Steps into Space - Commercialisation, Occupation, Colonization: 07/28/14

Monday, 28 July 2014

An anti-glare, anti-reflective display for mobile devices?

If you’ve ever tried to watch a video on a tablet on a sunny day, you know you have to tilt it at just the right angle to get rid of glare or invest in a special filter. But now scientists are reporting in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces that they’ve developed a novel glass surface that reduces both glare and reflection, which continue to plague even the best mobile displays today. Valerio Pruneri and colleagues note that much effort has been poured into anti-reflective and anti-glare technology. In the highly competitive digital age, any bonus feature on a device gives it an edge. But for the most part, that hasn’t included an integrated anti-glare, anti-reflective display. Users still typically have to dish out extra cash for a filter or film — some of questionable effectiveness — to lay on top of their glass screens so they can use the devices in bright light. One of the most promising developments involves layering anti-reflective nano-structures on top of an anti-glare surface. But the existing technique doesn’t work well with glass, the material of choice for many electronic displays, so Pruneri’s team at ICFO (The Institute of Photonic Sciences) in collaboration with

The post An anti-glare, anti-reflective display for mobile devices? has been published on Technology Org.

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Comet Jacques makes a 'questionable' appearance

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What an awesome photo! Italian amateur astronomer Rolando Ligustri nailed it earlier today using a remote telescope in New Mexico and wide-field 4-inch (106 mm) refractor. Currently the brightest comet in the sky at magnitude 6.5, C/2014 E2 Jacques has been slowly climbing out of morning twilight into a darker sky over the last two weeks.

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Turbulent Star-Birth Region Selection Print

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

Turbulent Star-Birth Region Selection Print

tagged with: hubble, nasa, stars, star, galaxy, galaxies, space, astronomy, telescope, beautiful, postcard, postcards, photos, photograph, gift, gifts, nebula, nature, landscapes

In commemoration of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope completing its 100,000th orbit in its 18th year of exploration and discovery, scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., have aimed Hubble to take a snapshot of a dazzling region of celestial birth and renewal. Hubble peered into a small portion of the nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074 (upper, left). The region is a firestorm of raw stellar creation, perhaps triggered by a nearby supernova explosion. It lies about 170,000 light-years away near the Tarantula nebula, one of the most active star-forming regions in our Local Group of galaxies. The three-dimensional-looking image reveals dramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-head "pillars of creation," and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation. The region is on the edge of a dark molecular cloud that is an incubator for the birth of new stars. The high-energy radiation blazing out from clusters of hot young stars already born in NGC 2074 is sculpting the wall of the nebula by slowly eroding it away. Another young cluster may be hidden beneath a circle of brilliant blue gas at center, bottom. In this approximately 100-light-year-wide fantasy-like landscape, dark towers of dust rise above a glowing wall of gases on the surface of the molecular cloud. The seahorse-shaped pillar at lower, right is approximately 20 light-years long, roughly four times the distance between our Sun and the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. The region is in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite of our Milky Way galaxy. It is a fascinating laboratory for observing star-formation regions and their evolution. Dwarf galaxies like the LMC are considered to be the primitive building blocks of larger galaxies. This representative color image was taken on August 10, 2008, with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Red shows emission from sulfur atoms, green from glowing hydrogen, and blue from glowing oxygen. Source: NASA

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VIDEO: The evolution of Bjork's instruments

Science Focus

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Bjork's musical director Matt Robertson explains how they developed the instruments for her Biophilia tour.
#science
» see original post http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28216444#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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Monogram Omega Nebula - Our Amazing Universe Oval Sticker

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

Monogram Omega Nebula - Our Amazing Universe Oval Sticker

tagged with: awesome astronomy images, omgneb, star forming regions, ngc 6618, omega nebula, inspirational, heavens, uplifting, initials, monogrammed, messier 17, european southern observatory, eso, vista, initialled, monogram, monograms

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

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

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The Horsehead Nebula from Blue to Infrared

Zazzle Space Gifts for young and old

Apply now for tickets to TEDxCERN

CERN will host a TEDx event 24 September 2014 on the theme “Forward: Charting the future with science”. Speakers will present innovative and ambitious ideas that apply science to problems the world faces today and those of tomorrow.

A small number of places has been set aside for members of the general public to attend the event at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Those who are interested should contact the organisers to apply. The event can also be followed live online.

Their short but inspiring talks will be grouped into three themed sessions – "adapt", "change" and "create" – according to the stance that they take on confronting global challenges such as the efficient management of natural resources or extending access to healthcare to non-urban areas. Each session will include a performance that combines art and science from artists such as musician Nitin Sawhney and dancer Andrew Nemr. Particle physicist and BBC presenter Brian Cox will host the conference.

“Science is both the exploration of worlds beyond the imagination and a part of everyday life – [it is] a vital ingredient in confronting the challenges we face today and in the future,” says Cox. “TEDxCERN will showcase ideas at the frontiers of science from remarkable people.”

Young talent – those for whom addressing future global issues is particularly important – is core to the programme. This year, a number of remarkable people – leading geneticist and molecular biologist Nina Federov, entrepreneur and scientist Danielle Fong, nanomaterials researcher Julia Greer, mathematician and philosopher John Mighton and biotechnologist Hayat Sindi, to name just a few – will take the floor.

Find out more: TEDxCERN

via CERN: Updates for the general public

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2014/07/apply-now-tickets-tedxcern

Horsehead Nebula - Our Awesome Universe Wall Graphic

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

Horsehead Nebula - Our Awesome Universe Wall Graphic

tagged with: breathtaking astronomy images, hrshdneb, stars, nebulae, star clusters, starfields, star nurseries, horsehead nebula, galaxies, vista, european southern observatory, eso

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A gorgeous deep space photograph featuring the Horsehead Nebula.
It's actually a composite colour image 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.

It was produced from three images, obtained on February 1, 2000, with the FORS2 multi-mode instrument at the 8.2-m KUEYEN Unit Telescope and extracted from the VLT Science Archive Facility.

The frames were obtained in the B-band (600 sec exposure; wavelength 429 nm; FWHM 88 nm; here rendered as blue), V-band (300 sec; 554 nm; 112 nm; green) and R-band (120 sec; 655 nm; 165 nm; red).

The original pixel size is 0.2 arcsec.

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image code: hrshdneb

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

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Improving tumour radiation therapy: When basic ions break DNA down

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A new study relevant for cancer radiation therapy shows that DNA building blocks are susceptible to fragmentation on contact with the full range of ions from alkaline element species Scientists now have a better understanding of how short DNA strands decompose in microseconds. A European team found new fragmentation pathways that occur universally when DNA strands are exposed to metal ions from a family of alkaline and alkaline earth elements. These ions tend to replace protons in the DNA backbone and at the same time induce a reactive conformation leading more readily to fragmentation.These findings by Andreas Piekarczyk, from the University of Iceland, and colleagues have been published in a study in EPJ D. They could contribute to optimising cancerous tumour therapy through a greater understanding of how radiation and its by-products, reactive intermediate particles, interact with complex DNA structures. In cancer radiation therapy, it is not the radiation itself that directly damages the DNA strands, or oligonucleotides. But rather, it is the secondary reactive particles, leading to the creation of charged intermediates. Here, the authors have studied one of these charged intermediates in the form of so-called protonated metastable DNA hexamers. To do so, the authors created selected oligonucleotide-metal-ion complexes that they

The post Improving tumour radiation therapy: When basic ions break DNA down has been published on Technology Org.

#materials
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Of catalysts and chirality: Highly-selective growth of structure-specific single-walled carbon nanotubes

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Content of (12,6) SWNTs in sample measured with Raman spectroscopy. Credit: Yan Li Carbon – the chemical basis of all known life and an element known as far back as the 8th century BC – exists in a range of forms, or allotropes, with remarkably diverse properties. (Diamond, for example, is transparent and extremely hard tetrahedral lattice that conducts electricity poorly but is an excellent thermal conductor. Graphite, on the other hand – a moderate electrical conductor – is a soft, black, flaky solid formed from sheets of flat hexagonal lattices known as graphene.) Among carbon’s allotropes, carbon nanotubes are cylindrical graphene-based nanostructures with properties central to many fields of materials science and technology. In particular, single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) are carbon nanotubes whose properties change with their chirality – that is, the arrangements of the carbon atoms, which is based on tube diameter and wrapping angle as specified by what is known as their (n,m) value. These variants behave either as electrical conductors or semiconductors with different bandgaps (the energy range in a solid where no electron states can exist), making them extremely desirable for nanoelectronics applications. While this characteristic depends on the SWVTs all being in chiral form or the other, it has historically been very

The post Of catalysts and chirality: Highly-selective growth of structure-specific single-walled carbon nanotubes has been published on Technology Org.

#materials
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Our flocculent neighbour

Space science image of the week: Herschel portrays nearby M33 galaxy blossoming with star births

via ESA Space Science

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/07/Nearby_M33_galaxy_blossoming_with_star_birth

Hubble's Ultra Deep Field Image Poster

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

Hubble's Ultra Deep Field Image Poster

tagged with: hubble, ultra deep field, ultra, deep, field, astronomical, astronomy, distant, galaxies, ancient, red shift, space images

This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just about 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies - the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals - thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old. The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004. Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team For more information, visit http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2006/12/image/b/

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Crab Nebula Astronomy and Science Poster

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

Crab Nebula Astronomy and Science Poster

tagged with: astronomy, astronomer, scientist, science, space, gift, space gift, astronomy gift, science gift, nebula, star, universe, hubble, hubble space telescope, nasa, astrophysicist, astrophysics, super nova, space exploration, big bang, birthday gift, graduation gift, unique gift idea, poster, print, astronomy poster, space poster, hubble poster, nebula poster, crab nebula, supernova

Crab Nebula a supernova explosion remnant - this striking image by the Hubble Space Telescope, 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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Omega Nebula - Our Amazing Universe Stickers

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

Omega Nebula - Our Amazing Universe Stickers

tagged with: omgneb, star forming regions, omega nebula, uplifting, messier 17, stars, hrbstslr, galaxies, outer space, universe, awesome astronomy images, ngc 6618, inspirational, heavens, european southern observatory, eso, vista

Carina Nebula - Our Breathtaking Universe Room Stickers

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

Carina Nebula - Our Breathtaking Universe Room Stickers

tagged with: crnneb, star clusters, stars, starfields, astronomy, nebulae, nebula, star forming region, star nurseries, galaxies, european southern observatory, vista, eso

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A fantastic astronomy photograph showing a panoramic view of the WR 22 and Eta Carinae regions of the Carina Nebula.

The picture was created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

It's a stunning, mind-blowing, fantastic image that reveals a little of the wonder that is our universe.

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image code: crnneb

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

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Veil Nebula 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!

Veil Nebula Case For The iPad Mini

tagged with: international, astronomy, space, nasa, hubble, telescope, gift, outer space, deep space, star

Supernova discoveries are reported to the International Astronomical Union's Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, which sends out a circular with the name it assigns to it. The name is the year of discovery, immediately followed by a one or two-letter designation. The first 26 supernovae of the year are designated with a capital letter from A to Z. Afterward pairs of lower-case letters are used: aa, ab, and so on.[36] Since 2000, professional and amateur astronomers find several hundreds of supernovae each year (572 in 2007, 261 in 2008, 390 in 2009). For example, the last supernova of 2005 was SN 2005nc, indicating that it was the 367th[nb 1] supernova found in 2005.[37][38] Historical supernovae are known simply by the year they occurred: SN 185, SN 1006, SN 1054, SN 1572 (Tycho's Nova) and SN 1604 (Kepler's Star). Since 1885 the letter notation has been used, even if there was only one supernova discovered that year (e.g. SN 1885A, 1907A, etc.)—this last happened with SN 1947A. "SN", for SuperNova, is a standard prefix. Until 1987, two-letter designations were rarely needed; since 1988, however, they have been needed every year.

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