Brown University researchers have found large deposits of glass formed by impactors on the surface of Mars. On Earth, impact glasses have been shown to sometimes preserve signatures of ancient life. That makes these deposits potentially interesting places to look for signs of past life on the Red Planet.
Twisty swirls of bright soil on the lunar surface have long fascinated scientists. An early theory said the swirls were caused by anomalies in the lunar crust’s magnetic field. New computer simulation techniques suggest a different cause: Crashing comets.
Microspheres in a fluid, spinning in opposite directions, create flow patterns that affect other particles. Computer simulations show the particles self-assembling into different structures at different concentrations: bands, small swirls, a single large vortex.
Heroic efforts by NASA flight engineers let the MESSENGER spacecraft collect important data on Mercury during its orbital decay. The crustal magnetic field, which could be measured only at low altitudes, suggests that magnetism generated by the Mercury's core dates to the very early history of the planet.
A group of scholars including three Nobel laureates will gather at Brown for a week-long series of talks on the future of their fields and honoring the legacy of computer pioneer and scientific polymath John von Neumann. The “Brown University 250th Anniversary Symposium: The Next 250 Years,” May 12-15, 2015, will feature talks in economics, physics, computer science, and brain science.
An international team of geoscientists co-led by James Russell will drill into ancient sediments beneath Lake Towuti on the Island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. The sediment cores they produce could hold up to a million years of climate and environmental data.
Its mission accomplished and its fuel spent, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft fell from Mercury orbit Thursday afternoon — “a phenomenally successful mission by any measure.”
Researchers at Brown University have developed an advanced technique for cell culturing that uses sheets of wrinkled graphene to mimic the complex 3-D environment inside the body.
The Large Hadron Collider, which restarted over the weekend, will operate at nearly twice the energy of the previous run. Brown physicists and students will be working at the collider, looking for signs of additional Higgs bosons, heavy top quark cousins, long-lived particles and dark matter.
Bertram Malle, professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences, is co-leader of the Humanity-Centered Robotics Initiative, which studies human-robot interactions that can meet pressing societal needs and also raise important ethical, legal and economic questions. This essay first appeared in Live Science. Spoiler alert: This article references the film Chappie.
