Comet ISON, which was due to emerge from behind the Sun today, has failed to appear, indicating that the comet has broken up and evaporated during its close encounter with the Sun. Several solar observatories watched the comet throughout this closest approach to the sun, known as perihelion. While the fate of the comet is […]
Physicists at the University of Innsbruck have shown that the magnetic fields produced by certain types of lightning have the same properties as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a technique used in psychiatry that can produce false images in the brain. The findings have been published in the journal Physics Letters A. To arrive at their […]
Astronomers have been observing an unusual M-dwarf star with an extremely active and complex magnetic field that is stronger than our own Sun’s, and a huge hydrogen hot-spot that covers half of its surface. Typically, M-dwarf stars – the most common type of star in the galaxy – are cold, quiet and dim. But a […]
Using time-slices of just 100 attoseconds (one attosecond equals one billion-billionth of a second), scientists from Imperial College London say they can now track individual protons moving in a molecule, paving the way for the direct observation of chemical reactions and potentially opening a new window on the fundamental processes occurring in chemistry and biology. […]
Street specific air pollution warnings will soon be available via text-messages in a pioneering project being tested in Central London and the Borough of Croydon. The European Space Agency (ESA) backed prototype service will initially warn around a thousand asthma sufferers prior to an elevation in air pollution, with additional patients to follow. Like other […]
Life has evolved to evolve. That’s the conclusion drawn by two Rice University scientists who have designed a computer simulation to test the idea that evolvability – the likelihood of genetic mutation – is a trait that can itself be favored or disfavored through the process of natural selection. The study appears in the Proceedings […]
