Fourth domain for a new form of life

The famous anecdote "On board the space station discovered a giant virus that infected Soviet cosmonaut" may be not so absurd: Biologists have discovered a virus of such size that they have no right to believe in it.

Initially called it simply - NLF, a new form of life (New Life Form). Strange body, a dedicated French microbiologist from sea water samples, pick up off the coast of Chile, infects the simplest - amoebas. Soon, the same body showed up and in Australia.

Student Engineers Spark Zero-Gravity Fires on Weightless Wild Ride

Gravity, we have defied you. Seven university student teams from across the United States escaped the pull of Earth's gravity — if only for a few seconds — on a NASA microgravity flight to see how fire, liquids and magnets behave in weightlessness.

The students flew with NASA's Microgravity University Program Friday (July 19) aboard a Zero Gravity Corporation Boeing 727 jet modified to fly up and down on a parabolic path to create up to 30 seconds of zero gravity, moon gravity or Martian gravity on the downswing followed by periods of "hypergravity" (twice Earth's pull) on the way back up.

How to Survive a Lightning Strike

There's a club open to people from all around the world, but you wouldn't want to join: The club is exclusively for people who've survived a lightning strike.

Lightning strikes kill about 24,000 people worldwide each year, and about 240,000 people are injured by lightning and survive.

Rare Particle Discovery Dims Hopes for Exotic Theories

Physicists have measured an extremely rare particle decay inside the world's largest atom smasher — a discovery that bolsters the leading model of particle physics and leaves little room for undiscovered particles beyond this theory.

Curiosity Rover Samples Air for a Taste of Mars History

It’s time to update the list of ingredients in Martian air.

In late 2012 NASA’s Curiosity rover drew air into its onboard laboratory and analyzed Mars’s atmospheric composition with a pair of spectrometers. The results of the investigation, published July 19 in Science, revise decades-old data on the makeup of Red Planet air and paint a broad picture of how the atmosphere has changed since the planet’s formation.

Physicists unveil results helping explain the universe

After a quarter-century of searching, scientists have nailed down how one particularly rare subatomic particle decays into something else — a discovery that adds certainty to our thinking about how the universe began and keeps running.

The world's top particle physics lab said Friday it had measured the decay time of a particle known as a Bs (B sub s) meson into two other fundamental particles called muons, 

The planets orbiting cooler stars have a warm climate

There is an assumption that the planets orbiting the cold star may not be on the surface of snow or ice, in contrast to those that rotate around hot. This is possible due to the interaction of starlight with ice and snow on the surface of the planets.