Artist concept of GRAIL mission. Grail will fly twin spacecraft in tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure its gravity field in unprecedented detail. © NASA/JPL

BEIJING, Sept. 6 — NASA will launch on Thursday twin lunar orbiters built to map the gravity of Earth’s moon in unprecedented detail, media reported Tuesday.

The twin lunar probes, Graili-A and Graili-B, will blast off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 8:37 a.m. EDT and at 9:16 a.m. EDT respectively Thursday, according to NASA.

The Grail twins will travel three to four months to get to the moon under a slower but more economical plan.

The two spacecrafts will reach the moon around New Year’s Day when they will begin to probe the moon’s composition from the crust to the core, according to NASA.

The data collected by the probes will be used to better understand the moon’s evolution and formation, NASA scientists said.

Researchers will also use the twin probes to pinpoint the best landing sites for future explorations.

The mission, from start to finish, costs 496 million U.S. dollars. The two Grail probes will crash into the moon after its mission. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2011-09/06/c_131103031.htm

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory observed a potent blast from the Sun had unleashed a firestorm of radiation on a level not witnessed since 2006. The flare is moving away from the Sun at 1,400 km per second.

The firestorm would deliver a “glancing blow to the Earth’s magnetic field” during the late hours of June 8th or on June 9th, according to the observatory.

The U.S. National Weather Service’s Space Weather Prediction Center said the event is “expected to cause G1 (minor) to G2 (moderate) levels of geomagnetic storm activity tomorrow, June 8, beginning around 1800 GMT.”

“Generally it is not going to cause any big problems, it will just have to be managed,” Bill Murtagh, program coordinator at the NWS’s Space Weather Prediction Center, was quoted by AFP as saying.

But he added that the solar storm could disrupt power grids, satellites, and may cause the rerouting of some flights away from the Polar Regions.

The geomagnetic storm activity will likely be over within 12-24 hours.

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2011-06/08/c_13917369.htm

The researchers said Wednesday it is the most ancient and distant galaxy ever seen — a small proto galaxy some 13.2 billion light-years away.

The dim object, found in images taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, was formed when the universe was just 480 million years old, the researchers said in the journal Nature.

“We’ve gone back through 96 percent of the life of the universe, to when the universe was only 4 percent of its current age, through 500 million years after the Big Bang,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, one of the researchers working on the study.

“The team searched through these wonderful data looking for galaxies at these extremely early times,” he added, “we’re peering into an era where big changes are afoot.”

Light travels at a speed of 300,000 kilometers a second in vacuum, or about 10 trillion kilometers a year. Astronomers use light-year to measure the distances of celestial bodies, and seeing light emitted from objects far away also indicates they were ancient.

The newly discovered galaxy, 13.2 billion light-year away, means the galaxy’s light started to travel 13.2 billion years ago.

Hubble, which was launched in 1990 and orbits outside the Earth’s atmosphere, has played a key role in the research in capturing faint light from the early ages of the universe. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2011-01/27/c_13709523.htm

The Paris japonica, a 12-inch (30-centimeter) flower native to Japan, has a genetic code 50 times long as that of a human being, researchers at London’s Kew Gardens discovered.

If laid end-to-end, this flower’s genome would stretch to more than 300 feet (about 91 meters), the researchers said.

A genome is the full complement of an organism’s DNA, complex molecules that direct the formation and function of all living organisms.

The size of an organism’s genome is typically measured by the number of base pairs — the building blocks of DNA.

The human genome has about 3 million bases and measures about 6 feet (1.8 meters) in length. The known organism with the second longest genome is the marbled lungfish, which has 130 million bases. And the newly discovered flower turns out to have 150 million bases.

However, researchers said bigger genomes don’t necessarily mean a more complex organism.

While genes are generally supposed to correspond to some traits in organisms, many genes don’t appear to correspond to anything. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2010-10/08/c_13546906.htm

The Hubble space telescope has observed a planet in the Milky Way galaxy being devoured by its parent star, media reports said Tuesday. ©CRI

BEIJING, May 25 — The Hubble space telescope has observed a planet in the Milky Way galaxy being devoured by its parent star, media reports said Tuesday.

The doomed planet, dubbed WASP-12b, is to be found about 600 light-years away in the winter constellation Auriga, and is the hottest known planet in the galaxy with a surface temperature at around 1,500 degrees Celsius, researchers said.

The planet is so close to its parent star that it can make the orbit around the star in slightly more than 24 hours, and is being stretched into the shape of an elipse by enormous tidal forces.

Previously, scientists had concluded in theory that planets can get absorbed by stars when they get too near to each other. However, it is the first time the phenomenon has been observed so clearly.

Researchers made the observation by using a new instrument called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph that was installed on Hubble last year. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2010-05/25/c_13315261.htm

The study, conducted by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), surveyed more than 13,000 mobile phone users in 13 countries over the past decade.

The study concluded that radio-frequency energy emitted by cell phones does not increase the risk of two main types of brain tumors, glioma and meningioma.

“The results really don’t allow us to conclude that there is any risk associated with mobile phone use, but… it is also premature to say that there is no risk associated with it,” the IARC’s director Christopher Wild was quoted by Reuters as saying.

The study did find a slightly greater risk of cancer among heavy users.

When researchers looked at the 10 percent of subjects who talked on a cell phone for at least a-half hour a day, seven days a week for ten years, they found a 40 percent increased risk of glioma.

The 21 scientists who conducted the study admitted that this finding suggested problems with the method, or inaccurate information from those who participated.

“We need to look in more depth at that finding in the context of all the other information that’s available to us before we are confident to conclude that there’s no associated risk,” said Christopher Wild. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/health/2010-05/19/c_13303468.htm

Scientists at Jichi Medical University in Tokyo said that one day the transgenic mosquitoes will act as vaccine deliverers to inoculate millions for free.

In a study the researchers genetically modified a mosquito species and made the mosquito’s saliva contain a protein that functions as a vaccine against leishmaniasis, a fatal disease that triggers terrible skin sores.

The study also showed that mice bitten by the transgenic mosquito could build up immunity against the disease.

“You would be vaccinated without even noticing,” said Shigeto Yoshida, the associate professor who has led the research, “you wouldn’t need any drug and you wouldn’t need to show up at a designated place for mass vaccinations.”

Repeat bites would strengthen the immunity, Yoshida added.

According to the researchers, the study could similarly be used to help combat malaria, perhaps in a decade.

But there remain some problems for this study, for example, no effective vaccine against malaria exists because malaria’s antigen changes frequently, and the vaccinator mosquito may still pick up and spread malaria. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/health/2010-03/25/c_13224634.htm

Actress Jessica Alba arrives at at the William J. Clinton Foundation’s Millennium Network Event in Los Angeles, California April 30, 2009. © Reuters

BEIJING, Dec. 23 — U.S. and Canadian researchers have calculated the ratios of the “perfect” face and claimed that U.S. star Jessica Alba has the most beautiful face.

Researchers say beauty can be measured according to how close together a woman’s eyes are and the distance between her eyes and mouth.

“We already know that different facial features make a female face attractive — large eyes, for example, or full lips,” said University of Toronto professor Kang Lee and one of the lead authors of the study, “our study proves that the structure of faces also contributes to our perception of facial attractiveness.”

Women’s faces are found to be at their most attractive when the space between their pupils was 46 percent of the width of their faces from ears to ears.

Another perfect dimension is when the distance between her eyes and mouth was 36 percent of the overall length of her face from hairline to chin.

Celebrities whose faces are in perfect proportion also include Liz Hurley and Shania Twain.

But the researchers acknowledged that actress Angelina Jolie does not fit their beauty criteria.

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-12/23/content_12693154.htm

The Russian Soyuz TMA-15 capsule landed as planned at 10:17 a.m. Moscow time (07:17 GMT) about 85 km north of the town of Arkalyk in Kazakhstan.

The capsule carrying Canadian astronaut Bob Thirsk, Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, and European Space Agency’s astronaut Frank De Winne of Belgium, touched down without a hitch, said Russian Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin.

“The landing was very soft; we were lucky not to have any wind,” Romanenko said in televised remarks after leaving the capsule. “Everything went quite nicely; there were no problems whatsoever.”

The crew will fly back to Russia’s space training center in Star City, outside Moscow, on Tuesday for a reunion with their families and for training on how to deal with gravity after six months on the space station, according to NASA.

Two astronauts, NASA’s Jeff Williams and Russia’s Maxim Suraev, will remain on the space station until the arrival of Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov, NASA’s Timothy J. Creamer, and Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency on Dec. 21. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-12/01/content_12571381.htm

The report, published by the British medical review The Lancet in a special issue, said that global warming will imperil health through malaria, cholera, heatwaves and hunger, but these problems can be eased or avoided if actions on climate change are taken immediately.

The report examined policies to reduce emissions from households, transport, electricity generation and agriculture in both developed and developing countries.

Researchers found that cutting carbon dioxide emissions would reduce many types of air pollution, especially tiny particles that lodge in the lungs and cause direct health damage.

Other benefits could come from encouraging more exercise and less meat consumption to improve heart health, according to the report.

Some scientists praised the study and said the research was sound.

“The science is really excellent; the modeling is quite good,” said Dr. Paul Epstein of the Harvard School of Medicine’s Center for Health and the Global Environment. “It really takes the whole field a step farther.” 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-11/26/content_12543736.htm