PASADENA, Calif. –– The NASA Mars rover Curiosity drove 63 feet (19 meters) northeastward early Monday, Dec. 10, approaching a step down into a slightly lower area called “Yellowknife Bay,” where researchers intend to choose a rock to drill.
The drive was Curiosity’s fourth consecutive driving day since leaving a site near an outcrop called “Point Lake,” where it arrived last month. These drives totaled 260 feet (79 meters) and brought the mission’s total odometry to 0.37 mile (598 meters).(more…)
Researchers at Michigan State University have discovered a protein that does its best work with one foot in the grave.
The study, which appears in the current issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, focuses on the nontraditional lifestyle of Retinoblastoma tumor suppressor proteins, which could lead to new ways to treat cancer.
“Retinoblastoma proteins are unique in that they use controlled destruction to do their jobs in a timely but restrained fashion,” said Liang Zhang, a lead author and MSU cell and molecular biology graduate student. “This is an unusual way for proteins to act.” (more…)
PASADENA, Calif. – Scientists with NASA’s Cassini mission have spotted what appears to be a miniature, extraterrestrial likeness of Earth’s Nile River: a river valley on Saturn’s moon Titan that stretches more than 200 miles (400 kilometers) from its “headwaters” to a large sea. It is the first time images have revealed a river system this vast and in such high resolution anywhere other than Earth.(more…)
A decade ago, a British philosopher put forth the notion that the universe we live in might in fact be a computer simulation run by our descendants. While that seems far-fetched, perhaps even incomprehensible, a team of physicists at the University of Washington has come up with a potential test to see if the idea holds water.(more…)
Berkeley Lab scientists develop a new nanotech tool to probe solar-energy conversion
If nanoscience were television, we’d be in the 1950s. Although scientists can make and manipulate nanoscale objects with increasingly awesome control, they are limited to black-and-white imagery for examining those objects. Information about nanoscale chemistry and interactions with light—the atomic-microscopy equivalent to color—is tantalizingly out of reach to all but the most persistent researchers.
But that may all change with the introduction of a new microscopy tool from researchers at the Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) that delivers exquisite chemical details with a resolution once thought impossible. The team developed their tool to investigate solar-to-electric energy conversion at its most fundamental level, but their invention promises to reveal new worlds of data to researchers in all walks of nanoscience. (more…)
A North Carolina State University researcher has taken a “snapshot” of the way particles combine to form carbon-12, the element that makes all life on Earth possible. And the picture looks like a bent arm.(more…)
The asteroid collision widely thought to have killed the dinosaurs also led to extreme devastation among snake and lizard species, according to new research — including the extinction of a newly identified lizard Yale and Harvard scientists have named Obamadon gracilis.
“The asteroid event is typically thought of as affecting the dinosaurs primarily,” said Nicholas R. Longrich, a postdoctoral associate with Yale’s Department of Geology and Geophysics and lead author of the study. “But it basically cut this broad swath across the entire ecosystem, taking out everything. Snakes and lizards were hit extremely hard.” (more…)
A multimedia feature published this week in the New York Times, “Pushing Science’s Limits in Sign Language Lexicon,” outlines efforts in the United States and Europe to develop sign language versions of specialized terms used in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The article shares newly defined signs for terms like “light-year,” “organism” and “photosynthesis.” It also describes a successful crowdsourcing effort started at the University of Washington in 2008 that lets members of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community build their own guide to the evolving lexicon of science.
“It’s not a dictionary,” explained Richard Ladner, a UW professor of computer science and engineering. “The goal of the forum is to be constantly changing, a reflection of the current use.” (more…)
