Kosta Grammatis wants to buy satellite to bring free internet access to entire world

Through his nonprofit A Human Right, scientist Kosta Grammatis is working to purchase a satellite that could provide free Internet access to developing countries.

Home green home

Maybe in the future more houses will be one that euronews visited in Aarhus, Denmark. Around 50 people are living in revolutionary homes that use energy in a new way. In terms of costs, it means cutting heating bills from over 200 euros a month to less than 50, even if it is very cold. One tenant, Agnete Dorph-Jensen, explained: “We have solar cells for the lights outside and for the…

Fifty new exoplanets discovered by HARPS

Astronomers using ESO’s world-leading exoplanet hunter HARPS have today announced a rich haul of more than 50 new exoplanets, including 16 super-Earths, one of which orbits at the edge of the habitable zone of its star. By studying the properties of all the HARPS planets found so far, the team has found that about 40% of stars similar to the Sun have at least one planet lighter than Saturn.

CRESST team finds new 'evidence' of dark matter

(PhysOrg.com) -- In the never ending search for proof that dark matter really exists, new findings have emerged from a team working under a big mountain in Italy. The group, from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, have pre-published a paper on arXiv, and have also given a talk at the Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics conference in Munich where they describe how their CRESST II detector has recorded 67 events which they say cannot be explained by anything other than Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS), a type of dark matter.

Invisible world discovered

Usually, running five minutes late is a bad thing since you might lose your dinner reservation or miss out on tickets to the latest show. But when a planet runs five minutes late, astronomers get excited because it suggests that another world is nearby.

Innovative superconductor fibers carry 40 times more electricity

Wiring systems powered by highly-efficient superconductors have long been a dream of science, but researchers have faced such practical challenges such as finding pliable and cost-effective materials. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University have found a way to make an old idea new with the next generation of superconductors.

Phase one of world's first commercial spaceport is now 90% completed - in time for first flights in 2013

The 1,800-acre Spaceport America site, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, is the home base for Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson

Dwarf planet mysteries beckon to New Horizons

(PhysOrg.com) -- At this very moment one of the fastest spacecraft ever launched -- NASA

New light shed on pulsars

Astronomers have made an important breakthrough in the understanding of how pulsars work. Using a new inverse mapping or reverse engineering approach, researchers were able to establish for the first time that most of the light from the pulsar comes from close to the star

The star that should not exist

A team of European astronomers has used ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to track down a star in the Milky Way that many thought was impossible. They discovered that this star is composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, with only remarkably small amounts of other chemical elements in it. This intriguing composition places it in the “forbidden zone” of a widely accepted theory of star formation, meaning that it should never have come into existence in the first place. The results will appear in the 1 September 2011 issue of the journal Nature.

Astrophysicists report first simulation to create a Milky Way-like galaxy

After nine months of number-crunching on a powerful supercomputer, a beautiful spiral galaxy matching our own Milky Way has emerged from a computer

Filling the pantry for the first voyages to the red planet

A green thumb and a little flair as a gourmet chef may be among the key skills for the first men and women who travel to the Red Planet later this century, according to one scientist.

Exotic galaxy reveals tantalizing tale

A galaxy with a combination of characteristics never seen before is giving astronomers a tantalizing peek at processes they believe played key roles in the growth of galaxies and clusters of galaxies early in the history of the Universe. The galaxy, dubbed Speca by the team of researchers, is only the second spiral, as opposed to elliptical, galaxy known to produce large, powerful jets of subatomic particles moving at nearly the speed of light. It also is one of only two galaxies to show that such activity occurred in three separate episodes.