In 2020, a new-generation Mars rover will land on the Red Planet and gather much more detailed data than Curiosity, which is on Mars now. NASA revealed details about the new rover at a news conference Tuesday, July 9, 2013. Brown University’s Jack Mustard chaired the Mars 2020 Science Definition Team.
The six noble gases do not normally dissolve into minerals, leaving earth scientists to wonder how they are subducted back into the Earth. Researchers at Brown have discovered that the lattice structure of minerals such as amphibole provides a way. Better yet, the multiple isotopes of noble gases could help scientists track volatiles like water and carbon.
In particle physics, not finding a particle can narrow the search and guide new theories. Michael Luk’s Joukowsky Prize-winning dissertation, The Search for a Heavy Top-Like Quark, describes the most comprehensive search ever carried out for a particle that could answer puzzling questions about the nature of the Higgs boson.
Jennifer R. Davis’ Joukowsky Award-winning dissertation explaining how
certain bacteria can turn plant matter into the precursors of biofuels
was a novel project in Jason Sello’s chemistry lab. It is also a tour
(de force) of genomics, bioinformatics, biochemistry, and structural
biology that has made a promising scientist even more broadly skilled.
Researchers used a multicollector ion microprobe to study hydrogen-deuterium ratios in lunar rock and on Earth. Their conclusion: The Moon’s water did not come from comets but was already present on Earth 4.5 billion years ago, when a giant collision sent material from Earth to form the Moon.
Researchers at Washington University in St., Louis, using powerful algorithms developed by computer scientists at Brown University, have assembled the most complete genetic profile yet of acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive form of blood cancer. Findings are reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.
A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the way carbon moves from within a planet to the surface plays a big role in the evolution of a planet's atmosphere. If Mars released much of its carbon as methane, for example, it might have been warm enough to support liquid water.
Large impacts on the Moon can form wide craters and turn surface rock liquid. Geophysicists once assumed that liquid rock would be homogenous when it cooled. Now researchers have found evidence that pre-existing mineralogy can survive impact melt.
Researchers at Brown and Yale have demonstrated a new “enabling technology” that could use excess carbon dioxide to produce acrylate, a valuable commodity chemical involved in the manufacture of everything from polyester cloth to disposable diapers.
The Isabella anomaly — indications of a large mass of cool, dehydrated material about 100 kilometers beneath central California — is in fact a surviving slab of the Farallon oceanic plate. Most of the Farallon plate was driven deep into the Earth’s mantle as the Pacific and North American plates began converging about 100 million years ago, eventually coming together to form the San Andreas fault.
