Recent Comments

    Asphalt helps Lithium Batteries charge Faster

    October 3, 2017, Categories  Uncategorized

    Scanning electron microscope images show an anode of asphalt, graphene nanoribbons and lithium at left and the same material without lithium at right. The material was developed at Rice University and shows promise for high-capacity lithium batteries that charge up to 20 times faster than commercial lithium-ion batteries. Credit: Tour Group/Rice University

    Scanning electron microscope images show an anode of asphalt, graphene nanoribbons and lithium at left and the same material without lithium at right. The material was developed at Rice University and shows promise for high-capacity lithium batteries that charge up to 20 times faster than commercial lithium-ion batteries. Credit: Tour Group/Rice University

    Lab finds asphalt-nanoribbon anode more efficient, resistant to dendrites. A touch of asphalt may be the secret to high-capacity lithium metal batteries that charge 10 to 20 times faster than commercial lithium-ion batteries, according to Rice University scientists. The Rice lab of chemist James Tour developed anodes comprising porous carbon made from asphalt that showed exceptional stability after more than 500 charge-discharge cycles...

    Read More

    Small Collisions make Big Impact on Mercury’s Thin Atmosphere

    October 3, 2017, Categories  Uncategorized

    Scientists used models along with earlier findings from the MESSENGER mission to shed light on how certain types of comets influence the micrometeoroids that preferentially impact Mercury on the dawn side of the planet. Here, data from the Mercury Atmosphere and Surface Composition Spectrometer, or MASCS, instrument is overlain on the mosaic from the Mercury Dual Imaging System, or MDIS. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

    Scientists used models along with earlier findings from the MESSENGER mission to shed light on how certain types of comets influence the micrometeoroids that preferentially impact Mercury on the dawn side of the planet. Here, data from the Mercury Atmosphere and Surface Composition Spectrometer, or MASCS, instrument is overlain on the mosaic from the Mercury Dual Imaging System, or MDIS. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

    Mercury, our smallest planetary neighbor, has very little to call an atmosphere, but it does have a strange weather pattern: morning micro-meteor showers...

    Read More

    Solving the Mystery of Pluto’s Giant Blades of Ice

    October 3, 2017, Categories  Uncategorized

    1. Pluto’s bladed terrain as seen from New Horizons during its July 2015 flyby. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI 2. An example of the penitentes from the southern end of the Chajnantor plain in Chile. Though these ice formations only reach a few feet in height, while Pluto’s bladed terrain reaches hundreds of feet, they both have similar sharp ridges. Credits: Wikimedia Commons/ESO

    1. Pluto’s bladed terrain as seen from New Horizons during its July 2015 flyby. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI 2. An example of the penitentes from the southern end of the Chajnantor plain in Chile. Though these ice formations only reach a few feet in height, while Pluto’s bladed terrain reaches hundreds of feet, they both have similar sharp ridges. Credits: Wikimedia Commons/ESO

    NASA’s New Horizons mission revolutionized our knowledge of Pluto when it flew past that distant world in July 2015. Among its many discoveries were images of strange formations resembling giant knife blades of ice, whose origin had remained a mystery...

    Read More

    Farthest Active Inbound Comet yet seen NASA’s Hubble

    October 2, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This illustration shows the orbit of comet C/2017 K2 PANSTARRS (K2) on its maiden voyage into the solar system. The Hubble Space Telescope observed K2 when it was 1.5 billion miles from the Sun, halfway between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. The farthest object from the Sun depicted here is the dwarf planet Pluto, which resides in the Kuiper Belt, a vast rim of primordial debris encircling our solar system. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

    This illustration shows the orbit of comet C/2017 K2 PANSTARRS (K2) on its maiden voyage into the solar system. The Hubble Space Telescope observed K2 when it was 1.5 billion miles from the Sun, halfway between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. The farthest object from the Sun depicted here is the dwarf planet Pluto, which resides in the Kuiper Belt, a vast rim of primordial debris encircling our solar system. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

    Space Telescope has photographed the farthest active inbound comet ever seen, at a whopping distance of 1.5 billion miles from the Sun (beyond Saturn’s orbit). Slightly warmed by the remote Sun, it has already begun to develop an 80,000-mile-wide fuzzy cloud of dust, called a coma, enveloping a tiny, solid nucleus of frozen gas and dust...

    Read More