ScienceDaily: Top Technology News

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• NASA's Super-TIGER balloon breaks records while collecting cosmic ray data
• Cassini sees Saturn's moon Titan cooking up smog
• Quantum microscope for living biology
• Scientists turn toxic by-product into biofuel booster
• Small asteroid to whiz past Earth safely
• Are super-Earths actually mini-Neptunes?
• Light shone on star mystery: Why sun's corona is much hotter than its surface
• Into the quantum Internet at the speed of light

NASA's Super-TIGER balloon breaks records while collecting cosmic ray data Posted: 04 Feb 2013 04:08 PM PST A large NASA science balloon has broken two flight duration records while flying over Antarctica carrying an instrument that detected 50 million cosmic rays.

Cassini sees Saturn's moon Titan cooking up smog Posted: 04 Feb 2013 04:05 PM PST Newly published research using data from NASA's Cassini mission describes in more detail than ever before how aerosols in the highest part of the atmosphere are kick-started at Saturn's moon Titan. Scientists want to understand aerosol formation at Titan because it could help predict the behavior of smoggy aerosol layers on Earth.

Quantum microscope for living biology Posted: 04 Feb 2013 01:34 PM PST A team of Australian scientists has developed a powerful microscope using the laws of quantum mechanics to probe the inner workings of living cells. The researchers believe their microscope could lead to a better understanding of the basic components of life and eventually allow quantum mechanics to be probed at a macroscopic level.

Scientists turn toxic by-product into biofuel booster Posted: 04 Feb 2013 12:38 PM PST Scientists studying an enzyme that naturally produces alkanes, long carbon-chain molecules that could be a direct replacement for the hydrocarbons in gasoline, have figured out why the natural reaction typically stops after three to five cycles -- and devised a strategy to keep the reaction going. The work could renew interest in using the enzyme in bacteria, algae, or plants to produce biofuels that need no further processing.

Small asteroid to whiz past Earth safely Posted: 04 Feb 2013 10:13 AM PST The small near-Earth asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass very close to Earth on February 15, so close that it will pass inside the ring of geosynchronous weather and communications satellites. NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office can accurately predict the asteroid's path with the observations obtained, and it is therefore known that there is no chance that the asteroid might be on a collision course with Earth. Nevertheless, the flyby will provide a unique opportunity for researchers to study a near-Earth object up close.

Are super-Earths actually mini-Neptunes? Posted: 04 Feb 2013 06:46 AM PST In the last two decades astronomers have found hundreds of planets in orbit around other stars. One type of these so-called 'exoplanets' is the super-Earths that are thought to have a high proportion of rock but at the same time are significantly bigger than our own world. Now a new study suggests that these planets are actually surrounded by extended hydrogen-rich envelopes and that they are unlikely to ever become Earth-like. Rather than being super-Earths, these worlds are more like mini-Neptunes.

Light shone on star mystery: Why sun's corona is much hotter than its surface Posted: 04 Feb 2013 06:46 AM PST Scientists have begun to unlock the mystery of why the outer edge of the Sun is much hotter than its surface for the first time.

Into the quantum Internet at the speed of light Posted: 04 Feb 2013 06:46 AM PST Not only do optical fibers transmit information every day around the world at the speed of light, but they can also be harnessed for the transport of quantum information. Physicists now report how they have directly transferred the quantum information stored in an atom onto a particle of light. Such information could then be sent over optical fiber to a distant atom.

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