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.

NASA selected the advanced technological concepts for further development

NASA has selected 12 proposals, including two from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (of California), for the study of the first phase of the Subsidiary Innovative Concepts (NIAC). The program focuses on a detailed study and elaboration of existing concepts without specific algorithm they use to humans. Thus, through this process, it is planned to make a series of scientific fantasies into reality.

                                                                             

The selected 12 applications, a rather controversial concept, including 3-D printing of biomaterials, such as cells. 

Is sending humans to Mars actually feasible?

"The challenge ahead is epic, but historic," says Buzz Aldrin. "We are on a pathway to homestead the Red Planet."

Why go to Mars?

The idea of a manned journey to Mars has animated science fiction for more than a century, and since the dawn of the space age,