Steps into Space - Commercialisation, Occupation, Colonization: 08/29/14

Friday 29 August 2014

Scientists unveil new technology to better understand small clusters of atoms

Physicists at the University of York, working with researchers at the University of Birmingham and Genoa, have developed new technology to study atomic vibration in small particles, revealing a more accurate picture of the structure of atomic clusters where surface atoms vibrate more intensively than internal atoms. An illustration of the extent to which the atoms, in a small cluster of atoms, vibrate. The spheres represent the range of motion of the atoms, rather than the atoms themselves – the spheres have been exaggerated in size by 45 times in order to ease visualisation. The atoms on the surface have larger ranges of motion than those in the middle of the cluster. Using new computer technology based on gaming machines, scientists were able to use a combination of molecular dynamics and quantum mechanics calculations to simulate the electron microscopy of gold particles. By modelling the atomic vibration of individual atoms in such clusters realistically, external atoms on the surface of the structure can be ‘seen’ to vibrate more than internal atoms. The research is published in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters. Currently, electron microscopy only allows scientists to estimate the average position of atoms in a three-dimensional structure. This

The post Scientists unveil new technology to better understand small clusters of atoms has been published on Technology Org.

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Astrophysicists report radioactive cobalt in supernova explosion

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Astrophysicists have detected the formation of radioactive cobalt during a supernova explosion, lending credence to a corresponding theory of supernova explosions.

via Science Daily

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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope witnesses asteroid smashup

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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted an eruption of dust around a young star, possibly the result of a smashup between large asteroids. This type of collision can eventually lead to the formation of planets.

via Science Daily

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Researchers use NASA and other data to look into the heart of a solar storm

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Scientists found that the CME contained a rare piece of dense solar filament material. This filament coupled with an unusually fast speed led to the large amount of solar material observed.

via Science Daily

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Astronomy: Radio telescopes settle controversy over distance to Pleiades

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A worldwide network of radio telescopes measured the distance to the famous star cluster the Pleiades to an accuracy within 1 percent. The result resolved a controversy raised by a satellite's measurement that now is shown to be wrong. The incorrect measurement had challenged standard models of star formation and evolution.

via Science Daily

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Step lightly: All-optical transistor triggered by single photon promises advances in quantum applications

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(Phys.org) —Optical transistors and switches are fundamental in both classical and quantum optical information processing. A key objective in optics research is determining and developing the structural and performance limits of such all-optical devices, in which a single gate photon modifies the transmission or phase accumulation of multiple source photons – a feature necessitating strong interaction between individual photons. While significant progress has been made – especially in cavity QED experiments, which use resonators to enhance interaction between photons, confined in a reflective enclosure, and natural or artificial atoms – the goal is to achieve high optical gain and high efficiency using a free-space – that is, cavity-free – approach. Recently, scientists at Universität Stuttgart, Germany demonstrated a free-space single-photon transistor based on two-color Rydberg interaction, which they say could lead to a high optical gain, high efficiency optical transistor through further improvements. (In a Rydberg atom a single electron is excited to a state with a large principle quantum number, meaning that it has high potential energy.) Moreover, the researchers state that the finding may lead to advances in quantum information processing, condensed matter physics, single step multi-photon entanglement, and other important areas.

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Our Milky Way Poster

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

Our Milky Way Poster

tagged with: solar system, milky way, space, universe, astronomy, galaxies

Like early explorers mapping the continents of our globe, astronomers are busy charting the spiral structure of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Using infrared images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have discovered that the Milky Way's elegant spiral structure is dominated by just two arms wrapping off the ends of a central bar of stars. Previously, our galaxy was thought to possess four major arms. <p> The artist's concept also includes a new spiral arm, called the "Far-3 kiloparsec arm," discovered via a radio-telescope survey of gas in the Milky Way. This arm is shorter than the two major arms and lies along the bar of the galaxy.

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Signal of anthropogenic climate change is written in the ice

Science Focus

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USGS

The world's glaciers are melting, driven to retreat by a warming trend that has persisted for well over a century. But glaciers are slow-moving bodies in more ways than one, as their huge mass of ice melts slowly, even when the temperatures rise rapidly. Since the onset of the current retreat traces back to the middle of the 19th century and the end of the Little Ice Age, it can be difficult to tell how much of recent ice dynamics is driven by recent warming.

Now, a new study has taken a close look how the world's glaciers have responded to natural and human-driven climate change. The results show that the majority of melting in the last century was still a hangover from the Little Ice Age, but a clear signal of human influence has emerged over the last few decades.

The authors of the new paper, who hail from Austria and Canada, recognize the challenge of discerning climate influences by following the behavior of glaciers. But they also suggest that there's a great opportunity in doing so. "Because glacier extent responds to changes in the glacier mass balance with a lag of decades to centuries," they write, "glaciers provide an opportunity to directly perceive long-term climate change, unobscured by interannual variability." In other words, the erratic behavior of short-term climate trends gets smoothed out by the slow adjustment of the glaciers.

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» see original post http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/iSFCraMzrPw/
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Turning a $40 Needle Into a $250,000 Live-Specimen Microscope

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A University of Utah team discovered a method for turning a small, \$40 needle into a 3-D microscope capable of taking images up to 70 times smaller than the width of a human hair. This new method not only produces high-quality images comparable to expensive microscopes, but may be implanted into the brains of living mice for imaging at the cellular level. The study appears in the Aug. 18 issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters. Designed by Rajesh Menon, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and graduate student Ganghun Kim, the microscope technique works when an LED light is illuminated and guided through a fiberoptic needle or cannula. Returned pictures are reconstructed into 3-D images using algorithms developed by Menon and Kim.“Unlike miniature microscopes, our approach does not use optics,” Menon says. “It’s primarily computational.” He says this approach will allow researchers not only to take images far smaller than those taken by current miniature microscopes, but do it for a fraction of the cost.“We can get approximately 1-micron-resolution images that only \$250,000 and higher microscopes are capable of generating,” Menon says. “Miniature microscopes are limited to the few tens of microns.”Menon hopes to extend the technology

The post Turning a \$40 Needle Into a \$250,000 Live-Specimen Microscope has been published on Technology Org.

#physics
» see original post http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechnologyOrgPhysicsNews/~3/x2vdqU5oRMM/
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Antarctic hides extreme ecosystem

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Scientists pull up thousands of different types of micro-organisms from Lake Whillans, a large body of water buried 800m under the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
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» see original post http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28853387#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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Monogram Fires of the Flame Nebula - in Orion Oval Sticker

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

Monogram Fires of the Flame Nebula - in Orion Oval Sticker

tagged with: breathtaking astronomy images, hfflmnb, star forming, orion constellation, young stars clusters, orion the hunter, flame nebula, awesome space picture, monogram, initialled, heavens, orions belt, european southern observatory, eso, vista, initials, monogrammed, monograms

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

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The Wizard Nebula

Open star cluster NGC 7380 is still embedded in its natal cloud of interstellar gas and dust popularly known as the Wizard Nebula. Seen with foreground and background stars along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy it lies some 8,000 light-years distant, toward the constellation Cepheus. A full moon would easily fit inside this telescopic view of the 4 million year young cluster and associated nebula, normally much too faint to be seen by eye. Made with telescope and camera firmly planted on Earth, the image reveals multi light-year sized shapes and structures within the Wizard in a color palette made popular in Hubble Space Telescope images. Recorded with narrowband filters, the visible wavelength light from the nebula's hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur atoms is transformed into green, blue, and red colors in the final digital composite. But there is still a trick up the Wizard's sleeve. Sliding your cursor over the image (or following this link) will make the stars disappear, leaving only the cosmic gas and dust of the Wizard Nebula.

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Atoms to product: Aiming to make nanoscale benefits life-sized

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Many common materials exhibit different and potentially useful characteristics when fabricated at extremely small scales—that is, at dimensions near the size of atoms, or a few ten-billionths of a meter. These "atomic scale" or "nanoscale" properties include quantized electrical characteristics, glueless adhesion, rapid temperature changes, and tunable light absorption and scattering that, if available in human-scale products and systems, could offer potentially revolutionary defense and commercial capabilities. Two as-yet insurmountable technical challenges, however, stand in the way: Lack of knowledge of how to retain nanoscale properties in materials at larger scales, and lack of assembly capabilities for items between nanoscale and 100 microns—slightly wider than a human hair.

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Eta Carinae Nebula Wall Skin

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

Eta Carinae Nebula Wall Skin

tagged with: eta carinae nebula, eta carinae, carinae, nebula, carinae nebula, space, astronomy, stars, outer space, wr 22

This spectacular panoramic view combines a new image of the field around the Wolf–Rayet star WR 22 in the Carina Nebula (right) with an earlier picture of the region around the unique star Eta Carinae in the heart of the nebula (left).

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Crab Nebula – Hubble Telescope 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!

Crab Nebula – Hubble Telescope Case 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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Hang out with Rosetta

Where will Philae land? Join Rosetta mission experts in a Google+ Hangout, Tuesday 2 September, 14:00 GMT (16:00 CEST)

via ESA Space Science

https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/100720077817157516563/events/c9gb2sk457gharo9tr2m85bsnng

Highly conductive organic metal looks promising for disposable electronic devices

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(b-d) Images of the organic metal, TATA, are shown with different imaging techniques. (e) X-ray scattering of a thin film of TATA. (f) Side view (i) and top view (ii) of the proposed stacking structure of TATA. Credit: Armao, et al. ©2014 American Chemical Society Although organic materials are often used as semiconductors, such as in organic LEDs and organic transistors, organic materials that have an electrical conductivity as high as that of metals are still very scarce. One problem with developing organic metals is that there is a tradeoff in terms of their crystalline structure: a high crystallinity is required for high conductivity, but is detrimental to the materials’ processability. Now in a new paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers Joseph J. Armao, IV, et al., at the University of Strasbourg in France, have demonstrated a way to overcome this problem by developing a new class of organic materials that are highly conductive yet very soft and flexible. When irradiated with a light pulse, the material reorganizes its molecules to correct structural defects. The new material can therefore be assembled with low crystallinity and then transformed via a light pulse into a material with high electrical conductivity. Read

The post Highly conductive organic metal looks promising for disposable electronic devices has been published on Technology Org.

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Breakthrough in light sources for new quantum technology

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One of the most promising technologies for future quantum circuits are photonic circuits, i.e. circuits based on light (photons) instead of electrons (electronic circuits). First, it is necessary to create a stream of single photons and control their direction. Researchers around the world have made all sorts of attempts to achieve this, but now scientists at the Niels Bohr Institute have succeeded in creating a steady stream of photons emitted one at a time and in a particular direction.

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research joke posters

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

research joke posters

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get this funny science design! more great designsin our gallery!

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Monogram Crab Nebula in Taurus Stickers

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

Monogram Crab Nebula in Taurus Stickers

tagged with: crbneb, astronomy, messier 1, neutron stars, star ejecta, pulsars, supernovae explosions, galaxies, outer space pictures, monogram initials, heavens, european southern observatory, eso, vista, monograms, initialled, monogrammed

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A great outer space picture featuring a three colour composite of the well-known Crab Nebula (also known as Messier 1), as observed with the FORS2 instrument in imaging mode in the morning of November 10, 1999.

It's the remnant of a supernova explosion at a distance of about 6,000 light-years, observed almost 1,000 years ago, in the year 1054. It contains a neutron star near its center that spins 30 times per second around its axis (see below).

In this picture, the green light is predominantly produced by hydrogen emission from material ejected by the star that exploded. The blue light is predominantly emitted by very high-energy ("relativistic") electrons that spiral in a large-scale magnetic field (so-called synchrotron emission). It's believed that these electrons are continuously accelerated and ejected by the rapidly spinning neutron star at the centre of the nebula and which is the remnant core of the exploded star.

This pulsar has been identified with the lower/right of the two close stars near the geometric center of the nebula, immediately left of the small arc-like feature, best seen in ESO Press Photo eso9948.

Technical information: ESO Press Photo eso9948 is based on a composite of three images taken through three different optical filters: B (429 nm; FWHM 88 nm; 5 min; here rendered as blue), R (657 nm; FWHM 150 nm; 1 min; green) and S II (673 nm; FWHM 6 nm; 5 min; red) during periods of 0.65 arcsec (R, S II) and 0.80 (B) seeing, respectively. The field shown measures 6.8 x 6.8 arcminutes and the images were recorded in frames of 2048 x 2048 pixels, each measuring 0.2 arcseconds. North is up; East is left.

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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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Eta Carinae Nebula Wall Skin

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

Eta Carinae Nebula Wall Skin

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Ring Nebula (NASA/Hubble Telescope) Cover 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!

Ring Nebula (NASA/Hubble Telescope) Cover For The iPad Mini

tagged with: space, nasa, hubble space telescope, space photography, astronomy, geek present, nerd gift, outer space, rainbow, colorful, star, starry, night sky, astronomer gift

Travel to outer space without leaving the dinner table, when you have these plates featuring this Hubble Telescope image of the Ring Nebula, courtesy of NASA.

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