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Bacterial growth at -15°C
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Researchers from McGill University in Montreal have discovered a bacterium living in the frozen permafrost of the high Arctic. The permafrost bacterium, Planococcus halocryophilus strain Or1, grows and divides at -15°C and can even remain metabolically active at -25°C. This bacteria is yielding clues about how extraterrestrial organisms might endure extreme conditions - as one of the things that makes it extremely hard for life to flourish in foreboding places like Mars and the moons of Saturn is the punishing cold. ...
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3690 |
duddy |
10 years ago |
A cratered inferno
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Mercury's surface looks similar to our Moon's. Each is heavily cratered and made of rock. Mercury's diameter is about 4800 km, while the Moon's is slightly less at about 3500 km (compared with about 12,700 km for the Earth). But Mercury is unique in many ways. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, orbiting at about 1/3 the radius of the Earth's orbit. As Mercury slowly rotates, its surface temperature varies from an unbearably cold -180 degrees Celsius to an unbearably hot 400 degrees Celsius. The place nearest the Sun in Mercury's orbit changes slightly each orbit - a fact used by Albert Einstein to help verify the correctness of his then newly discovered theory of gravity: General Relativity. The above picture was taken by the only sp ...
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2714 |
savio |
10 years ago |
How planet Earth looks like from Mars
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This is the first image taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover of what Earth looks like from its station on Mars. Not one to let a golden social media moment go to waste, Curiosity promptly tweeted: “Look Back in Wonder… My first picture of Earth from the surface of Mars."
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2795 |
duddy |
10 years ago |
On Venus it snows metal
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At the very top of Venus’s mountains, below a thick layer of clouds, is snow. But not snow as we know it - with some surfaces reaching 480°C, Venus is way too hot for that. So what is this stuff? Researchers have figured out that Venus's heat is vaporising minerals called galena and bismuthinite, causing them to enter the atmosphere as a metallic mist before condensing into a shiny, metallic frost that rains down on the mountaintops.
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2853 |
duddy |
10 years ago |
This moon looks like a ball of cheese
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The strangest moon in the Solar System is bright yellow. Taken by the Galileo spacecraft, this image shows Jupiter's moon, Io, and its incredibly bright colours derived from sulphur and molten silicate rock. Io is covered in volcanoes that are so active, they effectively turn the whole moon inside out. And some of Io's volcanic lava is so hot, it glows in the dark.
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2563 |
duddy |
10 years ago |
Have you ever seen the sun like this?
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The Sun, through an H-alpha filter, which captures a narrow band of light containing the frequency of photons emitted when a hydrogen's electron drops from the 3 rd energy level to the 2 nd.
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5023 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
NASA Rover finds conditions once suited for ancient life on Mars
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Scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon -- some of the key chemical ingredients for life -- in the powder Curiosity drilled out of a sedimentary rock near an ancient stream bed in Gale Crater on the Red Planet last month.
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2020 |
duddy |
9 years ago |