Tuesday 28 July 2015

Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo Crash Traced to Co-Pilot Error

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Federal investigators said the manufacturer failed to consider that a pilot might prematurely unlock a mechanism for the space plane’s descent.










via New York Times

Toward cheaper water treatment

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Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” produces a lot of wastewater. Drilling one well requires millions of gallons of water

The post Toward cheaper water treatment has been published on Technology Org.

 
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'Seeing' molecular interactions could give boost to organic electronics

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For the first time, researchers have directly seen how organic molecules bind to other materials at the atomic level. Using a special kind of electron microscopy, this information can lead to increasing the life span of electronic devices, for example.
via Science Daily

Lobster-eye imager detects soft X-ray emissions

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A group of scientists have described developing and launching their imager, which centers on "Lobster-Eye optics," as well as its capabilities and future applications in space exploration.
via Science Daily
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Carina Nebula Huge Astronomy Poster

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


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Carina Nebula image for the 17th anniversary of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope - this striking image is a unique gift idea for the space science, astronmer and astrophysics enthusiast on you Holiday gift list or a special gift for any occasion

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The sugary secrets of candy-making chemistry

Science Focus

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There's a real art to making candy — and a lot of science, too. Even the simplest sugary treat is shaped by complex chemistry. Here's some of the inventive science that goes on behind the scenes of making some of your favorite sweet treats:

(Amazon.com)

Atomic fireballs get their burn from the same stuff as hot peppers

Atomic Fireballs take cinnamon flavors over the edge into mouth-searing spiciness. To add some heat to their sweets, the makers of Atomic Fireballs, the Ferrara Candy Company, add a bit of a chemical called capsaicin, a little molecule that also gives hot peppers their kick. (Ferrara claims that the amount of capsaicin in Atomic Fireballs is equivalent to about 3,500 Scoville Heat Units, or the same spiciness as a jalapeno pepper.)

(More from World Science Festival: 11 small wonders captured on camera)

So what makes capsaicin so spicy? When the chemical binds to your taste receptors, it opens up channels in cell membranes that allow calcium ions to rush in — which, from your cells' point of view, is the exact same thing that happens when they're exposed to uncomfortable amounts of heat. Water won't neutralize the burn, because capsaicin is insoluble in it. Milk, on the other hand, works to take away the pain because it contains casein, a fat-loving molecule that can glom onto capsaicin's fatty tail, making it easier for the spicy molecules to be washed away.

(iStock)

Chocolate cherries get a liquid center from enzymes

There are lots of different ways of making chocolate-covered cherries, also known as cherry cordials. Some are just whole cherries coated in chocolate, while other cordials are made by placing cherries and cherry syrup in a chocolate mold that's plugged up with even more chocolate. But there's another way of making cherry cordials that gets a little more involved in chemistry.

These cherry cordials are made by coating a cherry with a sugary paste containing the enzyme invertase, which breaks down sugar, and then rolling that paste-covered cherry in chocolate. Once the cordials are made, they're stored for a couple weeks to allow the enzyme to do its work. Some of the sucrose in the cherries is broken down into the more water-soluble dextrose and fructose. "In effect, the outer part of the cherry liquefies in its own syrup, leaving the cherry center swimming in liquid," David Chisdes, a candy chemist, told the Los Angeles Times. "This explains how these succulent candies can be made without there being a hole somewhere in the coating."

(iStock)

The many transformations of sugar syrup

A lot of different types of candy can be made from a simple mixture of sugar and water. The key is in how hot you heat the mixture. Heated sugar solution passes through several candy stages, corresponding to the concentration of sugar in the mixture:

Thread stage — occurs when the mixture is heated to between 230 degrees Fahrenheit and 235 degrees F, and corresponds to a sugar concentration of 80 percent. When placed in water, this syrup forms a little liquid thread. This syrup is good for pouring over ice cream, glazing fruits, or sweetening tea.

Soft-ball stage — occurs at between 235 and 240 degrees F and corresponds to a sugar concentration of 85 percent. When dropped in water, the mixture forms a soft ball. This stage is good for making fondants and fudge.

Firm-ball stage — occurs at between 245 and 250 degrees F, with a sugar concentration of 87 percent. When dropped in water, this stage forms a ball that's still malleable but which won't flatten as much as the soft-ball stage. At this point, the mixture is good for making caramels.

Hard-ball stage — occurs at between 250 and 265 degrees F, with a sugar concentration of 92 percent. When dropped in water, this stage forms a hard ball that's still a little bit yielding if you really squish it. Marshmallows, gummies, and rock candy are made from this stage.

(More from World Science Festival: What's the real danger from solar flares?)

Soft-crack stage — occurs at between 270 and 290 degrees F, with a sugar concentration of 95 percent. When dropped in water, this stage forms threads that are flexible. Saltwater taffy and butterscotch are cooked to this stage.

Hard-crack stage — occurs at between 300 and 310 degrees F, with a sugar concentration of 99 percent. When dropped in water, this stage makes hard, brittle threads. Hard-crack stage is used to make lollipops, toffees, and brittles.

Heat your mixture beyond these stages and you will enter the realm of caramelization. The water in the mixture has been boiled off, and now there is a complicated series of reactions happening in the sugar molecules themselves. In the process, volatile chemicals are released that give caramelized sugar its luscious flavor.

The cool chemistry of rock candy

Candy chemistry isn't just dependent on how you heat up your sugar mixture; how you cool it down is important too. Rock candy is made by heating up sugar water to the hard-ball stage, then slowly cooling it for several days in order to allow huge crystals of sugar to form. Part of what allows those big crystals to grow is a fundamental chemistry concept known as Le Chatelier's principle, which basically says that when conditions are shifted inside a system at equilibrium, the system will respond in an attempt to restore equilibrium. In this case, the decreasing temperature of the sugar solution provokes crystallization.

"A decrease in temperature causes a system to generate energy, in an attempt to bring the temperature up," science writer Tom Husband wrote in an in-depth look at rock candy for the American Chemical Society. Sucrose molecules join together to form crystals and "because the formation of chemical bonds always releases energy, more sucrose molecules will join the crystal in an attempt to increase the temperature."

(iStock)

Smooth fudge is a delicate chemical process

For candies with a smooth texture, like fudge, a confectioner wants to minimize crystallization as the sugar mixture cools. Crystallization needs some "seed" to kickstart the process, a pattern for the dissolved sugar in the cooling mixture to copy, which could be a tiny sugar crystal or even a piece of stray dust. In making fudge, keeping anything that can act as a crystal nucleus out is key.

(More from World Science Festival: 5 ways good science goes bad)

"This is why most fudge recipes require that the sides of the pot be washed down early in the cooking process, either with a wet pastry brush or by putting the lid on the pan for about three minutes to remove any sugar crystals clinging to the container walls," University of Alaska Fairbanks physicist Sue Ann Bowling wrote in a piece on fudgy physics. "It is also why the recipes specify that the sides and bottom of the pan should not be scraped into the bowl where the candy is to cool. There is too much chance of scraping in a stray sugar crystal."

Fudge recipes also counteract crystallization by recommending the use of more than one kind of sugar, like corn syrup as well as table sugar. Having different kinds of sugar in the solution means they interfere with the other's crystallization process, according to Bowling. Then, when the mixture has cooled enough, the fudge is stirred rapidly to stimulate crystallization all at once, which produces a fudge with lots of tiny crystals as opposed to fewer chunks of larger crystals — creating a taste that's creamy, not grainy.

 
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 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/442570/sugary-secrets-candymaking-chemistry
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This scientific study is a con man's dream come true

Science Focus

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How do you decide if you can trust someone? Is it based on their handshake, the way they look you in the eye, or perhaps their body language?

We know that what someone wears has an effect on our trust in them. If you happen to be a doctor, 76 percent of us will favor you if you wear the white coat, compared to only 10 percent if you happen to just pop out in your surgical scrubs. Labels matter too. In one test, four times as many people were willing to stop and answer a survey on one day compared to another. The difference? Whether or not the interviewer had a designer label on their sweatshirt. But what if you had to decide whether or not to trust someone without knowing the gear they were togged up in? Without knowing anything about them at all?

When people fall victim to fraud, often it is because they have decided to trust a stranger. In mass-marketing fraud (known widely as the 419 scam or advance fee fraud), an unsolicited e-mail contact offers false promises or information designed to con you out of money. You may have already received an e-mail from, for example, a Nigerian prince who desperately needs your bank details in order to move some money out of the country fast. Phishing fraud, where links in carefully crafted, apparently legitimate emails redirect users to a different server, into which they are persuaded to enter usernames, passwords, or bank account details, cost the UK £405.8m in 2012, according to RSA Security.

But what makes some people laugh and delete immediately, while others are curious enough to find out more?

Playing games

A recent study led by Tim Hahn from Goethe University in Frankfurt examined people's initial levels of trust when co-operating with an unknown partner.

Sixty participants were asked to play the trust game, an extension of an experimental economics game called the dictator game for which the participants were put into pairs. Player one was given an initial amount of hypothetical "money" that they could choose whether or not to gamble with. The gamble was this: They could give their money to the stranger they were paired with, player two, and anything they gave would be tripled. Player two could then choose to give some of this money back to Player one, and again, anything they returned would be tripled — or player two could choose to keep it all.

In theory then, the more generous you are in the beginning, the richer you could become by the end. To make it more exciting, the players were told that at the end of the trust game, this notional money would be converted into real hard cash.

As player one, how much would you give away to a complete stranger? Well if you happen to have an electroencephalograph (EEG) handy, you can find out without ever needing to play. An EEG records your brain activity by measuring the electrical pulses generated by the brain's cells through a series of electrodes placed on your scalp. In this study, the researchers found that they could predict the amount of money the initial player would trust to the stranger purely based on the activity recorded by the EEG.

A state of trust

But what makes this finding even more interesting is that the EEG recording was taken several minutes before the trust game began. At this point, the staff running the experiment had not asked the participants to think about the game of trust. What the EEG recorded was the resting state of the participants' brains when not involved in tasks — relatively calm — rather than the heightened activity associated with performing mental or physical tasks.

Resting state brain activity is thought to be relatively stable over time. So the fact that the experimenters were able to predict the investment that player one would make to the stranger, player two, was purely based on this resting state activity. And it shows that initial levels of trust may be determined by an underlying pattern of brain activity.

So, returning to those who have unfortunately answered our Nigerian prince, or foreign businessman, or even opened the door to a man "from the electricity board," what this study perhaps indicates is that, regardless of the contents of the email or how convincing the con is, we are already subject to an unconscious bias as to whether or not we will trust that stranger.

Not only are some of us physically more inclined to trust strangers than others, but that susceptibility can be determined by any unscrupulous character who happens to have an EEG scanner to hand.

The ConversationMore from The Conversation UK...

 
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 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/443041/scientific-study-con-mans-dream-come-true
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Advances in DNA tech pave way for convicts to get new tests on evidence

Science Focus

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"No tradition is more firmly established in our system of law than assuring to the greatest extent that its inevitable errors are made in favor of the guilty rather than against the innocent."

That was the message from a US federal appeals court whose first-of-its-kind ruling (PDF) Friday opens the floodgates for criminals to demand fresh DNA testing if they were convicted by inconclusive or outdated DNA testing.

The legal flap—brought by a Montana man convicted of sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl in 2006—concerns the Innocence Project Act of 2004 (PDF). The measure, hailed by the defense bar, gave criminals three years to seek DNA testing of evidence after their conviction. Under that law, the three-year statute of limitations may be extended if a convict can demonstrate that there is "newly discovered DNA" evidence.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

 
#science 
 » see original post http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/-H2MYvSt8wQ/
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Monogram Omega Nebula - Our Amazing Universe Oval Sticker

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Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A great outer space picture featuring a three-colour composite image of the Omega Nebula (Messier 17, or NGC 6618), based on images obtained with the EMMI instrument on the ESO 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory. North is down and East is to the right in the image. It spans an angle equal to about one third the diameter of the Full Moon, corresponding to about 15 light-years at the distance of the Omega Nebula. The three filters used are B (blue), V ("visual", or green) and R (red).

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ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA www.eso.org
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Scientists demonstrate first color-tunable and first graphene-based LED

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(Phys.org)—Currently, all light-emitting diodes (LEDs) emit light of only one color, which is predefined during fabrication. So far, tuning the color of light produced by a single LED has never been realized, despite numerous attempts.

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Rainbows and Rays over Bryce Canyon

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Controlling interactions between distant qubits

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A big part of the burgeoning science of quantum computation is reliably storing and processing information in the form of quantum bits, or qubits. One of the obstacles to this goal is the difficulty of preserving the fragile quantum condition of qubits against unwanted outside influence even as the qubits interact among themselves in a programmatic way.

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Cats Paw Nebula NGC 6334, Scorpius Room Sticker

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Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A breathtaking outer space picture showing an infrared view of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334) taken by VISTA. NGC 6334 is a vast region of star formation about 5500 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius.

The whole gas cloud is about 50 light-years across. NGC 6334 is one of the most active nurseries of young massive stars in our galaxy, some nearly ten times the mass of our Sun and most born in the last few million years.

The images were taken through Y, J and Ks filters (shown as blue, green and red respectively) and the exposure time was five minutes per filter. The field of view is about 0degrees, 43mins across.

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ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA www.eso.org
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Desiderata Poem, Constellation Cygnus, The Swan Case For The iPad Mini

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Inspirational Guidance series

A gorgeous iPad Mini case featuring the full Desiderata by Max Ehrmann: Go placidly amidst the noise and haste... with an image of a star forming region in Constellation Cygnus (The Swan). This Hubble picture shows a dust-rich, interstellar gas cloud with a new-born star in the centre of the hour-glass shape.

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Image code: cygsb

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

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Hydraulic Fracturing Linked to Increases in Hospitalization Rates in the Marcellus Shale Region

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Hospitalizations for heart conditions, neurological illness, and other conditions were higher among people who live near unconventional gas

The post Hydraulic Fracturing Linked to Increases in Hospitalization Rates in the Marcellus Shale Region has been published on Technology Org.

 
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A miniature accelerator to treat cancer

Serge Mathot with the first of the four modules that will make up the miniature accelerator (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN)

CERN, home of the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is developing a new particle accelerator just two metres long.

The miniature linear accelerator (mini-Linac) is designed for use in hospitals for imaging and the treatment of cancer. It will consist of four modules, each 50cm long, the first of which has already been constructed. “With this first module we have validated all of the stages of construction and the concept in general”, says Serge Mathot of the CERN engineering department.

Designing an accelerator for medical purposes presented a new technological challenge for the CERN team. “We knew the technology was within our reach after all those years we had spent developing Linac4,” says Maurizio Vretenar, coordinator of the mini-Linac project. Linac4, a larger accelerator designed to boost negative hydrogen ions to high energies, is scheduled to be connected to the CERN accelerator complex in 2020.

The miniature accelerator is a radiofrequency quadrupole (RFQ), a component found at the start of all proton accelerator chains. RFQs are designed to produce high-intensity beams. The challenge for the mini-Linac was to double the operating frequency of the RFQ in order to shorten its length. This desired high frequency had never before been achieved. “Thanks to new beam dynamics and innovative ideas for the radiofrequency and mechanical aspects, we came up with an accelerator design that was much better adapted to the practical requirements of medical applications,” says Alessandra Lombardi, in charge of the design of the RFQ.

The “mini-RFQ” can produce low-intensity beams, with no significant losses, of just a few microamps that are grouped at a frequency of 750 MHz. These specifications make the “mini-RFQ” a perfect injector for the new generation of high-frequency, compact linear accelerators used for the treatment of cancer with protons.

And the potential applications go beyond hadron therapy. The accelerator’s small size and light weight mean that is can be set up in hospitals to produce radioactive isotopes for medical imaging. Producing isotopes on site solves the complicated issue of transporting radioactive materials and means that a wider range of isotopes can be produced.

The “mini-RFQ” will also be capable of accelerating alpha particles for advanced radiotherapy. As the accelerator can be fairly easily transported, it could also be used for other purposes, such as the analysis of archaeological materials.

Read more here


via CERN: Updates for the general public
http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/07/miniature-accelerator-treat-cancer

Earth at Night Poster

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Earth at Night

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Omega Nebula - Our Amazing Universe Oval Sticker

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Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A great outer space picture featuring a three-colour composite image of the Omega Nebula (Messier 17, or NGC 6618), based on images obtained with the EMMI instrument on the ESO 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory. North is down and East is to the right in the image. It spans an angle equal to about one third the diameter of the Full Moon, corresponding to about 15 light-years at the distance of the Omega Nebula. The three filters used are B (blue), V ("visual", or green) and R (red).

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image code: omgneb

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Glowing Stellar Nurseries RCW120 Wall Skin

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Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A fantastic astronomy picture featuring a colour composite image of RCW120.

It reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-years across is causing the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps where new stars are then formed.

The 870-micron submillimetre-wavelength data were taken with the LABOCA camera on the 12-m Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope. Here, the submillimetre emission is shown as the blue clouds surrounding the reddish glow of the ionised gas (shown with data from the SuperCosmos H-alpha survey). The image also contains data from the Second Generation Digitized Sky Survey (I-band shown in blue, R-band shown in red).

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Nebula iPad Mini Case

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Colorful turquoise sky and stars in a nebula as seen through the Hubble telescope

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