Thursday 11 September 2014

New species of electrons can lead to better computing

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Electrons that break the rules and move perpendicular to the applied electric field could be the key to delivering next generation, low-energy computers.

via Science Daily

Excitonic dark states shed light on TMDC atomic layers: New promise for nanoelectronic and photonic applications

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Researchers believe they have uncovered the secret behind the unusual optoelectronic properties of single atomic layers of TMDC materials, the two-dimensional semiconductors that hold great promise for nanoelectronic and photonic applications.

via Science Daily

Graphene paints a corrosion-free future: Keep food fresh longer?

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A thin layer of graphene paint can make impermeable and chemically resistant coatings which could be used for packaging to keep food fresh for longer and protect metal structures against corrosion, new findings show.

via Science Daily

Catalytic gold nanoclusters promise rich chemical yields

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The reaction mechanism of carbon monoxide oxidation is shown over intact and partially ligand-removed gold nanoclusters supported on cerium oxide rods. Image credit: Wu, Z.; Jiang, D.; Mann, A.; Mullins, D.; Qiao, Z.-A.; Allard, L.; Zeng, C.; Jin, R.; Overbury, S. Thiolate Ligands as a Double-Edged Sword for CO Oxidation on CeO2-Supported Au25(SCH2CH2Ph)18 Nanoclusters. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2014, 136(16), 6111. (hi-res image) Old thinking was that gold, while good for jewelry, was not of much use for chemists because it is relatively nonreactive. That changed a decade ago when scientists hit a rich vein of discoveries revealing that this noble metal, when structured into nanometer-sized particles, can speed up chemical reactions important in mitigating environmental pollutants and producing hard-to-make specialty chemicals. Catalytic gold nanoparticles have since spurred hundreds of scientific journal articles. With the world catalyst market poised to hit \$19.5 billion by 2016, gold nanoparticles may find commercial as well as intellectual importance, as they could ultimately lead to novel catalysts for energy, pharmacology and diverse consumer products. But before gold nanoparticles can be useful to consumers, researchers have to make them both stable and active. Recently, scientists learned to make tiny, highly ordered clusters with very specific numbers of gold

The post Catalytic gold nanoclusters promise rich chemical yields has been published on Technology Org.

 
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We could find alien life -- but Congress doesn't have the will

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The Conversation

While alien life can be seen nightly on television and in the movies, it has never been seen in space. Not so much as a microbe, dead or alive, let alone a wrinkle-faced Klingon.

Despite this lack of protoplasmic presence, there are many researchers — sober, sckptical academics — who think that life beyond Earth is rampant. They suggest proof may come within a generation. These scientists support their sunny point of view with a few astronomical facts that were unknown a generation ago.

In particular, and thanks largely to the success of NASA's Kepler space telescope, we can now...

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 » see original post http://theweek.com/article/index/266264/we-could-find-alien-life--but-congress-doesnt-have-the-will
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Everything you need to know about fracking

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Recently in New York City, protesters took to the boardwalk in the Rockaways to voice opposition to the Rockaway Lateral Project, which aims to install a pipeline under New York City's Jacob Riis and Fort Tilden beaches to connect two existing natural gas distribution systems. The pipeline, controlled by Williams Partners L.P., will allow fracked natural gas from the Marcellus Shale, in Pennsylvania, to flow to a new meter and regulator station at Floyd Bennett Field, in Brooklyn, and then into the current distribution lines running up Flatbush Avenue. The evidence for environmental damages caused...

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 » see original post http://theweek.com/article/index/266557/everything-you-need-to-know-about-fracking
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VIDEO: Footage of powerful solar flares

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The US Space Agency Nasa has released new footage showing a series of powerful solar flares. 
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 » see original post http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29008576#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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Crab Pulsar Time Lapse - Neutron Star Sticker

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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 code: crbplsr

Image credit: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope

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Name, Carina Nebula, intriguing outer space image Wrapping Paper

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Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A fantastic astronomy photograph showing a panoramic view of the WR 22 and Eta Carinae regions of the Carina Nebula.
The picture was created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

It's a stunning, fantastic image that reveals a little of the wonder that is our universe.
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image code: crnneb

ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA www.eso.org
Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

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Zodiacal Light before Dawn

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You might not guess it, but sunrise was still hours away when this nightscape was taken, a view along the eastern horizon from a remote location in Chile's Atacama desert. Stretching high into the otherwise dark, starry sky the unusually bright conical glow is sunlight though, scattered by dust along the solar system's ecliptic plane . Known as Zodiacal light, the apparition is also nicknamed the "false dawn". Near center, bright star Aldebaran and the Pleiades star cluster seem immersed in the Zodiacal light, with Orion toward the right edge of the frame. Reddish emission from NGC 1499, the California Nebula, can also be seen through the tinge of airglow along the horizon. Sliding your cursor over the picture (or following this link) will label the sky over this future site of the Giant Magellan Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory.

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Orion Nebula Upright Bass Wall Sticker

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Space image of the Orion Nebula on the shape of an upright bass.

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Astronomers pinpoint 'Venus Zone' around stars

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Astronomers have defined the 'Venus Zone,' the area around a star in which a planet is likely to exhibit the unlivable conditions found on the planet Venus. The research will aid Kepler astronomers searching for exoplanets, helping them determine which are likely to be similar to Earth and which are more likely to resemble Venus.

via Science Daily

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New observing capabilities for ALMA

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The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has reached a major milestone by extending its vision fully into the realm of the submillimeter, the wavelengths of cosmic light that hold intriguing information about the cold, dark, and distant Universe.

via Science Daily

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Where to grab space debris: Algorithm analyzes the rotation of objects in space

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Objects in space tend to spin -- and spin in a way that's totally different from the way they spin on earth. Understanding how objects are spinning, where their centers of mass are, and how their mass is distributed is crucial to any number of actual or potential space missions, from cleaning up debris in the geosynchronous orbit favored by communications satellites to landing a demolition crew on a comet.

via Science Daily

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Bright clumps in Saturn ring now mysteriously scarce

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Compared to the age of the solar system -- about four-and-a-half billion years -- a couple of decades are next to nothing. Some planetary locales change little over many millions of years, so for scientists who study the planets, any object that evolves on such a short interval makes for a tempting target for study. And so it is with the ever-changing rings of Saturn.

via Science Daily

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Geomagnetic storm mystery solved: How magnetic energy turns into particle energy

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Magnetic reconnection can trigger geomagnetic storms that disrupt cell phone service, damage satellites and black out power grids. But how reconnection, in which the magnetic field lines in plasma snap apart and violently reconnect, transforms magnetic energy into explosive particle energy remains a major unsolved problem in plasma astrophysics.

via Science Daily

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This star cluster is not what it seems: Messier 54 shows lithium problem also applies outside our galaxy

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A new image from the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in northern Chile shows a vast collection of stars, the globular cluster Messier 54. This cluster looks very similar to many others but it has a secret. Messier 54 doesn’t belong to the Milky Way, but is part of a small satellite galaxy, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. This unusual parentage has now allowed astronomers to use the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to test whether there are also unexpectedly low levels of the element lithium in stars outside the Milky Way.

via Science Daily

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Fantastic Hubble Images 1 Cover For The iPad Mini

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Keep a little bit of the universe with you and take home this Galaxy. Image from NASA Hubble and is PD.

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Sorting cells with sound waves

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Researchers from MIT, Pennsylvania State University, and Carnegie Mellon University have devised a new way to separate cells by exposing them to sound waves as they flow through a tiny channel. Their device, about the size of a dime, could be used to detect the extremely rare tumor cells that circulate in cancer patients’ blood, helping doctors predict whether a tumor is going to spread. Separating cells with sound offers a gentler alternative to existing cell-sorting technologies, which require tagging the cells with chemicals or exposing them to stronger mechanical forces that may damage them. “Acoustic pressure is very mild and much smaller in terms of forces and disturbance to the cell. This is a most gentle way to separate cells, and there’s no artificial labeling necessary,” says Ming Dao, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and one of the senior authors of the paper, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Subra Suresh, president of Carnegie Mellon, the Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering Emeritus, and a former dean of engineering at MIT, and Tony Jun Huang, a professor of engineering science and mechanics at Penn State, are also

The post Sorting cells with sound waves has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Lurking bright blue star caught—The last piece of a supernova puzzle

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A team led by Gastón Folatelli at the Kavli IPMU, the University of Tokyo, has found evidence of a hot binary companion star to a yellow supergiant star, which had become a bright supernova. The existence of the companion star had been predicted by the same team on the basis of numerical calculations. This finding provides the last link in a chain of observations that have so far supported the team's theoretical picture for this supernova. The results are published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and have wide implications for our knowledge of binary systems and supernova mechanisms.



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copernicus quote poster

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Crab Pulsar Time Lapse - Neutron Star Round Stickers

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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 code: crbplsr

Image credit: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope

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Name, Tarantula Nebula, outer space image Gift Wrap

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tagged with: galaxies, astronomy, stellar nursery, 30 doradus nebula, massive stars, amazing hubble images, tarantula nebula, cosmological stars, outer space, doorneblmc, r136, large magellanic cloud, star cluster

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series Hundreds of brilliant blue stars wreathed by warm, glowing clouds in appear in this the most detailed view of the largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood. The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus (or Tarantula) Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way.
There is no known star-forming region in our galaxy as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus. Many of the diamond-like icy blue stars are among the most massive stars known. Several of them are over 100 times more massive than our Sun. These hefty stars are destined to pop off, like a string of firecrackers, as supernovas in a few million years. The image, taken in ultraviolet, visible, and red light by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, spans about 100 light-years.
The movement of the LMC around the Milky Way may have triggered the massive cluster's formation in several ways. The gravitational tug of the Milky Way and the companion Small Magellanic Cloud may have compressed gas in the LMC. Also, the pressure resulting from the LMC plowing through the Milky Way's halo may have compressed gas in the satellite. The cluster is a rare, nearby example of the many super star clusters that formed in the distant, early universe, when star birth and galaxy interactions were more frequent.
The LMC is located 170,000 light-years away and is a member of the Local Group of Galaxies, which also includes the Milky Way. The Hubble observations were taken Oct. 20-27, 2009. The blue color is light from the hottest, most massive stars; the green from the glow of oxygen; and the red from fluorescing hydrogen.
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Image credit: Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3

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Astronomers pinpoint 'Venus Zone' around stars

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San Francisco State University astronomer Stephen Kane and a team of researchers presented today the definition of a "Venus Zone," the area around a star in which a planet is likely to exhibit the unlivable conditions found on the planet Venus.



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Nebula in Turquoise iPad Air Powis Case iPad Air Covers

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Nebula in Turquoise iPad Air Powis Case Personalize

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