General science advances thread

[ScienceRocks]

Diamond nanothreads predicted to be stronger than carbon nanotubes but not as stiff, and also more resiliant to defects

One of the newest carbon allotropes synthesized are diamond nanothreads. Using molecular dynamics, we determine the stiffness (850 GPa), strength (26.4 nN), extension (14.9%), and bending rigidity (5.35 × 10–28 N·m2). The 1D nature of the nanothread results in a tenacity of 4.1 × 107 N·m/kg, exceeding nanotubes and graphene. As the thread consists of repeating Stone–Wales defects, through steered molecular dynamics (SMD), we explore the effect of defect density on the strength, stiffness, and extension of the system.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Laser weapon system stops truck in field test

Lockheed Martin's 30-kilowatt fiber laser weapon system successfully disabled the engine of a small truck during a recent field test, demonstrating the rapidly evolving precision capability to protect military forces and critical infrastructure.

Known as ATHENA, for Advanced Test High Energy Asset, the ground-based prototype system burned through the engine manifold in a matter of seconds from more than a mile away. The truck was mounted on a test platform with its engine and drive train running to simulate an operationally-relevant test scenario.

 

[ScienceRocks]

US could ramp up military lasers by ten times to 300 kilowatts by 2018

In three years the US military could have a prototype 300 kilowatt laser weapon. This would be ten times the power of the 30 kilowatt laser being tested on the USS Ponce. Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. of Breaking Defense reports this from a Lockheed engineer.

The Army’s High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator(HEL MD) will improve to a 60 kw system late in 2016. This is up from the current 10 kilowatt laser. Today's technology will enable fiber lasers to scale to 300 kw. Near term improvement to the underlying technology will enable well beyond 500 kw lasers.

Solid state slab lasers (being developed by the Navy and Northrop) should be able to scale to a total power of 300 kW. This will not require any technological breakthroughs. Supporters of slab SSLs such as Maritime Laser Demonstration (MLD) believe they could eventually be scaled up further, to perhaps 600 kW. Slab SSLs are not generally viewed as easily scalable to megawatt power levels.

At 30 to 35 percent efficiency — the current cutting edge with fiber-optic lasers — 300 kw of output would require just under a megawatt of electrical power.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Earliest known fossil of the genus Homo dates to 2.8 to 2.75 million years ago

" The earliest known record of the genus Homo—the human genus—represented by a lower jaw with teeth, recently found in the Afar region of Ethiopia, dates to between 2.8 and 2.75 million years ago, according to an international team of geoscientists and anthropologists. They also dated other fossils to between 2.84 and 2.58 million years ago, which helped reconstruct the environment in which the individual lived.

"The record of hominin evolution between 3 and 2.5 million years ago is poorly documented in surface outcrops, particularly in Afar, Ethiopia," said Erin N. DiMaggio, research associate in the department of geosciences, Penn State.

Hominins are the group of primates that include Homo sapiens—humans—and their ancestors. The term is used for the branch of the human evolutionary line that exists after the split from chimpanzees."

 

[ScienceRocks]

Self-Driving Cars Will Be in 30 U.S. Cities By the End of Next Year
There will be driverless buses and pods as well.

Finally, we can put up our feet and let computers take the wheel.

Automated vehicle pilot projects will roll out in the U.K. and in six to 10 U.S. cities this year, with the first unveiling projected to be in Tampa Bay, Florida as soon as late spring. The following year, trial programs will launch in 12 to 20 more U.S. locations, which means driverless cars will be on roads in up to 30 U.S. cities by the end of 2016. The trials will be run by Comet LLC, a consulting firm focused on automated vehicle commercialization.

“We’re looking at college campuses, theme parks, airports, downtown areas—places like that,” Corey Clothier, a strategist for automated transportation systems who runs the firm told, The Observer.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Monolith electric skateboard has motors in its wheels
By Ben Coxworth
March 9, 2015
1 Comment
9 Pictures

Although we're now seeing a wide variety of electric skateboards, most of them utilize the same setup – a motor mounted on the underside of the deck, that drives one or two of the wheels via a belt. The designers at California-based Inboard Sports, however, are setting out to change that. Their Monolith is claimed to be the world's first skateboard to feature hub motors in the two rear wheels.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Machine automatically assembles complex molecules at the microscopic level
By Colin Jeffrey
March 13, 2015
2 Pictures

The synthesis of complex small molecules in the laboratory is specialized and intricate work that is both difficult and time-consuming. Even highly-trained chemists can take many years to determine how to build each one, let alone discover and describe its functions. In an attempt to improve this situation, a team of chemists at the University of Illinois claim to have created a machine that is able to assemble a vast range of complex molecules at the push of a button.

 

[ScienceRocks]

600 million year old animal fossil found in China, 60 million years older than prior oldest
Next Big Future 600 million year old animal fossil found in China 60 million years older than prior oldest

Chinese scientists recently discovered a fossil of a primitive sponge animal believed to be 600 million years old, the oldest animal fossil in the world. The finding proves that sponges made their evolutionary debut 60 million years earlier than in the previously confirmed Cambrian Period (541-485.4 million years ago).

The discovery was published on Tuesday by Zhu Maoyan, a research fellow at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, a branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences known as NIGPAS. The report says that the Weng'an Biota in southwest China's Guizhou Province was the location of the discovery, which would end the academic debate on whether there are in fact animal fossils in the Weng'an Biota.

The fossil's discovery is the fruit of years of effort -- researchers from NIGPAS have been going to the Weng'an Biota to collect samples since 2008. They found a rice-grain-sized fossil of an adult animal in phosphate ore and confirmed that it was 600 million years old, the first fossil of a so-called "adult animal" unearthed from the region. Zhu added that the fossil's age was determined by radiometric dating.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Engineers create color-changing synthetic 'skin'

Engineers at the University of California Berkeley have created a thin film, inspired by the skin of chameleons, that changes colors when pulled or stretched.

According to Berkeley.edu, the "skin," a film of silicon a thousand times thinner than a human hair, could be applied as camouflage or used to show stress on structures, by changing colors when a surface bends or flexes.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Potentially live-saving sensor detects cyanide poisoning in just over a minute
By Ben Coxworth
March 16, 2015
2 Pictures

As any classic murder mystery or spy thriller will tell you, cyanide is a poison that acts quickly. Once exposed to it, a person can die within 30 minutes. Unfortunately for people who think they might have encountered it, the standard test for determining exposure takes 24 hours. Now, however, a scientist at South Dakota State University has developed a sensor that detects cyanide within a blood sample in just 70 seconds.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Future soldiers may be wearing fish-inspired body armor
By Ben Coxworth
March 16, 2015
1 Comment

On most fish, their hard, overlapping scales provide considerable protection against pokes and cuts. Because those independently-moving scales are each attached to a flexible underlying skin, however, the fish are still able to easily twist and turn their bodies. Scientists from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and MIT are now attempting to copy that structure, to develop flexible-yet-effective armor for humans.

 

[longknife]

Future soldiers may be wearing fish-inspired body armor
By Ben Coxworth
March 16, 2015
1 Comment

On most fish, their hard, overlapping scales provide considerable protection against pokes and cuts. Because those independently-moving scales are each attached to a flexible underlying skin, however, the fish are still able to easily twist and turn their bodies. Scientists from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and MIT are now attempting to copy that structure, to develop flexible-yet-effective armor for humans.

I can't help but replying to this. Ancient Roman and Medieval armor copied the very same form.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Detection of mini black holes at the LHC could indicate parallel universes in extra dimensions

(Phys.org)—The possibility that other universes exist beyond our own universe is tantalizing, but seems nearly impossible to test. Now a group of physicists has suggested that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle collider in the world, may be able to uncover the existence of parallel universes, should they exist.

In a new paper published in Physics Letters B, Ahmed Farag Ali, Mir Faizal, and Mohammed M. Khalil explain that the key to finding parallel universes may come from detecting miniature black holes at a certain energy level. The detection of the mini black holes would indicate the existence of extra dimensions, which would support string theory and related models that predict the existence of extra dimensions as well as parallel universes.

 

[longknife]

'Green' batteries made to last: Oxide/carbon composite outperforms expensive platinum


An oxide/carbon composite outperforms expensive platinum composites in oxygen chemical reactions for green energy devices. Electrochemical devices are crucial to a green energy revolution in which clean alternatives replace carbon-based fuels. This revolution requires conversion systems that produce hydrogen from water or rechargeable batteries that can store clean energy in cars. Now, Singapore-based researchers have developed improved catalysts as electrodes for efficient and more durable green energy devices.


Read story @ Green batteries made to last Oxide carbon composite outperforms expensive platinum composites -- ScienceDaily

 

[ScienceRocks]

Tesla Model S to go semi-autonomous; Musk foresees a future where human driving is illegal
By Eric Mack
March 20, 2015
2 Comments
3 Pictures

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has a complicated outlook when it comes to the future of "smart" machines. He's warned about the dangers of strong artificial intelligence, but he's all-in on the lesser forms of artificial smarts, like those at the core of Teslas. He's also bullish on self-driving cars, and this week Musk went so far as to declare that they may completely replace the cars we drive today.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Caltech Scientists Develop Cool Process to Make Better Graphene

A new technique invented at Caltech to produce graphene—a material made up of an atom-thick layer of carbon—at room temperature could help pave the way for commercially feasible graphene-based solar cells and light-emitting diodes, large-panel displays, and flexible electronics.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Neanderthals shape up as globe's first jewellers
18 hours ago by Lajla Veselica

The widely-held vision of Neanderthals as brutes may need a stark rethink after research found they crafted the world's earliest jewellery from eagle talons 130,000 years ago, long before modern humans appeared in Europe

The widely-held vision of Neanderthals as brutes may need a stark rethink after research found they crafted the world's earliest jewellery from eagle talons 130,000 years ago, long before modern humans appeared in Europe.

Read more at: Neanderthals shape up as globe s first jewellers

 

[ScienceRocks]

CERN Large Hadron Collider restarts with redoubled energy
Deutsche Welle ^ | 3/12/2015 | Tatiana Ivanova

At the end of March, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will be up and running after a remodeling break of over two years. Physicists said on Thursday they hoped it would open the door to an even deeper understanding of our universe, now that the accelerator has twice the energy as before.

"We are all very excited," CERN director Rolf-Dieter Heuer said at the opening of a press conference on Thursday, adding that the accelator would be reactivated during the final week of March, pending final tests.

Since its initial launch in 2008, CERN researchers in Geneva have been using the 27-kilometer-long particle accelerator to smash protons together at just under the speed of light. Directly after the collision, the particles break up into their smallest building blocks, like Hadrons and Bosons. One of them is the Higgs-Boson, a particle that was previously only known as a theoretical quantity, but its existence was physically proven just before the LHC was shut down three years ago. The particles are recorded with huge sensors that have a similar function to light-detecting chips in digital cameras.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Mathematicians solve 60-year-old problem
48 minutes ago

Graphical representation of the resonance manifold in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem, plotted in Mathematica. Credit: Yuri Lvov

A team of researchers, led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Yuri Lvov, has found an elegant explanation for the long-standing Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) problem, first proposed in 1953, investigated with one of the world's first digital computers, and now considered the foundation of experimental mathematics.

The research, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, offers a mathematical explanation for how a level of energy sufficient to produce one complete wave in an idealized chain of masses connected by springs is gradually distributed to thermal equilibrium. In this system, 32 masses (or particles) can move only left or right, and the energy in the system cannot dissipate through friction or heat. This system, famous among mathematicians and physicists, was introduced by Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers Enrico Fermi, John Pasta, Stanislaw Ulam, and Mary Tsingou as a means to study how heat is conducted in solids and metals.

Read more at: Mathematicians solve 60-year-old problem

 

[ScienceRocks]

3,000 atoms entangled with a single photon
40 minutes ago
3 000 atoms entangled with a single photon

Scheme for heralded entanglement generation in a large atomic ensemble by single-photon detection. Credit: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature14293

Physicists from MIT and the University of Belgrade have developed a new technique that can successfully entangle 3,000 atoms using only a single photon. The results, published today in the journal Nature, represent the largest number of particles that have ever been mutually entangled experimentally.