Tuesday 17 June 2014

Move over, silicon, there's a new circuit in town

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When it comes to electronics, silicon will now have to share the spotlight. Scientists have now overcome a major issue in carbon nanotube technology by developing a flexible, energy-efficient hybrid circuit combining carbon nanotube thin film transistors with other thin film transistors. This hybrid could take the place of silicon as the traditional transistor material used in electronic chips, since carbon nanotubes are more transparent, flexible, and can be processed at a lower cost.

via Science Daily

Scientists predict fermionic matter in a previously unknown state

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Scientists have presented theoretical calculations which indicate the possible existence of fermionic matter in a previously unknown state -- in the form of a one-dimensional liquid, which cannot be described within the framework of existing models.

via Science Daily

A greener shade of yellow

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The next time you ‘take a leak’, consider the valuable resources you’re flushing away. “Urine contains all the essential components for plant growth, such as phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium,” says Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Dena Fam. “Yet our sewers carry these nutrients essential for agricultural production away from our urban centres and discharge them into waterways where they have the potential to negatively impact aquatic ecosystems.” Fam is a driving force in Australian and international research on urine diversion systems. As a result of her PhD research, UTS’s new Engineering and Information Technology building is installed with urine diversion (UD) pipework and the Barangaroo development in Sydney’s CBD has incorporated it into their design plans. Completed last year under the supervision of Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) Deputy Director Cynthia Mitchell, Fam’s PhD examined the transdisciplinary issues associated with trialling urine diverting systems in Australia, to determine how viable urine recovery and reuse is in practice. It’s a squeamish topic, acknowledges Fam, a researcher with ISF and the Centre for Management and Organisation Studies in the UTS Business School. But with global pressure on food production and infrastructure due to rapidly growing urban populations, recovering and reusing urine as a fertiliser

The post A greener shade of yellow has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Physicists propose way to use quantum bidding in bridge

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(Phys.org) —A team of physicists in Europe, led by Marcin Pawlowski, has proposed a way to use entangled quantum particles to improve the odds of winning in the game of bridge. As the team notes in their paper published in Physical Review X, their proposition appears to be the first example of using quantum enhancement of information transfer as it applies to a real-world (non-physics) application.



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Deep Sky Colors Print

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Full-size poster of several beautiful and unique award-winning images of the night sky, photographed by Rogelio Bernal Andreo.

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Scientists are designing the world's first 1000-mph car

Science Focus

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The Conversation
Apart from a brief break in the 1960s and 1970s, British engineering and drivers have played a dominant role in setting the land speed record in the fastest cars on the planet. It's a rich history, starting from Lydston Hornsted's Benz No. 3, which broke the record to reach 124 mph 100 years ago, to the current land-speed-record holder Andy Green's Thrust SSC, which crossed the supersonic barrier to reach 763 mph in 1997.

Now the people behind Thrust SSC have set themselves an even more challenging target: to reach the land speed record of 1,000 mph in a new car called Bloodhound SSC. The...

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 » see original post http://theweek.com/article/index/261901/scientists-are-designing-the-worlds-first-1000-mph-car
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Want to design a Mars base for Nasa? Now’s your chance

Science Focus

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A submission called "DasDome"
Pierre Meyitang

Would you like a 3D printer? Of course you would. Would you like to collaborate with Nasa? Please, we won't insult you while waiting for an answer. MakerBot has launched a competition tailored for you then, in collaboration with Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory: MakerBot Mars Base Challenge. It wants you to deliver inspiration for a human base on Mars, considering future visitors will have to combat extreme temperatures, radiation spikes, dust storms and the whole you-can't-breath-on-Mars thing. The brief provided is to design, with all these considerations in mind, "a utilitarian Mars base that can withstand the elements and maybe even make you feel at home, despite being 140 million miles away from Earth, on average". And if you win, they'll give you a MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer.

Of course not every entrant will have the astrophysics background required to tick all these environmentally challenged boxes, but Nasa is looking for anyone thinking outside of the box to provide another viewpoint, and possibly inspire the next generation of astronauts that will live in these abodes one day.

The competition opened on 30 May, and will close on 12 June, and already there have been 70 CAD file submissions on Thingiverse. Pierre Meyitang, an engineering graduate "just trying to make things better through technology" has submitted the somewhat beautiful DasDome, a huge dome housing Mars-dwellers surrounded by solar panel arrays that can fold in on top of the dome to protect it from the elements. Ice from Mars is dropped into the stainless steel spheres that contain steam powered electric generators, to create energy for spinning turbines and heating up the colony. "All parts have dual purposes," he says.

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 » see original post http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/jR-K7bJ303Y/
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NIST chip produces and detects specialized gas for biomedical analysis

Science Focus

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A chip-scale device that both produces and detects a specialized gas used in biomedical analysis and medical imaging has been built and demonstrated at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Described in Nature Communications,* the new microfluidic chip produces polarized (or magnetized) xenon gas and then detects even the faintest magnetic signals from the gas. Illustration of NIST chip that makes polarized xenon gas. Xenon atoms (green) are loaded into the chamber on the left. The xenon flows into the next chamber, where the atoms are polarized through collisions with rubidium atoms (red) that are illuminated with circularly polarized light. Then the xenon flows into the smaller chamber, where its polarization is measured, using the rubidium atoms in the same chamber as magnetometers. Atoms exit the chip from the chamber on the far right. Credit: NIST high resolution image Polarized xenon—with the atoms’ nuclear “spins” aligned like bar magnets in the same direction—can be dissolved in liquids and used to detect the presence of certain molecules. A chemical interaction with target molecules subtly alters the magnetic signal from the xenon; by detecting this change researchers can identify the molecules in a complex mixture. Polarized xenon is also used as a

The post NIST chip produces and detects specialized gas for biomedical analysis has been published on Technology Org.

 
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 » see original post http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechnologyOrgPhysicsNews/~3/60SNefQw6Ic/
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Name, Crab Pulsar, Intriguing Outer Space Pictures Wrapping Paper

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Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series Multiple observations made over several months with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope captured the spectacle of matter and antimatter propelled to near the speed of light by the Crab pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star the size of Manhattan.
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Image credit: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope

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Tadpole Nebula, Auriga Constellation Square Sticker

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Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series An awesome outer space picture featuring the Tadpole Nebula, a star forming hub located about 12000 light years away in the Auriga constellation.
This nebula is brimming with new-born stars, many as young as only a million years of age. It's called the Tadpole nebula because the masses of hot, young stars are blasting out ultraviolet radiation that has etched the gas into two tadpole-shaped pillars, called Sim 129 and130, the yellow forms that seem to be swimming away from the three red stars close to the centre of the picture.

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Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

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V838 Light Echo: The Movie

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Open Star Cluster NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula Room Graphics

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NGC 3324 is a star cluster at the northwest corner of the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372), home of the Keyhole Nebula and star Eta Carinae. This photograph was produced by European Southern Observatory (ESO). Their website states: "All ESO still and motion pictures are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported, unless the credit byline indicates otherwise." Source http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1207a/ Author ESO

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New molecules around old stars

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Using ESA’s Herschel space observatory, astronomers have discovered that a molecule vital for creating water exists in the burning embers of dying Sun-like stars.




via ESA Space Science

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Herschel/New_molecules_around_old_stars

Hubble Interacting Galaxy NGC 5256 iPad Mini Cover

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DNA nanotechnology places enzyme catalysis within an arm’s length

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Using molecules of DNA like an architectural scaffold, Arizona State University scientists, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Michigan, have developed a 3-D artificial enzyme cascade that mimics an important biochemical pathway that could prove important for future biomedical and energy applications. The findings were published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Led by ASU Professor Hao Yan, the research team included ASU Biodesign Institute researchers Jinglin Fu, Yuhe Yang, Minghui Liu, Professor Yan Liu and Professor Neal Woodbury along with colleagues Professor Nils Walter and postdoctoral fellow Alexander Johnson-Buck at the University of Michigan. Researchers in the field of DNA nanotechnology, taking advantage of the binding properties of the chemical building blocks of DNA, twist and self-assemble DNA into ever-more imaginative 2- and 3-dimensional structures for medical, electronic and energy applications. In the latest breakthrough, the research team took up the challenge of mimicking enzymes outside the friendly confines of the cell. These enzymes speed up chemical reactions, used in our bodies for the digestion of food into sugars and energy during human metabolism, for example. “We look to Nature for inspiration to build man-made molecular systems that mimic the sophisticated nanoscale machineries developed in living biological systems,

The post DNA nanotechnology places enzyme catalysis within an arm’s length has been published on Technology Org.

 
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The Orion Nebula Print

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A massive image of The Orion Nebula in infrared, thanks to NASA/Hubble Space Telescope Program. The image file is 6000x6000.

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Name, Carina Nebula in Argo Navis deep space image Wrapping Paper

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Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series Hubble's view of the Carina Nebula shows star birth in a new level of detail. The fantasy-like landscape of the nebula is sculpted by the action of outflowing winds and scorching ultraviolet radiation from the monster stars that inhabit this inferno. In the process, these stars are shredding the surrounding material that is the last vestige of the giant cloud from which the stars were born. The immense nebula is an estimated 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina the Keel (of the old southern constellation Argo Navis, the ship of Jason and the Argonauts, from Greek mythology).
The original image is a mosaic of the Carina Nebula assembled from 48 frames taken with Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The Hubble images were taken in the light of ionized hydrogen. Colour information was added with data taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Red corresponds to sulfur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission.

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image code: carnebngcttst

Image credit: Hubble Space Telescope; colour data from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile

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The Rose Galaxies, Arp 273 Square Sticker

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Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series An amazing outer space picture featuring two interacting galaxies that together form the shape of a rose. The larger of the spiral galaxies, UGC 1810, has a disk that is twisted by the gravitational pull of its companion galaxy, UGC 1813.
Knots of young, hot blue stars bejewel the spirals arms in glistening starlight while below, its smaller, nearly edge-on companion is going through intense star formation at its centre, perhaps triggered by their encounter.

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Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

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Nebulosity 360 Wall Art Wall Sticker

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Make your room a space mans room

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