MC²

August 31, 2009
As scientists attempt to learn more about how galaxies evolve, an open question has been whether collisions with our dwarf galactic neighbors will one day tear apart the disk of the Milky Way.
That grisly fate is unlikely, a new study now suggests.
While astronomers know that such collisions have probably occurred in the past, [...]

August 31, 2009
When bees sting, they pump poison into their victims. Now the toxin in bee venom has been harnessed to kill tumor cells by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The researchers attached the major component of bee venom to nano-sized spheres that they call nanobees.
In mice, nanobees delivered the [...]

August 31, 2009
A team of scientists has found a new planet which orbits the wrong way around its host star. The planet, named WASP-17, and orbiting a star 1000 light years away, was found by the UK’s WASP project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory. The discovery, which casts new light on how planetary systems form [...]

August 30, 2009
A planet has been discovered with ten times the mass of Jupiter, but which orbits its star in less than one Earth-day.
The discovery, reported in this week’s Nature by Coel Hellier, of Keele University in the UK, and colleagues, poses a challenge to our understanding of tidal interactions in planetary systems.
The planet, called [...]

August 29, 2009
IBM scientists have been able to image the “anatomy” — or chemical structure — inside a molecule with unprecedented resolution, using a complex technique known as noncontact atomic force microscopy.
The results push the exploration of using molecules and atoms at the smallest scale and could greatly impact the field of nanotechnology, which seeks [...]

August 28, 2009
The dust-filled disks where new planets may be forming around other stars occasionally take on some difficult-to-understand shapes. Now, a team led by John Debes at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., finds that a star’s motion through interstellar gas can account for many of them.
“The disks contain small comet- or [...]

August 28, 2009
The sandwich recipe recently concocted by scientists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) may prove tasty for computer chip designers, who have long had an appetite for molecule-sized electronic components – but no clear way to satisfy it until now.
The research team, which includes collaborators from the University of [...]

August 28, 2009
A team of U.S. and Japanese scientists has shown for the first time that the spectroscopic “fingerprint” of high-temperature superconductivity remains intact well above the super chilly temperatures at which these materials carry current with no resistance. This confirms that certain conditions necessary for superconductivity exist at the warmer temperatures that would make [...]

August 27, 2009
A team of Brown University scientists has pinpointed why carbon nanotubes tend to block a critical signaling pathway in neurons. It’s not the tubes, the team finds, but the metal catalysts used to form the tubes. The discovery means carbon nanotubes without metal catalysts may be useful in treating human neurological disorders. Results [...]

August 27, 2009
An international team of researchers has debunked one of astronomy’s long held beliefs about how stars are formed, using a set of galaxies found with CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope.
When a cloud of interstellar gas collapses to form stars, the stars range from massive to minute.
Since the 1950s astronomers have thought that in a [...]