Tuesday 22 April 2014

Anasys licenses ORNL nanoscale mass spectrometry imaging technology

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Anasys Instruments Corp. has licensed a Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory technology that allows for simultaneous chemical and physical characterization and could lead to advances in materials and drug development. The technique, which combines the power of atomic force microscopy and mass spectrometry, fills a void and streamlines analytical processes that are vital to science and industry, said Roshan Shetty, chief executive officer of Anasys Instruments. He also noted that the technology improves the current spatial resolution of ambient methods for mass spectrometry imaging by a factor of more than 100, resulting in imaging resolution as small as 250 nanometers, or 1/400th the thickness of a human hair. “This capability could have a tremendous impact on a broad field of applications in materials and life sciences ranging from single-cell imaging to polymer composites,” Shetty said. The license is the culmination of several years of research by a team led by Gary Van Berkel of ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division. The team’s research has focused on mass spectrometry-based imaging pushing toward nanoscale imaging at ambient conditions using atomic force microscopy. “No other group has these capabilities, and this research distinction made Oak Ridge National Laboratory the ideal partner,” Shetty said.

The post Anasys licenses ORNL nanoscale mass spectrometry imaging technology has been published on Technology Org.

 
#materials 
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High-performance, low-cost ultracapacitors built with graphene and carbon nanotubes

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By combining the powers of two single-atom-thick carbon structures, researchers have created a new ultracapacitor that is both high performance and low cost. The device capitalizes on the synergy brought by mixing graphene flakes with single-walled carbon nanotubes, two carbon nanostructures with complementary properties.

via Science Daily

A new 'APEX' in plant studies aboard the International Space Station

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Growing knowledge in a given field takes time, attention, and ... water? It does when you're talking about plant studies aboard the International Space Station (ISS). All of these things and some scientific know-how come into play as astronauts find out just how green their thumbs are while assisting researchers on the ground.

via Science Daily

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For an immune cell, microgravity mimics aging

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Telling someone to "act your age" is another way of asking him or her to behave better. Age, however, does not always bring improvements. Certain cells of the immune system tend to misbehave with age, leaving the elderly more vulnerable to illness. Because these cells are known to misbehave similarly during spaceflight, researchers are studying the effects of microgravity on immune cells to better understand how our immune systems change as we age.

via Science Daily

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Nanomaterial outsmarts ions: Novel types of electronic components made of graphene

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Ions are an essential tool in chip manufacturing, but they can also be used to produce nano-sieves. A large number of electrons must be removed from the atoms for this purpose. Such ions either lose a large amount of energy or almost no energy at all as they pass through a membrane that measures one nanometer in thickness. Researchers report that this discovery is an important step towards developing novel types of electronic components made of graphene.

via Science Daily

Like a hall of mirrors, nanostructures trap photons inside ultrathin solar cells

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In the quest to make sun power more competitive, researchers are designing ultrathin solar cells that cut material costs. At the same time they're keeping these thin cells efficient by sculpting their surfaces with photovoltaic nanostructures that behave like a molecular hall of mirrors.

via Science Daily

Scientists observe quantum superconductor-metal transition and superconducting glass

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A new article presents the results of the first experimental study of the graphene-based quantum phase transition of the "superconductor-to-metal" type, i.e. transformation of the system's ground state from superconducting to metallic, upon changing the electron concentration in graphene sheet.

via Science Daily

Beautiful Heart of The Milky Way Galaxy Poster

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


tagged with: nasa, galaxies, galaxy, space, prints, posters, poster, print, milky way, stars, nebula, fantasy, science fiction

A never-before-seen view of the turbulent heart of our Milky Way galaxy is being unveiled by NASA on Nov. 10. This event will commemorate the 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609. In celebration of this International Year of Astronomy, NASA is releasing images of the galactic center region as seen by its Great Observatories to more than 150 planetariums, museums, nature centers, libraries, and schools across the country. The sites will unveil a giant, 6-foot-by-3-foot print of the bustling hub of our galaxy that combines a near-infrared view from the Hubble Space Telescope, an infrared view from the Spitzer Space Telescope, and an X-ray view from the Chandra X-ray Observatory into one multiwavelength picture. Experts from all three observatories carefully assembled the final image from large mosaic photo surveys taken by each telescope. This composite image provides one of the most detailed views ever of our galaxy's mysterious core. Participating institutions also will display a matched trio of Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra images of the Milky Way's center on a second large panel measuring 3 feet by 4 feet. Each image shows the telescope's different wavelength view of the galactic center region, illustrating not only the unique science each observatory conducts, but also how far astronomy has come since Galileo. The composite image features the spectacle of stellar evolution: from vibrant regions of star birth, to young hot stars, to old cool stars, to seething remnants of stellar death called black holes. This activity occurs against a fiery backdrop in the crowded, hostile environment of the galaxy's core, the center of which is dominated by a supermassive black hole nearly four million times more massive than our Sun. Permeating the region is a diffuse blue haze of X-ray light from gas that has been heated to millions of degrees by outflows from the supermassive black hole as well as by winds from massive stars and by stellar explosions. Infrared light reveals more than a hundred thousand stars along with glowing dust clouds that create complex structures including compact globules, long filaments, and finger-like "pillars of creation," where newborn stars are just beginning to break out of their dark, dusty cocoons.Courtesy: NASA.

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'Upside-down planet' reveals new method for studying binary star systems

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What looked at first like a sort of upside-down planet has instead revealed a new method for studying binary star systems. Astronomers confirmed the first "self-lensing" binary star system -- one in which the mass of the closer star can be measured by how powerfully it magnifies light from its more distant companion star. Though our sun stands alone, about 40 percent of similar stars are in binary (two-star) or multi-star systems, orbiting their companions in a gravitational dance.

via Science Daily

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What makes Mars so hostile to life?

Science Focus

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What makes Mars so hostile to life? 
#science  
original post: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/20915340
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Meet Your Inner Fish—and a few other animals left inside you

Science Focus

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Shubin along with Tiktaalik, a fossil fish that made him famous.
Image courtesy of PBS.

Neil Shubin's day job consists of two apparently unrelated tasks. He teaches anatomy to medical students at the University of Chicago, and he studies evolution by looking at fossils of ancient fish (he also runs a lab that experiments on modern ones). But the work he does while moonlighting as a popularizer of science neatly ties these two things together. The human anatomy has deep roots in the evolutionary past, and some of our key features date back to an odd-looking fish called Tiktaalik that Shubin found high in the Canadian Arctic.

That find seems to have been what launched Shubin's career as a communicator. His first book, Your Inner Fish, was published in 2009, and it features Tiktaalik on its cover. The themes of that book have now been made into a three-part television series, which will begin airing on PBS tomorrow night.

Big ideas like human evolution take in concepts from a huge variety of fields, as different people tackle individual problems using a variety of methods that are largely unrelated to each other. The tools Shubin uses to dig for fossils, for example, have little to do with the ones his lab uses to manipulate the development of fish embryos. So it's often good to have an overarching metaphor to provide some conceptual organization to the chaos. Cosmos has its cosmic calendar and ship of the imagination; Your Inner Fish guides its viewers using the tree of life.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

 
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original post: http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/okBMCdjsZzQ/
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Groundbreaking optical device could enhance optical information processing, computers

Science Focus

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In an optical diode, the light input in one direction is transmitted while the light input in the opposite direction is blocked. The new optical diode, designed by Lan Yang and her collaborators, is made from parity-time (PT) symmetric microresonators in which loss of one of the resonators is balanced by the gain in the other.  Breaking the PT-symmetry, by tuning the coupling strength between the resonators, leads to strong field localization and hence enables nonlinearity-based one-way transmission for light.       At St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, a section of the dome called the Whispering Gallery makes a whisper audible from the other side of the dome as a result of the way sound waves travel around the curved surface. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have used the same phenomenon to build an optical device that may lead to new and more powerful computers that run faster and cooler.   Lan Yang   Lan Yang, PhD, associate professor of electrical and systems engineering, and her collaborators have developed an essential component of these new computers that would run on light. Their work brings predictions from recently formulated theoretical physics into real world applications.   The results

The post Groundbreaking optical device could enhance optical information processing, computers has been published on Technology Org.

 
#physics  
original post: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechnologyOrgPhysicsNews/~3/OvGDqo5PYiw/
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Stellar Nurseries RCW120 Stickers

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


tagged with: envelope sealers, star clusters, nebulae, gstlnrsr, rcw120, breathtaking astronomy images, star nurseries, inspirational stars, ionised gas clouds, star forming regions, galaxies, starfields, heavens, eso, european southern observatory, vista

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series

A fantastic set of stickers, with a monogram for you to change, 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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Image code: gstlnrsr

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

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The El Gordo Massive Galaxy Cluster

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Zazzle Space Gifts for young and old

Tarantula Nebula Hubble Space Room Graphics

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


tagged with: tarantula nebula, hodge star cluster, astronomy, large magellanic cloud, nebula photo, milky way, universe, hubble telescope, cosmos, nature, hodge 301, star cluster, 30 doradus nebula, r136, stars photo, stars, nasa, esa, outer space, hubble space telescope, hubble photo, astronomical, astrophotography, cosmology, space photo, space picture, space image, deep space, nebula picture, nebula image, natural, science, burgundy, maroon, abstract, pink, purple, magenta, cool space, cool astronomy

Hubble photograph of the Tarantula Nebula & Hodge 301 Cluster

This is a photograph of the Tarantula Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hodge 301 star cluster can be seen in the lower right hand corner (may not be visible on some products). This image has beautiful shades of pink and magenta, against a dark background studded with stars.

Credit: Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI/NASA/ESA)

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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Light-selective gene transfer using a nanomachine

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Techniques to transfer specific genes into target cells such as cancer cells (transfection) is a key methodology employed in the research and development of cutting-edge medical technology. Successful transfection requires a delivery system able to efficiently introduce a gene into a target cell. To date, virus vectors and lipid or polymer-based reagents were widely used in gene transfection into cultured cells, and their utility for localized administration has also been demonstrated. On the other hand, while gene therapy, including application to cancer treatment and regenerative medicine, requires a delivery system that can achieve selective in vivo transfection into a target tissue or cells in the body, it has been difficult to accomplish such selective transfection using virus vectors and reagents. In addition, there remain concerns over the safety of virus vectors and reagents. In this research, Professor Kazunori Kataoka’s group in the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Engineering Department of Materials Engineering has developed a light-responsive nanomachine by integrating multiple functions into a three-layered polymeric micelle, which acts as a novel gene delivery system that greatly surpasses conventional delivery systems and provides selective and highly efficient transfection. By administering this nanomachine systemically to mice with subcutaneous tumors and then

The post Light-selective gene transfer using a nanomachine has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Mysteries of nearby planetary system's dynamics solved

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Mysteries of one of the most fascinating nearby planetary systems now have been solved, report authors of a scientific paper to be published by the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in its early online edition on 22 April 2014. The study, which presents the first viable model for the planetary system orbiting one the first stars discovered to have planets—the star named 55 Cancri—was led by Penn State University graduate student Benjamin Nelson in collaboration with faculty at the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State and five astronomers at other institutions in the United States and Germany.



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Tracking particles faster at the LHC



For its next big performance, the Large Hadron Collider will restart in 2015 with twice its previous collision energy and a much higher rate of particle collisions per second.


Scientists have been scurrying to prepare their detectors for the new particle onslaught. As part of this preparation, a group that includes physicists from laboratories and universities in the Chicago area are designing a new system that will allow them to examine collisions faster than ever before.


When the Large Hadron Collider is running, billions of particle collisions occur every second. Of these, only a few are the kind of direct hits that scientists are looking for. These high-impact collisions convert large amounts of pure energy into mass, temporarily producing new particles such as Higgs bosons for physicists to study.


Read more: "Tracking particles faster at the LHC" – Symmetry magazine





via CERN: Updates for the general public

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2014/04/tracking-particles-faster-lhc

X-raying the cosmos

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Space science image of the week: Swarms of black holes and clusters of galaxies in the X-ray sky

via ESA Space Science

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/04/An_X-ray_view_of_the_COSMOS_field

Yes Posters

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


tagged with: yes, confirmation bias, constellation, positive, motivational, night, sky, stars, astronomy, astrology, starstuff, gaze, ingenuity, maverick, different, dissenter, dissentient, dissident, eccentric, individualist, offbeat, original, radical, rebel, astrophysics, selenology, sky watching, stargazing, space, humor

YES is a constellation formed from many NOs.

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Horsehead Nebula Room Decal

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


tagged with: horsehead nebula, dark nebula, nebulae, space, astronomy, space exploration, universe, cosmic, milky way galaxy, outer space

A reproduction of a composite colour image of the Horsehead Nebula (also known as Barnard 33 in emission nebula IC 434) and its immediate surroundings. It's based on three exposures in the visual part of the spectrum with the FORS2 multi-mode instrument at the 8.2-m KUEYEN telescope at Paranal. The Horsehead Nebula is a dark nebula in the constellation Orion. The nebula is located just to the south of the star Alnitak, which is farthest west on Orion's Belt, and is part of the much larger Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The nebula was first recorded in 1888 by Williamina Fleming.
Credit: ESO

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Crab Nebula Case iPad Mini Cover

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: crab, nebula, space, astronomy, crab nebula, universe, celestial

An image of the Supernova explosion of Crab Nebula by NASA’S Hubble Space Telescope on a .

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