'New results from NASA's Curiosity rover are painting a curious picture of the planet's methane. The level of methane found in the Gale Crater is less than expected, based on prediction models. But every once in awhile, it spikes. NASA scientists believe that means that the gas is being produced somewhere nearby -- though they aren't sure where or how.
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Fwd: Malaria
'An international research collaborative has determined that a promising anti-malarial compound tricks the immune system to rapidly destroy red blood cells infected with the malaria parasite but leave healthy cells unharmed.
Fwd: Ebola
'Endless Ebola Endemic? That's The 'Risk We Face Now,' CDC Says
Speed. That's key to ending the Ebola epidemic, says the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Thomas Frieden is visiting West Africa this week to figure out how to reduce the time it takes to find new Ebola cases and isolate them.
Otherwise, Ebola could become a permanent disease in West Africa.
Fwd: Babel Fish
'Speaking just one language will no longer be a barrier to global communication if Microsoft has its way.
The computing giant launched a preview of is Skype Translator project today, with the first iteration supporting English and Spanish.
A video demonstration showed two students -- one in the United States, one in Mexico, using the software to have a conversation in their native languages.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/skype-talk-world/story?id=27617184
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Fwd: Mars
NASA scientists today touted new evidence of a warm, wet and humid Mars that lasted for millions of years and could have supported life.
"Today's Mars is dry and probably has been that way for 2 billion years, but at one time Mars was shaped by water," said Ashwin Vasavada, NASA's deputy project scientist for the Mars rover Curiosity. "Rivers, lakes and ground water were present for millions of years. The atmosphere must have been thicker. Mars must have been warmer... and the climate system must have been loaded with water."
Mars at one time had the right ingredients and the right environment to support life, even if only in microbial form.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2856191/mars-once-was-warm-wet-and-humid.html
Fwd: Spary PV
'Scientists have just invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) -- a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.'
Friday, December 12, 2014
Fwd: Laser
'The U.S. Navy says its new laser weapon works and it will use it if it has to.
The Office of Naval Research reported Wednesday that its laser weapons system -- dubbed LaWS -- had performed flawlessly in tests aboard the amphibious transport dock USS Ponce in the Arabian Gulf from September to November.
"Laser weapons are powerful, affordable and will play a vital role in the future of naval combat operations," Rear Adm. Matthew L. Klunder, chief of naval research, said in a statement. "We ran this particular weapon, a prototype, through some extremely tough paces, and it locked on and destroyed the targets we designated with near-instantaneous lethality."
Klunder said the laser performed so well that the commander of the Ponce is now authorized to use it in defense of the vessel, according to a report from the U.S. Naval Institute.
"The captain of that ship has all of the authorities necessary if there was a threat inbound to that ship to protect our sailors and Marines (and) we would defend that ship with that laser system," Klunder is quoted as saying in a USNI report.
The laser could be used to stop threats ranging from drones and helicopters to small patrol boats, Klunder said, according to the USNI report.
Navy video released Wednesday shows the LaWS hitting exactly those types of targets. Watching the video, you can't see any light beam as you might expect from watching science fiction movies. Instead, the targets just burn up.
The Navy says the laser weapon is safer than conventional arms that use propellants and explosive warheads, and more cost-effective.
"At less than a dollar per shot, there's no question about the value LaWS provides,
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/11/tech/innovation/navy-laser-weapon/index.html?hpt=hp_c3
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Fwd: The Machine
'The Machine's design includes other novel features such as optical fiber instead of copper wiring for moving data around. HP's simulations suggest that a server built to The Machine's blueprint could be six times more powerful than an equivalent conventional design, while using just 1.25 percent of the energy and being around 10 percent the size.'
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Re: Particle accelerator
I heard a CERN scientist say that they accelerate particles to have the same kinetic energy as a freight train. I don't know if he meant that literally or figuratively, because that is a lot of energy for a particle.
Now if you could only make a gun that could do that...
On Dec 9, 2014, at 8:52 AM, <larry.r.trout> wrote:
'Scientists have found a way to accelerate subatomic particles to an energy gradient 1,000 times that of the massive Large Hadron Collider at CERN — all with a device that would fit on a tabletop.
The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkely National Lab used a specialized petawatt laser and plasma to speed up the particles. Known as a laser-plasma accelerator, it allows physicists to shrink the standard accelerator, which in the case of CERN is miles long, to much more compact machines, according to Gizmag.
Scientists shot plasma with a laser and produced energy of 4.25 giga-electron volts. The Large Hadron Collider, which is 17 miles in circumference and uses a series of modulated electromagnetic fields, can only achieve 100 mega-electron volts per meter before the energy starts to threaten the metal structure that holds it together.
The device put together by the Berkeley Lab is just a plasma tube that is 3.5 inches long, achieving a speed that would typically take many miles for a standard particle accelerator.
There is a catch, however: The approach of laser-plasma accelerators is entirely different, and used one of the most powerful lasers in the world, the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA), which produced a beam of light that equates to a quadrillion watts of power, or a petawatt. Researchers focused the laser on the small tube that contained the plasma.
The team was able to focus the laser beam into a 500 micro hole from a distance of 14 meters, which produced huge waves of rolling energy that accelerated free electrons in the plasma, similar to how a surfer increases its speed while going down the face of a wave, according to the report.'
Language
'In the 1960s, the US linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky offered what looked like a solution. He argued that children don't in fact learn their mother tongue – or at least, not right down to the grammatical building blocks (the whole process was far too quick and painless for that). He concluded that they must be born with a rudimentary body of grammatical knowledge – a 'Universal Grammar' – written into the human DNA. With this hard-wired predisposition for language, it should be a relatively trivial matter to pick up the superficial differences between, say, English and French. The process works because infants have an instinct for language: a grammatical toolkit that works on all languages the world over.
At a stroke, this device removes the pain of learning one's mother tongue, and explains how a child can pick up a native language in such a short time. It's brilliant. Chomsky's idea dominated the science of language for four decades. And yet it turns out to be a myth. A welter of new evidence has emerged over the past few years, demonstrating that Chomsky is plain wrong…'
http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/there-is-no-language-instinct/
Monday, December 1, 2014
Friday, November 28, 2014
Thursday, November 27, 2014
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Fwd: biocircuits
'Researchers have made great progress in recent years in the design and creation of biological circuits -- systems that, like electronic circuits, can take a number of different inputs and deliver a particular kind of output. But while individual components of such biological circuits can have precise and predictable responses, those outcomes become less predictable as more such elements are combined. Scientists have now come up with a way of greatly reducing that unpredictability, introducing a device that could ultimately allow such circuits to behave nearly as predictably as their electronic counterparts.'
Fwd: cool
'Physicists have developed a new cooling technique for mechanical quantum systems. Using an ultracold atomic gas, the vibrations of a membrane were cooled down to less than 1 degree above absolute zero. This technique may enable novel studies of quantum physics and precision measurement devices.'
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Fwd: Rosetta
'The probe that landed on the surface of a comet has discovered organic molecules, the most rudimentary building blocks of life, according to the German agency involved in the mission.
An instrument aboard the Philae lander detected the molecules after "sniffing" the comet's atmosphere. An organic compound is one whose molecules contain the carbon atom, the basis of life on earth.
Scientists are analyzing the data to see whether the organic compounds detected by Philae are simple ones—such as methane and methanol—or a more complex species such as amino acids, the building blocks for proteins. A drill on Philae also obtained some material from the comet's hard surface, but data about organic molecules from that experiment have yet to be fully analyzed.'
Monday, November 17, 2014
Fwd: Science
'Engineers have transformed the genome of the bacterium E. coli into a long-term storage device for memory. They envision that this stable, erasable, and easy-to-retrieve memory will be well suited for applications such as sensors for environmental and medical monitoring.'
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141113142006.htm
'Physicists have engineered a spiral laser beam and used it to create a whirlpool of hybrid light-matter particles called polaritons, hybrid particles that have properties of both matter and light and could link electronics with photonics.'
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141117093336.htm
'Engineers have successfully printed complex electronic circuits using a common t-shirt printer. The electronic circuits are printed using unique materials in layers on top of everyday flexible materials such as plastic, aluminum foil and even paper. Resistors, transistors and capacitors, the key components of a complex electronic circuit, are printed using non-toxic organic materials like silver nanoparticles, carbon and plastics.'
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141117084623.htm
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