Algae, Art and Attitudes: A Roundtable About the AAAS Conference

Scientific American staffers Mark Fischetti and Robin Lloyd talk with podcast host Steve Mirsky about sessions they attended--including those about algae for energy, dissecting the astronomy in art and attitudes about climate change--at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [More]


Read more »

Wild Ride: Comet Sample May Help Constrain the Early Evolution of the Solar System

The comets that come streaking through Earth's neighborhood are visitors from frigid, distant regions in the outer solar system. The icy, dusty bodies formed there billions of years ago, far from the heat and radiation of the sun, so it was long thought that they comprised unsullied scraps left over from the solar system's formation. But a new analysis of a particle from Comet Wild 2 indicates that the mote formed close to the sun and then migrated outward to be captured by the comet millions of years after the solar system began taking shape. Along with similar investigations of other samples , the new finding reinforces the theory that comets originating in the Kuiper belt, the distant field of icy debris where Pluto orbits and beyond, contain fragments that formed somewhat later than the solar system's primordial grains, and much closer to the sun. [More]


Read more »

Space shuttle Endeavour glides to Earth, several tons lighter

The STS-130 mission came to an uneventful close Sunday night in Florida when space shuttle Endeavour landed safely at Kennedy Space Center. The orbiter touched down at 10:20 P.M. after a two-week trip to the International Space Station (ISS). [More]


Read more »

The Moon That Would Be a Planet (preview)

If we had not known the images were coming back from Titan, we might have guessed they were new pictures of Mars or Earth. Some people in the control room saw the California coast, some saw the French Riviera, and one person even said that Saturn’s biggest moon looked like his backyard in Tucson. For three weeks, the Huygens probe had coasted, dormant, after detaching from the Cassini spacecraft and being sent on its way to Titan. Those of us watching anxiously felt a deep personal connection with the probe. Not only had we worked on the mission for a large part of our careers, but we had developed its systems and instrumentation by putting our minds in its place, to think through how it would function on an alien and largely unknown world. We imagined Titan might be like the comparably large moons of the outer solar system, such as Jupiter’s cratered Callisto or grooved Ganymede.

And so on the morning of January 14, 2005, at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, the pictures caused jubilation and puzzlement in equal measure. None of us expected the landscape to look so Earth-like. As Huygens parachuted down, its aerial pictures showed branching river channels cut by rain-fed streams. It landed on the damp, pebble-covered site of a recent flash flood. What was alien about Titan was its eerie familiarity.

Kepler Spacecraft May Be Able to Spot Elusive Oort Cloud Objects

The Kepler spacecraft's mission is a straightforward one: keep a vigilant watch on a large patch of stars to see if they dim, even just slightly, on a regular basis. The idea is that a planet passing in front of its host star will reveal itself to Kepler by blotting out a fraction of the star's light. This transit method has already borne fruit: NASA's Kepler spotted five planets in the first few weeks after its 2009 launch, and dozens more have been detected over the past decade from the ground and from other spacecraft. But Kepler's strength lies in its unique sensitivity to Earth-like planets--small, terrestrial worlds in temperate orbits that allow liquid water to persist. [More]


Read more »

Murchison Meteorite's Chemical Bonanza

The famous Murchison meteorite smashed into the Australian ground in 1969. Researchers then discovered that the space rock contained many organic chemicals, including amino acids--the building blocks of proteins. But a new study says that by focusing on the organic molecules by which life on earth might have been jumpstarted, those scientists missed possibly millions of other cosmic compounds.

Using high-resolution structural spectroscopy, a European research team [led by Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin of the Institute for Ecological Chemistry in Munich, Germany] has probed the errant rock further and found more than 14,000 basic combinations of molecules. They estimate that those compounds indicate that millions of different chemicals are present in the meteorite. And that suggests an extraterrestrial diversity of molecules far greater than the chemical makeup of Earth. The report is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

Science, Stimulated: 7 Stimulus-Funded Research Projects [Slide Show]

Can you put a price on science? The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), signed into law on February 17, 2009--a year ago today--sent some $31 billion to scientific pursuits. [More]


Read more »

Blast Off: Unsettled Mechanism of Supernova Detonation Gets a New Twist

When stellar cataclysms known as type Ia supernovae flare up far across the universe, their brightness and consistency allow astronomers to use them as so-called standard candles to measure cosmological distances. Just over a decade ago, two teams used the supernovae to show that the universe is accelerating in its expansion due to the influence of dark energy, a shocking discovery that thrust type Ia supernovae into the astrophysical limelight. But how exactly did these cosmic mileposts come to be? [More]


Read more »

Is the Recovery Act Stimulating Science and the Economy?

So far, $9.3 million for researchers building robotic bees, $1.3 million to hunt for viruses that infect single-celled organisms, and $845,000 to study past climate change in Russia has been doled out. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been able to fund thousands of new research projects with money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), aka the economic stimulus package , which was passed a year ago today. [More]


Read more »

Meteorite That Fell in 1969 Still Revealing Secrets of the Early Solar System

Fragments of a chemically primitive meteorite that landed near Murchison, Australia, in 1969 have long been known to harbor a variety of interesting compounds, including dozens of amino acids. But as analytic techniques become more sophisticated, the Murchison meteorite continues to reveal even more diversity and complexity in the early solar system, and new work by a team of European researchers is no exception. [More]


Read more »

Space shuttle astronauts install two large space station components

Astronauts on the STS-130 mission have installed the two major pieces of European-built hardware they delivered to the International Space Station on space shuttle Endeavour, edging the station ever closer to its long-awaited completion. The shuttle lifted off February 8 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. [More]


Read more »

Dark Side of Black Holes: Dark Matter Could Explain the Early Universe's Giant Black Holes

Black holes one billion times the sun’s mass or more lie at the heart of many galaxies, driving their spin and development. Common today, some 14 billion years after the big bang, such supermassive black holes were rare in the early universe--or at least they were supposed to be. Evidence of supermassive black holes existing when the universe was less than one billion years old has stumped scientists, because current theories of stellar evolution suggest that such giants should take much longer to grow. Now it seems this enigma could be solved by a mystery substance--dark matter.

The puzzle of early supermassive holes took shape in 2003, when the Sloan Digital Sky Survey detected roughly half a dozen of them. According to conventional thinking, the first regular stars were born when the universe was about 200 million years old, but given the state of the universe at the time, they could have formed black holes at most only about 100 times the sun’s mass. It would simply take too long to merge and make the billion-year-old, billion-solar-mass monsters seen by the Sloan survey.

100 Years Ago: The Flooding of Paris

FEBRUARY 1960 METEOR DUST -- “The recent extension of geophysical investigations into nearby space has given emphasis to the fact that life on earth is shielded by the earth’s atmosphere. Death from ‘meteoritic stroke’ might be a not-uncommon coroner’s verdict if the protective canopy of the atmosphere were not spread above our heads. During the past 13 years I have been engaged in efforts to secure direct measurement of the meteoritic fallout. My samples of meteoritic dust and cosmic spherules have come from the tops of high mountains remote from industrial civilization, and from the bottom of the ocean. The data now show that meteoritic material comes down to earth in much larger quantity (about five million tons per year) than earlier estimates. Moreover, it appears that the rate of fall has varied during the past 10 or 15 million years. --Hans Pettersson”

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory launches successfully

A NASA satellite that promises to deliver an unprecedented volume of data about the workings of the sun launched successfully atop an Atlas 5 rocket Thursday. The Solar Dynamics Observatory , or SDO, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 10:23 A.M. (Eastern Standard Time) after a one-day delay due to high winds at the launch site. The satellite separated from the upper rocket stage and deployed its solar arrays about two hours later. [More]


Read more »

Star Mills: Ancient Galaxies Packed More Raw Material for Stellar Formation

The Milky Way Galaxy, to take a census view, is a populous place with a very low birthrate--it is home to hundreds of billions of stars, but only a handful of new ones appear each year. Neighboring galaxies show similar traits; accordingly, they must have once formed stars at a much more rapid clip. Across the universe, astronomers can see galaxies earlier in cosmic history, and unsurprisingly the birthrate then was much higher. [More]


Read more »

NASA Readies a Satellite to Probe the Sun--Inside and Out

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is what might be called a satellite for the information age. It is designed to provide scientists who study the sun with a torrent of data--the space agency says the observatory will return 150 million bits of data about Earth's host star per second, or about 1.5 terabytes per day. [More]


Read more »

Space shuttle Endeavour blasts off after one-day delay

The fifth-to-last mission of the space shuttle program got under way early Monday, as the shuttle Endeavour rocketed up from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin a 13-day mission to the International Space Station . The orbiter launched at 4:14 A.M. (Eastern Standard Time), after a launch opportunity Sunday morning was scrapped due to cloud cover. [More]


Read more »

Endeavour Set for Sunday Liftoff as Space Shuttle Program Winds Down

NASA launch managers this morning cleared space shuttle Endeavour to lift off before dawn Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, one of the five remaining flights before the shuttle program concludes this year or early next. The planned launch comes less than a week after the future of human spaceflight in the U.S. was shaken by President Obama, whose budget request for fiscal year 2011, released Monday, would cancel Constellation , the planned successor to the shuttle. [More]


Read more »

Recommended: Gems and Gemstones

Gems and Gemstones by Lance Grande and Allison Augustyn. University of Chicago Press, 2009 [More]


Read more »

Down to Earth: Technique Lets Ground-Based Telescopes Parse Exoplanet Atmospheres

In the 15 years since the first planet orbiting a sunlike star outside our solar system was conclusively discovered, astronomers have compiled a vast and diverse menagerie of such so-called exoplanets. Of the more than 400 now known, many are large--10 times the mass of Jupiter or more--and a precious few are small, just a few times Earth's mass. Little is known about these faraway worlds beyond bulk properties such as their orbital periods, estimated masses and, on relatively rare occasions, their diameters. [More]


Read more »