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Alvin M. Weinberg introduced the term "big science" into the national lexicon in 1961. Big science is research that requires the coordination of massive resources, including thousands of our best minds and cutting-edge technologies to solve massive, complex problems. With visionary gusto, Weinberg wrote that "the monuments of big science, the huge rockets, the high-energy accelerators, the high-flux research reactors ... will be symbols of our time as surely as Notre Dame is a symbol of the Middle Ages." The concept of big science is especially timely in a highly charged political environment with the debate focused on the Affordable Care Act, streamlining services and controlling costs. As a result, vital research often gets short shrift. Big science is expensive and time-consuming, but the results can have exponential benefits: the potential for dramatically improved health outcomes throughout the world.

Perhaps it was too good to be true. Two months ago, a team of cosmologists reported that it had spotted the first direct evidence that the newborn universe underwent a mind-boggling exponential growth spurt known as inflation. But last week a new analysis suggested the signal, a subtle pattern in the afterglow of the big bang, or cosmic microwave background (CMB), could be an artifact produced by dust within our own galaxy. "We're certainly not retracting our result," says John Kovac, a cosmologist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and co-leader of the team, which used a specialized telescope at the South Pole known as BICEP2. Others say the BICEP team has already lost its case. "At this time, I think the fair thing to say is that you cannot claim detection-period," says Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University. From 2010 through 2012, BICEP2 peered at a small patch of the CMB to measure the polarization of the microwaves as it varies from point to point. On 17 March, BICEP researchers announced at a press conference in Cambridge that they had spotted ultrafaint pinwheel-like swirls in the sky. Those swirls, or B modes, are most likely traces of gravitational waves rippling through space and time during the 10-32 seconds that inflation lasted, the BICEP team says, and they fulfill a key prediction of the theory of inflation. Many cosmologists hailed the detection as a smoking gun for that theory.

Astronomers eagerly await the launch of the $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope. It will see back in time farther than any space telescope ever has before-back to the first light following the big bang. It will watch the first stars and galaxies form. And it will hunt for distant habitable planets by peering into their atmospheres. Expectations are high for the science that will come from the $8.7 billion James Webb Space Telescope-the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope's four main science instruments are now all in one place, as are its 18 mirror sections. When assembled in space, they will create the largest orbiting mirror ever seen. For more related topic: http://koyalgroupinfomag.com/ https://twitter.com/koyalgroup http://koyalgroup1.blogspot.com/

It was announced in headlines worldwide as one of the biggest scientific discoveries for decades, sure to garner Nobel prizes. But now it looks likely that the alleged evidence of both gravitational waves and ultra-fast expansion of the universe in the big bang (called inflation) has literally turned to dust. Last March, a team using a telescope called Bicep2 at the South Pole claimed to have read the signatures of these two elusive phenomena in the twisting patterns of the cosmic microwave background radiation: the afterglow of the big bang. But this week, results from an international consortium using a space telescope called Planck show that Bicep2's data is likely to have come not from the microwave background but from dust scattered through our own galaxy. Some will regard this as a huge embarrassment, not only for the Bicep2 team but for science itself. Already some researchers have criticised the team for making a premature announcement to the press before their work had been properly peer reviewed.

When you're working in the yard this summer, take a look up: Using a satellite, NASA scientists are paying attention to how healthy your lawn and garden are. Next month, the agency plans to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. Its primary aim is to create a global map of carbon sources and carbon sinks. The OCO-2 mission will provide the most detailed map of photosynthetic fluorescence - that is to say, of how plants glow - ever created. Using this data, scientists should be able to estimate how quickly the world's plants are absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. The applications of the project are wide-ranging, but the science is easy enough to understand. During photosynthesis, a plant absorbs light, then immediately re-emits it at a different wavelength. This is known as fluorescence. In a laboratory setting, botanists can measure the intensity of fluorescence to estimate how actively a plant is photosynthesizing. A satellite could, in theory, detect the light emitted by the world's plants to estimate how much carbon the plants are absorbing. But there has always been a big, fiery problem: the sun.Continue here More discoveries you might want to know about

Western Antartica's immense glaciers are melting fast and giving up ice to the sea at a rate that is considered already past "the point of no return," according to recent research work done by two different groups of scientists. The resulting scenario is compelling: an increase in the world sea levels of 4 feet or more in the next centuries, according to findings announced Monday by scientists from the University of Washington, the University of California-Irvine and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. "It truly is a startlingly disturbing situation," says Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Sridhar Anandakrishnan, who was not associated with any of the research studies. "This is a big part of West Antarctica, and it appears to have been pushed violently over the edge." The researchers claim the glaciers are most certainly bound to be lost. One study confirms that a river of ice named Thwaites Glacier is possibly starting to collapse and that complete collapse is likely to occur. A second research illustrates that six glaciers are giving up ice into the sea at an ever-increasing rate. At that rate, there will be a 4-feet increase in the sea-level, states study author Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California-Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.