#New, Ultrathin Optical devices Shape Light in Exotic Ways Researchers have developed innovative flat, optical lenses as part of a collaboration between NASA Jet propulsion laboratory and the California Institute of technology, both in Pasadena, California.
whereas waves in natural sunlight vibrate in all directions. Manipulating the polarization of light is essential for the operation of advanced microscopes, cameras and displays;
NASA SATELLITES and National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration data sets documented a 115-Degree fahrenheit surface temperature with a omfort indexof 165 degrees on July 31 in the city of Bandar-e Mahshahr.
because it had never been seen before. t just the same as wanting to look at Pluto in more detail
leaving open spaces for the stem cells to expand into before they naturally migrate out of the gel structure altogether to form actual mineralized bone tissue.
but hotspots are regions of volcanic activity at Earth surface that show no obvious association with plate boundaries.
They are thought to form above mantle plumes narrow upwellings of hot rock that originate at the Earth core-mantle boundary
outermost shell of the Earth known as the lithosphere can control the type and volume of hotspot-related volcanic rock at the surface.
and Elias M. Puchner, Phd, a UCSF former postdoctoral fellow who is now assistant professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota.
where critical resources, including reliable electric power, laboratory space, and computational server capacity, are limited often severely,
the carbon nanotubes act as antennas to capture light from the sun or other sources. As the waves of light hit the nanotube antennas,
The research, supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Center and the Army Research Office (ARO
which protect the organisms from negative effects of sunlight, such as DNA damage. The research also shows that the exact manner in which the photoreceptors bind to the DNA is novel.
meaning they have a lot of small spaces for liquid or air to pass through. That porosity is important for batteries
because it creates more space for the storage and transfer of energy, a critical component to improving battery performance.
but even a state-of-the-art humanoid such as NASA Robonaut has only 42 sensors in its hand and wrist.
developed together with researchers at Intelligent Fiber optic Systems Corp.,with support from NASA, Sept. 29 at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2015, in Hamburg, Germany.
and was the study first author. he vertical orientation can save a great deal of space, and that can mean smaller, more efficient personal electronics in the near future.
found in only 0. 0017 percent, by weight, of the Earth crust. Because of that it comparatively expensive,
which is 880 times more abundant in the Earth crust than lithium. The new findings show that it can work effectively with graphite or soft carbon in the anode of an electrochemical battery.
which has remarkable efficiency converting sunlight to electricity. Despite this success, the delicate nature of perovskite a very light, flexible, organic-inorganic hybrid material stalled further development toward its commercialized use.
Their new cell construction extends the cell effective life in air by more than 10 times, with only a marginal loss of efficiency converting sunlight to electricity.
#Comet: A supercomputer for the ong tailof science The San diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San diego this week formally launched omet,
and across a wider range of domains. he launch of Comet marks yet another stage in SDSC leadership in the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem,
Comet is designed to meet the emerging requirements often referred to as the ong tailof sciencehe idea that the large number of modest-sized computationally based research projects represent, in aggregate,
Comet joins SDSC Gordon supercomputer as another key resource within the NSF XSEDE (extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) computer resource-sharing system
SDSC used the formal launch of Comet to also celebrate 30 years as a national resource for advanced computation.
and Society Comet is configured to help transform advanced computing by expanding access and capacity not only among research domains that typically rely on HPCUCH as chemistry
Some of the domains already being served by Comet include: Astrophysics: Supercomputers can greatly accelerate timescales for researching the origins of the universe.
Key Features of Comet: 2 petaflops of overall peak performancene million billion operations or calculations per second.
researchers find A type of bacteria plucked from the bottom of the ocean could be put to work neutralizing large amounts of industrial carbon dioxide in the Earth atmosphere,
Still, Mckenna said he is encouraged by the prospect of discoveries that could ultimately benefit the planet. t shows that it physically possible to take known enzymes such as carbonic anhydrase
flexible film typically used to manufacture flexible printed circuits and the outside layer of spacesuits. Researchers were able to easily peel off the sensors from the curved film without compromising their functioning.
said Uhlmann. oue warping space, so that lines go around the cloaked object rather than through it.
such as digital cameras, night-vision goggles, smoke detectors, surveillance systems, satellites and other devices that rely on electronic light sensors.
#Whopping Galaxy cluster Spotted with Help of NASA Telescopes Astronomers have discovered a giant gathering of galaxies in a very remote part of the universe, thanks to NASA Spitzer space telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE.
The galaxy cluster, located 8. 5 billion light-years away, is the most massive structure yet found at such great distances.
Galaxy clusters are gravitationally bound groups of thousands of galaxies, which themselves each contain hundreds of billions of stars.
The clusters grow bigger and bigger over time as they acquire new members. How did these clusters evolve over time?
astronomers look back in time to our youthful universe. Because light takes time to reach us, we can see very distant objects as they were in the past.
For example, we are seeing the newfound galaxy cluster called Massive Overdense Object (MOO) J1142+1527 as it existed 8. 5 billion years ago, long before Earth formed.
As light from remote galaxies makes its way to us, it becomes stretched to longer, infrared wavelengths by the expansion of space.
That where WISE and Spitzer help out. For infrared space telescopes, picking out distant galaxies is like plucking ripe cherries from a cherry tree.
In the infrared images produced by Spitzer these distant galaxies stand out as red dots, while closer galaxies look white.
Astronomers first combed through the WISE catalog to find candidates for clusters of distant galaxies.
WISE catalogued hundreds of millions of objects in images taken over the entire sky from 2010 to 2011.
They then used Spitzer to narrow in on 200 of the most interesting objects, in a project named the assive and Distant Clusters of WISE Survey, or Madcows.
and WISE that lets us go from a quarter billion objects down to the most massive galaxy clusters in the sky,
The W. M. Keck Observatories and Gemini Observatory on Mauna kea in Hawaii were used to measure the distance to the cluster at 8. 5 billion light-years.
Using data from the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) telescopes near Owens Valley in California,
the scientists were then able to determine that the cluster mass is a quadrillion times that of our sun making it the most massive known cluster that far back in space and time.
according to the scientistsestimates. ased on our understanding of how galaxy clusters grow from the very beginning of our universe,
said co-author Peter Eisenhardt, the project scientist for WISE at NASA Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California.
700 additional galaxy cluster candidates with Spitzer, looking for biggest of the bunch. nce we find the most massive clusters,
we can start to investigate how galaxies evolved in these extreme environments, said Gonzalez n
#Breeding higher yielding crops by increasing sugar import into seeds Once a mother plant releases its embryos to the outside world,
when the plant turns the Sun energy into chemical energy and then transported to the seeds.
cluttered spaces key step in making these small autonomous flying vehicles practical. An emerging class of very small flying drones has taken off in public
But there remains a lot of work to be done toward developing miniature navigation systems, particularly for confined spaces.
and can detect motion in conditions ranging from a poorly lit room to very bright sunlight outdoorshree times faster than fast flying insects,
Benner, who works with NASA trying to find life on other planets, suggests that synthetic biology might also improve the ability to detect new earthly life forms. aybe they exist on earth,
flexible superconducting tapes made of rare-earth barium copper oxide, the ARC reactor can achieve magnetic fields with much higher energyhus enabling a reactor design much smaller than other tokamak-based machines.
Cloud Bigtable is by no means Google's first trip into the cloud-based Nosql database space.
#Nasa confirms water on Mars, increasing chance of alien life Mars has long been known as our barren sister planet but today,
NASA scientists have announced they have found flowing water on the red desert planet. NASA and the Nature Geoscience journal released their findings on a Live Stream announcement stating that the long,
dark streaks found on Mars are a telltale sign of still flowing water on the Martian surface.
These dark features, some of which span 5 meters wide and 100 meters long, were discovered originally in 2010.
Over the last few years eight scientists have been analyzing their light signature and now have concluded that the streaks contain mineral salts that easily absorb moisture.
Judging by images of Martian cliffs taken from orbit, NASA scientists theorize the liquid water runs down canyons
and cater walls during the summer months on Mars. Eventually these dark streaks dry up as the planet's surface cools in autumn.
The only question is where does the water come from? Astrologists suggest it may originate from underground water contained in ice or salty aquifers.
Another likely theory could be the water condenses into a liquid from Mars'atmosphere. To this day, Earth is still the only planet in the known universe with liquid H2o on its surface
and so finding out flowing water once exists on Mars is huge. Beyond the geological discovery, dramatically increases our chances of finding extraterrestrial life.
If life On earth is any indication, water is the central building block to all animals, bacteria and everything else alive today y
Creating a magnetic field for long-term magnetic memory requires power and space, which is why up until now computational
co-senior author of the paper and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State. hat compression helps push the drug out of the microcapsule.
or toxic materials, said Tim Moorsom from the School of Physics & Astronomy at Leeds University,
such as carbon and copper, said co-lead author Fatma Al Maari, also from the University School of Physics & Astronomy. uture technologies,
and Wisconsin have developed a new type of electrode for splitting water with sunlight, harvesting the hydrogen to be used as clean fuel.
Sun-capturing electrodes are designed to absorb as much of the solar spectrum as possible to maximise efficiency.
which he relaunched in collaboration with stars including Madonna and Daft punk. Regional variations Amid the growth in streaming,
ensuring patient privacy. ploaded images often look like a mess of black holes where things have been deleted, but that fine this is not about aesthetics,
who heralded the technology as fundamental transformation in how energy is delivered across the Earth Wall-mounted, with a sleek design,
when sunlight is low, during power cuts or at peak demand times, when electricity costs are highest.
has founded also a private space company, Space X, and is experimenting with a high-speed public transport system called Hyperloop.
Though not much use for capturing vessels in the vacuum of space, the team at the Public University of Navarre in Pamplona,
which is hardly a representative sample for the three billion or so women on the planet. The study also leaves out mention of other factors.
so this is obviously not something that is going to be used to draw the Millennium Falcon into the Death Star any time soon.
#Hendo's hoverboard technology could help NASA control satellites Last October, we rode a hoverboard.
microsatellites. Arx Pax is partnering up with NASA to explore how its technology could be used to move around tiny satellites in space using the MFA technology.
It could allow satellites to more safely dock with each other, for example.""Conveniently all satellites and spacecraft are made of aluminum,
which works just fine.""Henderson explains that his hover engine technology works with any conductive surface
which is to say it doesn't have to float over magnets nor utilize superconductors (like the Lexus hoverboard does).
"but conveniently all satellites and spacecraft are made of aluminum, which works just fine.""Speaking of convenience, sound doesn't travel in a vacuum.
In space, that's probably not a problem. The hover engine essentially creates"swirls of electricity"that form magnetic fields both within the hover engine and the conductive surface.
But in space, of course, the concept of"hovering"doesn't really apply. Instead, Arx Pax believes that using its tech to move around tiny objects in space will mean that they won't have to smack into each other
when they need to pair up. Arx Pax plans to co-develop a prototype with NASA over the course of the next couple of years
and chances are it will be pretty small. Cubesats can be as little as 10cm square, and the hover engine also isn't meant to work over large distances either."
"We're talking on the scale of centimeters,"Henderson notes. But in space, smaller pushes can have larger effects over time than they do under gravity.
Arx Pax may have a humble offices in Los Gatos, but it doesn't have humble ambitions."
This flaw was present on the One Max, Samsung's Galaxy S5, and others that Fireeye leaves unnamed;
#NASA test-fires shuttle engine for SLS rocket A former space shuttle engine roared to life Thursday in Mississippi, billowing steam from a Mississippi stand during a nearly nine-minute test firing.
The test shown live on NASA TV was the third of four preparing upgraded shuttle engines to lift NASA Space Launch System exploration rocket,
The agency is targeting a first launch of the 322-foot SLS rocket and an uncrewed Orion capsule in 2018 from Kennedy space center launch pad 39b.
and NASA plans to restart production of the RS-25. Two stretched versions of shuttle solid rocket boosters also will help lift the SLS rocket early in flight, for at least the first two launches,
and they also will not be recovered as they were with shuttles. A first SLS launch with a crew is possible by 2022
sending two astronauts around the moon
#Europe's top court rejects'Safe harbor'ruling Europe's top court on Tuesday ruled that a 15-year-old agreement allowing American companies to handle Europeans'data was invalid,
which uses the Galaxy Note 4 as the display in a set of goggles. In that environment
Given its size and influence in the device space, Google Project Fi could help accelerate the adoption of Wi-fi First through a couple of key moves.
Samsung unveiled the new Galaxy Note 5 phablet and the plus-sized Galaxy S6 Edge Plus at the press event Thursday n
#Every company now a software company, continued In this space, we've talked about the great shift that has been taking place across the business landscape--that is, every company,
Aerospace companies, consulting firms, retailers and even educational institutions are exploring these new universes. Thanks to cloud
and increased choice for consumers and pointed out that Samsung's new Galaxy S6 included pre-installed apps from rivals."
and can disinfect an entire room-including shadowed spaces-from one location, eliminating the need to move it to multiple places.
TRU-D's system analyzes the variables of the room and floods the space (both line-of-site and shadowed spaces) with the proper dose of UV LIGHT energy.
and that has led to lots of activity in the space. TRU-D's biggest competitor is Xenex,
"The newest competitor in the space is Clorox, which is known for its manually applied disinfectants.
This new tool brings historical precipitation reconstruction from a'rocket science'to a'toy science.'
and lead author Jingchuan Sun. This discovery suggests that a single ORC rather than the commonly believed two-ORC system loads both helicase rings.
and measured how microbes in the seafloor sediments consume the greenhouse gas methane as part of understanding how the Earth works.
--and pretty much every ocean basin in the world noted Thurber an assistant professor (senior research) in Oregon State's College of Earth Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences The study is important scientists say
By contrast all of the planet's gas and oil deposits are thought to total about 200-300 gigatons of carbon.
#Earths magnetic field could flip within a human lifetime Imagine the world waking up one morning to discover that all compasses pointed south instead of north.
Earth's magnetic field has flipped--though not overnight--many times throughout the planet's history. Its dipole magnetic field like that of a bar magnet remains about the same intensity for thousands to millions of years but for incompletely known reasons it occasionally weakens
Sprain and Paul Renne director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and a UC Berkeley professor-in-residence of earth and planetary science are coauthors of the study
Flip could affect electrical grid cancer ratesthe discovery comes as new evidence indicates that the intensity of Earth's magnetic field is decreasing 10 times faster than normal leading some geophysicists to predict a reversal within a few
Though a magnetic reversal is a major planet-wide event driven by convection in Earth's iron core there are no documented catastrophes associated with past reversals despite much searching in the geologic and biologic record.
And since Earth's magnetic field protects life from energetic particles from the sun and cosmic rays both
and why Earth's magnetic field episodically reverses polarity Renne said. The magnetic record the Italian-led team obtained shows that the sudden 180-degree flip of the field was preceded by a period of instability that spanned more than 6000 years.
#Rediscovering Venus to find faraway Earths: Measuring gravitational pull of a planet should speed search Astronomers Chih-Hao Li
and David Phillips of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics want to rediscover Venus--that familiar nearby planet stargazers can see with the naked eye much of the year.
Granted humans first discovered Venus in ancient times. But Li and Phillips have something distinctly modern in mind.
They plan to find the second planet again using a powerful new optical device installed on the Italian National Telescope that will measure Venus'precise gravitational pull on the sun
. If they succeed their first-of-its-kind demonstration of this new technology will be used for finding Earthlike exoplanets orbiting distant stars.
We are building a telescope that will let us see the sun the way we would see other stars said Phillips who is a staff scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Astronomers have identified more than 1700 exoplanets some as far as hundreds of light years away. Most were discovered by the traditional transit method
when a planet orbiting a distant star transits that luminous body moving directly between the Earth
and the star This provides information about the planet's size but not its mass.
which offers complementary information about the mass of the distant planet. From this information astronomers will be able to determine
whether distant exoplanets they discover are rocky worlds like Earth or less dense gas giants like Jupiter.
The method is precise enough to help astronomers identify Earthlike planets in the habitable zone the orbital distance sweet-spot where water exists as a liquid.
Better Precision with a Laserthe radial velocity method works by measuring how exoplanet gravity changes the light emitted from its star.
As exoplanets circle a star their gravitation tugs at the star changing the speed with
which it moves toward or away from Earth by a small amount. The star speeds up slightly as it approaches Earth with each light wave taking a fraction of a second less time to arrive than the wave before it.
To an observer On earth the crests of these waves look closer together than they should so they appear to have a higher frequency and look bluer.
As the star recedes the crests move further apart and the frequencies seem lower and redder.
This motion-based frequency change is known as the Doppler shift. Astronomers measure it by capturing the spectrum of a star on the pixels of a digital camera
and watching how it changes over time. Today's best spectrographs are only capable of measuring Doppler shifts caused by velocity changes of 1 meter per second or more.
Only large gas giants or super-earths close to their host stars have enough gravity to cause those changes.
however will be able to detect Doppler shifts as small as 10 centimeters per second--small enough to find habitable zone Earthlike planets even from hundreds of light years away.
This way we can compare data we take tonight with data from the same star five years from now
Their new version of the astro-comb lets astronomers measure green light --which is better for finding exoplanets.
The stars we look at are brightest in the green visible range and this is the range spectrographs are built to handle Phillips said.
Building the green astro-comb was a challenge since the researchers needed to convert red laser light to green frequencies.
The researchers plan to test the green astro-comb by pointing it at our sun analyzing its spectrum to see
when we point our spectrographs at distant stars Li said. The Harvard-Smithsonian team is installing this device on the High-Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher-North (HARPS-N) a new spectrograph designed to search for exoplanets using the Italian National Telescope.
We will look at the thousands of potential exoplanets identified by the Kepler satellite telescope by the transit method.
Together our two methods can tell us a lot about those worlds Li said. And because he will have discovered already Venus he will be more certain of the answers s
#Is matter falling into the massive black hole at the center of the Milky way or being ejected from it?
Is matter falling into the massive black hole at the center of the Milky way or being ejected from it?
Carl Gwinn a professor in UCSB's Department of physics and colleagues have analyzed images collected by the Russian spacecraft Radioastron.
Radioastron was launched into orbit from Baikonur Kazakhstan in July 2011 with several missions one of which was to investigate the scattering of pulsars--the cores of dead stars--by interstellar gas.
What the team found led them to examine additional observations of Sagittarius A-Star (A*)the source that marks the Milky way's central black hole.
Sagittarius A is visible at radio infrared and X-ray wavelengths. This massive black hole--which contains 4 million solar masses--does not emit radiation
but is visible from the gas around it. The gas is being acted upon by the black hole's very strong gravitational field.
The wavelengths that make Sagittarius A*visible are scattered by interstellar gas along the line of sight in the same way that light is scattered by fog On earth.
Gwinn and his colleagues found that the images taken by Radioastron contained small spots. I was surprised quite to find that the effect of scattering produced images with small lumps in the overall smooth image explained Gwinn.
--and the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West virginia showed the presence of lumps in the image of Sagittarius A*.Recent upgrades have increased greatly the sensitivity of these telescopes.
The theory and observations allow us to make statements about the interstellar gas responsible for the scattering
and about the emission region around the black hole Johnson said. It turns out that the size of that emission region is only 20 times the diameter of the event horizon as it would be seen from Earth.
With additional observations we can begin to understand the behavior in this extreme environment. While no scientific team has been able to produce a complete image of the black hole's emission astronomers have drawn inferences about scattering properties from observations at longer wavelengths.
From these they can extrapolate those properties to 1 centimeter and use that to make a rough estimate of the size of the source Gwinn said.
and his colleagues directly confirm these indirect inferences about the size of Sagittarius A*they were also able to provide new information about fluctuations in the interstellar gas that cause scattering.
This will be important for future research on the gas near this black hole. This work is a good example of the synergy between different modern research infrastructures technologies and science ideas.
A friendly international race is going on to see who will be the first to image the black hole's emissions
whether gas falls into the black hole or is being ejected in the form of a jet.
and we can get closer to the black hole. We may be able to extract more information than just the size of the emission region.
We might possibly be able to make a simple image of how matter falls into a black hole
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