Plants, crops and trees naturally absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) during photosynthesis and then pump surplus carbon through their roots into the earth around them. In most soils, this carbon can escape back to the atmosphere or enters groundwater.

Knowing this, a team from Newcastle University aims to design soils that can remove carbon from the atmosphere, permanently and cost-effectively using soils containing calcium-bearing silicates.

Calcium silicates are minerals that occur naturally in many different rocks and also in artificial materials such as concrete.

Astronomers have spied a faraway star system that is so unusual, it was one of a kind - and then its discovery helped them pinpoint a second one much closer to home.

They discovered the first star system 13 million light years away, tucked inside Holmberg IX, a small galaxy that is orbiting the larger galaxy M81. They studied it between January and October 2007 with the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mt. Graham in Arizona.

The star system is unusual, because it’s what the astronomers have called a “yellow supergiant eclipsing binary” -- it contains two very bright, massive yellow stars that are very closely orbiting each other. In fact, the stars are so close together that a large amount of stellar material is shared between them, so that the shape of the system resembles a peanut.

UC Irvine scientists have discovered a cluster of galaxies in a very early stage of formation that is 11.4 billion light years from Earth – the farthest of its kind ever to be detected. These galaxies are so distant that the universe was in its infancy when their light was emitted.

The galaxy proto-cluster, named LBG-2377, is giving scientists an unprecedented look at galaxy formation and how the universe has evolved. Before this discovery, the farthest known event like this was approximately 9 billion light years away.

“When you observe objects this far away, you are actually seeing the universe as it was a very long time ago,” said Jeff Cooke, a McCue Postdoctoral Fellow in physics and astronomy at UCI and lead author of this study. “It is as if a timeline is just sitting out there in front of you. These galaxies represent what the universe looked like well before the Earth existed.”

The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research has a couple of interesting things in the works, the first being next generation media storage. Dutch researcher Alexander le Fèbre has demonstrated that a field-emission current signal can be used to arrange the position of thousands of nanometre-sharp needles. These probes can be applied to write and read in new storage media with an extremely high density, using bits on a nanometre scale.

The development of the hard disk is reaching its technical limits because the entire disk is served by just a single head so the capacity of the disk and the reading and writing speed cannot expand much more in the future. Research into a memory based on probes from the University of Twente’s MESA+ research institute means able to control the position of each separate probe - essential for realizing a system with extremely high densities.

NGC 2397, pictured in this image from Hubble, is a classic spiral galaxy with long prominent dust lanes along the edges of its arms, seen as dark patches and streaks silhouetted against the starlight. Hubble’s exquisite resolution allows the study of individual stars in nearby galaxies.

Located nearly 60 million light-years away from Earth, the galaxy NGC 2397 is typical of most spirals, with mostly older, yellow and red stars in its central portion, while star formation continues in the outer, bluer spiral arms. The brightest of these young, blue stars can be seen individually in this high resolution view from the Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).

New Jersey Institute of Technolgy math professor Bruce Bukiet is once again opining on outcomes for this season’s Major League Baseball teams. His picks are based on a mathematical model he developed in 2000.

Bukiet’s main areas of research have involved mathematical modeling of physical phenomena, including detonation waves, healing of wounds, and dynamics of human balance. He has also applied mathematical modeling to sports and gambling, in particular for understanding baseball and cricket. Bukiet is an avid Mets fan but no one should hold that against him.