera about what happens when wringing a wet washcloth. Just watching the process of spraying the water into the cloth is fascinating enough, not to mention seeing the water cling to the cloth and run down his hands.

While that demonstration, along with the others, his social media presence, Reddit AMA, and more have all been entertaining, we’d argue nothing tops his final stand yesterday when he bade farewell to the ISS by singing David Bowie’s Space Oddity. The video shows some candid shots of our blue planet out the windows, as well as a what it looks like to wield a guitar in a gravity-free environment.

On May 10, two astronauts aboard the ISS were forced to take a spacewalk to repair an ammonia coolant leak that had developed in the space station, a particularly dangerous reality given that the station is powered by the coolant. Fortunately, all ended well, with Tom Marhsburn and Chris Cassidy replacing a pump controller over the course of 5.5 hours.

SOURCE: NASA (G+)

So far, Facebook uses 16 of 50 new emoticons that were created of a character they call Finch, with the potential to roll out more of them in the future being possible. The character’s creation was spurred by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a book published by Charles Darwin in the late 1800s, as well as research into user issues. Said Bejar, “This all began we were looking at the kind of issues people were reporting to Facebook. The reports had to do with things Facebook didn’t need to act on, but things people should address – what should happen when you say something that’s upsetting to me or put up a photo I didn’t like?”

The idea is that text alone presents issues when communicating due to its inherent lack of any sort of emotional context. Words alone can be ambiguous, and so users naturally began creating text-based emoticons to express the intention behind the words, such as the ever-popular :) smiley face. While text-based emoticons are better than nothing, they still lack the kind of emotional expression individuals are presented with when holding an in-person conversation, hence the eventual creation of image-based emoticons.

Keltner wasn’t satisfied with your average everyday emoticon, however, stating that he personally felt they were still lacking compared to what they could be. Because of this, Darwin’s work was partly used in the project to create richer, more expressive emoticons that tap into what the person behind the screen is feeling and helping the individual on the other side of the screen understand it better. One example given was sympathy: “It’s an under-appreciated emotion in Western culture. We now know what it looks like and sounds like because of science. They created this dynamic emoticon that when you see it, it’s really powerful.”

Because of this, the Finch emoticons are currently the most scientific set of stickers on Facebook, according to Bejar. He also hinted that perhaps one day audio will be added to the dynamic little character.

SOURCE: Popsci

IMAGE: Matt Jones

The sensors are designed to detect a variety of greenhouse gases, including methane and carbon dioxide, augmenting other stations that are already located in various places globally that measure greenhouse gases. These particular sensors are designed to achieve two purposes: monitor the specific carbon footprint effects of large cities, and as a by-product of that information to show whether such large cities are meeting – or are even capable of meeting – their green initiative goals.

Such measuring efforts will be intensified this year. In Los Angeles, for example, scientists working on the project will add a dozen gas analyzers to various rooftop locations throughout the city, as well as to a Prius, which will be driven throughout the city and a research aircraft to be navigated to “methane hotspots.” The data gathered from all these sensors, both present and slated for installation, is then analyzed using software that looks at whether levels have increased, decreased, or are stable, as well as determining where the gases originated from.

One of the examples given is vehicle emissions, with scientists being able to determine (using this data) the effects of switching to green vehicles over more traditional ones and whether its results indicate that it is something worth pursuing or whether it needs to be further analyzed for potential effectiveness. Reported the Associated Press, three years ago California saw 58-percent of its carbon dioxide come from gasoline-powered cars.

California is looking to reducing its emissions levels to a sub-35-percent level over 1990 by the year 2030, a rather ambitious goal. In 2010, it was responsible for producing 408 million tons of carbon dioxide, which outranks just about every country on the planet, putting it about on par with all of Spain. Thus far into the project, both the United States and France have individually spent approximately $3 million the project.

SOURCE: Associated Press

The leak was spotted as flakes of frozen ammonia, escaping from the far port truss (P6), as the chemical – used as a coolant on the ISS – escaped from the faulty pump controller. Cassidy and Marshburn suited up and replaced the broken component with a spare that had been stored on the backbone of the space station, NASA said today, with initial testing indicating the problem had been fixed.

The exact cause of the fault has not yet been revealed, though it perhaps comes as no surprise that the truss should be presenting issues. The P6 section is in fact the oldest part of the ISS backbone, having been placed into orbit back in November 2000 as part of the STS-97 mission. That was back in the days when the Space Shuttle Endeavour was still flying; shuttle Discovery then moved the truss from its original location to its current spot on the ISS, in late 2007.

Although NASA insisted throughout the incident that the problem was not a life-threatening one to the crew of the ISS, it was nonetheless vital that the faulty pump be addressed as quickly as possible. The space station uses ammonia as part of its active cooling system, circulating the chemical around the extensible radiators that can be deployed when excess heat needs to be shed.

Usually, the ISS relies on passive cooling – such as heat pipes and insulation – to maintain a steady operating temperature. When that proves insufficient, such as when the electronics produce more heat than can be handled by the passive systems, arrays of roughly 50-foot long radiators unfurl to more aggressively control heat.

NASA live-streamed the swiftly-planned spacewalk, with cameras tracking the two astronauts as they maneuvered around the habitat. Today’s outside mission was the most impromptu to-date, having been organized and staged with the least preparation time of any ISS spacewalk.

Initially, the concern had been that the specific fault would not be located. No external damage could be discovered, and NASA engineers recommended replacing the pump controller even though it was not certain that the part was, indeed, at fault. Commander Chris Hadfield, who has been on the ISS for several months, and who observed the spacewalk from within, took to Twitter to confirm that there were “no leaks” that could be seen, though NASA will continue to monitor the ammonia pressure remotely.

The project and application process was revealed to the public on April 16. By April 29, just three days after opening to video applications, over 20,000 people had applied. It has now been about two weeks, and the latest numbers show applications quickly heading towards the six-digit mark at 78,000, a small number compared to the half a million or more Mars One expects to have by the application deadline on August 31. Most of the applicants are located in the United States, but applications have been received from 120 different countries.

How will Mars One select who goes? Via a reality TV-esque public voting process.

There are four “rounds” to the application process, with the first requiring those interested to pay $25 and submit a video explaining why they want to spend the rest of their lives on Mars. In August when the submission process is closed, the tens of thousands of videos will be sorted through for those who will be sent on to the next round. In Round 2, the applicants-turned-candidates will be sent off to their local doctor for a full physical, then if they’re giving the physical go-ahead, will meet with the regional Mars One selection committee. Round 3 is when the quasi-reality TV aspect of the process comes into play, with between 20 and 40 candidates per country competing for votes from viewers across the world, with the top in each country going on to Round 4.

Round 4 is much the same as the last round, only with less candidates and without public voting. Those remaining will need to speak English by this point if it isn’t their main language, and will need to demonstrate their skills as part of their group they’re assigned to in a simulation of a Mars outpost, where they’re begin training. Some who can’t handle the training will go on to become Mars One employees instead. This round will also be broadcasted around the world.

So who are the folks ready to eschew the world they’ve always known and fly off into space, never to return again? You can find out for yourself by watching their public application videos over on the Mars One website.

SOURCE: TIME and Mars One

Specifically, researcher say that carbon dioxide has reached an average daily level over 400 parts per million, which won’t mean anything to the average person, but the researchers says that this is the highest level that they’ve observed since before mankind even existed. The last time that levels were this high was during the time period called the Pliocene, when the climate then was much warmer, ice caps were smaller, and sea levels may have been as much as 80 feet higher. To put 400 parts per million in simple terms, it basically means that if you filled up one million quart jars with air, about 400 of them would be all carbon dioxide.

This is also a reminder that all of the hard work that people have done over the decades in order to control emissions has “failed miserably,” as one researcher puts it. Environmental agencies and even the government has been involved in trying to cut down on emissions, but it seems the problem is much larger than anyone expected.

Then again, researchers say that levels will dip just slightly over the summer, as the growing leaves on trees will remove around 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the air worldwide. However, the level is expected to rise again in the fall and winter, and eventually, researchers say that carbon dioxide will reach 400 parts per million 24/7, no matter what season it is outside.

So what would happen if carbon dioxide levels kept rising? According to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the results could obviously be deadly. Not only can you not breath carbon dioxide, but the climate could eventually get to a point that isn’t a tolerable threshold” for humans to survive in. And while 500 parts per million doesn’t seem like a lot, research suggests that carbon dioxide is great at trapping heat near the surface of the Earth, even at extremely low levels.

SOURCE: The New York Times

IMAGE CREDIT: EMSL

The ISS’s power relies on ammonia coolant, so if that supply runs out, the space station would go dark and all the vital equipment needed for survival would stop working, which at that point the crew would be in grave danger. According to ISS Commander Chris Hadfield, the leak appears to have been stabilized, but there still needs to be a solid fix.

In order for the ammonia-based coolant system to operate normally, it needs a certain amount of ammonia in the tanks. However, based on the rate of the leak, the levels in the tanks could drop below that sweet-spot level within 48 hours, at which point the system would be at risk of shutting itself down due to a lack of ammonia. Of course, the station can operate on a broken cooling system, but it would take some clever thinking to prevent ISS components from overheating.

Luckily, the astronauts on board are fairly confident as far as where the leak is coming from, so once they begin their spacewalk, they’ll hopefully be able to go right to the leak and immediately begin repairing it. The spacewalk is being planned as we speak (with a live stream of the whole thing), and astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn are getting their spacesuits prepared for the spacewalk, which will take place at some point tomorrow.

In a similar but unrelated note, the United States Alliance has switched over the ISS’s computer systems from Windows to Linux to make sure that they’re “stable and reliable.” Specifically, the ISS was running Windows XP (not even Windows 7?), and they have now started to switch to Debian 6. For what it’s worth, however, some computers on the ISS have already been running various versions of Linux, including RedHat and Scientific Linux.

SOURCE: Chris Hadfield and ExtremeTech

The stars in question are white dwarfs with atmospheres said to be polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them. According to scientists, this discovered indicates that the formation of rocky planets with the common in star clusters. A white dwarf is a smaller, dim remnant of a star once like our sun.

The stars in question are 150 light-years away from the area in the Hyades star cluster. That cluster is part of the constellation of Taurus. Astronomers say that of the approximately 800 known exoplanets, only four are known to orbit stars in a cluster. However, the astronomers believe that the reason planets aren’t commonly discovered around clusters could have to do with the fact that cluster stars are typically young and very active producing lots of flares and other outbursts that make it difficult to study them in detail.

Spectroscopic observations made using the Hubble were able to identify silicon in the atmosphere of the two white dwarfs in this particular cluster. The scientists say that the presence of silicon is a major ingredient of rocky material that forms planets such as the Earth and other planets in our solar system. The theory is that the silicon present in the atmosphere of the stars was left there by planets destroyed by the gravity of the star. The scientists also believe that rocky debris left over from the destroying of planets is likely to have formed rings around the stars.

[via SpaceTelescope]

To gather additional information for crew members on the station and NASA controllers on the ground, ISS crewmembers used hand-held cameras while Mission Control used external television cameras to record images to gather additional data. Those images were used to narrow down the location of the leak.

Information from crewmembers aboard the space station and the photographs taken indicate that the ammonia leak in the section of the cooling system is increasing in capacity. The ISS uses ammonia to cool the power channels that provide electricity to systems aboard the space station. NASA says that the ISS crewmembers are in no danger at this time.

SpaceFlight Now reports that this coolant system requires at least 40 pounds of ammonia for normal operation. NASA believes that at the current leak rate, the coolant loop in question would drop below that level and shut down within 48 hours if a repair isn’t made. If that coolant loop shuts down, crewmembers would have to reconfigure the coolant loops to use a different loop to cool some of the computer systems the leaking 2B loop currently cools.

[via NASA and SpaceFlightNow]

The droplets in the rocks were found trapped in crystals on the inside, which protected the water droplets from volcanic eruptions, allowing them to be preserved through all these years and giving scientists the opportunity to look back at what the Moon’s ancient history as far back as 4.5 billion years ago.

According to past research, much of Earth’s water is believed to have been supplied by meteorites that crashed into our planet billions of years ago. The debris from the collision is said to have formed the moon, and since the intense heat from the explosion failed to vaporize all the water, it remained stagnant, which is what researchers are finding in the rock samples.

Scientists can tell where these water droplets originated from in the solar system based on ratio of the two chemicals deuterium and hydrogen. The water droplets in the rocks were found have small amounts of deuterium, which suggests that the water came from an area close to the sun, as opposed to further out in the solar system. The chemical structure essentially matched the levels of these aforementioned meteorites, which has scientists concluding that water found on the Moon very likely came from the Earth.

[via The Guardian]

[Source: Science Magazine]

While most people are familiar with total solar eclipses, an annular eclipse is less well known, involving the moon’s position over the sun in such a way that it will briefly look like a bright-glowing ring – like the One Ring is glowing bright way up yonder. Such an effect is the result of the moon’s distance, with it being far enough away from our planet that it appears smaller in diameter than the sun, causing the ring effect.

If such a prospect excites you and you won’t happen to be located in the remote Pacific tomorrow, you can watch it from your preferred device here tomorrow starting at 5:30PM Eastern Time. If you’re in Western Australia, Queensland, or the Northern Territories, on May 10 at 6:32AM, the moon’s shadow will begin passing over, eventually tracking to Cape York Peninsula at 8:44AM, then to the eastern side of Papua New Guinea, eventually to the Solomon Islands by 10:15AM (all local times).

Said Williams College Field Memorial professor Jay Pasachoff: “It is always astonishing to see the moon apparently cut bites out of the sun. And it is a wonder of modern science and mathematics that you can travel halfway around the world, arriving on a normal day with blue sky, but then, on schedule, the lunar silhouette breaks up the sunlight.”

[via National Geographic]

According to the team working on the robot, the melting plastic feet offer enough sticking forced to allow the robot to scale a vertical cliff face carrying five times its own mass. The idea is that robots of this type could be used to act as a scout for mountain rescue or to help construction crews working on multistory buildings.

While the rapid heating of the plastic footpads allows the robot to stick to vertical surfaces, those same footpads are then rapidly cooled to allow them to release. The robot is being created by researcher Fumiya Lida and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich.

The researchers say that the plastic on the robot feet melt at approximately 70-degrees Celsius. Above that temperature the surface of the robot feet are fluidic with a high degree of stickiness. The team uses resistors to heat the material above that 70-degree threshold. To cool the feet back down, the robot uses thermoelectric effect to allow the foot to release again. The researchers have built a test robot that was able to carry a 7 kg weight up walls made of plastic, wood, stone, and aluminum.

[via Roschler]

Before these latest observations, astronomers had assumed the interstellar clouds around Sagittarius A* would be much in line with regular clouds, with temperatures dawdling just about absolute zero (-273-degrees C). In actual fact, the black hole is surrounded by incredibly hot molecular gases, in the most central region at least, with only theories to explain why that might be the case.

Contributing to the heat – but unlikely to be responsible for all of it – is the cluster of massive stars around the black hole, the ESA says. Their output of ultraviolet radiation undoubtedly causes some of the unusual temperatures, but is not enough alone.

One theory, Doctor Javier Goicoechea of the Centro de Astrobiología, Spain, suggests, is that “emission from strong shocks in highly-magnetised gas” that also surround Sagittarius A* could be partially responsible. That could be the result of gas cloud collisions, or from the streams of hot gas that are being pulled toward the supermassive black hole.

Sagittarius A* masses around four million times that of our own Sun, and is the closest active black hole to Earth. “Herschel has resolved the far-infrared emission within just 1 light-year of the black hole,” Goicoechea explains of the new findings, “making it possible for the first time at these wavelengths to separate emission due to the central cavity from that of the surrounding dense molecular disc.”

Although black holes have been observed for many years, it’s only with recent advances in equipment that more accurate measurements could be taken. Sometimes those observations come unexpectedly; one black hole suddenly woke and consumed huge quantities of matter from a nearby planet while they had been taking measurements nearby, for instance. Earlier this year, meanwhile, scientists managed to measure a black hole’s spin for the first time.

Clouds can have both a warming and a cooling effect on our planet, depending on their formation. Condensed water droplets are the substance of clouds, with the size of the particles upon which they are suspended being directly related to the brightness of clouds as determined from above. Obviously, the brighter a cloud, the more sunlight it reflects away from our blue marble, something that has been widely known.

In this study, the effects of pollution on clouds was looked at, in particular the effects of organic compounds released by pollutants, which make their way upwards and serve as particles. Because of their nature, the pollutant particles cause larger droplets to form, and the result is brighter clouds, which in turn reflect more sunlight. Says the researchers, though, the effects aren’t likely powerful enough to combat increasing global temperatures.

Said the project’s author Gordon McFiggans: “More cloud droplets lead to brighter cloud when viewed from above, reflecting more incoming sunlight. We did some calculations of the effects on climate and found that the cooling effect on global climate of the increase in cloud seed effectiveness is at least as great as the previously found entire uncertainty in the effect of pollution on clouds.”

[via Science World Report]

Late last month, NASA‘s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and Swift Space Telescope both imaged the brightest, most powerful GRB ever spotted. Like the others mentioned, this gamma-ray burst was the result of a dying star, this particular one located 3.6-billion light-years from our planet. The scientists then took the images – one of which is featured above – and turned them into a video.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center scientist Julie McEnery said about the images: “We have waited a long time for a gamma-ray burst this shockingly, eye-wateringly bright. The GRB lasted so long that a record number of telescopes on the ground were able to catch it while space-based observations were still ongoing.”

Of all the gamma-ray bursts that have been detected, GRB 130427A turned out to be the longest that has ever. In addition, it also earned the title of most-powerful (by a factor of three) GRB the Large Area Telescope has ever imaged. The recording of the event started just 60 seconds after the GRB began, and has prompted a hunt for an accompanying supernova.

[via Space.com]

Whenever a bullet or other blunt object pierces through glass or other brittle material, the energy expands outward over the glass, creating the familiar look of radial cracking patterns formed around the bullet hole. While many people have always believed this to be completely random (and it is to an extent), it turns out that there’s actually a method to the madness.

After shooting BBs at plexiglass plates, which were of various thicknesses and strengths (with the BBs traveling at different speeds), the researchers concluded and created a “global scaling law,” with the rule of thumb that the number of cracks double for every fourfold increase in a bullet’s (or other object’s) impact speed.

These findings could be useful to forensic scientists who want to determine the location of a shooter or determine the speed of a vehicle when it got shot at. Of course, it’s not something that will give you a definite answer as to how fast a bullet was traveling, but based on the researchers’ findings, it’s definitely something that can provide forensic investigators with an accurate estimate.

[via io9]

Image via Flickr

This looted beast was spoken about by professionals and the scientific public alike, petitions having been signed and professors making the case for the impossibility of legality in the auction that was to take place in the Spring of 2012. Back then it was Dr Mark A Norell, Chairman and Curator, Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of National History who made one of several compelling cases for this construction of bones to have been looted illegally.

“In the current catalogue Lot 49317 (a skull of Saichania) and Lot 49315 (a mounted Tarbosaurus skeleton) clearly were excavated in Mongolia as this is the only locality in the world where these dinosaurs are known. The copy listed in the catalogue, while not mentioning Mongolia specifically (the locality is listed as Central Asia) repeatedly makes reference to the Gobi Desert and to the fact that other specimens of dinosaurs were collected in Mongolia.

As someone who is intimately familiar with these faunas, these specimens were undoubtedly looted from Mongolia. There is no legal mechanism (nor has there been for over 50 years) to remove vertebrate fossil material from Mongolia.” – Dr Mark A Norell for American Museum of National History

The “unusually complete” skeleton is set to be returned to Mongolian representatives today by Homeland Security officials in a ceremony near the United Nations. Prokopi meanwhile is currently free on bail and faces up to 17 years in prison. According to the NY Times, Prokopi agreed to a guilty plea with the court on December 27th of 2012 along with a forfeiture of several other skeletons that he’d apparently come into possession of illegally as well.

Prokopi surrendered the main Tyrannosaurus Bataar skeleton in question along with a second, slightly smaller Tyrannosaurus Bataar skeleton (surprise! he had two!), two Saurolophus skeletons, and two Oviraptor skeletons. His next court date will take place August 30th, 2013.

“A human mission to Mars is a priority” NASA chief Charles Bolden has committed, Discovery reports, though right now the agency can’t afford to do it all itself. Budgetary limitations, Bolden argues, mean the private and government agencies involved in space travel will have to effectively pool resources in order to get the most bang for their buck.

His strategy is to leave escaping Earth’s gravity well to private contractors, while NASA looks to the bigger picture such as getting from outside the atmosphere to Mars. Modules like SpaceX’s Dragon could be used to go from Earth to low-orbit he suggests, the Washington Post reports, while NASA works on taking the eventual crew further.

Even with those delineated roles – which the private sector may not be entirely happy with anyway – the project isn’t going to blast off any time soon. ““I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready. I don’t have the capability to do it” Bolden conceded. “NASA doesn’t have the capability to do that right now. But we’re on a path to be able to do it in the 2030s.”

Firing a pod off to Mars isn’t quite as simple as, say, launching astronauts to the International Space Station. The 250-350m mile journey is not only long but puts humans at risk of high levels of radiation; once the crew reached Mars, if they wanted to land on it they’d need a safe way of decelerating since the planet’s thin atmosphere lacks the friction to brake a capsule.

One possibility is the same sort of sky-crane system as NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab used to deploy Curiosity, the robotic rover that has been drilling samples from the Martian surface. That effectively lowered the rover from beneath a hovering crane; however, the weights involved for a human crew and their kit would make it far more difficult.

In fact, the payload involved could be anywhere around 40x the weight of Curiosity, NASA associate administrator Michael Gazarik told the Post. Curiosity “was a metric ton” he highlights, “the size of a MINI Cooper.” Assuming the team wanted to escape from the Martian surface at some point, they would need to have a return rocket and fuel as well.

Back in 2010, the US government set out a goal to have a human mission “to orbit Mars” though not land on it. NASA’s ambitions go a little further, of course, though there’ll likely be robotic missions before humans even leave Earth in order to test the technology, not to mention private proposals.

H2M is run by a non-profit group, Explore Mars Inc., and co-sponsored by a number of aerospace companies including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. It will close on Wednesday with final speech by Buzz Aldrin, second man to walk on the moon.

The product can give solar panels a run for their money, but the scientists aren’t going to stop there. They intend to find a way to use this technology to produce a paint that can be used for homes, as well as other objects. However, Professor Kostya Novoselov, one of the scientists who discovered graphene, stated that the development of the paint isn’t going to happen until much later in the future.

The graphene paint can be used to power a number of devices, with one emphasis being on mobile phones. The scientists believe that graphene paint would bring in a “new generation” of mobile phones that are solar powered and are ultra-thin. Not only can graphene paint be used to power objects, scientists believe that they will be able to make it change colors on-demand as well.

The scientists are optimistic about the development of graphene. Not only is the material harder than diamond, and able to conduct electricity, there are many more possibilities for it as well. Professor Novoselov stated that they would be able to use graphene to develop different types of products with a variety of properties other than producing solar powered energy. He states,

“We have been trying to go beyond graphene by combining with with other one atom thick materials. What we have been doing is putting different layers of these materials one on top of the other and what you get is a new type of material with a unique set of properties. It is like a book – one page contains some information but together the book is so much more. The implementations would go much further than simple solar powered cells”

[via Telegraph]

The parking lot in question is in the junction between Oxford and Newarke, and features 13 skeletons of all sorts of ages. The skeletons range from children to adults with a mixture of male and female. The remains are said to be in possession of personal items, such as rings, and to indicate different religions ranging from Christianity to paganism.

This isn’t the first time Leicester has been the source of an unearthed ancient grave cite, with the remains of King Richard III being found under a parking lot earlier this year. As Live Science points out, Scotland was also caught up in a similar story, with a medieval knight’s grave being found there, likewise under a parking lot. Concerning this project, the bones will be studied for information about the time period from which they come.

Archaeological project officer on the team responsible for the finding, John Thomas, said: “We have literally only just finished the excavation and the finds are currently in the process of being cleaned and catalogued so that they can then be analyzed by the various specialists.” The team hails from the University of Leicester and is still working on the project.

[via Live Science]

The dinosaur’s name is said to be in homage of the Chinese story Journey to the West‘s Dragon King, which is about as noble of a name as any fossil can hope for. George Washington University’s James Clark lead the team that made the discovery, which says the unearthed dinosaur could prove to be an important link betwixt its feathered and lizard-esque brethren.

The fossil was discovered in Xinjiang, China, and is composed of the dinosaur’s partial skeleton and mandible. Said Clark: “All that was exposed on the surface was a bit of the leg. We were pleasantly surprised to find a skull buried in the rock too.” Being a juvenile, it measured in at about 3-feet in length and is said to have likely weight about 3lbs.

The fossil is estimated to be at least 161 million years old, hailing from the early Late Jurassic Period. Says the researchers, the jaw indicates a diet that was mostly composed of small creatures, such as lizards. The project was made possible the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation and the National Science Foundation Division of Earth Sciences. The findings were recently published in The Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

[via George Washington University]

The hack you’re about to see comes straight from Caleb Kraft over at Hack A Day who, loving the greatness of the hammer, aka Mjolnir, decided it was time – finally – to create on of his own. This creation was initiated when he met up with the folks at ArcAttack and decided the time for electricity was nigh.

The creation you’re seeing above is not one your everyday average comic book film lover is going to be able to build. Instead you’re going to need to create a tesla coil yourself, make sure it’s perfectly sized to fit in the head or the arm of the hammer, and you’ll want to be at least a bit of a refined sense of 3D crafting style to boot. The coil created for this project was made by Staci Elaan and is shown in the video below. This coil is entirely battery powered!

The hammer itself isn’t entirely ready for high-action films – in this form it’s still a bit fragile – but it’s certainly ready to be taken to your local movie opening. Then again, it could very easily be considered a dangerous weapon, so watch yourself. Using this at home to impress the kids is probably as far as you should go – but again, don’t let them grab hold of it for too long – the insides may very well come out.

This is because tools, switches, valves, and environments where robots of the future are likely to work were created with humans in mind. DARPA and iRobot are currently working on one of the most important components of any humanoid robot, the hand. DARPA and iRobot have unveiled a robotic hand that has both strength and dexterity, something that is a requirement for any functional robot.

According to DARPA, the three-fingered robot hand is strong enough to lift a 50-pound weight, yet has the dexterity to utilize a small set of keys or even a set of tweezers. The robotic hand is also very strong and can survive being bashed by a baseball bat. DARPA stayed away from a five-finger human-style hand because the three-fingered hand features a usable palm making it easier to achieve fluid motion.

The hand created by DARPA and iRobot is known as the ARM-H and is constructed using 3-D printing, custom molded plastic and rubber, and plastic machining techniques. DARPA thinks that the hand will also be surprisingly affordable when produced in batches of 1000. DARPA predicts that in batches of thousand each robotic hand would cost about $3000. Current robotic hands can cost as much as $50,000 each.

[via CBS News]

According to the researchers, their bionic ear uses “biological tissue with functional electronics” to form a prosthetic device. The scientists created a proof of concept for the bionic ear using a 3-D printer that spat out a hydrogel that had been seeded with living cells. The prosthetic was printed using the “precise anatomic geometry of the human ear.”

Along with that bio gel and the living cells was a conducting polymer consisting of infused silver nanoparticles. The 3-D printed ear has enhanced auditory sensing able to hear radio frequencies. The researchers say that complementary left and right ears would allow the user to listen to stereo music.

The researchers say that they used off the shelf 3-D printing tools to create a functional ear. The researchers designing the bionic ear also used CAD design tools. Creating bionic organs is typically a big challenge because with normal electronics researchers have to devise a method of incorporating typically 2-D rigid electronic components with organic materials. This new 3-D printed bionic ear interweaves the electronics into the biological components making it much easier to create biological shapes for functional prosthetic devices.

[via GMA Network]

Although planets at such orbits would not, traditionally, be considered strong candidates for showing evidence of alien life, that’s avoiding the core physics and chemistry, Seager points out. For instance, greater quantities of hydrogen gas in the atmosphere would have a more significant warming effect despite the cooler heat from a more distant star, she suggests in a paper in Science.

Conversely, planets generally thought of as too close to a star might be equally viable candidates, if they were dry enough to avoid the greenhouse effect from larger quantities of atmospheric moisture. Even a planet without a star altogether could still sustain life if it had its own source of heat, the physicist insists, such as if it had a radioactive core and enough of an insulating atmosphere to prevent undue loss of that warmth.

NASA has been using the Kepler space telescope to identify which planets might support life, using some fundamental guidelines including position in orbit and size. Last month, for instance, the space agency announced it had spotted three such examples, each within the so-called “habitable zone.”

If Seager’s arguments are accommodated within mission guidelines, however, Kepler’s hunt could become far more comprehensive, though it’s unclear whether the space telescope has the right combination of strengths to actually identify such planets. Currently, it is difficult to track the “biosignature gasses” – such as atmospheric oxygen in the case of Earth, or ozone and methane on exo-planets – of distant planets.

That could change within the decade, however, with NASA green-lighting 2017 plans for TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. It is expected to hunt for relatively nearby exo-planets, though it will take the combined efforts of TESS and the James Webb Space Telescope – itself set to launch in 2018 – before atmospheric analysis can take place.

The rover is called GROVER, which stands for two things: Greenland ROVER, and Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research. The rover is an autonomic machine equipped with a solar panel on both its sides to power its batteries. Under the hood, so to speak, there is ground-penetrating radar for analyzing the different layers of ice and how they formed over time.

This projects follows a recent rapid change in Greenland’s icy surface, which melted drastically last summer as temperatures reached higher-than-normal temperatures. The result was a 97-percent melting of Greeland’s surface ice, with the current ice sheet being the subject of GROVER’s mission. A prototype of the rover has already been tested at an Idaho ski resort, which you can see in the image above.

While all of that is interesting, the perhaps most fascinating part of the story is that GROVER was made by students in what NASA calls summer engineering boot camps at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The development process lasted through summers 2010 and 2011, and is a by-product of the students’ desire to create a rover for studying snow accumulation on the ice sheets, a task most commonly carried out by airplanes and snowmobiles. Says NASA, the project costs less than space-bound rovers.

[via NASA]

The first flight, according to the Harvard announcement, took place at 3AM one day in the summer of 2012 at the helm of grad student Pakpong Chirarattananon. The robot measured in at half the size of a paperclip, and took flight through a pre-destined route established by presets. This flight was recorded by the student and promptly shared with colleagues.

Such a seemingly small project is the by-product of a lot of work – to the tune of over a decade, according to Harvard. This represents the first controlled flight of a robot as small as an insect; so-called “insect robots”. Its design is inspired by a fly, using two wings that beat 120 times per second. From here, work will be started on things like wireless flight, autonomy, and colony coordination.

Said SEAS professor of engineering and applied sciences Robert J. Wood: “This is what I have been trying to do for literally the last 12 years. It’s really only because of this lab’s recent breakthroughs in manufacturing, materials, and design that we have even been able to try this. And it just worked, spectacularly well.”

[via Harvard]

We’re not exactly sure what cities we’re looking at in the photo, but Hadfield points out that its the southeastern United States, with the bigger city toward the right side being Atlanta or Charlotte possibly. In any case, the horizon looks absolutely amazing, and the moon creeping in makes the photo that much more spectacular.

Hadfield not only takes a ton of photos of Earth from the ISS (which you can browse through all of them with this neat interactive map), but he also provides short videos on what it’s like to live on the ISS, and in one of his latest videos, he describes how he takes photos of Earth from the ISS. The secret? A huge lens.

Hadfield primarily uses a Nikon DSLR with a 400mm lens. This is one heavy setup, but thanks to the lack of gravity in space, Hadfield doesn’t need to strain his shoulders or arms lifting and holding the camera. Instead, the camera merely just floats in front of him. Hadfield even says that they take the cameras out on spacewalks into the cold vacuum of space. We’ll be keeping up with Hadfield and the ISS over the next months for any more photos that he posts in the future. Stay tuned!

In November of this year, NASA is planning to launch a new spacecraft called the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft. The space agency is calling on the public to submit their names and a personal message online that will be placed on a DVD that will be carried aboard the spacecraft on its mission to Mars. The actual purpose of the MAVEN spacecraft is to study the Martian upper atmosphere.

NASA says that the DVD aboard spacecraft will contain every name submitted. Other than names, the short messages can be submitted by people in the form of a three line poem or haiku. The catch with the poems is that only three will be included on the DVD.

NASA will allow the public to begin voting on which three poems will be included on the DVD beginning July 15. The DVD campaign is part of NASA’s Going to Mars campaign. NASA hopes that the Maven spacecraft will help determine how the loss of its atmosphere to space affected the history of water on the surface of the planet.

[via NASA]

The communications moratorium was in place due to a planetary alignment that could see communications sent to the rovers corrupted, resulting in actions that caused serious damage. As such, communications were stopped for a few weeks, leaving the ground team to discover the problem with Opportunity on April 27, about five days after it had switched itself into automode.

After making the discovery, NASA put together a series of commands on April 29 to switch the rover back into normal operations mode. The automode was triggered, the agency believed, when the rover’s cameras were checking out the sun and it rebooted its flight software, the combination of which sent it into the altered functioning mode.

Said NASA about the matter: “The Opportunity rover is back under ground control, executing a sequence of commands sent by the rover team. Opportunity is no longer in standby automode and has resumed normal operations.” Such is the simple life of a robot who has spent many years rolling around the Red Planet. Communication with the Curiosity rover will happen soon.

[via Space]

The camera is covered in tiny domes, which are covered in 180 microlenses, which each capture their own angle of the subject being shot. Essentially, the microlenses all work together to come up with one large collective image that’s high-resolution, sharp, and has a wide field of view.

The camera is obviously in its early stages, but scientists say that this technology could be used in surveillance cameras in order to capture a better picture that’s both sharp and can see everything in a large space. It would also be useful in endoscopic cameras, which are used by doctors to see inside the human body during surgical procedures.

Whereas traditional digital cameras have a flat sensor and a single camera lens, this bug-inspired camera has hundreds of lenses, which essentially bend and curve the elements found in a normal digital camera into a half-sphere in order to achieve a very wide field of view. It’s not said when the new cameras could hit the industry, but the researchers have already been working on the technology for several years now.

[via CNN]

These geysers were confirmed back in 2005, and it’s said that there are at least 98 geysers all located near the moon’s south pole, and the photo above does a great job showing off the beauty of water vapor shooting out of the moon’s surface. You can easily tell that the plume is has large as the diameter of the moon itself.

Since confirming the geysers in 2005, scientists have been continually trying to learn more about how they behave and where they are coming from. As of right now, the theory behind the geysers is that Enceladus has a liquid subsurface ocean, and pressure from the surface layers above that force the water up through surface cracks and out into space.

As far as what the plumes consist of, the Cassini space craft has flown through the geysers before and has determined that it’s a combination of water, organic material, and salt levels similar to that of our own oceans here on Earth. If the geyser indeed shoots the water vapor as far high as the diameter of the moon, that means that we’re looking at geysers that shoot plumes approximately 300 miles in the air.

[via Universe Today]

The study, published this week, looked at stated buying intentions when a group of shoppers with mixed political views were presented with a range of bulbs. All chose the eco-friendly compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs when each of the options were priced the same, but when the eco-friendly bulbs carried a premium – just as is usually the case, compared to traditional incandescent bulbs – and a label billing them good for the environment, those who described their political beliefs as conservative were less likely to choose them compared to their more liberal counterparts.

“You can lose significant portions of people who would otherwise be interested in these products when you use that environmental labeling” Gromet told National Geographic. “So it indicates that different messages can reach different groups.”

The results are interesting, because all of the 210 participants in the study were previously given information on how a greater upfront price of CFL bulbs could still be offset by lower running costs and a longer lifespan compared to incandescent. That suggests cost was not the primary deciding factor for the conservatives turned off by eco-labels.

“When we asked afterward, those consumers identified the CFL bulbs as providing greater monetary savings over time. But they would forgo that option when that product was made to represent a value that was not something they wanted to be identified with” Dena Gromet, University of Pennsylvania

Nonetheless, there are also indications that a green message isn’t especially effective on those with liberal views either. Comparing those who stated an intention to buy more expensive CFL versus more expensive CFL with eco-labels, the numbers weren’t much different, Gromet pointed out.

One possibility is that the “green” message on products is generally mistrusted, either resulting in an active dislike – such as observed in conservative shoppers – or the promotion being ignored altogether. Future research will look at whether different emphasis on advantages of energy-efficient products, such as reduced ongoing bills, causes the same political divide.

IBM says this project challenged the limits of movie making, and involved positioning the magnified atoms individually for each frame, resulting in the short film you can watch in the video below titled, “A Boy and His Atom.” Set against a gray backdrop, the story tells of a boy named Atom and his friend, an atom (such a small medium puts limitations on story options, it seems).

How does one make a movie using atoms? With a very large microscope, says IBM. Specifically, with its scanning tunneling microscope, which was the first means by which scientists got to peer at atoms. It is a huge hulking beast of a machine weighing two tons and running at a temp said to be approximately -268 Celsius. The combination of features allowed the researchers to move the atoms around with high levels of precision. You can get a more detailed look at how it was made in the next video.

The project’s principle investigator Andreas Heinrich said: “Capturing, positioning and shaping atoms to create an original motion picture on the atomic-level is a precise science and entirely novel. At IBM, researchers don’t just read about science, we do it. This movie is a fun way to share the atomic-scale world while opening up a dialogue with students and others on the new frontiers of math and science.”

[via IBM]

The discovery was made on April 27, and NASA prepared a new set of commands yesterday that will pull the rover back into a regular functioning mode, something it has been waiting for since going into the specific type of standby mode. It wasn’t down long, however, having reverted to that mode last week on April 22. Unlike Curiosity, Opportunity has called Mars its home for nearly a decade.

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas said: “Our current suspicion is that Opportunity rebooted its flight software, possibly while the cameras on the mast were imaging the sun. We found the rover in a standby state called automode, in which it maintains power balance and communication schedules, but waits for instructions from the ground. We crafted our solar conjunction plan to be resilient to this kind of rover reset, if it were to occur.”

Although the communications moratorium came to its end for Opportunity, it is still in effect for the Curiosity rover, which is set to resume its communications with the ground tomorrow. NASA says that thus far information received from the rover shows that it has made it through its mini vacation without incident, and as such is slated to receive its first set of commands on May 1.

[via NASA]