Friday 8 May 2015

Spacecraft Falls From Orbit Over the Pacific, Russia Says

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The cargo capsule went awry after launching for the International Space Station last week.








via New York Times

Magnifying vibrations in bridges and buildings

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To the naked eye, buildings and bridges appear fixed in place, unmoved by forces like wind and rain.

The post Magnifying vibrations in bridges and buildings has been published on Technology Org.

 
#materials 
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Milky Way Galaxy - Our Beautiful Neighborhood Poster

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: astronomy, space, universe, photo, photograph, poster, prints, milky way, milky way galaxy, galaxy, star, star cluster, neutron star, supernova, posters, print, nebula poster, nebula posters, space poster, space posters, nasa, stars, neutron, constellation, milky, way

Milky Way Galaxy - Our Beautiful Neighborhood In this spectacular image, observations using infrared light and X-ray light see through the obscuring dust and reveal the intense activity near the galactic core. Note that the center of the galaxy is located within the bright white region to the right of and just below the middle of the image. The swirling core of our galaxy harbors hundreds of thousands of stars that cannot be seen in visible light. These stars heat the nearby gas and dust. These dusty clouds glow in infrared light and reveal their often dramatic shapes. Some of these clouds harbor stellar nurseries that are forming new generations of stars. Like the downtown of a large city, the center of our galaxy is a crowded, active, and vibrant place. The galactic center is marked by the bright patch in the lower right. Along the left side are large arcs of warm gas that have been heated by clusters of bright massive stars. Winds and radiation from these stars create the complex structures seen in the gas throughout the image.This sweeping panorama is one of the sharpest infrared pictures ever made of the galactic center region. Hundreds of small dots show emission from material around black holes and other dense stellar objects. A supermassive black hole -- some four million times more massive than the Sun -- resides within the bright region in the lower right. The diffuse X-ray light comes from gas heated to millions of degrees by outflows from the supermassive black hole, winds from giant stars, and stellar explosions. This central region is the most energetic place in our galaxy.

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Diagnostics of quality of graphene and spatial imaging of reactivity centers on carbon surface

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A convenient procedure to visualize defects on graphene layers by mapping the surface of carbon materials with an appropriate contrast agent was introduced by a team of researchers.
via Science Daily

A gentle nudge with a nuke: Deflecting Earth-bound asteroids

Science Focus

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In 2013, a small asteroid exploded in the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The sonic boom from the event sent more than a thousand people to the hospital, mostly from flying glass from shattered windows. The Chelyabinsk meteor was a relatively small chunk of space rock—asteroid researchers think it was probably about 20 meters (66 feet) across—but exploding over a city made it a noteworthy event. It's probable many similar asteroids hit Earth on a regular basis, but most don't happen to fly over metropolitan areas; they fall into the ocean or over lightly populated regions.

However, Earth has played target in the cosmic darts tournament before. Meteor Crater in Arizona, the Tunguska impact in Siberia in 1908, and most famously the Chicxulub asteroid in Mexico (which played a part in the extinction of the dinosaurs) are just three of many known examples. That's why many people are looking at viable options for planetary defense: destroying or turning asteroids aside before they can hit Earth. And planetary defense is one reason the United States' National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) has given for not destroying some of its surplus nuclear warheads.

It's easy to be cynical about American nuclear weapons policy, especially now that we're decades since the end of the Cold War. Debates over nuclear winter, mutually assured destruction, and the like feel very distant. So reports that the US wasn't following the stated schedule for decommissioning nukes in the name of planetary defense triggered the skeptical radar, not least since The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and other sources made it sound like the plan was to blow asteroids to smithereens.

Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

 
#science 
 » see original post http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/sdIRKLBVdiQ/
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LHC: Crash course in physics

Science Focus

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The world’s biggest particle smasher – in fact, the world’s biggest machine – is warming up for its

The post LHC: Crash course in physics has been published on Technology Org.

 
#physics 
 » see original post http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechnologyOrgPhysicsNews/~3/dO7K2XxNN4A/
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Star Cluster Pismis 24, core of NGC 6357 Rectangular Sticker

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: galaxies, star cluster, pismis 24, sculpting ultaviolet ionisation, super massive stars, sclustpsms, nebula ngc 6357, peel off, outer space exploration, astronomy pictures

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series The star cluster Pismis 24 lies in the core of the large emission nebula NGC 6357 that extends one degree on the sky in the direction of the Scorpius constellation. Part of the nebula is ionised by the youngest (bluest) heavy stars in Pismis 24. The intense ultraviolet radiation from the blazing stars heats the gas surrounding the cluster and creates a bubble in NGC 6357. The presence of these surrounding gas clouds makes probing into the region even harder. One of the top candidates for the title of "Milky Way stellar heavyweight champion" was, until now, Pismis 24-1, a bright young star that lies in the core of the small open star cluster Pismis 24 (the bright stars in the Hubble image) about 8,000 light-years away from Earth. Pismis 24-1 was thought to have an incredibly large mass of 200 to 300 solar masses. New NASA/ESA Hubble measurements of the star, have, however, resolved Pismis 24-1 into two separate stars, and, in doing so, have "halved" its mass to around 100 solar masses.

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image code: sclustpsms

Image credit: NASA/ESA Hubble

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Quantum shortcut could speed up many quantum technologies

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(Phys.org)—Quantum technologies come in a wide variety of forms, from computers, sensors, and cryptographic systems to simulations and imaging systems. But one thing that all current and future quantum systems have in common is the need to achieve reliable control over physical systems such as atoms or photons. A frequently used method to prepare quantum systems in the desired quantum state is a quantum adiabatic process, but these processes often take so long that environmental noise causes the quantum state to decohere and lose its "quantumness."

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When Vega is North

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In only about 12,000 years Vega will be the North Star, the closest bright star to our fair planet's North Celestial Pole. By then, when you fix your camera to a tripod long exposures of the night sky will show the concentric arcs of star trails centered on a point near Vega as Earth rotates on its axis. Of course, presently the bright star conveniently near the North Celestial Pole is Polaris, but that will change as the Earth's axis of rotation precesses, like the wobble of a spinning top with a precession period of about 26,000 years. If your camera is ready now and you don't want to wait 12,000 years for Vega to be the North Star, consider this ingenious demonstration of contemporary star trails (left) versus star trails reminiscent of the year 14000 CE. Both were recorded this April at the Alqueva Dark Sky Reserve in Alentejo, Portugal. To produce the more Vega-centric star trails of the distant future, astronomer Miguel Claro combined the rotation of two startracking camera mounts to create the apparent shift in planet Earth's North Celestial Pole.
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Orion Nebula iPad Mini Cases

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!


tagged with: orion, nebula, space, image, nasa, hubble, astronomy, green

A lovely detail of an image of the Orion Nebula thanks to NASA/Hubble.

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Discovery unlocks ion conductor that is 100 times faster than all the others

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A research group at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Department of Energy Conversion and storage (DTU Energy)

The post Discovery unlocks ion conductor that is 100 times faster than all the others has been published on Technology Org.

 
#materials 
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US-CERN agreement paves way for new era of discovery

CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer (centre) signs a US-CERN agreement at the White House (Image: Ken Shipp/DOE Photo)

A new agreement signed yesterday in Washington between the United States and CERN will pave the way for renewed collaboration in particle physics. The agreement, signed in a White House ceremony by the US Department of Energy, US National Science Foundation and CERN will enable continued scientific discoveries in particle physics and advanced computing.

The agreement - which will automatically renew every five years unless one of the signatories indicates a need to modify or end the agreement - aligns European and American long-term strategies for particle physics. This global relationship has already generated amazing results, through instruments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and the Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab.

CERN and the United States have a long history of collaboration: American physicist Isidor Rabi was one of CERN’s founders, and American scientists have been involved in CERN projects since the institution’s creation in the early 1950s. CERN provided equipment for US projects, such as Brookhaven National Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider – used for nuclear physics research – and European scientists were critical to the success of US-based particle colliders such as the Tevatron.

US physicists have participated in a wide range of experiments at CERN over the last 30 years, from the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) through fixed-target experiments at the Super Proton Synchrotron, all the experiments on the Large Electron-Positron Collider (L3, ALEPH, OPAL, DELPHI), heavy-ion experiments and ISOLDE. Following the demise of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in 1993, many US physicists joined the LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS, as well as ALICE and LHCb.

More about the US at CERN:


via CERN: Updates for the general public
http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/05/us-cern-agreement-paves-way-new-era-discovery

Monogram, Star Cluster Pismis 24, core of NGC 6357 Classic Round Sticker

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: stars, galaxies, astronomy, peel off, envelope sealers, star cluster, pismis 24, sculpting ultaviolet ionisation, super massive stars, sclustpsms, nebula ngc 6357

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series The star cluster Pismis 24 lies in the core of the large emission nebula NGC 6357 that extends one degree on the sky in the direction of the Scorpius constellation. Part of the nebula is ionised by the youngest (bluest) heavy stars in Pismis 24. The intense ultraviolet radiation from the blazing stars heats the gas surrounding the cluster and creates a bubble in NGC 6357. The presence of these surrounding gas clouds makes probing into the region even harder. One of the top candidates for the title of "Milky Way stellar heavyweight champion" was, until now, Pismis 24-1, a bright young star that lies in the core of the small open star cluster Pismis 24 (the bright stars in the Hubble image) about 8,000 light-years away from Earth. Pismis 24-1 was thought to have an incredibly large mass of 200 to 300 solar masses. New NASA/ESA Hubble measurements of the star, have, however, resolved Pismis 24-1 into two separate stars, and, in doing so, have "halved" its mass to around 100 solar masses.

more items with this image
more items in the Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series

image code: sclustpsms

Image credit: NASA/ESA Hubble

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Electrons corralled using new quantum tool

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Researchers have succeeded in creating a new 'whispering gallery' effect for electrons in a sheet of graphene -- making it possible to precisely control a region that reflects electrons within the material. They say the accomplishment could provide a basic building block for new kinds of electronic lenses, as well as quantum-based devices that combine electronics and optics.
via Science Daily

Faster, more durable water filters: Plugging up leaky graphene

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For faster, longer-lasting water filters, some scientists are looking to graphene --thin, strong sheets of carbon -- to serve as ultrathin membranes, filtering out contaminants to quickly purify high volumes of water. Graphene's unique properties make it a potentially ideal membrane for water filtration or desalination. But there's been one main drawback to its wider use: Making membranes in one-atom-thick layers of graphene is a meticulous process that can tear the thin material -- creating defects through which contaminants can leak. Now engineers have devised a process to repair these leaks.
via Science Daily

Light Echo from Star V838 iPad Mini Cases

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!


tagged with: le0018, nasa, etoiles, les etoiles, astronomy, nebula, space, hubble, science, scientific, outer space, deep space, sky, hst, hubble telescope, nebulae, reflection, nova, v838, monocerotis, light echo, hubble space telescope, red, orange, black, beautiful, pretty, inspiring, celestial

"[This is] the most recent NASA Hubble Space Telescope view of an unusual phenomenon in space called a light echo. Light from a star that erupted nearly five years ago continues propagating outward through a cloud of dust surrounding the star. The light reflects or "echoes" off the dust and then travels to Earth."

(qtd. from HubbleSite.org NewsCenter release STScI-2006-50)

Credit: NASA, ESA, and H. Bond (STScI)

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