ScienceDaily: Top Science News |
- Unraveling a butterfly's aerial antics could help builders of bug-size flying robots
- Stellar astrophysics: The discovery of deceleration
- New super-Earth detected within the habitable zone of a nearby cool star
- Castaway lizards provide insight into elusive evolutionary process, founder effects
- Hubble zooms in on a magnified galaxy
- Do black holes help stars form?
| Unraveling a butterfly's aerial antics could help builders of bug-size flying robots Posted: 02 Feb 2012 12:16 PM PST By figuring out how butterflies flutter among flowers with amazing grace and agility, researchers hope to help build small airborne robots that can mimic those maneuvers. |
| Stellar astrophysics: The discovery of deceleration Posted: 02 Feb 2012 12:14 PM PST Pulsars are among the most exotic celestial bodies known. They have diameters of about 20 kilometres, but at the same time roughly the mass of our sun. A sugar-cube sized piece of its ultra-compact matter on Earth would weigh hundreds of millions of tons. A sub-class of them, known as millisecond pulsars, spin up to several hundred times per second around their own axes. Previous studies reached the paradoxical conclusion that some millisecond pulsars are older than the universe itself. |
| New super-Earth detected within the habitable zone of a nearby cool star Posted: 02 Feb 2012 12:14 PM PST Sientists have discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. The star is a member of a triple star system and has a different makeup than our Sun, being relatively lacking in metallic elements. This discovery demonstrates that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than previously believed. |
| Castaway lizards provide insight into elusive evolutionary process, founder effects Posted: 02 Feb 2012 12:11 PM PST A biologist who released lizards on tiny uninhabited islands in the Bahamas has shed light on the interaction between evolutionary processes that are seldom observed. He found that the lizards' genetic and morphological traits were determined by both natural selection and a phenomenon called founder effects, which occur when species colonize new territory. |
| Hubble zooms in on a magnified galaxy Posted: 02 Feb 2012 12:08 PM PST Astronomers aimed Hubble at one of the most striking examples of gravitational lensing, a nearly 90-degree arc of light in the galaxy cluster RCS2 032727-132623. Hubble's view of the distant background galaxy, which lies nearly 10 billion light-years away, is significantly more detailed than could ever be achieved without the help of the gravitational lens. |
| Do black holes help stars form? Posted: 02 Feb 2012 06:43 AM PST The center of just about every galaxy is thought to host a black hole, some with masses of thousands of millions of Suns and consequently strong gravitational pulls that disrupt material around them. They had been thought to hinder the birth of stars, but now astronomers studying the nearby galaxy Centaurus A have found quite the opposite: a black hole that seems to be helping stars to form. |
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