A mechanical engineer has developed a paperlike battery electrode that may improve tools for space exploration or unmanned aerial vehicles.
via Science Daily
There are advances being made almost daily in the disciplines required to make space and its contents accessible. This blog brings together a lot of that info, as it is reported, tracking the small steps into space that will make it just another place we carry out normal human economic, leisure and living activities.
Hubble's infrared vision pierced the dusty heart of our Milky Way galaxy to reveal more than half a million stars at its core. Except for a few blue, foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way's nuclear star cluster, the most massive and densest stellar cluster in our galaxy. Located 27,000 light-years away, this region is so packed with stars, it is equivalent to having a million suns crammed into the volume of space between us and our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. At the very hub of our galaxy, this star cluster surrounds the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, which is about 4 million times the mass of our sun.
To learn even more about the Milky Way's nuclear star cluster and Hubble, join astronomers and scientists during a live Hubble Hangout discussion at 3pm EDT on Thurs., March 31 at http://hbbl.us/y6k.
Decades of searching in the Milky Way’s nearby ‘twin’ galaxy Andromeda have finally paid off, with the discovery of an elusive breed of stellar corpse, a neutron star, by ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope.
Thousands of children across Europe have taken part in a competition to submit drawings that will be miniaturised and sent into space onboard ESA’s Cheops astronomy satellite.
Following the discovery of gravitational waves from the merging of two black holes, ESA’s Integral satellite has revealed no simultaneous gamma rays, just as models predict.
Graphene is hailed as a top material for technology due to its electrical, optical, and mechanical properties. Its high carrier mobility, optical transparency and tensile strength yield an unprecedented combination of properties favorable for applications ranging from high-speed electronics to construction. However, even with its high durability and flexibility, graphene can break when pulled at large forces, or due to friction when rubbed against. It is important to know the limits of wear resistivity when considering applications of this material. Now researchers from Graphenea and the Institute of Physics in Belgrade have shown that wear and breaking of graphene always start from wrinkles formed naturally during fabrication. The results were published in the journal Carbon.
Using atomic force microscopy (AFM), researchers scanned a very sharp needle probe across the surface of graphene. By gradually increasing the contact force that the probe exerts on graphene, effectively increasing friction until the surface ripped, the scientists observed that tears always start from the wrinkles. Wrinkles are out-of-plane deformations of graphene that probably occur during the transfer of graphene from its growth substrate to a practical substrate such as SiO2. The experiments were performed with CVD graphene.
Aside from wrinkles, CVD graphene contains naturally occurring terraces, which form because graphene conforms to the terraces of the copper substrate during CVD growth. It was shown that terraces have no effect on wear resistance.
Image: Graphene topography and local current flow. Current is reduced at the position of wrinkles.
Electric measurements with nanometer-scale resolution, using the same AFM method, further showed that no current is conducted through wrinkles, and that islands enclosed by wrinkles have different electrical potential compared to the surrounding area, indicating that wrinkles impede electrical conductance in graphene. This is an important finding, because technological applications in electronics require efficient transport of carriers across graphene devices.
This careful study of electrical and mechanical effects of wrinkles in graphene is expected to lead to new experiments on improving graphene uniformity and flatness, helping to speed up the adoption of graphene technology.
NASA has selected 36 fellows for its prestigious Einstein, Hubble, and Sagan Fellowships. Each postdoctoral fellowship provides three years of support to awardees to pursue independent research in astronomy and astrophysics. The new fellows will begin their programs in the fall of 2016 at a host university or research center of their choosing in the United States.
Nestled within the fractured rim of a vast impact basin on Mars are valley floors dusted in frost.
Arnaud Marsollier and Freya Blekman
A diphoton event display from the CMS collaboration (Image: CERN)
The Rencontres de Moriond in La Thuile Italy, are traditionally the most important meeting place for particle physicists in winter. After last year’s restart of the Large Hadron Collider at unprecedented energy, and as Rencontres de Moriond celebrate their 50th anniversary, physicists gathered last week with much interest for the electroweak session, to look at the latest results from the LHC experiments. Analyses presented during the week included measurements of the Higgs boson using last year’s LHC 13 TeV data, an eagerly anticipated update on diphoton resonances search, precision measurements of Standard Model processes, and new searches for supersymmetric particles and dark matter.
The week started with many results in the heavy flavours area, where one of the main highlights came from the LHCb experiment. Looking at their data, physicists of the LHCb collaboration could not spot any evidence for the existence of X(5568)– a tetraquark particle candidate recently reported by Fermilab’s DZero collaboration. LHCb and DZero collaborations will work together to investigate further, following this interesting outcome.
ATLAS also presented their full Run 1 result of a search for the extremely rare decay of a Bs meson to a muon pair.
The decay was observed by CMS and LHCb in 2014 from a combination of their datasets. The ATLAS analysis resulted in a signal that is smaller than expected, but still compatible with the Standard Model.
After a lot of hard work to calibrate and characterize the data collected, both ATLAS and CMS provided an update on an intriguing result first presented last December: a small excess above background in the diphoton channel near a mass of 750 GeV, which could mean, if confirmed, the existence of a new unexpected particle.
With refined analysis, the “bump” in the data is still there, but the statistical significance of the result still remains too low to be conclusive. Physicists must wait for the imminent restart of data collection before they can investigate further, as the LHC has been in its winter pause over the last weeks. Physicists will have to wait for summer conferences, such as ICHEP 2016 in Chicago, to possibly get excited again.
For more highlights from Moriond, see the latest from the ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments and from Symmetry Magazine.