Tags: NIST | Solar weather | UV sensor

A physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has helped NASA scientists observe a “hidden” layer of the Sun where violent space weather can originate, by positioning a crucial UV sensor inside a space-borne instrument.

The Sun releases particles and electromagnetic fields into space and when these particles pass through the Sun’s “transition region,” 5,000 kilometres above the surface, they can gather considerable steam, resulting in violent episodes of “space weather”.

The space weather can damage Earth-orbiting satellites and disrupt electronic communications.

To avoid this, a team at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville constructed a rocket-borne instrument, known as the Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation (SUMI), designed to take pictures of these magnetic fields from space.

Tags: Anopheles gambiae | Malaria mosquitoes | odour sensors | repellents | Vanderbilt University

In what may help develop more effective repellents, scientists claim to have discovered that malaria mosquitoes use several different kinds of odour sensors to sniff out their human prey.

For years, it's known that Anopheles gambiae — the species of mosquito that spreads malaria which infects 250 million and kills 900,000 people annually — use one family of odour sensors to track its human prey.

Now, a team at Vanderbilt University has found that the mosquitoes possess a second set of olfactory sensors that are fundamentally different from the set of sensors which was known to researchers for the last 10 years, the latest edition of the Public Library of Science Biology journal reported.

Tags: NASA | rocket flights | space programme | unmanned flights

Experimental unmanned rockets being developed by California and Texas firms will make tests flights to the edge of space this fall and winter under a NASA funding plan.

Masten Space Systems of Mojave, California, and Armadillo Aerospace of Rockwall, Texas, were awarded a total of USD 475,000 by NASA’s Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research Program, the space agency said yesterday.

The two companies are among an elite group of private spaceflight entrepreneurs that are not as well—known as the marquee programs being developed for Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space tourism company at Mojave, and SpaceX, the Hawthorne, California, company seeking to become NASA’s choice for space station supply missions.

Tags: brain activity | parent and child

Children share a special lifelong bond with their mothers which may be rooted in how the brain reacts when we see our mothers’ face.

When adults look upon their mothers’ face, it triggers a stronger response in the brain than when they look at pictures of strangers and that of their father, according to scientists.

Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines, researchers measured the brain activity of volunteers, with an average age of 35 years, as they were shown pictures of their parents, strangers and celebrities, reports the Telegraph.