#Quantum gas goes below absolute zero It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time1.
Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery.
whereas clouds of atoms would normally be pulled downwards by gravity, if part of the cloud is at a negative absolute temperature,
Another peculiarity of the sub-absolute-zero gas is that it mimics'dark energy''the mysterious force that pushes the Universe to expand at an ever-faster rate against the inward pull of gravity.
Schneider notes that the attractive atoms in the gas produced by the team also want to collapse inwards,
"It s interesting that this weird feature pops up in the Universe and also in the lab,
"This may be something that cosmologists should look at more closely o
#Memory molecule dethroned For years, a particular protein has been cast as a lynchpin of long-term memory.
#Ephemeral third ring of radiation makes appearance around Earth First discovered in 1958, the Van allen belts have been thought to comprise two reservoirs of high-speed,
electrically charged particles, corralled into separate doughnut-shaped rings by Earth s magnetic field. The outer ring orbits at a distance of some 10,000-60,000 kilometres above Earth,
and encircles an inner band of even more energetic particles, roughly 100-10,000 kilometres above Earth.
That s the configuration the belts were in when James Van allen first spotted them using satellite data half a century ago,
and that s also the structure that NASA s twin Van allen Probes recorded when they began operation on 1 september 2012.
But just two days later, telescopes on the probes revealed the emergence of an additional,
says Daniel Baker, a space physicist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.##The new ring persisted,
however, and Baker and his team now attributes its creation to an interplanetary shock wave#a travelling outburst of solar-wind particles from the Sun#that has been detected by other craft.
NASATHE two Van allen Probes orbit through the radiation belts that surround Earth, shown in cross section in this artist's impression.
either escaping into the atmosphere or reacting with the alkali and slowing down the methanol-hydrogen conversion.
parallel universe of unexplored RNAS, says Nikolaus Rajewsky, the lead author of one of the studies and a systems biologist at the Max Delbr#ck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin.
and her colleagues sent the first missive from the circular universe. They reported finding a plethora of circular human RNAS
#Moon-size exoplanet circling sun-like star smallest yet A newfound world called Kepler 37 b could easily blend in to the long and growing list of known extrasolar planets,
But the new addition to the catalogue of 800-plus exoplanets stands out in at least one major respect#it is far smaller than any planet yet discovered outside of our solar system.
In fact, it is just a shade larger than Earth s moon.""What makes this very interesting is this is a planet smaller than anything we see in our own inner solar system,
says Thomas Barclay, a research scientist at the NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER in Moffett Field, Calif. Barclay is lead author of a study published online February 20 in Nature announcing the discovery of Kepler 37 b and two slightly larger worlds in the same planetary system.
Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group. The researchers used NASA s Kepler space telescope to identify the three planets orbiting Kepler 37, a star some 200 light-years away that is somewhat smaller than the sun. The spacecraft monitors more than 150,000 stars in the Milky way
for occasional winks, or dips in brightness, that might be caused by a planet passing in front of its star, from the probe s perspective.
The Kepler mission has discovered already more than 100 new planets since its launch in 2009 and has identified thousands of additional candidates that await confirmation.
Planets smaller than Earth block relatively small amounts of starlight which limits astronomers ability to detect them with Kepler.
But the star Kepler 37 is bright and relatively free of disturbances, such as starspots, that can obscure a faint planetary signal.
By observing the planet Kepler 37 b as it transited, or passed in front of its star, more than 50 times,
Barclay and his colleague drew out a subtle but recurrent pattern. Every 13 days or so the star dimmed by a tiny fraction#just 0. 002 percent#as the tiny planet passed across the star s face.
The exoplanet that previously held the record on the tiny end of the size spectrum#a Mars-size object known as Kepler 42 d#is nearly twice the diameter of Kepler 37 b. The newfound body is just 80 percent
Mercury s diameter and 30 percent that of Earth. Kepler measures the diameters and orbital properties of exoplanets but is usually unable to pinpoint their masses.)
All three of the exoplanets found by Barclay and his colleagues, in fact, will rank among the smallest known:
Kepler 37 c is 74 percent the diameter of Earth, and Kepler 37 d is roughly twice our planet s diameter.
Orbiting its star at one tenth the distance between Earth and the sun, tiny Kepler 37 b must be extremely hot."
"Any water on the surface would disappear very quickly, Barclay says.""There is almost no chance of an atmosphere or liquid on the surface.
The researchers predict that Kepler 37 b would be a barren, rocky world similar to Mercury.
The larger worlds in the planetary system orbit somewhat farther out but would still suffer scorching heat from the star.
All three planets keep closer to the star Kepler 37 than any planet orbits the sun."It just shows that Kepler has just an extraordinary ability to see a wide diversity of planetary architectures,
says Greg Laughlin, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa cruz, who did not contribute to the new study.
Kepler was built to search for exo-Earths#rocky planets in cooler orbits than the uninhabitable worlds of the Kepler 37 system.
But in the meantime it has found numerous planetary systems that little resemble ours.""What Kepler is also showing,
and this is a side dividend to the main mission, is that the galactic planetary census is a lot different than we had believed from looking at our own planetary system,
Laughlin says.""Our solar system just contains nothing whatsoever inside Mercury s orbit. But it turns out that the average planetary system has a lot going on in the inner region.
More from Scientific American. There is one catch in Kepler s search for worlds comparable with or smaller than Earth:
Whereas giant Jupiter-size planets often exert a gravitational tug on their host stars that is detectable with Earth-based telescope spectrographs,
smaller exoplanet discoveries have proved difficult to confirm with observations other than Kepler s . So researchers have turned to statistical arguments
instead to quantify the probability of a false positive#for instance, a pair of undetected binary stars whose regular eclipses mimic a planetary signal.
Barclay and his colleagues used computer modeling to identify potential false positives and then rule them out with additional observations from the ground.
In the end, based on population estimates of exoplanets binary stars and other astronomical objects, the researchers calculated the probability that the signal collected from Kepler represents a true planet."
"In this case, with the innermost planet we are confident that it is a true planet orbiting the target star with a confidence of 99.95 percent,
Barclay says.""So we re very confident that this is what we think it is
#FDA Approves First Retinal implant An article by Scientific American. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Thursday approved the first retinal implant for use in the United states. The FDA s green light for Second sight s Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System gives hope to those blinded
by a rare genetic eye condition called advanced retinitis pigmentosa, which damages the light-sensitive cells that line the retina.
#Computer program roots out ancestors of modern tongues In Fiji, a star is a kalokalo. For the Pazeh people of Taiwan, it is mintol,
and distributed in laboratory space in Newhouse, Scotland, that was closed by Merck in 2010. Starting this July or August
Such things have included everything from spare parts for the International space station above to the beef on our dinner plates to the organs inside our bodies.
#Planck snaps infant Universe For astronomers, it is the ultimate treasure map. On 21 march, the Planck space telescope team released the highest-precision map yet of the cosmic microwave background (CMB),
the faint but ubiquitous afterglow of the Big bang. Crowning nearly 50 years of CMB study,
the map records the precise contours of the nascent Universe #and in doing so pins down key parameters of the Universe today.
The tiny fluctuations embedded in the CMB map reveal a Universe that is expanding slightly more slowly than had been thought.
That dials back the amount of gravity-countering dark energy to 68.3%of the Universe and adds a little more unseen dark matter to the mix.
It also means that the Universe is a little older: 13.82 billion years old, adding a few tens of millions of years to the previously calculated value.
The map even shows that the number of neutrino flavours permeating the cosmos will probably remain at three#had there been a fourth,
the Universe would have expanded more quickly during its first moments. These results represent refinements of numbers obtained by previous missions such as the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP.
Where the Planck spacecraft, watching the sky from a vantage point 1. 5#million kilometres away,
breaks the most new ground is in its support for the reigning theory that describes the instant after the Big bang. The theory, known as inflation,
holds that during an unimaginably rapid expansion lasting just 10##32#seconds or so, the Universe grew from a subatomic point to something the size of a grapefruit that then continued to expand at a more stately pace.
This growth spurt would help to explain why the Universe we see today is homogeneous on the largest scales
yet riddled with clumps, filaments and sheets of galaxies.""Planck could have found that there was something majorly wrong with inflation,
says astrophysicist Jo Dunkley at the University of Oxford, UK, who has worked on data from Planck and the WMAP."
"Instead, we ve got new evidence that this expansion did happen. In the minutes that followed the burst of inflation,
particles such as protons and electrons formed from the cauldron of proto-matter, and photons began to bounce around like pinballs.
It was only 380,000#years later, when the charged plasma cooled into neutral atoms, that those photons could fly freely.
and carry with them an imprint of the quantum fluctuations that roiled the inflationary Universe. Seen in the map as tiny variations around an average temperature of 2. 7 kelvins
which ultimately snowballed into the galaxies seen today.""All the structures we see in the Universe are coming from these little perturbations,
says Paul Shellard, a Planck cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. SLIDESHOW: Homing in on the cosmic microwave background In 1965,
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background. Their giant but crude microwave receiver saw the radiation as being the same in all directions,
occurring at 2. 7 kelvin. NASA/WMAP SCIENCE TEAMIT was not until the launch of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) spacecraft that astronomers could begin to see variations in the background, at levels of 1 part in 100,000.
NASATHE Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, launched in 2001, improved on COBE by looking for such anisotropy at much smaller angular scales.
NASA/WMAP SCIENCE TEAMPLANCK launched in 2009, provides a capstone to the study of the cosmic microwave background.
But unambiguous confirmation of a cosmic burst of expansion known as inflation remains elusive. ES a
#Canada puts commercialization ahead of blue-sky research Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty yesterday released the country's 2013 budget,
there is a piecemeal approach, with the government"picking winners and providing new money to the automotive, aerospace, forestry and aquaculture sectors."
#Planck telescope peers into primordial Universe The Planck space telescope has delivered the most detailed picture yet of the cosmic microwave background, the residual glow of the Big bang. Unveiling the results from the##700-million (US$904-million) European space agency (ESA) probe,
scientists say that the images shed fresh light on the first instants of the Universe s birth and peg the age of the Universe at 13.82 billion years#slightly older than previously estimated."
"For cosmologists, this map is a gold mine of information, says George Efstathiou, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, UK,
and one of Planck s lead researchers. The results strongly support the idea that in the 10##32 seconds or so after the Big bang,
the Universe expanded at a staggering rate#a process dubbed inflation. Inflation would explain why the Universe is so big,
and why we cannot detect any curvature in the fabric of space (other than the tiny indentations caused by massive objects such as black holes).
The sudden ballooning also amplified quantum fluctuations into clumps of matter that went on to seed the first stars,
and, eventually, the straggly superclusters of galaxies that now span hundreds of millions of parsecs.
The cosmic microwave background radiation studied by Planck dates from about 380,000 years after the Big bang, by
which time the Universe had cooled to a few thousand degrees and neutral atoms of hydrogen and helium were beginning to form from the seething mass of charged plasma.
That transition allowed photons to travel unimpeded through space, in a pattern that carried the echoes of inflation.
Those photons are still out there today as a dim glow of microwaves with a temperature of just 2. 7 kelvin.
Since the cosmic microwave background was detected first in 1964, two space-based experiments#the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP)# have mapped the tiny temperature variations within it.
Those data have enabled cosmologists to work out when the Big bang happened, estimate the amount of unseen dark matter in the cosmos
and measure the dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the Universe. Planck, launched in 2009,
is more than three times more sensitive than the WMAP. Its high-frequency microwave detector is cooled to just 0. 1 degrees above absolute zero
which enables it to detect temperature variations as small as a millionth of a degree.
These precise measurements show that the Universe is expanding slightly slower than estimated from WMAP's data.
The rate of expansion, known as the Hubble constant, is 67.15 kilometres per second per million parsecs,
which suggests that the Universe is about 50 million years older than calculated from WMAP images.
The Planck data also implies that dark energy makes up 68.3%of the energy density of the Universe,
a slightly smaller proportion than estimated from WMAP data. The contribution of dark matter swells from 22.7%to 26.8%
leaving normal matter making up just under 5%.Planck also confirmed some oddities earlier picked up by the WMAP.
The simplest models of inflation predict that fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background should look the same all over the sky.
The asymmetry"defines a preferred direction in space, which is an extremely strange result, says Efstathiou.
or for eye-popping views of the Earth
#Waterproof transistor takes cell's electric pulse Think of it as a medical monitor for the cell.
they are crucial for technologies in the aerospace and alternative-energy industries. China currently controls the vast majority of supplies.
"It is a bright star now in the literature, suggesting that it is not crazy to map every neuron in the brain of an animal.
#Life found deep under the sea For the first time, scientists have discovered microbes living deep inside Earth s oceanic crust#the dark volcanic rock at the bottom of the sea.
and covers 60%of the planet s surface, making it the largest habitat On earth. The microbes inside it seem to survive largely by using hydrogen,
which uses sunlight for the same purpose. Chemosynthesis also fuels life at other deep-sea locations such as hydrothermal vents
the crust"would be the first major ecosystem On earth to run on chemical energy rather than sunlight,
Within the immersive mixed/virtual reality space of Brainx3 users can explore and analysis dynamical activity patterns of brain networks
The pits are among the largest and deepest pockmarks ever found in Earth lakes, the researchers said.
which would (hypothetically, at least) be repelled by magnetic forces from the Earth itself. Duru's real-life flying skateboard is a bit simpler than Mcfly's:
Interaxon, the company behind the Muse headband and a Mars venture client, claims that sustained use of the device will train one brain to stay more naturally calm and focused.
assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Missouri S&t told Gizmag. Artists Discover 3-D Printingthe Missouri S&t team believes the mechanical coloring on the silver/silica materials provide a much higher printing resolution than conventional color printing, according to Gizmag.
and whether the top-secret Area 51 test range in Nevada is actually a hospitality center for extraterrestrials r
Since each molecule in the universe absorbs light at different optical frequencies, an odor has its own unique signature. ather than sniffing out a variety of smells as a dog would,
#Smog Harvested from Tower Made into Jewelry A Smog Free Tower that stands 23 feet tall is being built to scrub pollution out of the air in parks and other public outdoor spaces in Rotterdam, The netherlands.
and space. think this work is a real advance, says materials scientist Daniel Jaque at the Autonomous University of Madrid,
as the poles of Mars and almost 200 degrees hotter than the surface of Venus. They can also detect temperature changes across distances as small as 5 m (roughly the size of a sperm cell head) and on timescales as short as 800 picoseconds(.
a rare-earth metal that is highly magnetic and sometimes given to patients to increase contrast in an MRI.
because pentaquarks might be formed inside collapsing stars, their discovery might tell us more about what stars are composed of
and how they evolve. The new data might also lead to the discovery of other pentaquarks with different masses."
#Red planet racers: Next Mars rovers get a speed boost IT'S time for Martian rovers to put the pedal to the metal.
A system that lets rovers handle more of their own navigation could spell more speed for interplanetary explorers.
the Curiosity rover our best on the Red planet only covers about 200 metres per day. That's because when a rover encounters an obstacle it can't negotiate by itself it must wait for instructions from its minders On earth a huge waste of time.
Along the way the rover's onboard cameras scan for rocks that are too small for the satellites to catch.
In 2012 Seeker was tested for the first time in the Atacama desert in Chile a landscape similar to that of Mars. There it guided the Robovolc rover built to traverse the edge of volcanoes over several kilometres in a single day.
If all goes well Seeker could help the European space agency's Exomars rover which is planned for launch in 2018 find its way across vast stretches of Martian soil.
#Red planet racers: Next Mars rovers get a speed boost IT'S time for Martian rovers to put the pedal to the metal.
A system that lets rovers handle more of their own navigation could spell more speed for interplanetary explorers.
the Curiosity rover our best on the Red planet only covers about 200 metres per day. That's because when a rover encounters an obstacle it can't negotiate by itself it must wait for instructions from its minders On earth a huge waste of time.
Along the way the rover's onboard cameras scan for rocks that are too small for the satellites to catch.
In 2012 Seeker was tested for the first time in the Atacama desert in Chile a landscape similar to that of Mars. There it guided the Robovolc rover built to traverse the edge of volcanoes over several kilometres in a single day.
If all goes well Seeker could help the European space agency's Exomars rover which is planned for launch in 2018 find its way across vast stretches of Martian soil.
#China set to launch probe on round trip to the moon China is planning to launch an uncrewed spacecraft on a quick jaunt around the moon in a test of technology designed to return rocks from the lunar surface to Earth.
The Chang'e 5-T1 mission is set to blast off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan China on 23 october.
It will fly around the back of the moon and return to Earth using a parachute to slow its decent through the atmosphere about 8 days later.
It's a precursor to a more advanced mission planned for 2017. This future mission will send a lunar orbiter that will release a lander to touch down on the moon's surface and collect 2 kilograms of soil and rock.
The lander will then blast off and dock with the orbiter for the return trip to Earth.
China's most recent moon mission Chang'e 3 placed a lander and rover on the moon last year.
Chang'e 5-T1 will test China's heat-shield technology which is essential for surviving a high-speed re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
The country is following a path blazed by other major spacefaring nations: the US sent humans to retrieve rocks during the Apollo moon landing missions
The spacecraft will also carry experiments to test what happens to bacteria and plants exposed to radiation beyond low Earth orbit.
China has partnered also with a Luxembourg-based firm called Luxspace to send a tiny spacecraft called the Manfred Memorial Moon Mission around the moon.
It will ride on the same rocket as Chang'e 5-T1 and broadcast a ham radio signal for amateurs to tune in to o
#Spacecraft seek geysers without human help When the Rosetta spacecraft sends its lander to the surface of a comet on 12 november the lander will follow prearranged orders from Earth to touch down safely
and send data home for analysis . But future spacecraft may be able to do it all on their own.
Kiri Wagstaff and her colleagues at the Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena California have developed software that can identify a plume of water
or vapour on a celestial body's surface with the goal of directing another instrument to make follow-up observations.
Comets asteroids and icy moons have shown all signs of venting plumes into space. But because these bodies are far from Earth
and the jets are not always active exploring them remotely is challenging. The more the spacecraft can do without waiting for communication with Earth the better they can explore especially
when they encounter activity that may be short-lived or only within viewing range for a short time Wagstaff says.
The researchers tested the software on unprocessed images of comet Hartley 2 and Saturn's moon Enceladus.
We want to replicate what the instrument sees says team member David Thompson. The program looks for bright material outside the limb of the moon or comet checks that the material meets up with the surface
and is larger than a minimum size and then determines if it is seeing a plume.
Wagstaff thinks an upcoming Europa orbiter mission would be a great opportunity to use this technology.
But the software will be of even more benefit on future missions to the outer solar system and eventually planetary systems outside our solar system.
#Mini MRI to check bone health on space station Astronauts may soon have a portable MRI machine to keep an eye on their muscles and bones during a spell on the International space station.
Bone and muscle loss in microgravity is a major health issue in orbit astronauts are checked usually before and after missions.
So Sarty and his colleagues at MRI manufacturer MRI-Tech Canada of Calgary Alberta and space flight hardware maker Com Dev International of Cambridge Ontario have developed a technique called Transmit Array Spatial Encoding
Astronauts need only place their wrists inside to have checked their bones. Sarty presented the technology at the International Astronautical Congress in Toronto Canada on 3 october.
which saves us considerable weight making it suitable for space flight Sarty told New Scientist. It also leaks very little magnetism outside of its enclosure so it won't interfere with other experiments on the ISS.
if the Canadian space agency selects their ISS-MRI for a life science berth on a rocket flight in 2016.
While a system based on permanent magnets sounds perfect for use in space where power is scarce the Canadians will have their work cut out expanding the technology On earth predicts David Taylor founder of scanner-maker MR Solutions in Guildford UK.
#Desktop sonic black hole emits Hawking radiation A model black hole that traps sound instead of light has been caught emitting quantum particles thought to be the analogue of the theoretical Hawking radiation.
The effect may be the first time that a lab-based black hole has created Hawking particles in the same way expected from real black holes.
Black holes are ultra-dense concentrations of matter left behind when a star or other massive body collapses.
Their gravity is so strong that nothing not even light can escape from their edge a boundary called the event horizon.
Given that physicists expected that black holes would be well black. But in 1974 Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge predicted they should emit a faint glow of particles now known as Hawking radiation.
An oddity of quantum theory that says that the vacuum of space is not truly empty
But if one gets caught inside a black hole's event horizon the other is free to escape
The glow from real-life black holes would be too faint to see so to confirm Hawking's prediction physicists have built artificial black holes that mimic the event horizon.
In 2010 a team led by Francesco Belgiorno at the University of Milan made a model black hole the horizon
whether it used the same physics as a real black hole horizon. A quantum mechanical fluid should be able to mimic the exact physics of a black hole's event horizon albeit at a much smaller scale.
In 2009 Jeff Steinhauer at the Technion-Israel Institute of technology in Haifa and his colleagues made just such a model black hole using Bose-Einstein condensates (BECS) a quantum state of matter where a clump of super
-cold atoms behaves like a single atom. Now the team claims that their black hole has produced just the kind of Hawking radiation expected of a real black hole.
This tells us that the idea of Hawking actually works Steinhauer says. A black hole should really produce Hawking radiation.
The team used one laser to confine the BEC to a narrow tube and another to accelerate some of it faster than the speed of sound.
The Hawking effect comes from quantum noise at the horizon says William Unruh at the University of British columbia in Canada one of the first to propose fluid-based black hole analogues.
but the phonons inside the black hole bounce back and forth between the inner and outer horizons triggering the creation of more Hawking phonons each time much like a laser amplifies light.
Physicists call this effect a black hole laser The Hawking radiation exponentially grows it self-amplifies Steinhauer says.
whether the pairs of phonons are entangled another predicted feature of real black holes that may have fiery consequences.
This work is really impressive says Daniele Faccio at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh in the UK who was on the team that made the fibre-optic based black hole.
It is of course clear that black holes differ from flowing BECS and showing that the effect occurs in a BEC does not prove it would occur in black holes.
However it sure increases my confidence that it does. The mathematics and the results are too similar to just be a coincidence.
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