Wednesday 30 September 2015

New ASU research on sense of smell could help pinpoint causes of brain diseases

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Like most animals, we rely on our sense of smell for survival. It's critical to our health and

The post New ASU research on sense of smell could help pinpoint causes of brain diseases has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Mechanism of explosions and plasma jets associated with sunspot formation revealed

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Sunspots are planet-sized conglomerates of bundles of intense magnetic field lines on the surface of the Sun. They are known to cause explosions (solar flares) which can directly impact our technological infrastructure. What astrophysical mechanisms are responsible for the formation of sunspots and how do they drive explosive events are important questions in our quest to understand the Sun's activity and its magnetic effect on Earth.
via Science Daily
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New processes in modern ReRAM memory cells decoded

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Resistive memory cells or ReRAMs for short are deemed to be the new super information-storage solution of the future. At present, two basic concepts are being pursued, which, up to now, were associated with different types of active ions. But this is not quite correct, as researchers were surprised to discover. In valence change memory (VCM) cells, not only are negatively charged oxygen ions active, but so too are positively charged metal ions. The effect enables switching characteristics to be modified as required and makes it possible to move back and forth from one concept to the other.
via Science Daily

Blue Sun Poster

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Rays extending from blue sun.

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Asteroids found to be the moon's main 'water supply'

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Water reserves found on the moon are the result of asteroids acting as 'delivery vehicles' and not of falling comets as was previously thought. Using computer simulation, scientists have discovered that a large asteroid can deliver more water to the lunar surface than the cumulative fall of comets over a billion year period.
via Science Daily
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Dawn team shares new maps and insights about Ceres

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Mysteries and insights about Ceres are being discussed this week at the European Planetary Science Conference in Nantes, France. NASA's Dawn spacecraft is providing scientists with tantalizing views and other data about the intriguing dwarf planet that they continue to analyze.
via Science Daily
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Why combining Mentos and Coke creates a sugary volcano, and other cool candy tricks

Science Focus

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How to make sparks fly in your mouth

We're issuing a science-based exception to the "don't chew with your mouth open" rule for this one. If you crunch Wint-O-Green Life Savers with your mouth open in the dark in front of a mirror, you should see some sparks start to fly. The light you see is due to a phenomenon called "triboluminescence."

When you chomp down on a mint, your teeth are fracturing crystals of sugar. This fracturing happens all the way down at the molecular level, where chemical bonds are broken. Because of the structure of the sugar crystal, the breaking of these chemical bonds causes a build-up of electrons that creates a miniature electrical field. Eventually, the electrons glom onto molecules like oxygen or nitrogen in the air, and emit a bit of light in the process. Usually we can't see this light because it's in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. But wintergreen candies contain a compound called methyl salicylate that fluoresces, converting that UV light into visible blue light.

(More from World Science Festival: Remembering polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk)

Why do Pop Rocks pop?

Carbon dioxide gas is the chemical key to making Pop Rocks crackle in your mouth. Pop Rocks are made by heating a mixture of carbon dioxide and candy (a combination of sugar, corn syrup, lactose, and flavoring) to temperatures above 320 degrees Fahrenheit inside a pressurized chamber. While there's still 600 pounds per square inch of pressure on the mixture, the candy-carbon dioxide combination is cooled. After cooling, the pressure is released and the candy shatters into pieces full of tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide gas.

When you stick some Pop Rocks in your mouth, the candy melts and the carbon dioxide bubbles escape from their sugary prisons with satisfying pops.

And, despite any rumors you might have heard, eating Pop Rocks and drinking soda together won't cause your stomach to explode. That urban legend seems to have spread based on the false notion that pop rocks and soda would combine like an acid and a base and react violently — but since they both just get their fizz from carbon dioxide, the worst thing that would happen to you would be a really big burp.

Why do Mentos and Diet Coke create a geyser?

While you won't get much of a thrill from mixing Pop Rocks and Coke, if you pop some Mentos mints into a bottle of Diet Coke, you'll get to see an impressive geyser:

In some ways, the reaction looks like a science fair volcano. But unlike a baking soda-vinegar geyser, the candy isn't combining with the Coke in an acid-base reaction (none of the ingredients in Mentos are basic). Instead, the Mentos serves as a little factory and launchpad for carbon dioxide bubbles — supercharging the normal bubble-formation process in the Coke. The mint's rough surface has thousands of tiny pores, an ideal landscape for lots of bubbles to form (a process called nucleation). As the bubbles grow they become more buoyant and float up to the top of the soda. The process keeps chugging along, creating more and more bubbles until it explodes out the top of the bottle in a foamy overflow.

Certain ingredients in Mentos, like aspartame and potassium benzoate, also speed the process by acting as surfactants — chemicals that lower the surface tension of the soda. This makes it even easier for bubbles to form on the candy. Too much surface tension in a liquid doesn't allow for much bubble formation — the attractions between molecules in the liquid are strong enough that the molecules at the surface resist moving up and away. Adding a surfactant, like Mentos in Coke or soap in water, loosens the liquid molecules' hold on each other a little bit, allowing for bubbles to form.

Appalachian State University physicist Tonya Coffey wrote an in-depth paper on the science behind the Coke-Mentos reaction published in the American Journal of Physics in 2008. Coffey found that combining Diet Coke and Fruit Mentos yielded the most impressive horizontal spray distance, flinging the soda nearly 17 feet from the bottle.

Making candy dance

For a less explosive demonstration of the powers of carbon dioxide fizziness, you can drop a few pieces of various kinds of candy or food into a glass of clear soda and see what happens. Anything with a rough surface — like raisins, or Valentine's Day conversation hearts — should provide a good surface for bubbles to form, as we saw with the Mentos. If the candy (or raisin) is light enough, the carbon dioxide bubbles should be able to buoy it up to the surface; when the bubble pops, the candy (or raisin) falls back down again. This up-and-down "dance" should last until the soda goes flat.

See the spectrum in black jellybeans

Plunk a wet black jellybean down on a piece of filter paper, and you'll be able to see that its blackness is actually made from a combination of hues. The various dyes in the bean will travel different distances away from the jellybean on the filter paper due to their different properties. Some shades of dye are more water-soluble, meaning they dissolve more easily and can be carried along the paper further. Some colors will be more attracted to the paper. The resulting rings of colors are called a separation pattern — something chemists use all the time to figure out what different chemical ingredients are in a mixture. You can try this same experiment with other colors of jellybeans and with other candies as well.

(More from World Science Festival: Getting sleep in the wild)

How to grow giant gummy bears

If you leave gummy bears in tap water for a while, they'll swell up into something more like Gummy Grizzlies. The reason for this is the process of osmosis — the tendency for water to perform a balancing act where it flows from a solution with fewer molecules dissolved into it into a solution that has more molecules in it (provided the two solutions are accessible to each other through a semipermeable membrane that allows certain molecules to cross its border, but which screens out others).

Gummy bears are actually a solution of water. These candies start out as a liquid mixture of water and gelatin, which is heated and then cooled, a process that draws water out of the bear and hardens it into a chewier texture. But there's still some water trapped in the matrix of gelatin that forms the bear. When you stick a gummy bear in water, osmotic pressure forces water molecules into the gummy bear, making the candy swell up like a sponge.

How to take the M off an M&M

If you leave an M&M or a Skittle in water for a little while, the 'M' or 'S' should peel off and float up to the surface. That's because the letters on the candy are made out of white edible ink that doesn't dissolve, unlike the dyes that color the candy shell.

Making soap bubbles with candy corn

This is one experiment you won't be able to do at home, unless you happen to live in a low-gravity environment:

NASA astronaut Don Pettit used his special stash of candy corn on the International Space Station to model how soap works. Soap molecules have a hydrophobic (water-hating) end and a hydrophilic (water-loving) end. When you scrub something with soap, the hydrophobic ends of the soap molecules automatically point towards little globules of grease and oil on your clothes (or your dishes, or your skin); eventually, the particles of grease are encased in little bubbles of soap and can be rinsed off with water.

(More from World Science Festival: How fear happens)

With his candy corn experiment, Pettit did the same trick, but in reverse: He coated one end of his candy corn pieces with oil, making it hydrophobic, then started adding kernels to a floating sphere of water. The hydrophobic ends naturally oriented themselves away from the center. After Pettit added enough candy corn, the sphere reached what's known as the "critical micelle concentration." The candy corn sphere wasn't mushy anymore, but behaved like a solid ball — or like a soap-coated grease globule ready to be rinsed off and away.

Why microwaved marshmallows puff up

Put a couple marshmallows in the microwave for about a minute, and you'll see them puff up. This is because the heat from the microwave softens the sugar in the marshmallow, and also causes the air pockets inside the sweet to expand. Because the sugary walls of the marshmallow are softer, the marshmallow puffs up. When cooled, the marshmallow shrinks down again — but is usually a bit crunchier than before, probably because some of the water inside it evaporated in the heat of the microwave.

 
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 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/442667/why-combining-mentos-coke-creates-sugary-volcano-other-cool-candy-tricks
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What would happen if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today?

Science Focus

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Earth's climate is changing rapidly. We know this from billions of observations, documented in thousands of journal papers and texts, and summarized every few years by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The primary cause of that change is the release of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil, and natural gas.

Negotiations about reducing emissions grind on. But in the meantime, how much warming are we already locked into? If we stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, why would the temperature continue to rise?

The basics of carbon and climate

The carbon dioxide that accumulates in the atmosphere insulates the surface of the Earth. It's like a warming blanket that holds in heat. This energy increases the Earth's surface average temperature, heats the oceans, and melts polar ice. As consequences, sea level rises and weather changes.

Global average temperature has increased. Anomalies are relative to the mean temperature of 1961-1990. | (Finnish Meteorological Institute and Finnish Ministry of the Environment/The Conversation US)

Since 1880, after carbon dioxide emissions took off with the Industrial Revolution, the average global temperature has increased about 1.5F (0.85C). Each of the last three decades has been warmer than the preceding decade, as well as warmer than the entire previous century.

The Arctic is warming much faster than the average global temperature; ice in the Arctic Ocean is melting and the permafrost is thawing. Ice sheets in both the Arctic and Antarctic are melting. Ecosystems on both land and in the sea are changing. The observed changes are coherent and consistent with our theoretical understanding of the Earth's energy balance and simulations from models that are used to understand past variability and to help us think about the future.

Slam on the climate brakes

What would happen to the climate if we were to stop emitting carbon dioxide today, right now? Would we return to the climate of our elders? The simple answer is no. Once we release the carbon dioxide stored in the fossil fuels we burn, it accumulates in and moves amongst the atmosphere, the oceans, the land, and the plants and animals of the biosphere. The released carbon dioxide will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years. Only after many millennia will it return to rocks, for example, through the formation of calcium carbonate — limestone — as marine organisms' shells settle to the bottom of the ocean. But on time spans relevant to humans, once released the carbon dioxide is in our environment essentially forever. It does not go away, unless we, ourselves, remove it.

If we stop emitting today, it's not the end of the story for global warming. There's a delay in temperature increase as the climate catches up with all the carbon that's in the atmosphere. After maybe 40 more years, the climate will stabilize at a temperature higher than what was normal for previous generations.

This decades-long lag between cause and effect is due to the long time it takes to heat the the ocean's huge mass. The energy that is held at the Earth by the increased carbon dioxide does more than heat the air. It melts ice; it heats the ocean. Compared to air, it's harder to raise the temperature of water — it takes time, decades. However, once the ocean temperature is elevated, it adds to the warming of the Earth's surface.

So even if carbon emissions stopped completely right now, as the oceans catch up with the atmosphere, the Earth's temperature would rise about another 1.1F (0.6C). Scientists refer to this as committed warming. Ice, also responding to increasing heat in the ocean, will continue to melt. There's already convincing evidence that significant glaciers in the West Antarctic ice sheets are lost. Ice, water, and air — the extra heat held on the Earth by carbon dioxide affects them all. That which has melted will stay melted — and more will melt.

Ecosystems are altered by natural and manmade occurrences. As they recover, it will be in a different climate from that in which they evolved. The climate in which they recover will not be stable; it will be continuing to warm. There will be no new normal, only more change.

Glacial ice loss over Greenland and Antarctica from 2003 to 2010.

Best of the worst case scenarios

In any event, it's not possible to stop emitting carbon dioxide today, right now. Despite significant advances in renewable energy sources, total demand for energy accelerates and carbon dioxide emissions increase. I teach my students that they need to plan for a world 7F (4C) warmer. A 2011 report from the International Energy Agency states that if we don't get off our current path, then we're looking at an Earth 11F (6C) warmer. Our current Earth is just over 1F warmer, and the observed changes are already disturbing.

There are many reasons that we need to essentially eliminate our carbon dioxide emissions. The climate is changing rapidly; if that pace is slowed, the affairs of nature and human beings can adapt more readily. The total amount of change, including sea-level rise, can be limited. The further we get away from the climate that we have known, the more unreliable the guidance from our models and the less likely we will be able to prepare. The warmer the planet gets, the more likely reservoirs of carbon dioxide and methane, another greenhouse gas that warms the planet, will be released from storage in the frozen Arctic permafrost — further adding to the problem.

If we stop our emissions today, we won't go back to the past. This is not reason, however, to continue with unbridled emissions. We are adaptable creatures, with credible knowledge of our climate's future and how we can frame that future. We're already stuck with some amount of guaranteed climate change at this point. Rather than trying to recover the past, we need to be thinking about best possible futures.

More from The Conversation US...

 
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 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/441503/what-happen-stopped-emitting-greenhouse-gases-today
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Mars: New hypothesis on the origin of the megafloods

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A recent study puts forward a new explanation for the Martian megafloods: enormous discharges of subterranean water that dug out the biggest flood channels in the solar system over 3 billion years ago.
via Science Daily
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Initialled Spiral Galaxy - NGC 253 Oval Sticker

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


tagged with: spgxy253, breathtaking astronomy images, galaxies, stars, horsehead nebula, spiral galaxy, initials, initialled, monogrammed, monogram, european southern observatory, eso, vista, monograms

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A gorgeous image that reveals a little of the wonder that is our universe.

Measuring 70 000 light-years across and laying 13 million light-years away, the nearly edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 253 is revealed here in an image from the Wide Field Imager (WFI) of the MPG/ESO 2.2 m telescope at the La Silla Observatory.

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

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Seasonal Streaks Point to Recent Flowing Water on Mars

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Research pair offer a way to put a living organism into superposition state

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(Phys.org)—A pair of physicists, one with Tsinghua University in China, the other with Perdue University in the U.S. has come up with what they believe is a viable way to cause a living organism to be in two places at the same time. In the paper they have posted to the arXiv server, Zhang-Qi Yin and Tongcang Li suggest that an experiment conducted at the University of Colorado recently, could be modified by placing a living organism into a superposition state, rather than using just a piece of metal.

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Desiderata Poem, Constellation Cygnus, The Swan Case For The iPad Mini

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: full desiderata, desiderata poem, noise and haste, go placidly, awesome hubble images, star forming activity, constellation cygnus, the swan, hrbstslr cygsb, cosmological, new star s106ir, star nurseries, young hot stars, interstellar gas clouds, star birth, glowing hydrogen, turbulence

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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Important Facts about Sodium Citrate

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Sodium citrate is a food additive which is mainly used in cough syrups and for neutralizing acids in

The post Important Facts about Sodium Citrate has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Challenges mount for common herbicide Roundup

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When the herbicide Roundup hit the market in the mid-'90s along with crop seeds designed to resist its

The post Challenges mount for common herbicide Roundup has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Backpacking Poster

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Backpacking, Space Shuttle Creator/Photographer: NASA

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Monogram Fires of the Flame Nebula - in Orion Oval Sticker

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Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A gorgeous outer space picture featuring the spectacular star-forming region known as the Flame Nebula, or NGC 2024, in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter) and its surroundings.

In views of this evocative object in visible light the core of the nebula is completely hidden behind obscuring dust, but in this VISTA view, taken in infrared light, the cluster of very young stars at the object's heart is revealed. The wide-field VISTA view also includes the glow of the reflection nebula NGC 2023, just below centre, and the ghostly outline of the Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) towards the lower right.

The bright bluish star towards the right is one of the three bright stars forming the Belt of Orion. The image was created from VISTA images taken through J, H and Ks filters in the near-infrared part of the spectrum.

The image shows about half the area of the full VISTA field and is about 40 x 50 arcminutes in extent. The total exposure time was 14 minutes and was the first to be released publicly from VISTA, the world's largest survey telescope.

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Disappearing carbon circuits on graphene could have security, biomedical uses

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Using carbon atoms deposited on graphene, researchers have demonstrated a technique for creating dynamic patterns on graphene surfaces. The patterns could be used to make reconfigurable electronic circuits, which evolve over a period of hours before ultimately disappearing.
via Science Daily

Crab Nebula – Hubble Telescope Cover For The iPad Mini

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Hubble photograph of the Crab Nebula

This is a composite photograph produced from 24 individual images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and is the most detailed image of the Crab Nebula that has been produced to date.
Credit: NASA, ESA and Allison Loll/Jeff Hester (Arizona State University). Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble)

You can personalise the design further if you'd prefer, such as by adding your name or other text, or adjusting the image - just click 'Customize it' to see all the options. IMPORTANT: If you choose a different sized version of the product, it's important to click Customize and check the image in the Design view to ensure it fills the area to the edge of the product, otherwise white edges may be visible.

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