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,
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,
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.
#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.
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.
#Martian methane sniffer adapted for Earth WHAT'S that gassy smell? The hypersensitive methane detector on NASA's Mars rover curiosity is being repurposed to ferret out gas leaks On earth.
The Pacific gas and electric company in San francisco and global energy giant Chevron are testing a handheld earthbound version that is 1000 times as sensitive as existing methane sniffers.
It's the same technology as on Mars she says. When it picks up trace amounts of methane it kind of sings to the operator
and Earth observation privacy law to ensure that people can wield authentic imagery that stands up in court.
For instance people cannot be given sure a satellite was working on the day in question or that the area of land imaged is actually the land at issue.
But most of the work will involve images taken by orbiting satellites especially as recent earth observation start-ups like Planet Labs
#Rainbow galaxies reveal why cosmos is full of spirals (Image: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/ SMA/CARMA/IRAM/J. Ueda et al.
Each entry in this visual catalogue of psychedelic pictures captures a violent collision of galaxies revealing for the first time how galaxies like the Milky way form.
These images show the carbon monoxide gas detected in neighbouring galaxies 40 to 600 million light years from Earth in their final stages of merging.
Out of 37 galaxies observed these 30 all show gas rotating around the centre of the galaxy meaning they are disc galaxies in the making.
For the first time there is observational evidence for merging galaxies that could result in disc galaxies. 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.
As this rogues'gallery of galactic mergers shows a disc-shaped offspring is a common result of a collision.
Journal reference: The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series DOI: 10.1088/0067-0049/214/1
#Water-splitter could make hydrogen fuel on Mars Making fuel on site for a return trip to Mars may be a step closer.
A cunning way to split water into oxygen and hydrogen in two distinct steps could be a boon to both astronauts
and future Earthlings enabling them to use renewable energy sources for making hydrogen fuel. 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.
That means renewable energy sources like wind or sunlight which are often patchy are not reliable enough.
which make fuel from sunlight just like plants says Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow UK.
or for making fuel on Mars to power a rocket back to Earth. It is unclear
#Supernova find backs dark energy and universe expansion Astronomers have had long a dark secret: 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
but hard evidence that this was remained the case lacking. Now more than 15 years later we finally have firm proof that such supernovae explode as expected.
In 1998 astronomers used measurements of the distances of various type IA supernovae to show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating
which they attributed to a mysterious dark energy pushing the cosmos apart. Astrophysicists theorised that the reason all type IA supernovae have the same brightness is that they are thermonuclear detonations in
which a white dwarf star somehow reaches a critical mass of about 1. 4 solar masses and explodes.
But this central idea had never been confirmed because no type IA had gone off near Earth in recent decades.
That changed on 21 january when Steve Fossey of University college London and his students stumbled upon a type IA supernova in M82 or the Cigar galaxy.
At 11.4 million light years away SN 2014j is the closest such explosion in decades. Eugene Churazov of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching Germany and colleagues observed SN 2014j with the INTEGRAL gamma-ray telescope.
They found the classic signature of a thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf. The process begins with the compression of the white dwarf leading to the formation of nickel-56
which decays to cobalt-56 which in turn decays to a stable isotope of iron producing characteristic gamma rays.
Nobody had seen directly these gamma rays says Churazov. Using SN 2014j's gamma rays the team estimated that the mass of nickel-56 that decayed to be about 0. 6 solar masses within the range predicted by models.
That means the status of type IA supernovae as standard candles is secure. But there are still a few different ways for the explosion to happen
which could change the way astronomers interpret these supernovae in the future. In the favoured model called the single degenerate system a white dwarf reaches its critical mass by stealing material from an ordinary companion star.
In an alternative double degenerate model two white dwarfs orbiting each other cause the explosion either by merging or by one poaching matter from the other.
Churazov and his colleagues'observations support the single degenerate model. A second team however favours the double degenerate scenario.
Miguel Pérez-Torres of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalucia in Granada Spain and colleagues used the European VLBI Network of radio telescopes spread across Europe and China to study SN 2014j.
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.
so concluded SN 2014j probably began as two white dwarfs. Robert Kirshner of Harvard university who studies type IA supernovae is convinced not yet.
but astronomers would have to account for multiple types of supernovae. One has to care about this
now that we are in an era of precision cosmology says Pérez-Torres. No wonder Kirshner is thrilled to have a nearby type IA to study in detail.
#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.
A new project proposing that galaxy-spanning alien civilisations should generate detectable heat has turned up a few dozen galaxies that hold promise as harbours for life.
The best-known technique used to search for tech-savvy aliens is eavesdropping on their communications with each other.
A galaxy should emit about 10 per cent of its light in the mid-infrared range says team leader Jason Wright at Pennsylvania State university.
though it could also be a sign of more prosaic processes such as rapid star formation or an actively feeding black hole at the galaxy's centre.
The team's preliminary survey suggests that such galaxies are rare but they are out there.
We have found several dozen galaxies giving out a superlative amount of mid-infrared light says Wright.
Could that mean we have already found alien civilisations that have spread across galaxies? If by'found them'you mean that WISE detected the waste heat from them then yes that's right
The next step is to look at the stars and galaxies that raised the infrared flag in the WISE survey
and figure out if there are more ordinary processes at work. This effort is important because it tries to resolve the question of extraterrestrial life scientifically using the laws of chemistry
and physics that govern the universe says astronomer Geoff Marcy of the University of California Berkeley.
Even if the effort doesn't discover intelligent aliens it is still doing solid science says Marchis.
what because it's cataloguing the mid-infrared of our stars and galaxies he says.
Like our exoplanet search and using rovers to look for microbes on Mars this search for extraterrestrial life is driving useful science.
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
The results hint at the mysterious conditions deep inside giant planets. The dense atmospheres of gas giants Jupiter and Saturn contain carbon.
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
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.
These exoplanets are rocky like Earth but are rich in carbon rather than silica and may contain large layers of diamond.
because we can now use direct experimental data to model the deep interiors of carbon-rich planets says Madhusudhan.
#Cool planet hints at potential for life in double stars It's a cool planet in a tight spot.
A frigid world about 3000 light years away offers the first evidence that rocky planets can form in Earthlike orbits even
Although this planet probably cannot support life as we know it the discovery greatly expands the places we can look for potentially habitable worlds outside our solar system.
In a binary star system the two partners are locked in an orbital embrace. Astronomers have found a handful of planets that orbit both partners in close binary pairs.
But no one was convinced that a planet could orbit just one star at a sufficient distance to host life.
Most stars are part of binary systems and a significant fraction of these are close binary systems so if you want to maximise the places you can look for habitable planets you're going to want to look at these close binaries as well says Scott Gaudi at Ohio State university (OSU) in Columbus. Gaudi
and his team used a technique called gravitational microlensing to study a binary system with two red dwarfs small stars that are dimmer than the sun. The distance between the stars is about 10 to 15 times that of Earth
and the sun. The team found a planet about twice the mass of Earth orbiting just one of the two stars at about the same distance as we are to our home star.
Some scientists argue that the planet formation process would get too disrupted if a star has a tight stellar companion
and the further it is from the star the more difficult it would be for planets to form.
But this discovery argues that yes indeed at least in this system of two red dwarfs you can form planets at these sorts of longer distances says Gaudi.
Jean-Philipe Beaulieu at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics in France called the newfound planet an important discovery.
This shows more than ever that our solar system is not the paradigm in our galaxy says Beaulieu.
While the planet is most likely rocky based on its mass its surface is a frigid-213°C That's
because at its orbital distance it does not get enough heat from its dim host star.
But the same planet orbiting a sun-like star in a binary system would be in the habitable zone where conditions could support liquid water
and perhaps life as we know it. The discovery was announced the same week that other scientists sounded a note of caution on exoplanet finds.
An analysis led by astronomer Paul Robertson at Pennsylvania State university concluded that Gliese 581 d and g two of the first potentially habitable worlds ever found are created actually illusions by sunspots on the parent star.
Gaudi's co-author Andrew Gould also at OSU says his team's evidence for the existence of their frozen planet is airtight.
Microlensing detects planets by watching how their gravity affects the light of a distant background star.
As one star passes in front of another as seen from Earth light from the background star is bent gravitationally
and magnified projecting images next to the foreground star. But if the foreground star hosts a planet the world's gravity can sometimes eliminate one of these images.
The planet isn't blocking the background star's light. It's just that the mathematics of focusing is disrupted by the planet's gravity he says.
There's absolutely no doubt that what we've detected is a rocky planet in a binary star system adds Gould.
Ten thousand years from now people will go visit this system and find out that it's exactly
what we say it is. Beaulieu also expressed confidence in the frozen exoplanet discovery: In the case of the planet announced by Gould's team stellar variability could not mimic the observed signal.
This is a very robust detection. Journal reference: Scienc n
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