Summaries | Headlines

Dusty Winds Bursting Out Of Black Holes May Have Seeded Planets, Life (October 11, 2007) -- The hit song that proclaimed, "All we are is dust in the wind," may have some cosmic truth to it. New findings from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that space dust -- the same stuff that makes ... > full story

Shining A Light On Mysterious 'Dark Matter' (October 5, 2007) -- We've all been taught that our bodies, the Earth and in fact all matter in the universe is composed of tiny building blocks called atoms. Now imagine if this weren't the case. This mind-bending ... > full story

Dark Matter Of The Universe Has A Long Lifetime (October 4, 2007) -- The universe consists not just of visible celestial bodies, stars, planets and galaxies. It also has a mystical fellow player -- dark matter. The astronomers can measure that the dark matter exists ... > full story

Dilaton Could Affect Abundance Of Dark Matter Particles (October 2, 2007) -- The amount of dark matter left over from the early universe may be less than previously believed. The 'relic abundance' of stable dark matter particles such as the neutralino may be reduced as ... > full story

Baby Booms And Birth Control In Space (September 26, 2007) -- Stars in galaxies are a bit similar to people: during the first phase of their existence they grow rapidly, after which a stellar birth control occurs in most galaxies. Thanks to new observations it ... > full story

Some Black Holes May Not Be Black, But Rather 'Naked Singularities' (September 24, 2007) -- Researchers think there is a way to determine whether some black holes are not actually black. Astronomers cannot say for sure whether all black holes are actually black, having never fully ... > full story

Early Star Formation In The Universe Illuminated (September 18, 2007) -- A groundbreaking study has provided new insight into the way the first stars were formed at the start of the universe, some 13 billion years ago. Cosmologists suggest that the formation of the first ... > full story

Large Hadron Collider Project To Study The Origins Of Matter (September 18, 2007) -- Researchers have started work on the first stage of the European project Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator in the world, which has the aim of reproducing conditions similar to ... > full story

Oldest Stars May Shed Light On Dark Matter (September 14, 2007) -- The universe's earliest stars may hold clues to the nature of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up most of the universe's matter but doesn't interact with light, cosmologists report. The ... > full story

What Is Dark Energy? 'Beyond Einstein' Program Aims To Investigate (September 10, 2007) -- NASA and the US Department of Energy should pursue the Joint Dark Energy Mission as the first mission in the "Beyond Einstein" program, according to a new report from the National Research Council. ... > full story

'Lego-block' Galaxies Discovered In Early Universe (September 7, 2007) -- The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope have joined forces to discover nine of the smallest, faintest, most compact galaxies ever observed in the distant universe. ... > full story

'Heart' Of Herschel Space Observatory Almost Ready (September 6, 2007) -- By the end of 2007, the assembly of the ESA's Herschel far-infrared space observatory -- the latest mission to study the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies -- will be ... > full story

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Programming the Universe : A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos
Is the universe actually a giant quantum computer? According to Seth Lloyd—Professor of Quantum-Mechanical Engineering at MIT and originator of the first technologically feasible design for a ... > read more

Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes
As Charles Seife reveals in this energetic new book, information theory, once the province of philosophers and linguists, has emerged as the crucial science of our time, shedding new light on the ... > read more

Modern Cosmology
Modern Cosmology begins with an introduction to the smooth, homogeneous universe described by a Friedman-Robertson-Walker metric, including careful treatments of dark energy, big bang ... > read more

Universe
Continuing in the bestselling tradition of Animal and Earth, DK brings you Universe - a truly definitive guide that takes you on a tour from the Solar System to the farthest limits of ... > read more

Astronomy: A Beginner's Guide to the Universe, Fourth Edition
Astronomy Today 4/e (ISBN 0-13-091542-4) is the more comprehensive text by this: proven team of authors. This twenty-eight chapter text begins with the foundations of the history of science and ... > read more

Horizons : Exploring the Universe (with TheSky CD-ROM, AceAstronomy, and Virtual Astronomy Labs)
This newly revised and updated Ninth Edition of HORIZONS shows students their place in the universe ? not just their location, but also their role as planet dwellers in an evolving universe. ... > read more

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
There is an ill-concealed skeleton in the closet of physics: "As they are currently formulated, general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right." Each is exceedingly accurate in its ... > read more

A Briefer History of Time
Stephen Hawking’s worldwide bestseller, A Brief History of Time, has been a landmark volume in scientific writing. Its author’s engaging voice is one reason, and the compelling subjects ... > read more

A Brief History of Time : The Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition
Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in history, wrote the modern classic A Brief History of Time to help nonscientists understand the questions being asked by scientists ... > read more

The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
If Albert Einstein were alive, he would have a copy of The Road to Reality on his bookshelf. So would Isaac Newton. This may be the most complete mathematical explanation of the universe yet ... > read more