Science News

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Did you ever wish you could be just a teensy bit taller? Well, if you spend a few months in space, you could get your wish -- temporarily.

A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive.

A team led by Bruno Giacomazzo at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and including Baker developed computer simulations that for the first time show what happens in the magnetized gas (also called a plasma) in the last stages of a black hole merger.

Still no sailing on Titan's methane lakes...

NASA has its sights on launching rockets into space with lasers. "What if..." they're wondering, "shuttles could be sent up using laser beams to heat their fuel from the ground?" Biophysicists in Japan have had a similar idea. They've successfully used lasers to launch genes inside living creatures, with a little help from nanotechnology. If this works in humans, future battles with cancer may be fought by remote control

Superficially, Saturn's moon Phoebe doesn't look much like a planet, but on the inside, the little gray moon has a lot in common with worlds like Earth.

This video shows a simple activity with clay that demonstrates the stages of fusion within the core of a star. Depending on its mass, a star can fuse and create many different elements before it finally runs out of fuel.

That's the promise of robotic refueling on orbit: aging satellites can get a new lease on life from a robotic machine making a service call. Or, at least, the dream of such a system got dramatically closer after NASA's robotic mission success. NASA had an idea, and in a series of extraordinary tests, decided to demonstrate that technologies for servicing satellites in space had evolved to levels of material value. Extending the lifespans of satellites already at work hundreds, even thousands of miles above the Earth, could soon be a reality. In a six-day test at the International Space Station called the Robotic Refueling Mission, they tried out tools and techniques for repairing and refueling satellites without a single astronaut in sight. It's a story with historical roots dating back to the 1980's, and with RRM's twenty-first century on-orbit success, it shines a light on bold imaginings for a space-faring future that suddenly doesn't seem so far ahead. In this documentary we look at the lifecycle of this extraordinary initiative.

From high above the Earth, the International Space Station (ISS) provides a unique vantage point to view our home planet. Stunning time-lapse photography of cities, aurora, lightning and other sights are seen from orbit. Famed astronomer Galileo imagined these views from space and now through the technological marvel of the space station, we can see them for ourselves.

Filmed at 10,000 frames per second by Japan's NHK television, movies like this of electromagnetic bursts called "sprites" will help scientists better understand how weather high in the atmosphere relates to weather on the ground.

Researchers animated this simulation of a magnetic tornado in the solar atmosphere in order to study how such twisters evolve over time and determine how complex magnetic fields manipulate the Suns ionized gas/plasma.

From NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio. This video takes images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory and applies additional processing to enhance the structures that are visible. The result is a beautiful, new way of looking at the sun.