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Pasadena News Now: Local High School Students Hunt for Pulsars
Hanaa is hunting for a blip in a vast set of data. Although she is only a high school student, she is searching for the signal of a pulsar — a rapidly rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation like a lighthouse. Hanaa and 19 of her fellow students at Alverno Heights…
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Clandestine Black Hole May Represent New Population
06/29/2016: Astronomers combined data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) [and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope] to find out that there is a peculiar source of radio waves originally thought to be a distant galaxy. As it turns…
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06/29/2016: Seeking Radio Silence in West Virginia’s Quiet Zone
The town of Green Bank, West Virginia, is a sleepy Appalachian town, the kind one might move to in order to escape the grind of urban centers and bustling suburbs. But its 143 residents didn’t exactly move there for literal quiet. Green Bank is located in eastern West Virginia, in what’s known as the National Radio Quiet Zone,…
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06/26/2016: ‘Full Measure’: The No-Fi zone
Just three hours from the nation’s capital, two unthinkable acts are occurring. One, an unlikely partnership with the Russians, and two — prepare yourself — the government is cutting ties to your cellphone. “Full Measure” news correspondent Joce Sterman traveled to the No-Fi zone. In the digital age, we live on an electronic leash, and…
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Twisty molecules with ‘handedness’ that are essential to life found in deep space
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06/14/2016: A Molecule In Space Could Help Us Understand The Origin Of Life On Earth
Are your molecules lefties or righties? There are a lot of concepts that help life exist here on Earth. One is as simple as whether a molecule is right handed or left handed. As straightforward as it is, we still don’t know how the molecules got that way. But a recent discovery of a molecule…
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Astronomers find first evidence of chiral chemistry in distant cosmic cloud
An organic (if toxic) alcohol could point the way toward finding more “handed” molecules — the kind that make up RNA, DNA, and other building blocks to life. To make life, our bodies require many chemicals to have a certain “handedness,” a left or right orientation called chirality that determines the behavior of those substances…
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06/07/2016: Growing crops, business in WV no small potatoes
What can people in West Virginia do to make the state more economically productive and diverse, particularly to overcome the loss of many of its traditional big money industries? How about agriculture? A crazy idea considering the rugged terrain of much of the Mountain State, but when you look further, is it such a crazy…