For centuries, the creation of the universe has loomed large in human thought, cropping up in everything from ancient folklore to modern scientific theories. A newly-developed nano-sized device, 100 times smaller than the thickness of human hair and capable of detecting infrared light that dates back to the "big bang," could soon give us more food for thought concerning the galaxy's formation 14 billion years ago.

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Snug in Earth’s orbit, Hubble is free from the background glare that earthly telescopes must fight to see the stars. This allows its supersensitive camera to take better photos of galaxies farther away—and thus much dimmer—than any optical telescope on the ground can. But despite being closer to the moon than any other telescope, there’s no way the scope could snap a photo of that one small step man took 40 years ago.

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Considering the birth rate, astronomers might have named this the Rabbit Galaxy. According to a new paper in today’s issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers have discovered a galaxy that birthed stars 400 times faster than our Milky Way, overturning previously held ideas about the formation of giant galaxies

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Mammoth-sized blimps may work well as advertising tools, but soon they could be doing a lot more work than that. Aerospace and defense corporation Boeing and Canadian company SkyHook International are working together to create a 302-foot-long airship with rotors that can haul heavy loads—double the capacity of the biggest helicopter—across remote regions at a lower fuel and environmental cost.

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These detailed views of the red planet were transmitted to Earth by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). After a 72-million-mile trek through space, the craft reached Mars in March 2006, delivering some of the most advanced technology ever sent to another world.

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Now that the glitches caused by the Martian soil's clumpy consistency have been shaken out, the Phoenix Lander has been able to cook up a few samples to test the soil composition. The preliminary results are surprising even to the chemists at work on the project: the soil is alkaline, and much more so than anyone expected. The analysis has found trace amounts of magnesium, sodium, potassium, and other elements similar to those in the soil on Earth. On first pass, Martian dirt appears to be non-toxic and laden with the basic nutrients necessary to support life.

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Along with satellites and space stations, Earth is surrounded by tens of millions of pieces of floating space debris. Like any landfill, the trash is diverse, ranging from dead satellites to castaway rocket parts to flecks of paint. On average, over the past 40 years, one piece of space junk has fallen to Earth every day.

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At this moment, in the constellation Taurus, a planet is forming in the dust and debris surrounding the star HL Tau. The protoplanet, named HL Tau b, may be the youngest yet discovered.

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A couple of days ago, it was big news when ice was found on Mars. Now, an upcoming study in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta claims that the Martian environment was once wet enough to produce morning dew. This finding runs counter to the more widely accepted view that liquid water on Mars seeped up from the ground, rather than falling from the sky as precipitation.

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Skin guns. Organ printers. Pig dust. Biochemist Alan Russell believes tools like these could one day be standard-issue for the battlefield medic. The skin gun would heal burns. The organ printer would replace badly wounded livers, kidneys, even hearts. And the pig dust?

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When it launches in 2009, NASA's Kepler Mission will include the most sensitive detection system ever put into service for discovering exosolar planets. In the meantime, our toolkit on Earth is getting better with each passing year. Astronomers using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at La Silla Observatory in Chile have discovered three new rocky planets orbiting a single star, all within ten times the size of Earth.

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NASA spent $420 million to send the Phoenix Lander to Mars last year. Festooned with state-of-the-art detection equipment, the rover's task was to scour the red surface in search of elusive Martian ice. And today, the NASA mission finally did uncover some extraterrestrial frost, and it did it with its simplest tool, a shovel.

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If the paranoid blogosphere is to be believed, every morning a group of plasma-physics grad students wakes up at a research facility in Gakona, Alaska, 200 miles north of Anchorage, and prepares for another day of playing God. It’s cold, dark as a mineshaft in winter, and the day’s work does little to cheer the mood. Depending on the unpredictable agendas of military scientists, this group of technicians must shoot radio waves into the upper reaches of our atmosphere to create missile shields, eviscerate enemy satellites, set off the occasional earthquake, or control the minds of millions of people.

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For as long as humans have looked to the night sky to divine meaning and a place in the universe, we have let our minds wander to thoughts of distant worlds populated by beings unlike ourselves. The ancient Greeks were the first Western thinkers to consider formally the possibility of an infinite universe housing an infinite number of civilizations.

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Although it's only one part of the answer, we have come another step closer to solving the question of how life originated. Two necessary molecular ingredients of DNA and RNA have been confirmed to have originated from outer space. They join the handful of amino acids we have discovered to have been delivered to Earth on the backs of asteroids and comets.

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