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This week, NASA unveiled its preliminary budget plans for the coming years. The budget request contains $1.36 billion for planetary science. The Mars rover Opportunity, however, is slated to receive no money in 2016. NASA officials said that the budget was a matter of balancing priorities in a time of limited funds, and that if there continued to be a scientific need for Opportunity, the agency would look for ways to continue funding the project. Steven Squyres, the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, says that he’s still excited about the rover’s science prospects, and expects that funding for continued operations will be restored.

How Budget Plans on Earth Might Stop Opportunity Rover on Mars

Ryan Rykaczewski describes one of the most massive migrations on the planet, driven by the sun. Image by Tintinnidguy (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons 

#ExplainTheSun  - The Largest Migration on The Planet

Once, there was the ordinary incandescent light bulb. It shone brightly, but wasted much of the energy put into it as heat. Then came the compact fluorescent. And as costs have dropped, consumers have increasingly been switching to light-emitting diode (LED) technology for many lighting applications, in an ongoing search for a more efficient bulb. Now, in work published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, researchers report that nanophotonic devices may be able to breathe new life into old incandescent technology. Marin Soljačić and Ognjen Ilic, two authors of the study, explain how they’ve been able to “recycle” some of the incandescent bulb’s wasted heat and re-emit it as visible light, boosting efficiency.

For the Lowly Incandescent Bulb, a Ray of Hope

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How Budget Plans on Earth Might Stop Opportunity Rover on Mars

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