Wednesday, April 22, 2009 - 6:27am
Mysterious Space Blob Discovered at Cosmic Dawn
With Video
A team of astronomers, led by Carnegie’s Masami Ouchi, has discovered a mysterious, giant object that existed when the universe was only 800 million years old. Dubbed an extended “Lyman-Alpha blob,” it is a huge body of gas. It is named Himiko for a legendary Japanese queen and stretches for 55 thousand light years, a record for that early point in time. Its length is comparable to the radius of the Milky Way’s disk.
Monday, January 5, 2009 - 8:56am
Zeroing in on Hubble’s Constant
With Video
The rate at which the universe is expanding, a value known as the Hubble constant, has been hotly debated for the last 80 years. Now the director of the Carnegie Observatories, Wendy Freedman, will lead a team who will slash the uncertainty of this value to just 3% via the new Carnegie Hubble Program using NASA’s space-based Spitzer telescope.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - 4:16pm
Astronomers detect earliest galaxies
With Video
Astronomers, including Carnegie's Ivo Labbe, used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to break the distance limit for galaxies by uncovering a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before. They are from 13 billion years ago, just 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang.
Thursday, February 2, 2012 - 10:28am
New super-Earth detected within the habitable zone of a nearby cool star
An international team of scientists led by Carnegie’s Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. The star is a member of a triple star system and has a different makeup than our Sun, being relatively lacking in metallic elements. This discovery demonstrates that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than previously believed.
Thursday, August 18, 2011 - 11:18am
New component of a plant steroid-activated pathway discovered
With Audio
Plant biologists have been working for years to nail down the series of chemical signals that one class of plant hormones, called brassinosteroids, send from a protein on the surface of a plant cell to the cell’s nucleus. New research has isolated another link in this chain. Fully understanding the brassinosteroid pathway could help scientists better understand plant growth and help improve food and energy crop production.
Monday, December 13, 2010 - 3:02pm
Unlocking the secrets of a plant’s light sensitivity
Plants are very sensitive to light conditions, in part due to a signal that activates some special photoreceptors that regulate growth, metabolism, and physiological development. Scientists believe that these light signals control plant growth and development by activating or inhibiting plant hormones. New research from Carnegie plant biologists has altered the prevailing theory on how light signals and hormones interact. Their findings could have implications for food crop production.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011 - 2:30pm
A “Jumping Gene’s” preferred targets may influence genome evolution
With Audio
Our genetic blueprint contains numerous entities known as transposons, which have the ability to move from place to place on the chromosomes within a cell. An astounding 50% of human DNA comprises both active transposon elements and the decaying remains of former transposons. Every time a plant or animal cell prepares to divide, the chromosome regions richest in transposon-derived sequences are among the last to duplicate. New research provides potential insight into both these enigmas.
Thursday, January 3, 2008 - 3:51pm
Plate Tectonics May Take a Break
Plate tectonics, the geologic process responsible for creating the Earth’s continents, mountain ranges, and ocean basins, may be an on-again, off-again affair. Scientists have assumed that the shifting of crustal plates has been slow but continuous over most of the Earth’s history, but a new study from researchers at the Carnegie Institution suggests that plate tectonics may have ground to a halt at least once in our planet’s history—and may do so again.
Thursday, May 7, 2009 - 1:03pm
Bioelectricity Promises More ‘Miles Per Acre’ Than Ethanol
With Audio
Biofuels such as ethanol offer an alternative to petroleum for powering our cars, but growing energy crops to produce them can compete with food crops for farmland, and clearing forests to expand farmland will aggravate the climate change problem. How can we maximize our “miles per acre” from biomass? Researchers writing in the online edition of the May 7 Science magazine say the best bet is to convert the biomass to electricity, rather than ethanol. They calculate that, compared to ethanol used for internal combustion engines, bioelectricity used for battery-powered vehicles would deliver an average of 80% more miles of transportation per acre of crops, while also providing double the greenhouse gas offsets to mitigate climate change.
Friday, June 5, 2009 - 10:10am
‘Colossal’ Magnetic Effect Under Pressure
With Audio
Millions of people today carry around pocket-sized music players capable of holding thousands of songs, thanks to the discovery 20 years ago of a phenomenon known as the “giant magnetoresistance effect,” which made it possible to pack more data onto smaller and smaller hard drives. Now scientists are on the trail of another phenomenon, called the “colossal magnetoresistance effect” (CMR) which is up to a thousand times more powerful and could trigger another revolution in computing technology.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - 6:59am
Potentially Habitable Planet Discovered
With Video
Astronomers, including Carnegie’s Paul Butler, have found the first, potentially habitable Earth-sized planet. It is one of two new planets discovered around the star Gliese 581, some 20 light years away. The planet, Gliese 581g, is located in a “habitable zone”—a distance from the star where the planet receives just the right amount of stellar energy to maintain liquid water at or near the planet’s surface. Watch news conference
Thursday, January 3, 2008 - 1:37pm
Red Dust in Planet-Forming Disk May Harbor Precursors to Life
Astronomers at the Carnegie Institution have found the first indications of highly complex organic molecules in the disk of red dust surrounding a distant star. The eight-million-year-old star, known as HR 4796A, is inferred to be in the late stages of planet formation, suggesting that the basic building blocks of life may be common in planetary systems.
Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 2:10pm
Mineral Kingdom Has Co-Evolved with Life
With Video Interview with Robert Hazen
Evolution isn’t just for living organisms. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have found that the mineral kingdom co-evolved with life, and that up to two thirds of the more than 4,000 known types of minerals on Earth can be directly or indirectly linked to biological activity. The finding, published in American Mineralogist, could aid scientists in the search for life on other planets.
Monday, January 28, 2008 - 8:24am
Hyperfast star proven to be alien
A young star is speeding away from the Milky Way so fast that astronomers have been puzzled by where it came from; based on its young age it has traveled too far to have come from our galaxy. Carnegie astronomers Alceste Bonanos and Mercedes López-Morales, with collaborators, determined that it came from our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and may have been ejected from that galaxy by a yet-to-be-observed massive black hole.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008 - 9:32am
New Process Promises Bigger, Better Diamond Crystals
With Audio
Researchers at the Carnegie Institution have developed a new technique for improving the properties of diamonds—not only adding sparkle to gemstones, but also simplifying the process of making high-quality diamond for scalpel blades, electronic components, even quantum computers.
Thursday, April 17, 2008 - 10:10am
Changing Jet Streams May Alter Paths of Storms and Hurricanes
The Earth’s jet streams, the high-altitude bands of fast winds that strongly influence the paths of storms and other weather systems, are shifting—possibly in response to global warming. These changes have implications for the frequency and intensity of future storms, including hurricanes.
Friday, February 15, 2008 - 1:54pm
Stabilizing Climate Requires Near-Zero Carbon Emissions
Now that scientists have reached a consensus that carbon dioxide emissions from human activities are the major cause of global warming, the next question is: How can we stop it? Can we just cut back on carbon, or do we need to go cold turkey? According to a new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution, halfway measures won’t do the job. To stabilize our planet’s climate, we need to find ways to kick the carbon habit altogether.
Thursday, October 2, 2008 - 1:18pm
“Little Bang” triggered Solar System formation
With Video
For several decades, scientists have debated whether the Solar System formed as a result of a shock wave from an exploding star—a supernova—that triggered the collapse of a dense, dusty gas cloud that contracted to form the Sun and the planets. Now, astrophysicists at the Carnegie Institution have resolved the debate and shown for the first time that a supernova could indeed have triggered the Solar System’s formation under conditions of rapid heating and cooling.
Thursday, April 30, 2009 - 8:26am
MESSENGER Reveals Mercury as a Dynamic Planet
With Audio
Analyses of data from the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft’s second flyby of Mercury in October 2008 show that the planet’s atmosphere, magnetosphere, and geological past are all characterized by much greater levels of activity than scientists first suspected. These results are published in the May 1st Science magazine and are discussed in a NASA press telecon today.
