General science advances thread

[ScienceRocks]

 

[ScienceRocks]

 

[ScienceRocks]

Hybrid polymer shows promise in self-repairing materials, smart drug delivery, and artificial muscles

• David Szondy
• January 30, 2016
• 2 PICTURES

We live in an age of plastics, but even after a century of progress, most polymers still come in a single, homogenous form with basic properties. Now a team of researchers at Northwestern University under the leadership of materials scientist Samuel Stupp have developed a hybrid polymer that combines soft and hard areas like bones and muscles in animals. According to the team, this breakthrough in nanoengineering opens the door to applications ranging from self-repairing materials to artificial muscles.

 

[ScienceRocks]

NASA will use laser communication that is up to 100 times faster data rates than todays communication

A NASA team has been tapped to build a new type of communications modem that will employ an emerging, potentially revolutionary technology that could transform everything from telecommunications, medical imaging, advanced manufacturing to national defense. NASA's first-ever integrated-photonics modem will be tested aboard the International...

 

[ScienceRocks]

World's first 'robot run' farm to open in Japan
February 1, 2016

A worker checks lettuces at the indoor farm of Spread company in its Kameoka factory in Kameoka city, Kyoto prefecture June 14, 2012
A Japanese firm said Monday it would open the world's first fully automated farm with robots handling almost every step of the process, from watering seedlings to harvesting crops.



Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-02-world-robot-farm-japan.html#jCp

 

[longknife]

A New Experimental Fusion Reactor Powers Up in Germany

The reactor's first test was brief but successful

Here's how the current generators work @ Nuclear Reactors | Nuclear Power Plant | Nuclear Reactor Technology - World Nuclear Association and this story tells how this new one is supposed to work @ History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian

 

[longknife]

Cement that Captures Pollution and Turns it Into Harmless Salt

Wow! What amazing technology. Watch the video @ http://video.dailymail.co.uk/video/...7324952695121/640x360_2268897324952695121.mp4

And read the story @ Cement can clean up air POLLUTION

 

[ScienceRocks]

Physicists say they’ve finally confirmed the existence of a 'four neutron-no proton' particle

Quote

Physicists have found the most convincing signs of a tetraneutron - a four neutron-no proton particle - to date, adding weight to the possibility that the hypothetical particle really does exist. According to theory, this highly elusive particle cluster is impossible, because of how unstable lone neutrons are, but scientists in Japan say they’ve spotted its signature during recent experiments.
While the results need to be replicated independently before we can truly say the fabled tetraneutron exists, if other teams can confirm its existence, we’re going to have to make some serious changes to current understanding of nuclear forces. "It would be something of a sensation," nuclear theorist Peter Schuck from France's National Centre for Scientific Research, who wasn’t involved in the discovery, told Science News.

Physicists have been searching for the tetraneutron for decades, and while this 1965 paper concluded that no evidence could be found and "the existence of tetraneutrons is most unlikely", four separate papers have since reported experimental observations of the particle.
Most recently, theoretical physicist Francisco-Miguel Marqués and his team at the Ganil accelerator in France used a new technique to observe the particle - by watching the disintegration of beryllium and lithium nuclei. In 2002, they were smashing beryllium-14 particles into carbon particles in an attempt to blow apart beryllium’s cluster of four neutrons.
As Esther Inglis-Arkell explains over at Gizmodo, when they happened, they should have observed four little flashes, but instead, they got one big flash, signalling that these neutrons broke off in a cluster.
So why is the idea of four neutrons teaming up so impossible?
"Well, the Pauli exclusion principle specifies that particles in the same system cannot be in the same quantum state. As a consequence of this, even two neutrons shouldn't be able to stick together, let alone four," says Inglis-Arkell."However, four neutrons smashing at high speed into a carbon atom, and then reaching a detector at exactly the same place and exactly the same time is nearly as impossible as the idea that a basic tenet of physics needs to be modified."
Marqués’s team found similar evidence in 2004, but no one’s been able to replicate their results, making true confirmation impossible… until now. A team from the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Science also worked with beryllium particles to produce what they’re calling tetraneutron states.
They did this by firing a beam of helium nuclei (which have two protons and six neutrons) at liquid helium (which has two protons and two neutrons), and when the particles collided, four neutrons went missing. Their conspicuous absence lasted around 1 billionth of a trillionth of a second before reappearing as particle decay.

We've just found a theoretical impossibility. Goddamn.

 

[ScienceRocks]

http://gizmodo.com/holy-shit-scientists-have-confirmed-the-existence-of-g-1755465297

Einstein Was Right: Scientists Make Waves With Gravitational Discovery

Gravitational waves are ripples in the universe caused by some of the most energetic cosmic events, from exploding stars to supermassive black hole mergers. As they propagate through space and time, gravitational waves cause tiny tremors in atoms that make up matter. While Einstein predicted them in his general theory of relativity in 1916, and their existence was indirectly demonstrated in the 1980s, it wasn’t until the LIGO detector came online in 2002 that the hunt for elusive spacetime ripples started to get serious.

The two black holes behind the all the hubbub are 29 and 36 times the mass of the Sun, respectively. During the peak of their cosmic collision, LIGO researchers estimate that their power output was 50 times that of the entire visible universe.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Physicists create first photonic Maxwell's demon

(Phys.org)—Maxwell's demon, a hypothetical being that appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, has been widely studied since it was first proposed in 1867 by James Clerk Maxwell. But most of these studies have .

 

[ScienceRocks]

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A new form of frozen water? Scientists reveal new ice with record-low density
Amid the season known for transforming Nebraska into an outdoor ice rink, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln-led research team has predicted a new molecular form of the slippery stuff that even Mother Nature has never borne.