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December 23, 2013

Ultrafast heating of water - This pot boils faster than you can watch it
Hamburg, Germany (SPX) Dec 22, 2013
Scientists from the Hamburg Center for Free-Electron Laser Science have devised a novel way to boil water in less than a trillionth of a second. The theoretical concept, which has not yet been demonstrated in practice, could heat a small amount of water by as much as 600 degrees Celsius in just half a picosecond (a trillionth of a second). That is much less than the proverbial blink of an eye: one picosecond is to a second what one second is to almost 32 millennia. This would make the technique th ... read more

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NASA Releases New Earthrise Simulation Video NASA has issued a new visualization of the events leading to one of the iconic photographs of the 20th Century - Earth rising over the moon captured by the crew of the Apollo 8 mission. The photo k ... more		Liftoff for ESA's billion-star surveyor ESA's Gaia mission blasted off this morning on a Soyuz rocket from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on its exciting mission to study a billion suns. Gaia is destined to create the ... more		NASA's Asteroid Hunter Spacecraft Returns First Images after Reactivation NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), a spacecraft that made the most comprehensive survey to date of asteroids and comets, has returned its first set of test image ... more
				Most Chang'e-3 science tools activated Six out of the eight pieces of scientific equipment deployed to the moon with the Chang'e-3 lunar mission have been activated by scientists and are functioning properly, according to scientists work ... more		Dawn Creates Guide to Vesta's Hidden Attractions Some beauty is revealed only at a second glance. When viewed with the human eye, the giant asteroid Vesta, which was the object of scrutiny by the Dawn spacecraft from 2011 to 2012, is quite unspect ... more

Will the Moon be carved-up? Experts forecast that the Moon will become sort of the seventh continent of Earth by the middle of the 21st century. People will reclaim the polar regions and build residential areas there. In this ... more		Electron 'antenna' tunes in to physics beyond Higgs Though it was hailed as a triumph for the "Standard Model" of physics - the reigning model of fundamental forces and particles - physicists were quick to emphasize that last year's discovery of the ... more		Denmark closes airspace to civilian drones amid rise in sightings Top diplomats of North Korea, China agree to oppose 'hegemonism' What is the high seas treaty?		Electron's shapeliness throws a curve at supersymmetry A small band of particle-seeking scientists at Yale and Harvard has established a new benchmark for the electron's almost perfect roundness, raising doubts about certain theories that predict what l ... more
				Oracle to buy cloud firm for $1.5 bn Business software giant Oracle announced plans Friday to boost its cloud services with a $1.5 billion acquisition of Responsys. ... more		Leaner Fourier transforms The fast Fourier transform, one of the most important algorithms of the 20th century, revolutionized signal processing. The algorithm allowed computers to quickly perform Fourier transforms - fundam ... more

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Supernovae hundreds of times brighter than normal observed U.S. astronomers say they've discovered two supernovas 10 billion light-years from Earth that are 100 times more luminous than a normal supernova. ... more		SMA Reveals Giant Star Cluster in the Making W49A might be one of the best-kept secrets in our galaxy. This star-forming region shines 100 times brighter than the Orion nebula, but is so obscured by dust that very little visible or infrared li ... more		The first animals on Earth may have been sea sponges, study suggests Wildfire-induced thunderstorms recreated in Earth system models for first time Fengyun satellite strengthens China global weather forecasting capacity		What happens to ISON's remains? Apologies for going quiet on this site - it takes a while to recover from events like this! I have actually started several blog posts and then never gotten chance to finish them. That will happen e ... more
				Gaia Mission Could Help Map Exoplanets The Kepler mission from NASA has discovered more than 3,600 possible worlds, a haul greater than any mission before it. Now researchers suggest the Gaia spacecraft, scheduled for launch on December ... more		Astrium has finalised preparation of Gaia, the star mapper of the Milky Way Astrium, the world's second largest space company, has finalised its preparation of Gaia in Kourou, French Guiana. Europe's most advanced space telescope is scheduled for launch on 19 December aboar ... more

The Sounds of New Horizons

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Hard rock life

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Mars rover Curiosity gets software upgrade, improved capabilities

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	Swift satellite catches 100,000 new cosmic X-ray sources An international team led from the University of Leicester has published a major list of celestial X-ray sources in the Astrophysical Journal. The result of many years work, this list of over 150,00 ... more		First detection of a predicted unseen exoplanet A team of European astronomers, including EXOEarths member Alexandre Santerne (Centro de Astrofisica da Universidade do Porto - CAUP), used the SOPHIE spectrograph at the Observatoire de Haute-Prove ... more		Oil and metal munching microbes dominate deep sandstone formations Halomonas are a hardy breed of bacteria. They can withstand heat, high salinity, low oxygen, utter darkness and pressures that would kill most other organisms. These traits enable these microbes to ... more		NASA creates 'rainbow' movie of the sun based on temperature NASA says a movie of the sun based on data from its Solar Dynamics Observatory shows its wide range of wavelengths invisible to the naked eye. ... more

NASA ISRO radar satellite beams first Earth images from space

India plans mega-dam to counter China water fears

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Study: 'Missing' arms of our Milky Way galaxy are actually there		'Approximate' computers could do tasks not requiring exact answers		Organics Preserved in Ancient Meteorite-Formed Glass		Swirls in remnants of Big Bang may hold clues to universe's infancy		Nearby failed stars may harbor planet
Juno slingshots past Earth on its way to Jupiter		Astronomers solve temperature mystery of planetary atmospheres		Fast Radio Bursts Might Come From Nearby Stars		Clay-Like Minerals Found on Icy Crust of Europa		Astronomers discover first noble gas molecules in space

Recipe for a Universe

China plans to launch Chang'e-5 in 2017

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China's Lunar Lander May Provide Additional Science for NASA Spacecraft

Think you know what alien life may look like? Be careful!

Mining the moon is pie in the sky for China: experts

Rare meteorite sat unnoticed in private Dutch collection for 140 years

Facebook seeks to get smarter with big data

Image of sun shows two areas of sunspots, one arriving and one leaving

MESSENGER Celebrates 1,000 Earth Days in Orbit around Mercury

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Noble gas molecule discovered in space

Hard rock life

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