A team of geologists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working with colleagues at the University of Tennessee, has found a mineral water in lunar rock brought to Earth by Apollo astronauts.

The team of John Eiler, Jeremy Boyce, Larry Taylor and George Rossman, has found water in a calcium phosphate mineral in particular apatite, existing in a basaltic rock collected from the lunar surface by Apollo 14 astronauts in 1971. (more…)

An international team of scientists led by Professor Donald Schneider of Pennsylvania State University, has announced the completion of an extensive survey in which these experts identified quasars exist in a quarter of the sky.

The team’s work is part of the SDSS. The full catalog includes 105,783 quasars, more than 96 percent of which was discovered in the framework of the SDSS.

Quasars are hundreds of times more luminous than our entire galaxy, despite this tremendous energy generated in very small, comparable in size to our solar system. (more…)

Electric batteries could result in increased energy capacity as a result of a new finding of researchers at MIT. They have found that using carbon nanotubes to an electrode of the battery is a significant increase, up to ten times the amount of energy that can provide, to the same weight and same basic material, compared to a conventional battery Lithium-ion.

Such electrodes may be useful for many types of portable devices. In addition, this research could also lead to improvements in batteries to permit their use in applications with higher power consumption. (more…)

An investigation has revealed that plants, like animals, they also have a war between the sexes when it comes to creating new offspring.

The discovery could open new avenues of research that would lead to increased yields and improved food security for a global human population constantly growing.

In the animal kingdom, mothers tend to spend more resources than parents to create new offspring. (more…)

For if the concern about global climate change is not enough, the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is an even more resounding example of the desirability of abandoning fossil fuels and use others that are renewable, can be produced in a sustainable and do not put the environment at risk.

Liquid fuels derived from biomass plants have the potential to be used as direct substitutes for gasoline, diesel and aviation fuels, as long as they can have cost-effective means of commercial production. (more…)

A process using carbon-14 dating has enabled an international team of researchers to establish for the first time an absolute chronology of Dynastic Egypt (approximately between 2700 and 1100 BC). The analysis of short-lived organic samples, archaeologically attributed to a specific period or reign in Egyptian history, has confirmed previous chronological estimates, but has also questioned other estimates. (more…)

An international team of scientists from the MINOS experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) announced the most accurate measurements to date of the parameters that govern the oscillations of antineutrinos, or antineutrinos transformations from one type to another.

This achievement provides crucial information on the mass difference between different types of antineutrinos. (more…)

Using images taken from satellites hundreds of kilometers above the earth’s surface, a team of researchers are exploring the risks of flooding in some of the largest regions in the world. It is expected that the data used may be freely available for use in every task undertaken to provide more immediate responses to natural disasters. (more…)

A team of scientists at University College London and the University of Cambridge has developed codes of machine learning, modeled on certain characteristics of the human brain, which can be used in computers to classify the galaxies with precision and efficiency remarkable.

Notably, the new method is so reliable that coincides with human classifications in more than 90 percent of the time.

There are thousands of millions of known galaxies in the universe. Most of them contain between ten million and a billion stars. The galaxies show a wide range of shapes, the elliptical and spirals from there until they have more irregular structures. Thanks to several monitoring projects on a large scale, it is getting photographed and mapped a large number of galaxies. (more…)

New research reveals that the splitting in two of part of the earth’s crust does not always cause huge volcanic eruptions. The study explains why some parts of the world suffered horrendous volcanic eruptions since millions of years ago and others are not.

The Earth’s crust is divided into plates that are in constant motion over millions of years. Occasionally, the plates collide and merge, or divide to form new ones. When the latter happens, it can raise a column of hot rock from deep within the Earth, which can cause an enormous volcanic activity on the surface. (more…)