This is a large and unexpected step towards understanding the mystery of the birth of disc galaxies says Junko Ueda from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Ueda and her team made the observations using data from the ALMA radio telescope. Computer simulations suggested that
when galaxies merge they usually form a single blob-shaped galaxy classed as elliptical. However most of the galaxies in the universe are shaped pancake disc galaxies such as lenticular galaxies and our own spiral Milky way.
#Water-splitter could make hydrogen fuel on Mars Making fuel on site for a return trip to Mars may be a step closer.
Hydrogen fuel cells can power vehicles ranging from cars to submarines and rockets. They can also heat buildings
and double as portable power-packs for computers or other kit used in the field. But existing methods for creating usable hydrogen gas from water require a lot of electricity.
That means renewable energy sources like wind or sunlight which are often patchy are not reliable enough.
It can also be hazardous to scale up artificial leaves which make fuel from sunlight just like plants says Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow UK.
This is because the low powers available don't produce the gases quickly enough to keep them apart once they form.
All they do is build up oxygen and hydrogen until they explode he says. Cronin and his colleagues see this as a major obstacle to a future in which hydrogen fuel replaces oil.
To get around it they built a device that uses a single pulse of power to split water so continuous energy is needed not.
The device zaps water with electricity to release oxygen then a silicon-based chemical mediator dissolved in the water mops up stray protons and electrons.
whether Cronin's device will be able to compete with other existing processes says Steve Reece a water-splitting expert at Lockheed martin in Cambridge Massachusetts.
one of the cornerstones of the Nobel prizewinning discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating had never been tested directly.
The discovery hinged on the assumption that certain kinds of supernovae detonate in thermonuclear explosions that have fixed a amount of energy
when Steve Fossey of University college London and his students stumbled upon a type IA supernova in M82 or the Cigar galaxy.
In a single degenerate system the shock wave from the white dwarf explosion should smash into the surrounding gas from the companion star generating radio waves.
Pérez-Torres and colleagues saw no radio waves so concluded SN 2014j probably began as two white dwarfs.
#Spot ET's waste heat for chance to find alien life RATHER than searching for aliens phoning home scientists are looking for signs of the homes themselves.
if these sorts of energy-hungry civilisations exist WISE should have detected them Wright says. But identifying them is another story.
and physics that govern the universe says astronomer Geoff Marcy of the University of California Berkeley.
This work is useful no matter what because it's cataloguing the mid-infrared of our stars
This article appeared in print under the headline Spot ET's waste heat for chance to find alien lif f
#Largest laser gives diamond a record-setting squeeze Diamond has been subjected to the wrath of the world's largest laser
Chemical modelling suggests pressure deep inside the planets would crush it into a rain of diamond chips
and perhaps create chunks of diamond large enough to impress even the Kardashians. But until now no one had been able to replicate such pressures On earth
Our experiment provides the first actual data of diamonds under such high pressure says Ray Smith at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Using the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Livermore Smith's team bombarded tiny targets with 176 laser beams to put the squeeze on diamond.
The team fixed a diamond inside a hole cut in a small gold cylinder and then precisely timed laser pulses to strike the cylinder's interior walls.
This caused the gold to emit an avalanche of X-rays that bombarded the stone triggering powerful compression waves inside it.
From start to finish each run of the experiment lasted only about 20 nanoseconds much faster than the blink of an eye
During that short time the team was able to squeeze diamond to pressures of up to 5 terapascals about 50 million times the atmospheric pressure On earth's surface.
The team's data can now be used to improve models of gas giants and the suspected diamond in their depths.
These findings contribute to an ongoing effort to put together an understanding of the cores of giant planets says Stevenson.
Nikku Madhusudhan at the University of Cambridge says the results can also aid our understanding of the insides of diamond planets.
but are rich in carbon rather than silica and may contain large layers of diamond. His team reported on models of such a world dubbed 55 Cancri e in October 2012.
The present result is extremely valuable because we can now use direct experimental data to model the deep interiors of carbon-rich planets says Madhusudhan.
Journal reference: Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature1352 2
#Cool planet hints at potential for life in double stars It's a cool planet in a tight spot.
It's just that the mathematics of focusing is disrupted by the planet's gravity he says.
The mysterious rock may be known the first piece of the bullet that sparked an explosion of life on early Earth.
Roughly 100 fossil meteorites have emerged from the limestone quarry west of Stockholm which is being mined for flooring.
when Earth experienced a mysterious burst of new species. Now miners working in the Swedish quarry have found a meteorite fragment that is not an L chondrite.
Analysing its microscopic crystals Birger Schmitz at Lund University and his colleagues found that the rock dates to the same time period
David Harper at Durham University UK agrees. The team may at last have identified the impactor responsible for the break up of the parent body of the L chondrite meteorites he says.
#How to cash in on cheap Earth-watching satellites THERE ARE some big plans brewing for small satellites. With hordes of cheap orbiters filling the skies researchers
and start-ups are promising a powerful new perspective on earthly activities that range from global commerce to perfecting the art of mining landfills for recyclable materials.
On 10 june Google acquired Skybox Imaging a 5-year-old Silicon valley firm for $500 million.
The appeal for Google and other firms is the potential to mine profitable data from satellite images.
For instance commodity traders might pay top dollar for detailed information on the level of oil in Saudi arabia's storage facilities.
Predicting retail activity a key economic indicator could be done by counting vehicles in the car parks of supermarkets and malls.
Google has said it will use the images to improve Google earth and its Maps app though that is likely to be just the beginning of its plans.
It wants to hire satellites already in orbit to prospect landfill sites for potentially valuable materials.
Landfill mining isn't new but it's tremendously expensive. There are 25000 active or historic landfills in the UK but finding out
what might be in them means drilling about a hundred 25-metre-deep holes into each one to extract core samples.
Each core costs around £1200. Still the incentive to mine landfills is large. In the US and UK only about half of aluminium drinks cans are recycled
Then there are rare-earth metals that could be retrieved from discarded electronics along with bits of tin copper and gold.
If the satellite gives us 1000 potential sites from the 25000 in the UK we would then use drone reconnaissance to get a richer picture of say the wood cover
We could also use other sensors to assess methane outgassing levels and explosion risk. Initially the firm plans to use information collected by European space agency satellites
or deforestation he says. And with an open software interface anyone will be able to develop apps that use the imagery.
This article appeared in print under the headline Prize in the sk s
#Crystal cocoons kept bacteria safe in space ASTEROIDS have a killer reputation taking the blame for death and destruction on massive scales.
But it did not yet have an ozone layer to shield the surface from the sun's harshest ultraviolet rays.
In 2002 a team led by astrobiologist Charles Cockell at the University of Edinburgh UK discovered a unique group of cyanobacteria in Haughton crater in northern Canada.
Cockell's team found that the altered crystal structure of the rocks absorbed and reflected UV rays.
but there have been countless space rock strikes in Earth's history. That raised a whole bunch of questions about
Alexandra Pontefract at the University of Western Ontario in Canada says the ISS experiment is a fantastic proof of concept.
if any of these cells would remain viable in that type of environment. Asteroid and comet impacts are ubiquitous in the solar system
This article appeared in print under the headline Space rock strikes protected early lif f
or by activity from the host star and they say a massive rocky world is the best explanation for the data.
Calculations by geophysicists previously suggested that gravity should compress planets so much that rocky worlds can't get bigger than twice Earth's size says Kepler team member Geoff Marcy at the University of California Berkeley.
The new vehicle has simple silvery walls seats for up to seven passengers and a set of flatscreen control panels.
But the craft does include touchscreen interfaces to control the spacecraft as well as manual buttons for critical functions that would be needed in case of emergency.
Passengers on the Dragon V2 won't get much leg room (Image: Spacex) NASA ASTRONAUTS are not set to ride in the Dragon V2 until 2017.
It will no longer be heroic to go to space it will become a commodity and it's about time says John Logsdon a space policy expert at George washington University's Elliott School of International affairs in WASHINGTON DC.
What will count is what people do once they get there e
#Baby model cosmos grows up to look like the real thing A supercomputer simulation has tracked the evolution of the universe from a mere 12 million years after the big bang until the present day.
It is the first to produce realistic-looking galaxies by the thousands and a triumph for our current understanding of the history of the universe.
Instead of forcing the units to stay in a rigid grid the team allowed them to shift making the simulation more accurate as well as more computationally efficient than previous ones.
and supermassive black holes pulling in material that gets too Close to run the simulation the team used several supercomputers in Europe and the US each
of which contained many central processing units or CPUS. By contrast an ordinary computer might have just one.
The entire simulation took 16 million CPU hours which means that running it on a single normal computer would take nearly 2000 years.
The resulting cosmos was almost indistinguishable from the real one we see today. As a demonstration the team compared a simulated version of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field observation to the real thing
which was made when the Hubble space telescope stared at one spot in the sky for nearly 12 days.
This is like simulating the whole US where previously it was like just simulating your neighbourhood says Michael Boylan-Kolchin at the University of Maryland in College Park who led one of the largest previous simulations called Millennium-II.
The more we can get at these processes by trying to make realistic galaxies and seeing what works and
An unexpected pattern has been glimpsed in the solar wind the turbulent plasma of charged particles that streams from the sun. It offers clues for handling plasmas that roil inside nuclear fusion reactors On earth.
Now Sandra Chapman of the University of Warwick UK and her colleagues have examined the solar wind's behaviour using NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft.
when the movement of the wind's particles is perpendicular to the sun's magnetic field they resemble a fluid with sections that are smooth interrupted by bursts of violence.
If you look out of a plane window you see mountain ranges and then long rolling plains.
Snowflakes shorelines and most recently black holes (see Turbulent black holes grow fractal skins as they feed) also exhibit such fractal behaviour.
The result may help to control nuclear fusion reactors. These create energy in the same way as the sun by fusing a superheated plasma of hydrogen nuclei to form helium.
One problem with optimising their energy output is deducing what is going on inside them inserting a probe isn't an option as it would melt.
Enter the solar wind. Though less dense and cooler than the hydrogen of a fusion reactor the wind is a plasma
and can be probed thanks to STEREO. The great thing about solar wind turbulence is that the satellites sit right inside
By adding the fractal behaviour to their plasma models fusion scientists may be able to control turbulence
which can cause plasma to escape the magnetic field containing it in the reactor. They may also be able to use turbulence to disrupt high energy plasma blobs that can rip holes in the reactor.
These results look very promising says Todd Evans of nuclear energy firm General Atomics in San diego California.
This article appeared in print under the headline Sunny surprise for fusion reactor r
#Canada uses satellite to scold Russia over Ukraine Canada has blocked the launch of a satellite aboard a Russian rocket as a result of tensions over Russia's actions in Ukraine.
The move is a step up from a largely symbolic US ban on cooperating with Russia in space earlier this month.
and was due to be shipped to the launch site in Baikonur Kazakhstan. Recognising the current events in Ukraine we had been engaged in discussions with the government of Canada with respect to a potential delay of the launch of M3m
But unlike the US Canada doesn't have its own vehicles capable of launching a satellite into orbit
Now a team led by Robert Quimby at the University of Tokyo Japan has confirmed the first case of this lensing effect in a type 1a supernova:
There were good data taken before during and after the supernova and none of these showed obvious signs of a foreground object says Quimby.
I'm impressed they could find this thing says Brian Schmidt at the Australian National University in Canberra.
The waves were said to be the smoking gun evidence for the theory of inflation which suggests that space expanded faster than the speed of light in the first moments after the universe's birth.
or align the electromagnetic fields of photons they came into contact with in the infant universe.
Magnetic field lines threading through those shells should get compressed and aligned causing some of the material to line up as well.
If the aligned dust contains iron the particles'slight vibrations due to their own heat would produce polarised microwave radiation says Mertsch.
Mertsch and his colleagues led by Hao Liu at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark plotted the positions of these loops.
arxiv. org/abs/1404.189 9
#NASA'flying saucer'for Mars to land in Hawaii In June while beachgoers in Hawaii sit blissfully unaware a flying saucer will descend over the island of Kauai.
and one day people on the surface of Mars. The Low density supersonic decelerator (LDSD) will be lofted into the stratosphere from the US NAVY's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai.
The inflatable technology is intended to help slow down vehicles after they enter the thin Martian atmosphere at supersonic speeds.
rockets and aerodynamic drag. Until recently NASA had used parachutes and airbags for most robotic landings on Mars starting with the Viking mission in 1976.
But the heavier the load the harder it is to come in softly. For the car-sized Curiosity NASA invented an ambitious system called the sky crane
which combined parachutes with landing gear powered by retrorockets that could lower the rover to the surface on tethers.
The LDSD design solves this quandary using a balloon-like decelerator and a giant parachute twice the size of Curiosity's. The decelerator would attach to the outer rim of a capsule-like entry vehicle.
When the capsule is travelling at about Mach 3. 5 the device would rapidly inflate like a Hawaiian pufferfish to increase surface area.
To simulate Mars's thin atmosphere On earth the team in Hawaii will first lift a test vehicle fitted with the LDSD system to about 37 kilometres above the Pacific ocean using a high-altitude balloon.
Think about it like a bridge for humans to Mars. This is the next step in a sequence of technologies that would need to be developed d
Cassini scientist Luciano Iess at the Sapienza University of Rome Italy and colleagues have mapped now Enceladus's gravity
Europa meanwhile appears to be covered entirely by an ocean sandwiched between a rocky core and a thin ice crust.
Data from NASA's Galileo probe which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 show clay-like minerals on Europa's surface probably debris from meteor impacts
And Jupiter's strong magnetic field means that intense radiation surrounds the moon which makes it difficult for spacecraft to operate.
For now Europa is slightly ahead in terms of funding. NASA's budget for next year includes $15 million to design possible missions there
so seeing molecules would suggest something is replenishing them hinting at possible biological activity. Europa is sized a good moon
The memo stated that the suspension includes NASA travel to Russia and visits by Russian government representatives to NASA facilities bilateral meetings email and teleconferences or videoconferences.
Though examples date back to the cold war the most recent case relates to China. China has been banned for years from participating in the ISS
and human spaceflight programme and works with many other countries including Russia in space. When the Soviet union collapsed
and the cold war ended the US pragmatically merged its human spaceflight programme specifically the ISS programme with the Soviet Mir space station programme inherited by the new Russian state.
After all space technology is largely dual use of value to both military and civilian communities. The basics of rocket technology and missile technology are largely symbiotic.
It seemed a good idea at the time. Then after spending decades building the ISS the US cancelled the space shuttle the vehicle originally intended for transport to the ISS as part of its post-Apollo programme.
The first resident crew arrived at the ISS in 2000 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft
After the shuttle's last flight in 2011 though the US became dependent on Russia for transport to the ISS using Soyuz at a cost of nearly $71 million for each seat it requires.
Whether that for-the-camera useless blame game can translate into much needed political will to accelerate backup plans for ISS transport remains to be seen
because acceleration and diversification would involve a lot of money. NASA's suspension of working with the Russians will likely be received in Russia much the same way other sanctions over its actions in Ukraine have been:
with ridicule. Regrettably Putin holds all the cards or more specifically the keys to the rocket capable of getting crew to the ISS.
-and that this liquid water is in direct contact with the moon's core which is rich in nutrients.
Luciano Iess at the Sapienza University of Rome in Italy and his colleagues used radar On earth to track Cassini on three separate fly-bys of Enceladus
They found that Enceladus has a rocky core and an icy crust. Before we knew almost nothing about the core beyond its likely existence.
Now we know roughly how big it is and also that it has a surprisingly low density says team member Francis Nimmo at the University of California Santa cruz. That might be due to open fractures
or low-density hydrated minerals like clays. Either answer suggests that the rock has been in substantial contact with water for instance allowing minerals to dissolve
and explaining the salty ice grains we see coming out of the surface. The team also found that the southern hemisphere has a stronger gravitational pull than its topography would suggest.
That could be explained by a localised sea sitting beneath 35 kilometres of ice and up to 8 kilometres deep.
because it wouldn't be in contact with the rock says team member Jonathan Lunine at Cornell University in Ithaca New york. This gravity map hinting at a much larger ocean is a more favourable model for having some sort of life in Enceladus's interior.
The subsurface-sea idea is just the simplest possible interpretation of the gravity data cautions William Mckinnon at Washington University in St louis who was involved not in the work.
#Mini robot space surgeon to climb inside astronauts It could one day answer the prayers of astronauts who need surgery in deep space.
The miniature surgeon slides into the body through an incision in the belly button. Once inside the abdominal cavity which has been filled with inert gas to make room for it to work the robot can remove an ailing appendix, cut pieces from a diseased colon or repair a perforated gastric ulcer.
The fist-sized robot, a product of Virtual Incision in Lincoln, Nebraska, will have its first zero gravity test in an aircraft flying in parabolic arcs in the next few months.
the surgery bot will perform a set of exercises to demonstrate its dexterity, such as manipulating rubber bands and other inanimate objects.
if you would consider surgery in space, "says team member Shane Farritor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Medical emergency For now, the only humans in space venture no further than the International space station.
Astronauts are screened carefully for health issues before leaving Earth, and the ISS has an escape capsule standing by in case of emergencies,
Surgery in space would be extremely difficult. Without gravity, it is easy for bodily fluids like blood to float free
so medical tools need to be relatively light but capable of handling many kinds of situations."
"says Dmitry Oleynikov at the University of Nebraska Medical center.""That difficulty increases logarithmically when you're trying to do complex procedures such as an operation."
and its head is a small video camera. The feed relays to a control station, where a human surgeon operates it using joysticks.
Space surgeons Prototypes have performed several dozen procedures in pigs. The team says the next step is to work in human cadavers
and then test the technology in a living human On earth. Remote-operated technologies would have a disadvantage in space
because the further away a spaceship gets, the greater the time delay in communications signals.
Virtual Incision hopes to avoid this problem by training astronauts to perform procedures on each other.
James Burgess at Carnegie mellon University in Pittsburgh thinks robots like these could be particularly useful
"You could imagine situations in the future where you can actually dial in a surgery from the ground
This article will appear in print under the headline"Surgery bot fits in astronaut's gut a
#Earth raises a plasma shield to battle solar storms Earth can raise shields to protect itself against solar storms.
For the first time satellites and ground-based detectors have watched as the planet sends out a tendril of plasma to fight off blasts of charged solar matter.
But sometimes the sun's magnetic field lines can directly link up with Earth's in a process called magnetic reconnection which opens up cracks in the magnetosphere.
and the resulting plasma becomes trapped by magnetic fields in a doughnut-shaped ring around the planet.
Theory had suggested that an extra-strong electric field from the sun can rip plasma away from the plasmasphere during reconnection triggering a plume.
This would make it harder for magnetic field lines to meet up and spark further reconnection. But while ground-based measurements can see a plume forming their resolution isn't good enough to tell for sure
In January 2013 GPS sensors on the ground mapped electrons in the upper atmosphere and saw a tendril of increased electron density curling away from the north pole indicating that a plume of plasma was veering off towards the sun. At the same time three of NASA's THEMIS spacecraft
which are designed to study solar storms crossed through the magnetic boundary during the event. The craft saw a 100-fold increase in the number of electrons at the boundary
For the first time we were able to monitor the entire cycle of this plasma stretching from the atmosphere to the boundary between Earth's magnetic field
Not every solar storm generates a plasma plume which means ground-based observations will continue to be vital for understanding the phenomenon.
#Interplanetary comms get easier with a nanotech boost E t. MANAGED to phone home. But what about our own future Mars colonies or space probes millions of kilometres away?
Spacecraft currently use radio waves to beam information back home. Laser signals carry more data but the light is almost undetectable
by the time it reaches Earth. Now a nanoscale light detector could make such deep-space missives easier to read.
So says Richard Mirin at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder Colorado who developed the detector with NASA.
Data must be encoded before it can be sent. The most reliable way of doing this is to vary the time interval between light pulses with a long interval representing a 0 say
and a shorter gap representing a 1. But false readings dent accuracy. Mirin made a nanowire detector that operates at-270 C. This boosted the number of photons it received each second by two orders of magnitude compared with regular detectors.
Laser communication is one of the technologies we are considering says Bas Lansdorp CEO of the Mars One project which aims to place a human colony on Mars by 2025.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011