Wednesday 3 September 2014

Observatory: Astronomers Give Name to Network of Galaxies

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The supercluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way was outlined and named Laniakea, Hawaiian for “immense heaven.”















via New York Times

Rooting out skin creams that contain toxic mercury

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As countries try to rid themselves of toxic mercury pollution, some people are slathering and even injecting creams containing the metal onto or under their skin to lighten it, putting themselves and others at risk for serious health problems. To find those most at risk, scientists are reporting today that they can now identify these creams and intervene much faster than before. Authors of the research are speaking at the 248th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS). The meeting, organized by the world’s largest scientific society, features nearly 12,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics and is being held through Thursday. “In the U.S., the limit on mercury in products is 1 part per million,” says Gordon Vrdoljak, Ph.D., of the California Department of Public Health. “In some of these creams, we’ve been finding levels as high as 210,000 parts per million — really substantial amounts of mercury. If people are using the product quite regularly, their hands will exude it, it will get in their food, on their countertops, on the sheets their kids sleep on.” Identifying the toxic products has been a slow process, however. So, Vrdoljak turned to an instrument that uses a

The post Rooting out skin creams that contain toxic mercury has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Newly identified galactic supercluster is home to the Milky Way

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Astronomers using the Green Bank Telescope -- among other telescopes -- have determined that our own Milky Way galaxy is part of a newly identified ginormous supercluster of galaxies, which they have dubbed 'Laniakea,' which means 'immense heaven' in Hawaiian.

via Science Daily

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'Brightpoints': New clues to determining the solar cycle

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Approximately every 11 years, the sun undergoes a complete personality change from quiet and calm to violently active. However, the timing of the solar cycle is far from precise. Now, researchers have discovered a new marker to track the course of the solar cycle -- brightpoints, little bright spots in the solar atmosphere that allow us to observe the constant roiling of material inside the sun.

via Science Daily

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Cosmic forecast: Dark clouds will give way to sunshine

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Lupus 4, a spider-shaped blob of gas and dust, blots out background stars like a dark cloud on a moonless night in this intriguing new image. Although gloomy for now, dense pockets of material within clouds such as Lupus 4 are where new stars form and where they will later burst into radiant life.

via Science Daily

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Laniakea: Newly identified galactic supercluster is home to the Milky Way

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Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT)—among other telescopes—have determined that our own Milky Way galaxy is part of a newly identified ginormous supercluster of galaxies, which they have dubbed "Laniakea," which means "immense heaven" in Hawaiian.



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How collaborative innovation led to the experimental serum for Ebola

Science Focus

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Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, the two American aid workers infected with the Ebola virus while volunteering in Liberia, were released from the hospital yesterday after they recovered from the illness.

They were both given an experimental serum, Zmapp, before being flown from Liberia to CDC facilities in Atlanta, Georgia, three week ago. Brantly — who was seriously deteriorating before the drug was administered — yesterday appeared overjoyed, telling the media he was "thrilled to be alive."

These two Americans might have recovered anyway. In the West African communities that have...

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 » see original post http://theweek.com/article/index/266889/how-collaborative-innovation-led-to-the-experimental-serum-for-ebola
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Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?

Science Focus

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When I first started reading Ars Technica, performance of a processor was measured in megahertz, and the major manufacturers were rushing to squeeze as many of them as possible into their latest silicon. Shortly thereafter, however, the energy needs and heat output of these beasts brought that race crashing to a halt. More recently, the number of processing cores rapidly scaled up, but they quickly reached the point of diminishing returns. Now, getting the most processing power for each Watt seems to be the key measure of performance.

None of these things happened because the companies making processors ran up against hard physical limits. Rather, computing power ended up being constrained because progress in certain areas—primarily energy efficiency—was slow compared to progress in others, such as feature size. But could we be approaching physical limits in processing power? In this week's edition of Nature, The University of Michigan's Igor Markov takes a look at the sorts of limits we might face.

Clearing hurdles

Markov notes that, based on purely physical limitations, some academics have estimated that Moore's law had hundreds of years left in it. In contrast, the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), a group sponsored by the major semiconductor manufacturing nations, gives it a couple of decades. And the ITRS can be optimistic; it once expected that we would have 10GHz CPUs back in the Core2 days. The reason for this discrepancy is that a lot of hard physical limits never come into play.

Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

 
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 » see original post http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/O8buG6dm59Y/
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Neutron tomography technique reveals phase fractions of crystalline materials in 3-dimensions

Science Focus

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The method overcomes limitations of existing techniques which are limited to the surface or small-sized specimens, and allows a 3-D representation of the phase fractions within the sample volume. The work has just been published in the journal “Advanced Materials“. Reconstructed energy-selective neutron tomography: This is a visualization of austenite and martensite distribution in torsion (two images to left) and tensile (image to the right) loading. “For many engineering applications it is of major importance to characterize the bulk of materials spatially, instead of only probing selected locations. The new method provides exactly that capability, and the HZB-UTK team has demonstrated it by using samples made from stainless steel that undergo a phase transformation after being subjected to tensile and torsional deformation.”, said Prof. Dayakar Penumadu from UTK. He and UTK Ph.D. student Robin Woracek collaborated with the researchers Ingo Manke, Nikolay Kardjilov and André Hilger from the Imaging Group at the Institute of Applied Materials (F-IAM) at HZB on establishing new quantitative imaging methods by making use of diffraction contrast due to Bragg scattering in polycrystalline materials. Since the measurement method uses neutrons of selected wavelengths, the current work will also pave the way to implement such methods at

The post Neutron tomography technique reveals phase fractions of crystalline materials in 3-dimensions has been published on Technology Org.

 
#physics 
 » see original post http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechnologyOrgPhysicsNews/~3/QcFT104MAjw/
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Sculpted Region of the Orion Nebula Stickers

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Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A region within the Orion Nebula showing the sculpting effect that stars can have on any surrounding gas clouds. This glowing region reveals arcs and bubbles formed when stellar winds - streams of charged particles ejected by the nearby Trapezium stars - collide with material.

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Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

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Out There: The V838 Monocerotis Star Still Has Astronomers’ Heads Exploding

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The eruption of a star 20,000 years ago made it a million times as luminous as the sun, and its violent beauty still echoes through space.















via New York Times

Ultrafast graphene based photodetectors with data rates up to 50 GBit/s

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In cooperation with Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs researcher from AMO realized the worldwide fastest Graphene based photodetectors. By demonstrating a maximum data rate of 50 GBit/s a new record level could be reached, pushing this technology closer to applications.



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M6: The Butterfly Cluster

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To watch DNA unwrap, blank out the proteins

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A schematic of the stopped-flow mixing experiment to probe salt-induced disassembly of nucleosome core particles. The left side shows NCPs in solution before the addition of sucrose. On the right, sucrose is added to increase solvent density, effectively erasing the signal from the protein. Pollack lab     Biophysics is a science of shapes – the shapes of molecules like DNA as they wrap and unwrap around protein cores, for instance. Cornell researchers have unveiled a new method for observing such processes in real time. Professor of applied and engineering physics Lois Pollack and her research group have devised a way to watch dynamic movements and shape changes of molecules in solution using a new X-ray scattering method. In aNucleic Acids Researchpaper recently published online, they proved their method by observing transient nucleosome structures as DNA unwound from them. The work was done in collaboration with professor Lisa Gloss and her research group at Washington State University. When stored away, DNA is wrapped like thread around a core of eight proteins called histones. This assembly is known as a nucleosome core particle (NCP). The entire system takes many shapes as the DNA unwraps for processes including transcription and replication of genetic

The post To watch DNA unwrap, blank out the proteins has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Astronomy 101: posters

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Scientists' work may lead to mission to find out what's inside asteroids

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Future asteroid mining operations and how we deal with an impending strike could be influenced by research on a potential NASA mission.

via Science Daily

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Sculpted Region of the Orion Nebula Rectangular Sticker

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NGC 6357 is a diffuse nebula near NGC 6334 in the constellation Scorpius. The nebula contains many proto-stars shielded by dark disks of gas, and young stars wrapped in expanding "cocoons". This nebula was given the name War and Peace Nebula by the Midcourse Space Experiment scientists because of its appearance. They said that in infrared images the bright, western part resembles a dove, while the eastern part looks like a skull. This nebula includes the open cluster Pismis 24, which is home to several massive stars. One of the brightest stars in the cluster, Pismis 24-1, was thought possibly to be the most massive on record, approaching 300 solar masses, until it was discovered to be a binary system with each star exceeding 100 solar masses. Image by NASA, ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain). Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble)

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Hubble Images of Star Cluster iPad Cover

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