#Star Pair#s Dusty Disk Shines Light on Planet formation Astronomers using the Gemini South telescope in Chile have discovered striking new evidence for planet formation in a dusty disk surrounding
a pair of stars in Sagittarius. The team took advantage of an offering for Early Science using the Gemini Planet Imager to study infrared light scattered off dust grains in the disk around the binary system V4046 Sgr.
Left: J-band polarized intensity (P#)images. Right: P#scaled by r2, where r is the distance in pixels from the central binary, corrected for projection effects.
The coronagraph is represented by the black filled circles. Left: J-band polarized intensity (P#)images.
The coronagraph is represented by the black filled circles. he Gemini Planet Imager allows us to study nearby planet forming disks in sufficient detail that we can obtain direct-image evidence for young planets in orbits similar to those of the giant planets
in our own solar system, says Valerie Rapson of the Rochester Institute of technology, who led the research team.
the GPI imaging reveals an intriguing double ring structure around the V4046 Sgr binary that is most likely due to the formation of a giant planet
(or planets) at some 4-12 times the Earth-Sun distance (approximately between Jupiter and Uranus,
if orbiting our Sun). his is perhaps the best such evidence yet for planet formation so close to a binary system,
Analysis of the data also indicates that the dust grains orbiting the star are sorted by particle size,
as predicted by recent planet formation models. The result is published in The Astrophysica i
#Scientists discover new treatment for dementia Pushing new frontiers in dementia research, Nanyang Technological University,
The destruction of the Amazon is bad news for the whole planet. Let start with the good news part of the story,
So Persson and her team do work closely with experimentalists to guide their research. ecause the space is so vast,
They had another success screening molecules for redox capabilities for flow batteries for fellow Berkeley Lab scientist Brett Helms. e basically gave us a chemical space of organogelator molecules and asked
#Major Advance in Artificial Photosynthesis Poses Win/Win for the Environment A potentially game-changing breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis has been achieved with the development of a system that can capture carbon dioxide emissions before they are vented into the atmosphere
which plants use the energy in sunlight to synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. However
The more carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere the warmer the atmosphere becomes. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, primarily as a result of the burning of fossil fuels.
Technologies for sequestering carbon before it escapes into the atmosphere are being pursued but all require the captured carbon to be stored,
Yang says. hen sunlight is absorbed, photo-excited electron#hole pairs are generated in the silicon and titanium oxide nanowires,
With this approach, the Berkeley team achieved a solar energy conversion efficiency of up to 0. 38-percent for about 200 hours under simulated sunlight,
It akin to the difference between looking at the stars with a standard telescope versus an observatory-quality refractor telescope, according to Yale chair of neurology, Dr. David Hafler, who worked with Montgomery to bring Cytof to Yale. t allows
and which can operate under harsh atmosphere, which previously was not attainable for the individual ESB.
so they opened a door to a universe of new and unknown possibilities. e have created
and other synthetic versions are commercially available. he precursors are all earth abundant, so it available in reasonably low cost, says Sanghera.
but it won crack. t like navigating through the asteroid belt, you create a tortuous path:
Spinel windows could also protect sensors on space satellites, an area Sanghera interested in testing. ou could leave these out there for longer periods of time,
This pioneering Earth Explorer mission will provide accurate and timely profiles of the world winds as well as information on aerosols and clouds.
To do this, the satellite will carry some of the most challenging technology ever put into orbit:
a novel wind lidar called Aladin incorporating two powerful lasers, a large telescope and very sensitive receivers.
which is beamed towards Earth. This light bounces off air molecules and small particles such as dust, ice and droplets of water in the atmosphere.
The fraction of light that is scattered back towards the satellite is collected by Aladin telescope and measured.
The movement of the air molecules, particles or droplets cause this backscattered light to change frequencies slightly.
the winds below the satellite can be determined. A lot of time has gone into developing the technology involved
Both lasers have now been delivered to Airbus Defence and Space in Toulouse, France, ready to be integrated into the rest of Aladin.
who have overcome major technology issues along the way. he contributions of Airbus Defence and Space,
and the DLR German Aerospace Center in Stuttgart, should not be underestimated. hanks to these collective efforts,
and Radar Institute/GFZ/e-GEOS/INGVSA SEOM INSARAP study Sentinel-1a is the first satellite for the Copernicus environment-monitoring programme led by the European commission.
The satellite is planned to provide systematic observations of tectonic and volcanic areas at global level.
In parallel, the International Charter Space and Major Disasters was activated by India, China and the UN.
Camera is so capable it can capture light traveling through a crystal lattice at close to one sixth the speed of light.
The daily vertical migration of marine plankton toward sunlight, is one example, and it the way many microbes find food. f you can design particles that can feel their environment
Fitting a new diagnostic into the available space is always tricky, but squeezing a three-meter-long X-ray microscope into the space between the end of the diagnostic insertion manipulator (DIM)
and the inner wall of the Target Bay has created unique design, logistic and engineering challenges.
and the (Target Bay) wall, said system manager Jay Ayers. o get the magnification we need (more than 10. 5x) we needed an additional one meter of space,
you will see flashes of light every time the wheel is at the perfect spot for sunlight to hit it.
and aerospace applications. t a simple process and can create a lightweight CNT film, or ucky paper, that is a meter wide and twice as strong as previous such films it even stronger than CNT FIBERS,
a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, and principal developer of the mission-planning system. ith this system, we were showing we could safely zigzag all the way around the reef,
and the top-down command center of the fictional starship Enterprise, after which Williams modeled and named the system.
Just as a hierarchical crew runs the fictional starship Williamsenterprise system incorporates levels of decision-makers. For instance, one component of the system acts as a aptain, making higher-level decisions to plan out the overall mission,
Autonomy in the sea The system is similar to one that Williams developed for NASA following the loss of the Mars Observer, a spacecraft that, days before its scheduled insertion into Marsorbit in 1993,
lost contact with NASA. here were human operators On earth who were experts in diagnosis and repair,
and were ready to save the spacecraft, but couldn communicate with it, Williams recalls. ubsequently,
NASA realized they needed systems that could reason at the cognitive level like engineers, but that were onboard the spacecraft.
Williams, who at the time was working at NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER, was tasked with developing an autonomous system that would enable spacecraft to diagnose
and repair problems without human assistance. The system was tested successfully on NASA Deep space 1 probe,
which performed an asteroid flyby in 1999. hat was the first chance to demonstrate goal-directed autonomy in deep space,
Williams says. his was a chance to do the same thing under the sea. By giving robots control of higher-level decision-making
we can use Earth-orbiting satellites, but they don penetrate much below the surface, Williams says. ou could send sea vessels which send one autonomous vehicle,
The new study highlights how ZAP-70 and other molecules communicate in space and time,
Generating a magnetic field takes power and space, which is why magnets have not yet been integrated onto computer chips.
season and year along with weather events and increased use of intermittent renewable energy from the sun
#Astronomers discover powerful aurora beyond solar system Astronomers have discovered the first aurora ever seen in an object beyond our Solar system.
The aurora similar to the famous orthern Lightson Earth is 10,000 times more powerful than any previously seen.
They found the aurora not from a planet, but from a low-mass star at the boundary between stars and brown dwarfs.
The discovery reveals a major difference between the magnetic activity of more-massive stars and that of brown dwarfs and planets,
the scientists said. ll the magnetic activity we see on this object can be explained by powerful auroras,
said Gregg Hallinan, of the California Institute of technology (Caltech. his indicates that auroral activity replaces solar-like coronal activity on brown dwarfs and smaller objects,
he added. The astronomers observed the object, called LSR J1835+3259, using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) at radio wavelengths,
along with the 5-meter Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the 10-meter Keck Telescope in Hawaii at optical wavelengths.
The combination of radio and optical observations showed that the object, 18 light-years from Earth, has characteristics unlike any seen in more-massive stars.
Brown dwarfs, sometimes called ailed stars, are objects more massive than planets, yet too small to trigger the thermonuclear reactions at their cores that power stars.
The astronomers said their observations of LSR J1835+3259 indicate that the coolest stars and brown dwarfs have outer atmospheres that support auroral activity,
rather than the type of magnetic activity seen on more-massive and hotter stars. The discovery also has implications for studying extrasolar planets.
The aurora the scientists observed from LSR J1835+3259 appears powered by a little-understood dynamo process similar to that seen on larger planets in our Solar system.
This process is different from that which causes the Earth auroral displays the planet magnetic field interacting with the solar wind. hat we see on this object appears to be the same phenomenon wee seen on Jupiter, for example,
but thousands of times more powerful, Hallinan said. his suggests that it may be possible to detect this type of activity from extrasolar planets,
many of which are significantly more massive than Jupiter, he added e
#Real-time data for cancer therapy In the battle against cancer, which kills nearly 8 million people worldwide each year,
doctors have in their arsenal many powerful weapons, including various forms of chemotherapy and radiation.
What they lack, however, is good reconnaissance a reliable way to obtain real-time data about how well a particular therapy is working for any given patient.
Magnetic resonance imaging and other scanning technologies can indicate the size of a tumor, while the most detailed information about how well a treatment is working comes from pathologistsexaminations of tissue taken in biopsies.
Yet these methods offer only snapshots of tumor response and the invasive nature of biopsies makes them a risky procedure that clinicians try to minimize.
Now, researchers at MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research are closing that information gap by developing a tiny biochemical sensor that can be implanted in cancerous tissue during the initial biopsy.
and basic science at Virginia Tech Carilion Medical school, analyzed an often ignored part of the human genome repetitive DNA sequences referred to as microsatellites.
More than 1 million microsatellites exist in the human genome including in neural crest tissues, a thin layer of cells within an embryo that contains genetic instructions to build hundreds of cell types, from neurons to adrenal cells.
or predicted from specific markers within these repetitive sequences, known as cancer-associated microsatellite loci, or CAML.
microsatellites are known for their role in certain diseases such as Fragile X and Huntington disease. Garner group has shown that these regions can be informative about diseases ranging from cancer to autism spectrum disorder.
incorporate multiple layers visible and UV channels-,convert to animal colour spaces, and to measure images easily.
#Perseid meteors to light up summer skies The evening of Wednesday 12 august into the morning of Thursday 13 august sees the annual maximum of the Perseid meteor shower.
This year, a new moon makes prospects for watching this natural firework display particularly good. A Perseid seen in August 2010 above the four enclosures of the European Southern Observatory Very Large telescope at Paranal, Chile.
Credit: ESO/S. Guisard. Meteors (popularly known as hooting stars are the result of small particles,
some as small as a grain of sand, entering the Earth atmosphere at high speed.
The tail of the Comet Swift-Tuttle, which last passed near the Earth in 1992, leaves such debris in the Earth path.
On entering the atmosphere, these particles heat the air around them, causing the characteristic streak of light seen from the ground.
This shower of meteors appears to originate from a single point, called a adiant in the constellation of Perseus, hence the name.
The shower is active each year from around 17 july to 24 august although for most of that period only a few meteors an hour will be visible.
From the UK, the peak of the shower occurs in the late evening on 12 august to the morning of 13 august,
when as many as 100 meteors or more may be seen each hour. This year, for the first time since 2007, this peak coincides with a new moon on 14 august,
creating ideal dark sky conditions for meteor-spotting. Perseid shooting star near the Pleiades over Woodingdean, Sussex, on the early morning of the 13th,august 2013.
Credit: Darren Baskill. Professor Mark Bailey, Director of Armagh Observatory, said he Perseid meteor shower is one of the best and most reliable meteor showers of the year.
The french astronomer Jeremie Vaubaillon has predicted also that the Perseids may this year produce an outburst of activity around 7. 40pm BST on 12th august.
Although it is unfortunately still daylight at that time in the UK and Ireland, it is just possible that enhanced rates may persist for a few hours around this time
and so be observable soon after dark. nlike many celestial events meteor showers are straightforward to watch,
and for most people the best equipment to use is simply the naked eye. Advice from experienced meteor observers is to wrap up well and set up a reclining chair to allow you to look up at the sky in comfort.
If possible it also helps to be in a dark place away from artificial light, and to have unobstructed an view of the sky.
Although the number of visible meteors is hard to predict accurately, at least one every few minutes can be expected.
They mostly appear as fleeting streaks of light lasting less than a second but the brightest ones leave behind trails of vaporised gases
their trajectories are bent into circular orbits, causing them to loop around and around. The higher the magnetic field, the tighter a particle orbit becomes.
However, to confine electrons to the microscopic scale of a crystalline material, a magnetic field 100 times stronger than that of the strongest magnets in the world would be required.
ultrahigh magnetic field, using laser beams to push atoms around in tiny orbits, similar to the orbits of electrons under a real magnetic field.
However, in a tilted lattice, the atoms would have to work against gravity. In this scenario, atoms could only move with the help of laser beams. ow the laser beams could be used to make neutral atoms move around like electrons in a strong magnetic field
the group could make the atoms orbit, or loop around, in a radius as small as two lattice squares, similar to how particles would move in an extremely high magnetic field. nce we had the idea,
This is according to the latest edition of Tracking the Sun, an annual PV cost tracking report produced by the Department of energy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Installed prices for residential and small nonresidential systems completed in 2014 were $0. 40-per-watt (W) lower,
or even particular market segments, as a whole. he report, Tracking the Sun VIII: The Installed Price of Residential and Nonresidential Photovoltaic systems in the United states,
is the eighth edition in Berkeley Lab Tracking the Sun report series. It is collected based on data from more than 400,000 residential and nonresidential PV systems installed between 1998 and 2014 across 42 states,
The latest edition of Tracking the Sun along with a summary slide deck and data file, may be downloaded at trackingthesun. lbl. gov. Source:
#Novel technology may illuminate mystery moon caves It widely believed that the moon features networks of caves created when violent lava flows tore under the surface from ancient volcanoes.
A unique imaging technology being developed at the Morgridge Institute for Research is providing NASA with an interesting
The system sends a pulse of laser light off of a wall or surface and into a nonvisible space.
The dimensions of that unseen space are recreated then based on the time stamp of the photons that scatter back to the camera.
This technology is included in the NASA PERISCOPE project, which seeks to illuminate some of the more than 200 suspected lunar caves lurking under skylights.
The ultimate goal is to include the technology on a satellite that orbits the moon at close range
Even cooler are the implications for future manned missions to the moon. hat interesting for space travel is you can have people on the surface for long periods because of the temperature extremes
and is beginning a second phase of field trials funded by a two-year, $500, 000 NASA grant.
and they should provide Velten with geologic features comparable to the moon. hese are likely much bigger than
NASA has been interested in lunar subsurface exploration ever since the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter discovered cave skylights in 2009.
The NASA Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California is developing robotic rovers that could investigate such caves.
#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,
and engineering, allowing researchers to open new windows into phenomena as vast as the universe and as small as nanoparticles.
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.
Neurosciences, Brain Research: SDSC Neuroscience Gateways project will contribute to the national BRAIN INITIATIVE announced by the Obama Administration to deepen our understanding of the human brain.
Social sciences: Sociologists and political scientists are analyzing newly accessible data sets to study censorship of the press, factors that affect participation in the political process,
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.
MOO J1142+1527 may be one of only a handful of clusters of this heft in the early universe,
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
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