NASA Flight Tests Unique Jumbo Jet with Opening in Side

NASA Tests Unique Jumbo Jet with Opening in Side; Plane's Airborne Telescope Will Be Used to Study Cosmos

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created Dec 21, 2009 | popularity 5 / 5 (4) | comments 2

(PhysOrg.com) -- A NASA jumbo jet that will help scientists unlock the origins of the universe with infrared observations reached a milestone Friday when doors covering the plane's telescope were fully opened ...


Ski Runs Are Not Created Equal

Space & Earth / Environment

created Dec 21, 2009 | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- Building a new ski run by bulldozing a mountainside rather than only cutting its shrubs and trees is far more damaging ecologically, yet might offer only a week's earlier start to the downhill season, says ...


Colliding auroras produce an explosion of light

Colliding auroras produce an explosion of light

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created Dec 17, 2009 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (8) | comments 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- A network of cameras deployed around the Arctic in support of NASA's THEMIS mission has made a startling discovery about the Northern Lights. Sometimes, vast curtains of aurora borealis collide, ...


A scale model of the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo

Virgin Galactic readies maiden suborbital flight

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created Dec 06, 2009 | popularity 5 / 5 (23) | comments 10

British billionaire Sir Richard Branson will unveil a craft on Monday that could soon carry tourists on an out-of-this-world trip into space -- for a mere 200,000 dollars. (Update: Virgin Galactic unveils commercial spaceship) ...


Silicon technology offers extended X-ray vision of high-energy cosmos

Silicon technology offers extended X-ray vision of high-energy cosmos

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created Dec 21, 2009 | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 2

(PhysOrg.com) -- As elements of the integrated circuits running our computers, phones and electronics, silicon wafers are everywhere. An ESA-led effort is establishing an out-of-this-world use for these ...


The volume of garbage dumped in landfills every year in Japan has shrunk to roughly one third of 1990 levels

Japan mines toxic e-waste for precious materials

Space & Earth / Environment

created Dec 17, 2009 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (7) | comments 0

Seeking to turn an environmental problem into an economic opportunity, high-tech companies in resource-poor Japan are mining mountains of toxic e-waste for precious materials.


Arctic ice

Study: Earth's polar ice sheets vulnerable to even moderate global warming

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Dec 16, 2009 | popularity 2.8 / 5 (46) | comments 40

A new analysis of the geological record of the Earth's sea level, carried out by scientists at Princeton and Harvard universities and published in the Dec. 16 issue of Nature, employs a novel statistical approa ...


EPA, Army Corps urged to consider separating Great Lakes, river basin

Space & Earth / Environment

created Dec 21, 2009 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 0

The once-radical idea of somehow plugging the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to stop the flow of unwanted species from spilling between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basin is quickly picking up political support.


Soil Microorganisms? Role Cited as a Missing Factor in Climate Change Equation

Space & Earth / Environment

created Dec 17, 2009 | popularity 3.4 / 5 (7) | comments 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- Those seeking to understand and predict climate change can now use an additional tool to calculate carbon dioxide exchanges on land, according to a scientific journal article co-authored by a University of ...


Giant Planet Set for a Cataclysmic Show

Giant Planet Set for a Cataclysmic Show

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 16, 2009 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (16) | comments 4

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of Chinese astronomers have discovered a giant planet close to the exotic binary star system QS Virginis. Although dormant now, in the future the two stars will one day erupt in a violent ...


Absence of evidence for a meteorite impact event 13,000 years ago

Absence of evidence for a meteorite impact event 13,000 years ago

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Dec 08, 2009 | popularity 4.1 / 5 (17) | comments 13

An international team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa have found no evidence supporting an extraterrestrial impact event at the onset of the Younger Dryas ~13000 years ...


Unexpected Wheel-Test Results

Spirit Mars Rover: Unexpected Wheel-Test Results

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created Dec 15, 2009 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (7) | comments 2

(PhysOrg.com) -- Diagnostic tests were run on Spirit's right-rear wheel and right-front wheel on Sol 2013 (Dec. 12, 2009).


Sandtrapped Rover Makes a Big Discovery

Sandtrapped Rover Makes a Big Discovery

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created Dec 03, 2009 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (56) | comments 11

Homer's Iliad tells the story of Troy, a city besieged by the Greeks in the Trojan War. Today, a lone robot sits besieged in the sands of Troy while engineers and scientists plot its escape.


Astronauts blast off for Christmas space mission (AP)

Astronauts blast off for Christmas space mission

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created Dec 20, 2009 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 0

(AP) -- A Russian rocket blasted off from a cosmodrome in Kazakhstan lighting up the frigid Central Asian steppe Monday, shuttling an American, a Russian and a Japanese to the International Space Station.


Icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter may have conditions needed for life

Icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter may have conditions needed for life

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 15, 2009 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (16) | comments 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists once thought that life could originate only within a solar system's "habitable zone," where a planet would be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface. ...