The world's most powerful laser that took $5 billion and a decade recently debuted with a special dedicated at the Livermore National Laboratory in California. The laser is housed inside a football field sized building called the National Ignition Facility. The AP says the laser was designed to help ensure the reliability of the nation's aging nuclear weapons but it could also be used one day to create a more efficient energy source. In 2010, NIF will focus the intense energy of 192 giant laser beams on a BB-sized target filled with hydrogen fuel - fusing, or igniting, the hydrogen atoms' nuclei in the world's first controlled thermonuclear reaction. You can read how the NIF works here.
National Geographic researchers are trying to collect DNA samples from the platypus to determine whether there are separate subspecies of the duck-billed mammals. The male platypus has a spur on its hind foot that can deliver painful venom so they have to be handled carefully.
NASA's Swift satellite recently discovered the most distant object in the Universe. The object is the afterglow of a self-destructing star located 13.1 billion light years from Earth.
NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers have found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or less than five percent of its present age. The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen.
"Swift was designed to catch these very distant bursts," said Swift lead scientist Neil Gehrels at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The incredible distance to this burst exceeded our greatest expectations -- it was a true blast from the past."
At 3:55 a.m. EDT on April 23, Swift detected a ten-second-long gamma-ray burst of modest brightness. It quickly pivoted to bring its ultraviolet/optical and X-ray telescopes to observe the burst location. Swift saw a fading X-ray afterglow but none in visible light.
"The burst most likely arose from the explosion of a massive star," said Derek Fox at Pennsylvania State University. "We're seeing the demise of a star -- and probably the birth of a black hole -- in one of the universe's earliest stellar generations."
Here's a video that shows a computer graphic animation of the distant object.
