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The University of California, San Diego’s Nanofabrication Cleanroom Facility (Nano3) is the first institution to obtain a novel FEI Scios dual-beam microscope, with an adaptation for use at cryogenic temperatures. The new microscope will enable research among a highly diverse user base, ranging from materials science to structural and molecular biology.

Now here’s something I guarantee you’ve never seen before: a video of the dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon Charon showing the two distinctly separate worlds actually in motion around each other! Captured by the steadily-approaching New Horizons spacecraft from July 19–24, the 12 images that comprise this animation were acquired with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument from distances of 267 million to 262 million miles (429 million to 422 million km) and show nearly a full orbital rotation. Absolutely beautiful!

In the first evidence that natural selection favors an individual’s infection tolerance, researchers from Princeton University and the University of Edinburgh have found that an animal’s ability to endure an internal parasite strongly influences its reproductive success. Reported in the journal PLoS Biology, the finding could provide the groundwork for boosting the resilience of humans and livestock to infection.

Three University of California, Riverside engineers are part of team recently awarded a nearly $1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to characterize, analyze and synthesize a new class of ultra-thin film materials that could improve the performance of personal electronics, optoelectronic devices and energy conversion systems.

Industry leaders looking to see how automation and product ion will behave on the next levels will see two technology paths, robots offered as replacements for human labor and robotic technologies that will not replace humans but instead improve the ability of humans to perform their tasks. A ship-building company in South Korea is interested in the latter path in the form of robotic suits that can support workers’ tasks

(Phys.org) —Neil Hall, a genomics professor with the University of Liverpool, has kicked up a bit of an Internet storm. He’s written a paper and has had it published in the journal Genome Biology, suggesting (with tongue firmly in cheek) that some scientists are getting more attention than they deserve, due to their heightened social standing.

Two of Cornwall’s existing wine producers, Camel Valley Vineyard of Bodmin and Polgoon Vineyard and Orchard of Penzance, have offered researchers from the University of Exeter’s Penryn-based Environment and Sustainability Institute (ESI) access to their vineyards for the study. The researchers are now inviting other local vineyards to come forward and collaborate on the research.

The Universe is home to a variety of exotic objects and beautiful phenomena, some of which can generate almost inconceivable amounts of energy. ASU Regents’ Professor Sumner Starrfield is part of a team that used the Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope satellite to discover very high energy gamma rays (the most energetic form of light) being emitted by an exploding star.

A team of researchers at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado has created a computer simulation that depicts the first 500 million years of Earth’s existence, taking into account collisions with asteroids and comets. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the researchers describe how they built their simulation using crater data from the moon and other planets, and what it likely meant for early Earth.

Adult African penguins communicate using four different vocalizations and juveniles and chicks use two begging calls to request food, according to a study published July 30, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Livio Favaro and colleagues from University of Turin, Italy.