science wire

This image, taken with NASA's Spitzer infrared space telescope, shows the mysterious galactic cloud, seen as the black object on the left. The galactic center is the bright spot on the right. The Spitzer image of the cloud (left). The SMA image (center) shows the relative lack of dense cores of gas that are thought to form stars.

Just like home computers, the sophisticated capabilities of today's space missions are made possible by the power of their processor chips.

Long Beach, CA - The quest for a twin Earth is heating up. Using NASA's Kepler spacecraft, astronomers are beginning to find Earth-sized planets orbiting distant stars. A new analysis of Kepler data shows that about 17 percent of stars have an Earth-sized planet in an orbit closer than Mercury. Since the Milky Way has about 100 billion stars, there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized worlds out there.

Comets trailing wispy tails across the night sky are a beautiful byproduct of our solar system's formation, icy leftovers from 4.6 billion years ago when the planets coalesced from rocky rubble. The discovery by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Clarion University in Pennsylvania of six likely comets around distant stars suggests that comets - dubbed "exocomets" - are just as common in other stellar systems with planets.

The popular astronomy show presented by Brian Cox and comedian Dara O'Briain will run on BBC Two from January 8 to January 10.

Science is no stranger to cinema, being a regular staple of Hollywood blockbusters ever since Star Wars in the 1970s through to Prometheus last year.

Researchers from Canada, California, and Poland have devised a straightforward way to test an intriguing idea about the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

A play based on the confessions of a notorious Cold War supergrass - whose personal papers are now housed in an archive at the University of Sussex - is heading for a run in London in 2013.

Attempting to make predictions about science, technology and economics is a famously fraught task. Former IBM Chairman Thomas Watson apparently once remarked: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers".

Look up at the night sky and you'll see stars, sure. But you're also seeing planets-billions and billions of them. At least . That's the conclusion of a new study by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that provides yet more evidence that planetary systems are the cosmic norm.

The planetarium is sized to fit a child's hand, with instructions designed to be read aloud." —Seb Falk Object Wh.5892 in the University's Whipple Museum of the History of Science is something of an enigma.

Stanford Report, December 28, 2012 An autonomous system for exploring the solar system's smaller members, such as moons and asteroids, could bring us closer to a human mission to Mars.

Have you been on virtual safari yet? If you haven't then you should visit Snapshot Serengeti , a new citizen science project asking online volunteers to identify animals in millions of photos taken by camera traps across Serengeti National Park.

Space research has developed a new way of measuring the pressure inside your skull using simple sound waves from headphones.

Ten scientists are being inducted into the ranks of fellowship in the American Physical Society. LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO, December 18, 2012—Ten scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are being inducted into the ranks of fellowship in the American Physical Society (APS) for 2012.

Gravity: It's the law in these parts. But to reach the stars, humans may have to learn to live outside the law.

Optical images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope of distant galaxies in one of the first fields to be measured by the new collaboration. The new measurements will reveal details of the galaxies' gases, stars and black holes. Credit: NASA/ CANDELS. Astronomers will begin an ambitious new project to measure light from thousands of distant galaxies this weekend.

Good weather forecasting saved America tens of billions of dollars' worth of damage to homes and belongings during super-storm Sandy, The White House's most senior science advisor told an audience at Imperial College London last week.

Ground Systems Engineering 14 December 2012 A new satellite tracking station at Malargüe, Argentina, will be formally inaugurated on Tuesday, completing the trio of deep-space stations and confirming ESA as one of the world's most technologically advanced space organisations.

The international Cassini mission has spotted what appears to be a miniature extraterrestrial version of the Nile River: a river valley on Saturn's moon Titan that stretches more than 400 km from its 'headwaters' to a large sea. It is the first time images have revealed a river system this vast and in such high resolution anywhere beyond Earth.

ESA's Earth-observing microsatellite Proba-1 has glimpsed one of the loneliest places on Earth - Concordia research base in the heart of Antarctica.

Three Imperial physicists will receive a share of a new $3 million prize, awarded for their part in identifying a Higgs-like boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator at CERN.

Engineering concentrator named one of the Crimson's "15 seniors to meet before they graduate" (Harvard Crimson) Like many children, Carolina I. Ragolta '13 wanted to be an astronaut.

Four University of Chicago faculty members were elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the organization announced on Nov.

The high-resolution stereo camera on ESA's Mars Express imaged the Charitum Montes region of the Red Planet on 18 June, near to Gale crater and the Argyre basin featured in our October and November image releases.

Wallenberg Academy Fellows is the single largest private initiative to support young researchers in Sweden. It is a new career programme aimed at promising young researchers in all disciplines. Besides giving the best young researchers long-term funding, which means they can concentrate on their research, the programme also contributes to the internationalisation of the Swedish research environment.

The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite captured this nighttime image of the United States.

News Release University of Minnesota researchers are part of international project MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (12/05/2012) —You could advance science simply by looking at beautiful pictures from space. An international team of astronomers is seeking volunteers to explore Andromeda, the galaxy next door.

On Dec. Quirks and Quarks' Bob McDonald hosts Pierre Savard and William Trischuk , two University of Toronto professors involved in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and Caltech physicist Sean Carroll, author of The Particle At The End of The Universe , at U of T's Isabel Bader Theatre.

Europe's third Galileo satellite has transmitted its first test navigation signals back to Earth. The two Galileo satellites launched last October have reached their final orbital position and are in the midst of testing.

A $2.1 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to the University of California at Berkeley, through the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP), will fund the developm

Astronomers are inviting the public to search Hubble Space Telescope images of the Andromeda galaxy to help identify star clusters and increase understanding of how galaxies evolve. The new Andromeda Project , set to study thousands of high-resolution Hubble images, is a collaboration among scientists at the University of Washington, the University of Utah and several other partners.

Santa Claus may someday need wheels for his sleigh - satellites show a decreasing amount of snow in the Northern Hemisphere. A new analysis of snow cover observed by satellites shows record lows in Eurasia for June each year since 2008. In addition, three of the past five years have seen record low cover in North America.

The brilliant cascade of stars through the middle of this image is the galaxy ESO 318-13 as seen by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Six years of observations by ESA's Venus Express have shown large changes in the sulphur dioxide content of the planet's atmosphere, and one intriguing possible explanation is volcanic eruptions. The thick atmosphere of Venus contains over a million times as much sulphur dioxide as Earth's, where almost all of the pungent, toxic gas is generated by volcanic activity.

The University of Warwick is playing a key role in a new space mission which will study planets around stars outside our own solar system.

Watch online: 'Yellow River, Sea and sand' on the Earth from Space programme Discover more about our planet with the Earth from Space video programme.

Stanford Report, December 3, 2012 Scientists have long suspected that a vast ocean of liquid water lies under the crusty exterior of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

We are incredibly excited to be working with BBC Learning to put on a fantastic event for all the family in celebration of Stargazing Live 2013.

Advances in our knowledge of planets in the outer reaches of our Solar system are being made thanks to an instrument created by experts at the University of Sheffield which observes high speed phenomena in outer space. The instrument, known as the ULTRACAM, is an ultrafast, triple-beam three-colour camera for high-speed astrophysics.

New research shows some of the clearest evidence yet of a discernible human influence on atmospheric temperature. Published online in the Nov. 29 early edition of the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences , the study compared 20 of the latest climate models against 33 years of satellite data.

As leaves fall and winter approaches in Earth's Northern Hemisphere, a change of seasons is also rapidly becoming noticeable in the southern hemisphere of Saturn's giant moon, Titan. Thanks to NASA's Cassini spacecraft which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, scientists have been able to observe for the first time ever the seasonal atmospheric circulation direction change on Titan - an event which only happens once every 15 years and is never observable from Earth.

Services 28 November 2012 This weekend, the International Space Station will turn itself to position ESA's SOLAR instrument for a better view of the Sun.

Using ESA's Herschel space observatory, astronomers have discovered vast comet belts surrounding two nearby planetary systems known to host only Earth-to-Neptune-mass worlds. The comet reservoirs could have delivered life-giving oceans to the innermost planets. In a previous Herschel study, scientists found that the dusty belt surrounding nearby star Fomalhaut must be maintained by collisions between comets.

An enhanced approach to capturing changes on the Earth's surface via satellite could provide a more accurate account of how ice sheets, river basins and other geographic areas are changing as a result of natural and human factors. In a first application, the technique revealed sharper-than-ever details about Greenland's massive ice sheet, including that the rate at which it is melting might be accelerating more slowly than predicted.

Material in the debris disc is a fossil from the epoch of planet formation so it may carry information about the processes that contributed to build up the planetary system." —Mark Wyatt Astronomers have detected massive debris discs around 61 Virginis and Gilese 581, two nearby stars that are known to host "super-Earth" planets - so-called because their mass is between that of Earth and Neptune.

ESA Bulletin 152 (Nov 2012) Living in one of the world's most extreme environments creates an ideal opportunity to study the adaptation of human psychology and physiology in conditions similar to those of long-duration spaceflight.

For the first time, ESA's Mars orbiter has relayed scientific data from NASA's Curiosity rover on the Red Planet's surface.