
IC 342 is a challenging cosmic target. Although it is bright, the galaxy sits near the equator of the Milky Way’s galactic disk, where the sky is thick with glowing cosmic gas, bright stars, and dark, obscuring dust.
Written by NASA

IC 342 is a challenging cosmic target. Although it is bright, the galaxy sits near the equator of the Milky Way’s galactic disk, where the sky is thick with glowing cosmic gas, bright stars, and dark, obscuring dust.
Written by Andrew Follett

A Department of Defense study found that industrial wind farms could hamper military readiness, according to a top U.S. Navy official.
Written by Mark Prigg

It is one of the most mysterious planets in the universe – and one we know very little about.
Now European space bosses hope to send two probes stacked on the same craft to the rocky planet in 2018.
Written by Sandrine Ceurstemont

How low can they go? Almost as low as you can go, it seems. For the first time, transistors of the sort used in computers, smartphones, and other consumer devices have been tested successfully at temperatures a whisker above absolute zero.
Written by Mark Kaufman

As NASA inches closer to launching new missions to the solar system’s outer moons in search of life, scientists are renewing their focus on developing a set of universal characteristics of life that can be measured.
Written by Phys.org

Hopes of finding life on Mars, at least on the surface, were dealt a blow Thursday by a study revealing that salt minerals present on the Red Planet kill bacteria.
Written by Simon Lamb And Timothy Stern
Volcanoes erupt when magma rises through cracks in the Earth’s crust, but the exact processes that lead to the melting of rocks in the Earth’s mantle below are difficult to study.
Written by Julie Kelly

Way, way back in April 2017, scientists around the world participated in the ‘March for Science’ as a show of force and unity against an allegedly anti-science Trump administration. Their motto was “science not silence”: many wrote that mantra on pieces of duct tape and stuck it across their mouths.
Written by British Antarctic Survey

Reporting in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) explains that wind-driven incursions of warm water forced the retreat of glaciers in West Antarctica during the past 11,000 years.
Written by University of Granada

Scientists from the University of Granada (UGR) have designed a computer system based on new artificial intelligence techniques that automatically detects in real time when a subject in a video draws a gun.
Written by Luke Dormehl

Last year, the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner committed to spending $100 million on “Breakthrough Starshot,” a massive engineering project with the intention of developing a fleet of miniature spacecraft capable of travelling to our nearest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri — some 20 to 30 years away from Earth travelling at less than a quarter the speed of light.
Written by Sean Martin

Volcanologists are warning over the destructive power of the Phlegraean Fields, also known as Campi Flegrei, near to Naples, Italy, as it is showing signs of erupting.
Written by Joe Postma

A commentator in a previous post said:
DC: “When you change the amount of energy streaming in from the outside, or out – TO the outside, you change the equilibrium temperature, the temperature it settles on after a time.”
I totally agree with that. And the only way to do that with radiation is by changing emissivity.
Written by Frontiers

A balanced diet is chocolate in both hands — a phrase commonly used to justify one’s chocolate snacking behavior. A phrase now shown to actually harbor some truth, as the cocoa bean is a rich source of flavanols: a class of natural compounds that has neuroprotective effects.
Written by Dr. Roy Spencer
Lowest global temperature anomaly in last 2 years (since July 2015)
The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for June 2017 was +0.21 deg. C, down from the May 2017 value of +0.44 deg. C (click for full-size version).
Written by Klaus L.E. Kaiser

As The Verge reports, self-driving, i.e. “autonomous cars” (ACs) have a problem, at least in Aussie-land. They can’t figure out whether the kangaroos are going to jump or not or, and if so, where to.