General science advances thread

[ScienceRocks]

Theory of the strong interaction verified
3 hours ago

Supercomputer JUQUEEN. Credit: Forschungszentrum Jülich

The fact that the neutron is slightly more massive than the proton is the reason why atomic nuclei have exactly those properties that make our world and ultimately our existence possible. Eighty years after the discovery of the neutron, a team of physicists from France, Germany, and Hungary headed by Zoltán Fodor, a researcher from Wuppertal, has finally calculated the tiny neutron-proton mass difference. The findings, which have been published in the current edition of Science, are considered a milestone by many physicists and confirm the theory of the strong interaction. As one of the most powerful computers in the world, JUQUEEN at Forschungszentrum Jülich was decisive for the simulation.

Read more at: Theory of the strong interaction verified

 

[ScienceRocks]

Europeans Upgrading Already-Superior Weather Model Just to Rub It In
2,635

Just months after NOAA upgraded the American global weather model, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) plans to upgrade their already-superior model so that it wipes the floor with our proud, measly little heap of computer algorithms.

Bells rang and geeks chortled across the world on Wednesday morning as NOAA pulled the plug on the… Read more

If all goes according to schedule, the ECMWF will implement the upgrade on April 14, 2015, at which point all of us on the other side of the pond will be forced to hang our heads in shame. The Euro consistently ranks as the best global weather model when it comes to forecast accuracy, performing better than its competitors, including NOAA's GFS (American) model.

You can find a whole list of changes at the ECMWF's website if you're into that sort of thing, but the main takeaways are that they've tweaked the model from the bottom-up to make it more accurate. The model will also begin producing forecasts for precipitation type and precipitation rates for various types of sky water (rain, snow, freezing rain, sleet).

The "money-hungry" American stereotype falls flat when it comes to weather modelling; the Euro is (in)famously behind a hefty paywall, while the American models are free to access. If you want to buy access to the Euro, you have to subscribe to a weather model site like WeatherBELL or F5 Data. Posting images from the model on sites like Facebook and Twitter are against licenses, so in theory, people who don't cough up a pretty penny would never see Euro products that aren't already freely available.


[Image: ECMWF]

Probably 90% of all advance research in meteorology and the infrastructure for it is publicly funded.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Wooly Mammoth Genes Inserted into Elephant Cells
Discovery News ^ | 25 March 2015

Researchers from Harvard University have successfully inserted genes from a woolly mammoth into living cells from an Asian elephant, the extinct giant's closest remaining relative.

Harvard geneticist George Church used DNA from Arctic permafrost woolly mammoth samples to copy 14 mammoth genes -- emphasizing those related to its chilly lifestyle.

"We prioritized genes associated with cold resistance including hairiness, ear size, subcutaneous fat and, especially, hemoglobin," Church told The Sunday Times.

Then, using a kind of DNA cut/paste system called CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat), Church dropped the genes into Asian elephant skin cells.

The result? A petri dish of elephant cells functioning normally with mammoth DNA in them, marking the first time mammoth genes have been on the job since the creature went extinct some 4,000 years ago, as Sarah Fecht, from Popular Science, noted.

Longer term, Church and his team hope to first create hybrid elephant/mammoth embryos, grown in artificial wombs, and then raise hybrid elephants that could be genetically wired to thrive in colder climes -- hopefully expanding their range to live at a greater remove from humans.

Longer, longer term, if the hybrid elephant can be created and successfully integrated in the wild, then the team might even try to bring back the woolly mammoth itself.

VIDEO: Are We Finally Ready to Clone a Mammoth?

 

[ScienceRocks]

Boeing patents temporary plasma forcefields that will reduce shockwaves from explosions
Next Big Future Boeing patents temporary plasma forcefields that will reduce shockwaves from explosions

Boeing has a patent for temporary "forcefields" against shockwaves. The blast shockwave would be attenuated by creating a plasma.

An arc generator may be configured to generate a focused microwave beam or a focused laser beam. The focused beam rapidly heats the air in the selected region and changes its temperature, density and composition, the latter the result of the creation of free electrons.

The arc generator may be adapted to create a conducting path for the electric current. Accordingly, the arc generator may be configured to generate one or more of a laser-induced plasma channel (LIPC) from converging laser beams, ionizing tracer pellets fired along converging paths, and projectiles trailing fine electrical wires fired along converging paths. In each of these embodiments, an electric arc may be generated to travel along a conducting path created by dielectric breakdown of ionized ambient air at the selected region.

 

[ScienceRocks]

MARK POST: Cattle are very inefficient animals in converting vegetable proteins into animal proteins. We lose actually a lot of food by giving it to animals as an intermediate.

At an environmental scale in methane and other greenhouse gases exhaust, it is also for the environment not a very healthy system.

DOMINIQUE SCHWARTZ: A year and a half ago the professor of vascular physiology gave the world its first taste of a beef burger he'd grown from stem cells taken from cow muscle.

It passed the food critics' taste test, but at more than a quarter of a million dollars, the lab quarter-pounder was no threat to the real deal. Now, after further development, Dr Post estimates it's possible to produce lab-beef for $80 a kilo - and that within years it will be a price-competitive alternative.

MARK POST: From a small piece of muscle you can produce 10,000 kilos of meat.

http://www.abc.net.a...15/s4205857.htm

1st burger was $250,000. Now the guy who served it estimates the cost of this meat at $80/kg.

This is quite possibly the greatest price drop in history. 4 orders of magnitude in two years!

 

[ScienceRocks]

http://www.reddit.co...dropped/cpu189q


Quotes from the article:

Dr Post: I do think that in 20, 30 years from now we will have a viable industry producing alternative beef.

Dr Post estimates it's possible to produce lab-beef for $80 a kilo - and that within years it will be a price-competitive alternative.

Emphasis mine. The scientist estimates he would be able to produce it for that price. Note that this still isn't a steak or anything like that. It is large scale cell culture, producing thin strands or layers of beef muscle. Thick pieces of muscle currently cannot be created. Fatty tissue currently cannot be created. The price drop may just be accounted to basic problems having been solved and cannot simply be projected into the future, that's why his estimate is in tens of years.

The tissue is currently cultured by using fetal calf serum, which is produced from bovine fetuses. In that sense, it is still very dependent on conventional agriculture. It is unclear to me if, using fetal calf serum, the process still is calorically beneficial, as it should be in theory. Cultures also need to be kept in very clean conditions and depend on usage of antibiotics which might be a problem in large-scale production. Basic research has been done, but it still is a long way before this goes mainstream. I would guess that 3D printing plant proteins will produce cheaper meat replacements much earlier, as it already is doing a pretty good job and is already accepted by parts of society.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Graphene light bulb is to go on sale later this year

A light bulb made with graphene - said by its UK developers to be the first commercially viable consumer product using the super-strong carbon - is to go on sale later this year.
The dimmable bulb contains a filament-shaped LED coated in graphene. It was designed at Manchester University, where the material was discovered.
It is said to cut energy use by 10% and last longer owing to its conductivity.
The National Graphene Institute at the university was opened this month.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Photon 'afterglow' could transmit information without transmitting energy
15 hours ago by Lisa Zyga feature

Spacetime diagram of the scientists’ proposed set-up, where the dotted lines indicate the first and last light rays emanating from Alice. Although no energy is transmitted, the receiver (Bob) must provide the energy needed to detect the …more

(Phys.org)—Physicists have theoretically shown that it is possible to transmit information from one location to another without transmitting energy. Instead of using real photons, which always carry energy, the technique uses a small, newly predicted quantum afterglow of virtual photons that do not need to carry energy. Although no energy is transmitted, the receiver must provide the energy needed to detect the incoming signal—similar to the way that an individual must pay to receive a collect call.

Read more at: Photon afterglow could transmit information without transmitting energy

 

[ScienceRocks]

Quantum teleportation on a chip
5 hours ago

Experimental set-up. Credit: Centre for Quantum Photonics at the University of Bristol

The core circuits of quantum teleportation, which generate and detect quantum entanglement, have been successfully integrated into a photonic chip by an international team of scientists from the universities of Bristol, Tokyo, Southampton and NTT Device Technology Laboratories. These results pave the way to developing ultra-high-speed quantum computers and strengthening the security of communication.

Read more at: Quantum teleportation on a chip

 

[ScienceRocks]

Delphi completes first coast-to-coast automated drive

A self-driving car equipped by GM spinoff Delphi Automotive completed today a historic, 3,500-mile journey across the U.S. from San Franscisco to New York.
The trip demonstrated the full capabilities of its active safety technologies with the longest automated drive ever attempted in North America. The coast-to-coast trip, launched in San Francisco on March 22, covered approximately 3,500 miles.

https://www.youtube....h?v=qeJVFavHVJM

 

[ScienceRocks]

New breakthrough in thermoelectric materials
4 hours ago

Generation of dislocation arrays during the liquid-phase compaction process. The Te liquid (red) between theBi0.5Sb1.5Te3 grains flows out during the compacting process and facilitates theformation of dislocation arrays embedded in low-energy …more

A joint South Korean and American research group has developed a scalable production method for a state of the art alloy for the use in solid state thermoelectric devices. This new alloy is nearly twice as efficient as existing materials and may lead to a new host of applications. Uses include refrigeration, consumer electronics, transportation as well as novel devices which have not been produced yet do to the inefficiencies of existing materials

Read more at: New breakthrough in thermoelectric materials

 

[ScienceRocks]

Cern's Large Hadron Collider restarts with sights set on dark matter
Cern s Large Hadron Collider restarts with sights set on dark matter Science The Guardian

The world’s largest and most powerful atom smasher has been upgraded, raising hopes of a ‘new era for science’
The world’s largest and most powerful atom smasher is to be restarted after an upgrade that could see it making scientific history for a second time.

Shortly after 8.30am on Sunday UK time, scientists plan to send two beams of high-energy particles racing through the Large Hadron Collider’s 16.7 miles of circular underground tunnels.

Two years ago the team operating the £3.74bn machine straddling the Swiss-French border astounded the world with the discovery of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle that gives other particles mass.

Now they have their sights set on an even more exotic trophy: dark matter, the invisible, undetectable material that makes up 84% of matter in the universe and binds galaxies together yet whose nature is unknown.

 

[ScienceRocks]

One step ahead
Engineers show off a simple way to make walking more efficient
Biomechanics One step ahead The Economist

"THE human body is a machine that winds its own springs," wrote Julien Offray de La Mettrie, a French physician-philosopher, in 1748. While La Mettrie's primitive ideas on physiology have long since been supplanted, the idea that the human machinery is particularly finely tuned, particularly when it comes to locomotion, remains. A clever bit of kit described this week, however, suggests that the tuning is not quite perfect.

People have been engaged in a quest to improve upon the bodies nature gave them for about as long as there have been engineers. Nicolas Yagn, a Russian inventor, got a patent in 1890 for his "Apparatus for facilitating walking, running and jumping", an unwieldy wearable contraption of bendy bow-springs that would in modern parlance be called an exoskeleton.

The idea was to recoup some of the energy of movement, making walking more efficient and thereby less fatiguing. Any gain would be a great help to those who do lots of walking, such as soldiers. But what Yagn and similarly minded inventors have all discovered is that it is difficult to squeeze any more efficiency out of the human machine.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Magnetic-field detector is 1,000 times more efficient than its predecessors
2 hours ago by Larry Hardesty

In this image, laser light enters a synthetic diamond from a facet at its corner and bounces around inside the diamond until its energy is exhausted. This excites "nitrogen vacancies" that can be used to measure magnetic fields. Credit: H. Clevenson/MIT Lincoln Laboratory

MIT researchers have developed a new, ultrasensitive magnetic-field detector that is 1,000 times more energy-efficient than its predecessors. It could lead to miniaturized, battery-powered devices for medical and materials imaging, contraband detection, and even geological exploration.

Magnetic-field detectors, or magnetometers, are already used for all those applications. But existing technologies have drawbacks: Some rely on gas-filled chambers; others work only in narrow frequency bands, limiting their utility.

Synthetic diamonds with nitrogen vacancies (NVs)—defects that are extremely sensitive to magnetic fields—have long held promise as the basis for efficient, portable magnetometers. A diamond chip about one-twentieth the size of a thumbnail could contain trillions of nitrogen vacancies, each capable of performing its own magnetic-field measurement.

The problem has been aggregating all those measurements. Probing a nitrogen vacancy requires zapping it with laser light, which it absorbs and re-emits. The intensity of the emitted light carries information about the vacancy's magnetic state.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-magnetic-field-detector-efficient-predecessors.html#jCp

 

[ScienceRocks]

New magnet at Fermilab achieves high-field milestone

Last month, a new superconducting magnet developed and fabricated at Fermilab reached its design field of 11.5 Tesla at a temperature nearly as cold as outer space. It is the first successful twin-aperture accelerator magnet made of niobium-3-tin in the world.

The advancements in niobium-3-tin, or Nb3Sn, magnet technology and the ongoing U.S. collaboration with CERN on the development of these and other Nb3Sn magnets are enabling the use of this innovative technology for future upgrades of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). They may also provide the cornerstone for future circular machines of interest to the worldwide high-energy physics community. Because of the exceptional challenges—Nb3Sn is brittle and requires high-temperature processing—this important milestone was achieved at Fermilab after decades of worldwide R&D efforts both in the Nb3Sn conductor itself and in associated magnet technologies.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-magnet-fermilab-high-field-milestone.html#jCp

 

[ScienceRocks]

Physicists propose method to measure variations in the speed of light
14 hours ago by Lisa Zyga feature

Enlarge
A relation between the angular diameter distance (DA), the Hubble function (H), and the speed of light c at a specific point called the maximum redshift (zM) may allow researchers to detect variations in the speed of light. Credit: Salzano, et al. ©2015 American Physical Society

(Phys.org)—The speed of light, c, is one of the best-known constants, having a value of just under 300,000,000 meters per second in a vacuum. But in some alternative theories of cosmology, the speed of light is not actually constant, but varies throughout time and space. Observational data in support of variations in the speed of light are lacking, but in a new paper, physicists have proposed a way to constrain possible speed-of-light variations and show that future experiments might be able to detect these variations, if large enough.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-physicists-method-variations.html#jCp

 

[percysunshine]

Physicists propose method to measure variations in the speed of light
14 hours ago by Lisa Zyga feature

Enlarge
A relation between the angular diameter distance (DA), the Hubble function (H), and the speed of light c at a specific point called the maximum redshift (zM) may allow researchers to detect variations in the speed of light. Credit: Salzano, et al. ©2015 American Physical Society

(Phys.org)—The speed of light, c, is one of the best-known constants, having a value of just under 300,000,000 meters per second in a vacuum. But in some alternative theories of cosmology, the speed of light is not actually constant, but varies throughout time and space. Observational data in support of variations in the speed of light are lacking, but in a new paper, physicists have proposed a way to constrain possible speed-of-light variations and show that future experiments might be able to detect these variations, if large enough.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-physicists-method-variations.html#jCp[URL='http://phys.org/news/2015-04-physicists-method-variations.html#jCp[/QUOTE'][/QUOTE]

Interesting theory;

E = mc** 2.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

.[/URL]

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-physicists-method-variations.html#jCp[/QUOTE

 

[ScienceRocks]

Britain joins laser arms race with up to £100 million high energy combat laser project

The Ministry of Defence will begin building an experimental laser weapon later this year as a prototype for Star Wars-type armaments that could one day be used by British forces.

The project costing up to £100 million aims to create a high-energy laser that can track and hit moving targets in any weather.

Britain is joining the laser arms race as America has already developed a series of drone-killing and ship-burning lasers and already has one weapon on board a warship in the Gulf.

The project, known as the Laser Directed Energy Weapon Capability Demonstrator, is worth between £20 million and £100 million according to the MOD.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Is It Time To Resurrect The Brontosaurus?
April 07, 2015 4:40 PM ET

The Brontosaurus may be back.

Not that it ever really went away, at least not in the minds of generations of people who grew up watching Fred Flintstone devour one of his beloved Brontosaurus burgers.

But if you're a scientist, you have to stick to the rules, and in 1903, the name Brontosaurus was struck from the record. That was when paleontologist Elmer Riggs deemed that the Brontosaurus was really just a different dinosaur, Apatosaurus.

Both were long-necked and long-tailed creatures, among the largest to roam the Earth in their time. But now an extensive study published online in the journal PeerJ, finds that there are considerable differences between the two — enough, the researchers say, to conclude that they belong to separate groups.

A team of paleontologists spent five years researching and analyzing hundreds of different physical features of dinosaur specimens. The study's lead author, Emanuel Tschopp from the New University of Lisbon in Portugal, says, "Generally, the Brontosaurus can be distinguished from Apatosaurus most easily by its neck, which is higher and less wide," according to Scientific American.

Tschopp tells the magazine that while both dinosaurs are massive and robust animals, Apatosaurus is "even more extreme than Brontosaurus."

A name change is a normal part of the constant updates and revisions associated with identifying and naming new species, according to The Guardian. The newspaper says evolution doesn't happen in big leaps and it takes time for changes and differences to accumulate, but eventually populations are different enough that they're recognized as separate entities and given a name.

Is It Time To Resurrect The Brontosaurus The Two-Way NPR

 

[ScienceRocks]

Unparticles may provide a new path to superconductivity

(Phys.org)—Physicists have proposed that a hypothetical form of matter called "unparticles" may play a key role in mediating superconductivity—the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity with zero resistance.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-unparticles-path-superconductivity.html#jCp