material

This Stupendous Crater on Mars Looks Eerily Like a Tree Stump

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You might be forgiven for thinking the above picture is the stump of a tree. Shift your perspective a little, however, and the truth becomes clear: What you’re looking at is much bigger than any tree – a concave depression on the surface of Mars, gouged out by a massive impact.   The rings radiating … Read more

Physicists Just Smashed a Record by Keeping a Bubble Intact For Over a Year

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When you think of the word “ephemeral”, many people will immediately conjure up the image of a soap bubble: delicate, gorgeous, and gone in a blink (or maybe a few). Now a team of physicists led by Aymeric Roux of the University of Lille in France has defied this cliché, creating a bubble that maintained … Read more

Strong, Sporadic Magnetic Fields Could Explain One of The Moon’s Enduring Mysteries

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It’s been half a century since the Apollo missions returned from the Moon, and yet the lunar samples they brought home continue to baffle us. Some of these rocks are more than 3 billion years old and appear to have been formed in the presence of a strong geomagnetic field, like the one on Earth. … Read more

120x Faster Than Normal Copper

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Copper is well known for being able to kill off bacteria that it comes into contact with – the metal releases ions that are toxic to bacterial cells, punching through their outer membranes. However, this process usually takes several hours.   A newly developed copper surface does the job in just a couple of minutes, … Read more

Astronomers Spot a Ghostly ‘One-Winged Butterfly’ Blazing Through Space

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The beautiful birth of a star has produced an exquisitely ethereal structure in interstellar space. It’s called the Chamaeleon Infrared Nebula, located about 520 light-years away, and in a new image from the NSF NOIRLab’s International Gemini Observatory in Chile, it appears in the sky like a pale gossamer butterfly wing.   At its core, … Read more