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    Chemical Composition of Dust from beyond the Solar System analyzed

    April 16, 2016, Categories  Uncategorized, Astronomy/Space

    The Cosmic Dust Analyser on the international Cassini spacecraft has detected the faint but distinct signature of dust coming from outside our Solar System, from the local interstellar cloud: an almost empty bubble of gas and dust we are travelling through with a distinct direction and speed. This graphic summarises the location of Saturn, and the Solar System, with respect to the local interstellar cloud, and our place in the Milky Way galaxy. Credit: ESA

    The Cosmic Dust Analyser on the international Cassini spacecraft has detected the faint but distinct signature of dust coming from outside our Solar System, from the local interstellar cloud: an almost empty bubble of gas and dust we are travelling through with a distinct direction and speed. This graphic summarises the location of Saturn, and the Solar System, with respect to the local interstellar cloud, and our place in the Milky Way galaxy. Credit: ESA

    A Heidelberg-designed dust detector on Cassini space probe – ie cosmic dust analyser (CDA) – has identified several extremely rare and minuscule particles of interstellar dust from outside our solar system, and examined their chemical composition...

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    Repairing DNA Damage in the Human Body

    April 13, 2016, Categories  Uncategorized

    Workers representing the repair system known as nucleotide excision repair (NER), repairing DNA and snakes, representing proteins that bind DNA at gene promoters, potentially preventing them from doing this. Credit: Jackie Mostek

    Workers representing the repair system known as nucleotide excision repair (NER), repairing DNA and snakes, representing proteins that bind DNA at gene promoters, potentially preventing them from doing this. Credit: Jackie Mostek

    DNA repair is compromised at important regions of our genome, shedding new light on the human body’s capacity to repair DNA damage, UNSW medical scientists have discovered. Repairing damage in DNA from anything that causes a mutation, such as UV radiation and tobacco smoke, is a fundamental process that protects our cells from becoming cancerous.

    The scientists analysed > 20 million DNA mutations from 1,161 tumours across 14 cancer types...

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    Supermassive Black Holes do not form from Stellar Black Holes

    April 6, 2016, Categories  Uncategorized

    Slices of collapsing gas within dark matter halos on three different spacial scales: from 10,0000 to 10 light years across. The colors represent the gas density, from low density (blue color) to much larger density (red color). The gas on the smallest spatial scales is going to form a supermassive black hole. Credit: Isaac Shlosman, University of Kentucky

    Slices of collapsing gas within dark matter halos on three different spacial scales: from 10,0000 to 10 light years across. The colors represent the gas density, from low density (blue color) to much larger density (red color). The gas on the smallest spatial scales is going to form a supermassive black hole. Credit: Isaac Shlosman, University of Kentucky

    Often containing more than a billion times the mass than our Sun, supermassive black holes have perplexed humans for decades. But new research by astrophysicist Isaac Shlosman and collaborators will help to understand the physical processes, providing details of how supermassive black holes formed 13 billion years ago...

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