Tuesday 22 September 2015

Nanoporous gold sponge makes DNA detector

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Sponge-like nanoporous gold could be key to new devices to detect disease-causing agents in humans and plants, according

The post Nanoporous gold sponge makes DNA detector has been published on Technology Org.

 
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New graphene oxide biosensors may accelerate research of HIV, cancer drugs

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Researchers have devised a novel type of graphene oxide-based biosensor that could potentially significantly speed up the process of drug development. The outstanding properties of this carbon allotrope help to improve significantly the biosensing sensitivity, which in future may enable the development of new drugs and vaccines against many dangerous diseases including HIV, hepatitis and cancer.
via Science Daily

Bugs in space: How microbes are surviving on astronauts

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Bugs are winning out, and that's a good thing according to NASA's Human Research Program. As part of NASA's One-Year Mission, researchers are studying how microbes living on astronauts' skin, inside their bodies and on the International Space Station impact their health. To prepare for a journey to Mars, it is important to understand how long-duration spaceflight affects microorganisms because changes to this complex ecosystem could be detrimental to future missions.
via Science Daily
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Solar System Montage of Voyager Images 54x42 Poster

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tagged with: poster, hi-res, astronomy, voyager, solar, system, discovery, grand, tour, planetary missions

Recommended size: 54x42 inches at 300 PPI (maximum size: 66x52 inches at 243 PPI). This image is 205 MP. Many other sizes available. Click 'Customize it!' on the right.

This montage of images taken by the Voyager spacecraft of the planets and four of Jupiter's moons is set against a false-color Rosette Nebula with Earth's moon in the foreground. Studying and mapping Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and many of their moons, Voyager provided scientists with better images and data than they had ever had before or expected from the program. Although launched sixteen days after Voyager 2, Voyager 1's trajectory was a faster path, arriving at Jupiter in March 1979. Voyager 2 arrived about four months later in July 1979. Both spacecraft were then directed to Saturn with Voyager 1 arriving in November 1980 and Voyager 2 in August 1981. Voyager 2 was then diverted to the remaining gas giants, Uranus in January 1986 and Neptune in August 1989. Data collection continues by both Voyager 1 and 2 as the renamed Voyager Interstellar Mission searches for the edge of the solar wind influence (the heliopause) and exits the Solar System. A shortened list of the discoveries of Voyager 1 and 2 include:the discovery of the Uranian and Neptunian magnetospheres (magnetic environments caused by various types of planet cores); the discovery of twenty-two new satellites including three at Jupiter, three at Saturn, ten at Uranus, and six at Neptune; Io was found to have active volcanism (the only other Solar System body than Earth to be confirmed); Triton was found to have active geyser-like structures and an atmosphere; Auroral Zones (where gases become excited after being hit by solar particles) were discovered at Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune; Jupiter was found to have rings; Neptune, originally thought to be too cold to support such atmospheric disturbances, had large-scale storms.

Credit: NASA



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Ta-Nehisi Coates' surprising explanation of climate change

Science Focus

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Ta-Nehisi Coates' excellent new book Between the World and Me has been getting a lot of attention for what it says about racial injustice, white supremacy, and the American Dream. However, my favorite part of the book comes near the end, when he leaves the question of race to examine other issues, particularly climate change.

A great many American problems, by Coates' lights, come from the fact that the nation was simultaneously founded on a messianic self-conception and gruesome injustice — the high moral principles of the Declaration of Independence grafted onto an agrarian slave state. Ever since, brief, halting efforts at redressing the original sins of slavery and the extermination of Native Americans have run aground on the shoals of America's colossal self-regard.

Coates takes this tendency and applies it to climate change. America has always had an energy-gulping lifestyle of tank-sized cars, sprawling houses always set to 70 degrees, and big food portions with lots of meat. Climate policy is all but impossible if major changes to that lifestyle are ruled out as an infringement on the American Dream. It's long been clear that this will come back to bite us very soon — in fact, it's happening already.

[T]he damming of the seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself... Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. [Between the World and Me]

Of course, such an argument must come with some caveats. Other nations struggle with carbon emissions as well — Australia recently repealed its carbon tax, with disastrous results, and China is by far the world's top emitter today. But when you take historical emissions into account, America is by far the worst culprit overall.

It's doubly damning when you consider that the science of climate change has been fairly clear for over 30 years. As the top emitter for most of that time and as the world's most powerful nation, we would have been ideally placed to negotiate a binding international climate treaty. Instead, we dithered and procrastinated so long that the action required to keep warming under the internationally agreed limit of 2 degrees Celsius is looking all but impossible. We have begun some limited action, but given that one of two political parties has decided the whole thing is a socialist conspiracy, the prospect of achieving the necessary vigor looks dim.

Why? Because, as the first President Bush said at the Earth Summit in 1992, "The American way of life is not negotiable." It's hard to imagine someone from, say, Denmark saying something like that.

We should also note that a robust, critical self-examination does not entail admitting that America is a uniquely terrible, hateful place. On the contrary, since no nation is perfect, being and doing good is the result of consciously atoning for the sins of the past — not a self-indulgent wallowing in guilt, but concrete action.

But historically, Americans have not been too keen on this. As Rick Perlstein wrote in The Invisible Bridge, the greatest political asset of Ronald Reagan was his soothing argument that the Vietnam War implied nothing about the rottenness of the national character. Instead, we could just pretend it never happened!

Turns out it's easier to shout loudly about how America is the greatest nation that has ever existed than it is to undertake the painful, costly action that would make that claim true.

 
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 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/568210/tanehisi-coates-surprising-explanation-climate-change
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Silicon photonics meets the foundry

Science Focus

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Lionel Kimerling, Rajeev Ram, and other MIT researchers explore practical ways to bring optical interconnection toward and directly

The post Silicon photonics meets the foundry has been published on Technology Org.

 
#physics 
 » see original post http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechnologyOrgPhysicsNews/~3/6bYqww1yjz4/
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The scientists who conquered Pluto

Science Focus

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On the night of July 14, a small crowd gathered outside the Kossiakoff Center at the Applied Physics Laboratory campus in Laurel, Maryland. Halogen street lights cut across the darkness, outlining boom microphone operators and cameramen who looked like soldiers about to go into combat. Reporters scribbled in notepads, and a few of the faithful who absolutely couldn't wait any longer stood with mobile phones raised like Eucharistic offerings, ready to begin their furious Instagramming.

Inside the K-Center, hundreds of people lined a path to the main auditorium. They were anxious, giddy, twittering like birds and saying things that everyone already knew, but needing to say something. Most carried small American flags that had been distributed earlier in the day. Some had had a few festive drinks. It had been that kind of night.

Outside, the New Horizons team emerged from a bus to camera flashes, cheers, and applause. Alan Stern, who leads the mission, raised his fist in sheepish solidarity. When it became clear that there was movement around the bus, the crowd inside the K-Center thundered its approval as well. Minders opened doors and just under 40 members of the New Horizons team glided inside, where they were received as conquering heroes, and rightly so. They had, after all, just conquered a world.

It is said that a soldier doesn't salute the officer; he or she salutes the rank. When political foes of a president stand and cheer during the State of the Union address, they're not cheering a rival; they're cheering the embodiment of the United States. What was the crowd that night cheering? The team members of New Horizons, certainly. Though the press had only arrived days earlier, the New Horizons team in various forms had been working to get to Pluto since the 1980s. They formed the "Pluto Underground" in 1989, and wrote papers and lobbied NASA and the planetary science community to support a mission to the ninth planet. In a decade's time, five missions to Pluto were proposed. Five mission to Pluto were canceled. Sometimes the proposals ran into cost problems. Sometimes NASA just ran out of money.

Finally, in 2001, the New Horizons mission — what Stern called the "last chance" — got its moment. It was formally approved, designed, and built over the next five years. It launched in 2006. It took nine and a half years to reach Pluto, during which time the team planned out sequences and rehearsed every conceivable problem. Then on July 4 of this year — days before the most important moment of the mission — the spacecraft malfunctioned and entered "safe mode," threatening decades of work and hundreds of millions of dollars. It had to be fixed from Earth at a distance of just under three billion miles. The team put in 24-hour workdays, and never quite had time to catch up on sleep before the Pluto flyby. On July 14, the day of closest approach, they were exhausted and rapidly approaching incoherence.

When traveling at 31,000 miles per hour, a space rock as small as a grain of rice could destroy the spacecraft.

The New Horizons team had earned their applause, and then some. But something more, it seemed, was at work in the crowds. What of the flags? Patriotism was a recurring theme last week, but a secondary one. Undeniably, it had been an American week. Early that morning, seconds after the New Horizons spacecraft's moment of closest approach to Pluto, another packed crowd in an APL ballroom broke spontaneously into cheers of "USA! USA!" And why not? At that moment, after all, the United States had achieved a breathtaking milestone in human history: Every planet in the classical solar system had now been explored, and the first successful exploration to each had been undertaken by spacecraft built by American hands. Who during NASA's earliest years would have thought such a thing possible? Until the moon landing, the Soviet space program outfoxed NASA at every turn, beating the United States into orbit; sending the first man into space; putting a spacecraft in orbit around the sun. At the time, the most visible symbol of American space exploration was the Vanguard rocket loaded with what was to be the first American satellite. Broadcast live on television, midway during the launch countdown, the rocket rose a few inches and blew up.

These American voyages to the nine planets were hard fought. And so minutes after the flyby, when Stern asked the audience to "please raise your flags in appreciation," the crowd did so enthusiastically.

But this was bigger than the United States, as the enthusiastic international response suggests. It is a milestone for humanity. Fifty-eight years ago, with Sputnik I, humankind gingerly dipped its toe into an ocean of black. In 1969, we took a giant leap. On July 14, 2015, we learned how to run. And yet, for the scientists, engineers, space administrators, support staff, and family members present, "human achievement" isn't quite right either. From the outside, these are glorious firsts — well done, species! — but the men and women in the trenches of the Applied Physics Laboratory do this every day. They're the ones who machine every screw and type every line of code. They're the ones who slug it out with appropriations committees and develop new ways to harness the laws of physics. They write the papers for scientific journals, with titles like "Potential Collateral Effects in Stable Hafnium Isotopes Due to the S-Process Production of the Short-Lived Radionuclide 182Hf?". To those of us on the outside, exploring Pluto just happens. Insiders know that such things are made to happen.

"We are in lock with carrier," said Alice Bowman, who leads New Horizons' mission control. She was in the mission operations center — the Earthly half of the celestial voyage — at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Early that morning, when the spacecraft had made its flyby of Pluto, nobody was listening. In part, the missions team feared an "observer effect"; blasting New Horizons with signals might have interfered with its computers, creating the very error the team feared. Regardless, spying on the spacecraft would have been pointless. There's a four-and-a-half-hour delay from Pluto to Earth, and by definition, a flyby is a one-shot deal. Had the spacecraft malfunctioned (and thus reoriented itself to send a warning signal to Earth) the mission would have been lost. Instead of listening during the flyby, the mission's controllers would know the status of the spacecraft by two brief transmissions — one before, and one after. Ahead of closest approach, Bowman's team would poll the spacecraft and ask if everything was OK. After the scheduled completion of the flyby, the team would again ask if everything was OK. Before and after would suggest that during was a success as well. At 8:52 p.m. and 37 seconds, local time, NASA's Deep Space Network established contact with the spacecraft. New Horizons had survived.

Of the tremendous distance traveled by the spacecraft, the last few hours were the most dangerous. In 2011 and 2012, astronomers discovered two new moons of Pluto, bringing the total number to five. They were remarkable finds, but for the New Horizons team, troubling ones. Moons mean trouble for spacecraft — especially unexpected moons. Worlds as large as Pluto have considerable gravity, relatively speaking. When they are struck by asteroids, comets, and other large objects, impact craters might be created, but the debris kicked up falls back to the ground. That's not necessarily so with moons; without strong gravity, collisions simply blow debris into space. When planning a spacecraft's course, team members use computer software to account for such space debris. Models take into consideration orbital dynamics, and can offer reasonable predictions of where space rocks might be scattered around a planetary system. A flight path is designed to simply avoid them. But new moons mean unanticipated dangers. Worse yet for New Horizons, if two moons could be discovered so recently, there was the possibility of a sixth or more. Models can attempt to predict where other moons are likely to be, and thus where debris might be, but the possibilities are literally infinite. And it gets worse. New Horizons didn't have to slam into Moon X or Giant Rock 78 to be destroyed. When traveling at 31,000 miles per hour, a space rock as small as a grain of rice could destroy the spacecraft.

Traveling through space for nine-and-a-half years, New Horizons had to arrive within 100 seconds of the predicted time.

The spacecraft was sending engineering data to the mission operations center. That it could even do that was an encouraging sign. The string of ones and zeroes traveling across the solar system at light speed contained the status of each of the spacecraft's subsystems. At that moment, everything happened very fast, and also unbearably slowly. Each member of the mission began reporting to Bowman. Radio frequency was nominal (as expected). Autonomy was nominal. The spacecraft's memory holding the presumed data from the flyby: nominal. The guidance, navigation, and control was nominal, and thrusters were good. Propulsion was nominal. Power systems and thermal reports were nominal, "all temperatures green."

The spacecraft was in perfect condition and its memory was filled with newly acquired information.

"P.I.," said Bowman to principal investigator Stern over the radio. "MOM on Pluto-1. We have a healthy spacecraft. We've recorded data of the Pluto system and we are outbound from Pluto."

The numbers associated with the mission are inconceivable to the human mind. From a distance of three billion miles, the spacecraft had to hit a target window 200 miles in diameter. Traveling through space at speeds greater than Mach 46 for nine-and-a-half years, it had to arrive within 100 seconds of the predicted time. (It arrived within 70). New Horizons is only 9 feet long, for God's sake, and it's out there, awash in an infinite black sea — forever. Hundreds of thousands of years from now, New Horizons will presumably still be speeding along, cold but preserved. The spacecraft carries a postage stamp minted by the U.S. Postal Service in 1991. It was part of a series honoring America's exploration of the solar system. Every planet had an affiliated spacecraft (e.g., the Mercury stamp read "Mariner 10," the Venus stamp read "Mariner 2," etc.) but the stamp for Pluto — the one carried by New Horizons — read: Pluto: Not Yet Explored.

Because of the sheer, inconceivable size of space, the spacecraft will almost certainly outlive our species. Those four words will outlive the works of Shakespeare.

We know well the way astronauts think because we've studied them for so long — lionized them, rightfully, in books and movies and on television. We understand the human adventure. We understand that astronauts train hard and while in space live in pretty miserable conditions. But we also understand the glory of being an astronaut. They are humanity's ambassadors. They are exploring the final frontier. They've played golf on the moon! But what of these people — the New Horizons people, these spacecraft pilots and planetary scientists who study the outer reaches of the solar system? What can be made of them? Alice Bowman said the words, "We are outbound from Pluto." Has a more breathtaking string of words ever been uttered?

Charon, Pluto's largest moon and the counterpart to its "binary planet," exists in a tidal lock with Pluto. The two worlds forever face one another and orbit a single, invisible point between them. All that was known. But many scientists expected that Charon would appear ancient and massively cratered — a dead rock in an eternal circle dance with its host planet. New Horizons annihilated that belief. "Charon blew our socks off," said Cathy Olkin, deputy project scientist on New Horizons. Even to the untrained eye, the world is immediately fascinating. A series of troughs and cliffs extend 600 miles across the planet. Smooth regions suggest recent geological activity. High-resolution imagery reveals a canyon so deep — at least four miles down and possibly six — that you can see clean through to the other side and out into space. "It's a small world with deep canyons, troughs, cliffs, dark regions that are still slightly mysterious to us," said Olkin. "Pluto did not disappoint. I can add Charon did not disappoint, either." Unlike most north poles found in the solar system, Charon's north pole is dark and foreboding. The New Horizons team calls it Mordor.

As for Pluto, the first high-resolution photograph downloaded from the spacecraft is of an area 150 miles across. The image is so closely resolved that if APL's campus had been built on Pluto, you would have been able to spot it. The image contained a mountain range with peaks as tall as 11,000 feet. John Spencer says they "stand up respectably again the Rocky Mountains here on Earth." (Spencer is the deputy leader of geology and geophysics for the New Horizons team.)

But here's where it gets interesting. The surface of Pluto is covered in nitrogen ice, methane ice, and carbon monoxide ice. "You can't make mountains out of that stuff," he said. "It's just too soft; it doesn't have the strength to make mountains." At Pluto's temperatures, there is one thing that can hold up such a mountain: a bed of water ice. The volatile ices — nitrogen, methane, and such — are just a frosting on the surface.

The image was startling for another detail, or rather, the absence of a detail: It lacked even a single impact crater. That makes it a "young" surface in geologic terms, and it is now thought to be less than 100 million years old. But Pluto is billions of years old, and it is continually bombarded by objects in the Kuiper Belt. If craters cannot be found, then something is going on to smooth things out. "It might be active right now," said Spencer.

"This is the first time we've seen an icy world that isn't orbiting a giant planet," he said. "All the other icy worlds that we've visited have been moons of giant planets. And we see strange geological features on many of these moons and we usually attribute this to tidal heating, deformation of these worlds by the gravity of that giant planet and interactions with other moons. That can't happen on Pluto. There is no giant body that can be deforming Pluto on an ongoing, regular basis to heat the interior; Charon is just too small to do that. So this is telling us that you do not need tidal heating to power ongoing recent geological activity on icy worlds. That's a really important discovery that we just made this morning."

That remark, to an auditorium of scientists and space enthusiasts, elicited 28 seconds of applause, along with murmurs and bewildered, nervous laughter. It was back to the drawing board for them! Hypotheses and papers in progress will have to be thrown out. Textbooks will need to be rewritten. Someone's life's work has been proven incorrect, and someone's pet theory likely elevated. And here they were, everyone, cheering — cheering! — with a level of enthusiasm otherwise seen at monster truck rallies.

For what were they cheering? For whom? For the spacecraft? For the New Horizons team? For Pluto's very fine terrain? Each in part, but just as the crowd at APL cheered the moment of New Horizons' closest approach to Pluto, and just as hundreds welcomed the New Horizons team like rock stars after the spacecraft phoned home successfully, the tears and cheers and handshakes and hugs were for something more, something bigger. It was applause not for species or nationality, but for the sake of intelligence and discovery — that it's still done by people who toil, one paper at a time, to prove the need for missions that take decades to see through to completion. At APL last week, a tiny piece was presented of a massive jigsaw puzzle that will never be solved, and the scientists and the crowds and the auditorium and the whole wide world were applauding that piece. That's who planetary scientists are. That's what they do.

"These are pictures that have been a long time in the making," said Ralph McNutt, co-investigator on the science team, and a founding member of the Pluto Underground. "It's no understatement to say we're all very, very excited on the human scale, and oh my God there's some science to do as well." Tomorrow they'll search for cryo-volcanism on Pluto. Today, they celebrate the branch of human knowledge that calls for the search for ice volcanoes three billion miles away: the discipline of science.

 
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 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/566768/scientists-who-conquered-pluto
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Mystic Mountains - Carina Nebula Rectangular Sticker

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


tagged with: mystic mountain, billowing interstellar gas clouds, cnbigc, star forming activity, carina nebula, amazing space sculpture, star nurseries, stellar winds, young hot stars, gas cloud sculpture

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A beautiful space photograph featuring the 7500 light year distant Carina Nebula. This Hubble image shows rich, interstellar gas clouds feeding the formation of new stars. As a proto star forms, the gas clouds get dragged to its surface and some gets emitted as tight jets of material travelling at hundreds of miles per second. These in turn help sculpt the gas clouds into weird and grotesque shapes, some looking like strange worms, swimming through space.

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

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Milky Way over Bosque Alegre Station in Argentina

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Cats Paw Nebula NGC 6334, Scorpius Room Sticker

Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: star clusters, breathtaking astronomy images, ctspwneb, star forming regions, scorpius constellation, cats paw nebula, european southern observatory, gas clouds, galaxies, outer space picture, eso, vista

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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Star Cluster N90 Hubble Space Case For iPad Air

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!


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This beautiful Hubble space photograph shows a cluster of newly formed stars in the N90 star forming region. Shiny twinkling stars are surrounded by brown dust clouds and dark black sky.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

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Rational design of carbon skeleton by bioengineering

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Researchers at the University of Tokyo have demonstrated a new biosynthetic methodology to rationally design the polyketide carbon

The post Rational design of carbon skeleton by bioengineering has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Vintage Astronomy Star Chart Planisphaeri Coeleste Poster

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A wonderful antique star chart depicting the constellations titled Planispaeri Coeleste This wonderful old constellation chart would be perfect for your home wall decor. Add a frame and it would make the perfect retro decoration in your bar, cafe, restaurant, home theater, office or kitchen. Framed canvas prints also make an exceptional gift for any occasion or holiday.

At The Vintage Vamp we obtain high quality images of vintage artwork. Then we use state of the art technology and editing to bring back to life the most compelling images from the past. Unlike a lot of reproductions sold on the Internet, ours have been refurbished to bring out the original colors and fix as many imperfections as possible. We use only PNG format and the largest PPI (pixels per inch) possible, which is the very best for printing. This assures that your image will print with the highest quality possible, no matter what size you choose. Credit: Library of Congress & Wikipedia




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Tarantula Nebula Star Forming Gas Cloud Sculpture Rectangular Sticker

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Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series An awesome mobile phone shell featuring the Tarantula Nebula of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is the nearest galaxy to the Milky Way, our galactic home. This Hubble image shows old stars from the distant past and rich, interstellar gas clouds feeding the formation of new ones. The most massive and hottest stars are intense, high-energy radiation sources and this pushes away what remains of the gas and dust, compressing and sculpting it. As the whorls and eddies clump and stretch it, gravity takes over and the birth of the next generation of new stars is triggered.

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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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Astronomers identify a new mid-size black hole

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Astronomers have found evidence for a new intermediate-mass black hole about 5,000 times the mass of the sun. The discovery adds one more candidate to the list of potential medium-sized black holes, while strengthening the case that these objects do exist.
via Science Daily
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Nebula in Turquoise iPad Air Powis Case Cover For iPad Air

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!


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Nebula in Turquoise iPad Air Powis Case Personalize

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