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NASA’s NuSTAR Mission Celebrates 10 Years Studying the X-Ray Universe

Lead Image: Artist’s concept of NuSTAR on orbit. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech This small but powerful space telescope has spent a decade of observing some of the hottest, densest, and most energetic regions in our universe — and still has more to see. Before NuSTAR launched in 2012, it promised to explore supermassive black holes hidden inside of galaxies. Now, a decade after launch, it has succeeded in illuminating black holes, as well as achieving many other cosmological discoveries. NuSTAR studies the universe in high-energy X-rays, detecting hard X-rays at energies of 5 to 80 kiloelectronvolts. This range in the electromagnetic spectrum…

Director Of The World’s Fastest Supercomputer Explains How They Did It

Lead Image: The Frontier supercomputer. OLCF at ORNL The world’s fastest supercomputer — called Frontier — is whizzing away in a national lab located in the foothills of East Tennessee. It’s the only machine in the world that has ever demonstrated that it could perform more than one quintillion (that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. In the language of computer science, that’s called an exaflop. Frontier’s project leader, Justin Whitt, told IE that his favorite way to explain the scale of his team’s achievement is to imagine if every single person on Earth could pull out a pen and paper and do one…

What Has Happened To The World’s Nuclear test sites?

Lead Image: An Artist’s impression of a nuclear blast on a city and the wave of destruction thereof. Nuclear Weapons are the pinnacle of our species’ ingenuity for large-scale devastation. While large proportions of their development could occur on paper and under lab conditions, the time soon came when real bombs would need to be field-tested. To this end, most of today’s nuclear powers have conducted hundreds of nuclear tests in various remote locations worldwide, taking place over decades. Thankfully, most of this testing ceased entirely in the late 1990s, with countries like India, China, and Pakistan not detonating another…

“Viral Dark Matter” Could Help Mitigate Climate Change – Here’s How

Lead Image: Recently scientists uncovered a treasure trove of new data about RNA viruses in the ocean including 5,500 new RNA virus species. Analysis suggests that a small portion of them had “stolen” genes from organisms they infected, which helps identify their functions in marine processes. Several may help drive carbon absorbed from the atmosphere to permanent storage on the ocean floor. Study identifies 1,200+ RNA viruses with connections to carbon flux. Many scientists believe that climate change is a significant threat and that we are running out of time left to act. On top of that, new research shows…

Mastodon Killed in Bloody Battle 13,200 Years Ago – Reveals Extinct Animal’s Annual Migration

Lead Image: University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher with a mounted skeleton of the Buesching mastodon, based on casts of individual bones produced in fiberglass, on public display at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor. Credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography Mastodons are relatives of elephants belonging to the genus Mammut that inhabited North and Central America before they went extinct about 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. Typical adults stood between 8 and 10 feet (2.5-3 m) tall at the shoulder and weighed around 8,000 to 12,000 pounds (3,600-5,400 kg). The largest specimen found was 10.7…