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Scientists Detect Earth-Equivalent Amount of Water Within the Moon There is water inside the moon - so much, in fact, that in some places it rivals the amount of water found within Earth. The finding from a scientific team including Brown University comes from the first-ever measurements of water in lunar melt inclusions. Those measurements show that some parts of the lunar mantle have as much water as Earth's upper mantle. Lunar melt inclusions are tiny globules of molten rock trapped within crystals that are found in volcanic glass deposits formed during explosive eruptions. The new finding, published this week in Science Express, shows lunar magma water contents 100 times higher than previous studies have suggested. The result is the culmination of years of investigation by the team searching for water and other volatiles in volcanic glasses returned by NASA Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a paper in Nature in 2008, the same team led by...

Scientists from the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville have determined that an inexpensive semiconductor material can be "tweaked" to generate hydrogen from water using sunlight. The research, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, was led by Professors Madhu Menon and R. Michael Sheetz at the University of Kentucky Center for Computational Sciences, and Professor Mahendra Sunkara and graduate student Chandrashekhar Pendyala at the University of Louisville Conn Center for Renewable Energy Research. Their findings were published Aug. 1 in the Physical Review B. The researchers say their findings are a triumph for computational sciences, one that could potentially have profound implications for the future of solar energy. Using state-of-the-art theoretical computations, the University of Kentucky-University of Louisville team demonstrated that an alloy formed by a 2 percent substitution of antimony (Sb) in gallium nitride (GaN) has the right electri...