Scientists have spotted a new ring around Saturn - the largest planetary ring seen yet in the solar system.

Nasa is planning a lunar dust-up to test a theory about the presence of water on the moon.

A NASA spacecraft and its trusty rocket stage are drawing ever closer to the moon to intentionally crash to their doom Friday, all in the name of science.

In recent years scientists have made synthetic versions of key parts of the cell, such as chromosomes and ribosomes. Now researchers have developed the first working artificial prototype of an “organ” of a human cell--the Golgi apparatus.Made up of a network of sacs piled together like a stack of pancakes, the Golgi apparatus chemically modifies proteins to help make them stable and functional, and it helps to manufacture complex sugars. But it remains one of the most poorly understood organelles. “The sacs are fluid and constantly change shape, so it’s difficult to get a handle on,” explains Robert Linhardt, a chemist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “And while we know the general direction of the flow of vesicles between stacks, we don’t really know what cargoes they’re carrying.” [More]

The rooftop of a Paris skyscraper is to be transformed into a cosmic-ray laboratory in an unusual week-long experiment.

(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) NASA and JAXA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission captured rainfall within Typhoon Melor as it was approaching Japan. TRMM revealed that Melor lost its symmetrical structure with most of the rain now to the north of the center.

FAJARDO, Puerto Rico--I first heard about Matt Hedman's talk while going out to dinner on Tuesday night. Best talk of the meeting, I was told. Everywhere I went yesterday, I kept hearing about this guy Matt Hedman. A former professor of mine chided me for missing his presentation. The problem with the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting is that you have to make hard choices about which of many parallel sessions to go to, and clearly I'd made the wrong choice on Tuesday afternoon. Fortunately, I caught up with Hedman today and learned what is causing all the fuss. [More]

The astronomy community, amateurs and professionals alike, will turn its attention to the moon early tomorrow morning in the hopes of confirming the long-suspected presence of water ice trapped in permanently shadowed areas near the lunar poles (not to mention the drama of seeing two man-made objects crash into the moon). A research collaboration showed last month that water exists at very low levels across the lunar surface , but concentrated ice deposits would likely be a more accessible and abundant resource. [More]

FAJARDO, Puerto Rico--A fascinating idea came up in an informal chat I had yesterday with asteroid expert Erik Asphaug of the university of California, Santa Cruz. The early solar system was a veritable shooting gallery. Our moon is thought to have formed when a Mars-size body hit Earth and threw out a cloud of debris that coalesced in orbit around our young planet. In his talk Monday at the annual Division for Planetary Sciences meeting here, Asphaug reported that the incoming body had to hit at a fairly low velocity. Any faster, and the debris would have scattered into interplanetary space. In that case, whatever body coalesced would not have been a moon, but a planet in its own right. Riffing on his talk, Asphaug has a provocative answer for one of my favorite questions in planetary science: Why doesn't Venus have a moon ? How did it manage to dodge all the bullets flying around the early solar system? Asphaug suggests that maybe it didn't. Maybe Venus got hit worse than we did, s

(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) NASA begins a series of flights Oct. 15 to study changes to Antarctica's sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets. The flights are part of Operation Ice Bridge, a six-year campaign that is the largest airborne survey ever made of ice at Earth's polar regions.