Artist’s impression of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) in its enclosure on Cerro Armazones, a 3060-metre mountaintop in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The 39-metre E-ELT will be the largest optical/infrared telescope in the world — the world’s biggest eye on the sky. Operations are planned to start early in the next decade, and the E-ELT will tackle some of the biggest scientific challenges of our time. The design for the E-ELT shown here is preliminary. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

With a main mirror 39 metres in diameter, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), is going to be, as its name suggests, enormous. Unlike any other before it, ELT is also designed to be an adaptive telescope and has the ability to correct atmospheric turbulence, taking telescope engineering to another level...

Fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, such as those planned for use as model organisms for variable gravity studies aboard the International Space Station.
Credits: NASA

Researchers at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) today announced 6 boxes of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) will travel to the International Space Station (ISS) to study the impact of weightlessness on the heart. The fruit flies are scheduled to launch on June 1, 2017, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and will travel to the ISS via a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

Living in zero gravity is known to negatively impact the body’s cardiovascular system...

Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have found that two types of non-small cell lung cancer metabolize glucose — a type of sugar — differently. A glucose transporter called GLUT1, shown in green, is much more prevalent in lung squamous cell carcinoma cells (right) in comparison to lung adenocarcinoma cells (left). The findings, published in the online journal Nature Communications, may aid the development of new lung cancer therapies targeted at inhibiting GLUT1. Credit: University of Texas at Dallas

In a new study, The University of Texas at Dallas scientists have found that some types of cancers have more of a sweet tooth than others...

Researchers develop technique to electrically manipulate light through interaction with an atomically thin semiconductor. Credit: Image courtesy of North Carolina State University

Researchers from North Carolina State University have discovered a technique for controlling light with electric fields. “Our method is similar to the technique used to provide the computing capabilities of computers,” says Linyou Cao, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at NC State. “In computers, an electric field is used to turn electric current on or off, which corresponds to logic 1 and logic 0, the basis of binary code. With this new discovery, a light may be controlled to be strong or weak, spread or focused, pointing one direction or others by an electric field...