Scientists detect giant atmospheric waves using auroras like flashlights

October 4th, 2009 LONDON - An experiment that fires powerful radio waves into the sky has created a patch of 'artificial ionosphere', mimicking the uppermost portion of Earth's atmosphere. According to a report in Nature News, the experiment is called the 'High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program' (HAARP), near Gakona, Alaska.

October 2nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists have said that an innovative new laser technique could be used to detect microbial life forms in Martian ice. According to scientists, the technique, called L.I.F.E.

September 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists have developed a new technique that uses data collected from earthquakes, potentially allowing the Earth's seismic activity to be mapped more comprehensively. Scientists from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, developed the new method.

August 31st, 2009 LONDON - The dentist's dreaded drill may soon be a thing of past, thanks to the laser tests University of Sydney scientists have developed to identify weaknesses in dental enamel. Currently, X-rays and metal probes are used to check cavities, but they fail to detect weaknesses in the enamel in time to repair the surface.

August 15th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA scientists have placed about a dozen monitoring 'spiderbots' inside the volcanic crater in Mount St Helens in the US, which are high-tech devices that can detect an impending eruption. Mount St. Helens is one of the most active volcanoes in the US.

August 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a new research, scientists have determined that depletion in the ozone layer is reducing the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) uptake of the Southern Ocean. Most current models predict that the strength of the Southern Ocean CO2 sink should increase as atmospheric CO2 rises, but observations show that this has not been the case.

June 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists is developing hand-held devices that can detect the presence of aerosols in air above oceans by measuring how light scatters as it strikes the particles. The portable photometers have been developed by Alexander Smirnov, an AERONET (Aerosol Robotic Network) project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, and his team.

June 11th, 2009 Washington, June 11 (ANI: Scientists have made a surprising discovery that typhoons trigger slow earthquakes, at least in eastern Taiwan. Slow earthquakes are non-violent fault slippage events that take hours or days instead of a few brutal seconds to minutes to release their potent energy.

June 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists at NASA have mapped chorus waves, a type of electromagnetic emission generated by electrons in Earth's radiation belt. Chorus waves play an important role in both accelerating and removing the energetic radiation belt electrons that can disrupt satellite electronics and disturb communications with ground-based operators.

May 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists have determined that thousands of miles above our planet, a cosmic chorus is filling the Earth's magnetic field with a mysterious, low frequency "hiss." According to a report in National Geographic News, that's the conclusion of scientists studying data from a set of NASA probes designed to monitor substorms-dramatic exchanges of energy among charged particles that spark the auroras at Earth's poles. The charged particles come from the sun and get trapped in loops around our planet by Earth's magnetic field.

April 24th, 2009 WASHINGTON - New observations by a suite of five NASA space probes has reportedly solved the mystery of the Northern Lights, attributing the cause of the natural phenomenon to powerful currents generated by giant electrical tornadoes in outer space. The probe cluster, called Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS), indicate that these "space tornadoes" span a volume as large as Earth and produce electrical currents exceeding 100,000 amperes.

March 20th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of astrophysicists, using telescopes on the ground and in space, has uncovered surprising changes in radiation emitted by an active galaxy classified as a Blazar. The picture that emerges from these first-ever simultaneous observations with optical, X-ray and new-generation gamma-ray telescopes is much more complex than scientists expected and challenges current theories of how the radiation is generated.

March 18th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory say that they may have developed a new tool to enhance the way computer chips, LEDs, and transistors are built by reversing a process that converts electrical signals into sounds heard out of a cell phone. The researchers claim that this is the first time that any research team have converted the highest frequency sounds into light by reversing a process that converts electrical signals to sound.

March 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists have found the interaction between shock waves created by high-pressure supersonic fuel jets. The discovery may lead to cleaner and more efficient internal combustion engines as well as advances in high-speed jet cleaning, machining and mining.

March 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Aerosols, those tiny, ubiquitous particles in the air, may profoundly affect global climate. But scientists have long struggled to measure their composition, size and global distribution accurately.