Astronauts Being Trained For Mission To Look For Minerals, Get Info On How To Destroy It. Washington: Nasa is reportedly training a team of astronauts for a mission to land on an asteroid by the end of the next decade. The US space agency is training the astronauts to land on an asteroid to explore its surface, search for minerals and even learn the skills they may need to destroy it should one pose a threat to the Earth, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ reported.

The coldest deep ocean water that flows around Antarctica in the Southern Ocean has been strangely disappearing at a high rate for the past few decades, a new study has revealed. This mass of water is called Antarctic Bottom Water, which is formed in a few distinct locations around Antarctica, where seawater is cooled by the overlying air and made saltier by ice formation (which leaves the salt behind in the unfrozen water).

These Cosmic Bodies Don’t Orbit Any Star, Belong To A Whole New Class Of Alien World
Washington: Thousands of rogue alien planets may be rambling through space in our Milky Way galaxy, instead of being locked in orbit around a star, says a new study.
According to researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), an independent laboratory of the Stanford University, these “nomad planets” could be surprisingly common in our bustling galaxy.

London: Scientists claim to have identified a “secret language” used in the animal kingdom. An international team has found how animals use polarization, a type of light that humans cannot see, as an important tool for communication, the Current Biology journal reported.

China recently released a set of “world's highest resolution” lunar images taken by its second moon orbiter, Chang'e-2, as it braces to launch its next mission to land a rover to explore its surface. China's State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) recently published a set of full coverage map of the Moon and its images with a resolution of seven meters captured by Chang'e-2.

Chi-b(3), A Boson Like the ‘God Particle’, Sighted By Large Hadron Collider
Paris: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), famously engaged in the quest for the Higgs boson, has turned up a heavier variant of a sub-atomic particle first discovered a quarter-century ago, scientists reported on Thursday.

Few scientists are betting against Einstein yet, but the phantom neutrinos of Opera are still eluding explanation.

Two months after scientists reported that they had clocked subatomic particles known as neutrinos going faster than the speed of light, to the astonishment and vocal disbelief of most of the world’s physicists, the same group of scientists, known as Opera, said on Friday that it had performed a second experiment that confirmed its first results and eliminated one possible explanation for how the experiment could have gone wrong.

The chances have risen that Einstein was wrong about a fundamental law of the universe. Scientists at the world’s biggest physics lab said Friday they have ruled out one possible error that could have distorted their startling measurements that appeared to show particles traveling faster than light.
Many physicists reacted with skepticism in September when measurements by French and Italian researchers seemed to show subatomic neutrino particles breaking what Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein considered the ultimate speed barrier.

An award-winning pioneering physicist is setting up a local research centre with the aim of producing the next Nobel laureate from India. Will he succeed? The scientific community is not excited and the debate extends to the quality of research at India’s science institutions, including the IITs. Ahona Ghosh researches the issue.