General science advances thread

[ScienceRocks]

Company in Canada gets U.S. patent for space elevator
Exploring space while seated on Earth, gazing up on screens in museum theaters or at home via VR headsets. is exciting but the top imagination-grabber is the very idea of finding a way to access space. This is the present-day ...

 

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Critically endangered species successfully reproduced using frozen sperm from ferret dead for 20 years
Genetic diversity of the species significantly increased providing fresh hope for the future survival of this near-extinct species
Date:
August 13, 2015
Source:
Lincoln Park Zoo
Summary:
Black-footed ferrets, a critically endangered species native to North America, have renewed hope for future survival thanks to successful efforts by a coalition of conservationists, to reproduce genetically important offspring using frozen semen from a ferret who has been dead for approximately 20 years. The sire, 'Scarface,' as he is affectionately called, was one of the last 18 black-footed ferrets to exist in the world in the 1980s.
Eight kits, including offspring of Scarface, were born recently, significantly increasing the gene diversity of this endangered population that a dedicated team is working to recover in the wild.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150813130242.htm

 

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Wouldn't that be wonderful if we could change a few genes and make 140, 150 and even 200 iq'ed human beings?

 

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http://phys.org/news/2015-08-glass-metal-roofs-cool-sunny.html
http://phys.org/news/2015-08-glass-metal-roofs-cool-sunny.html
http://phys.org/news/2015-08-glass-metal-roofs-cool-sunny.html
http://phys.org/news/2015-08-glass-metal-roofs-cool-sunny.html
Glass paint could keep metal roofs and other structures cool even on sunny days
Sunlight can be brutal. It wears down even the strongest structures, including rooftops and naval ships, and it heats up metal slides and bleachers until they're too hot to use. To fend off damage and heat from the sun's .

 

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Passive exoskeleton to lighten the load for soldiers
By Ben Coxworth - August 18, 2015 1 Picture

Imagine if you were to carry over 100 lb (45 kg) of gear in a backpack, for several hours at a time. Well, that’s just what some soldiers have to do, and it can cause great stress to their torso and legs. That’s why engineers at the Australia’s Department of Defence have developed a new exoskeleton, that diverts two thirds of pack weight directly to the ground.

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Hydrogen sulfide at high pressures 200 GPa (2 million atmospheres) has superconductivity at -70 celsius has sparked renewed mainstream efforts for room temperature superconductivity

Hydrogen sulfide — the compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs — conducts electricity with zero resistance at a record high temperature of 203 kelvin (–70 °C), reports a paper published in Nature. The first results of the work, which represents a historic step towards finding a room-temperature superconductor, were released on...

 

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US Army funds Lockheed Combat Laser as an alternative to Boeing HEL-MD Truck Mounted Combat Laser

The Boeing HEL-MD program currently mounts an off-the-shelf 10-kilowatt laser, but it will be upgraded in 2016 to a custom-built 50-60 kW weapon, with potential for 100 kW and above. It’s already shot down drones and mortar rounds, and the higher power levels should make it capable against rockets and even artillery shells. “There is some...

 

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FIRST YEAR NANOSCIENCE STUDENTS ADVANCE TOWARD SELF-ASSEMBLING NANOELECTRONICS

"This is a clear step forward towards self-assembling electronics. By mixing solutions of the right substances, we automatically built structures that in principle could have been solar cells or transistors. What is more, is that they were built in the same way that nature builds such things as cell membranes," said Thomas Just Sørensen (in the top picture), an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen. "For us as a university, the big news is obviously that first year students conducted the research. But, we achieved a very significant result in molecular electronics as well."

The goal of self-assembling molecular electronics research is to use chemistry-based methods to assemble transistors and other electronic components such as resistors, LED screens, and solar cells. This could result in smaller, cheaper and more flexible, as well as more environmentally sustainable electronics. But, while electronic engineers can draw an integrated circuit on silicon, molecular components must self-organize in usable structures.

 

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Scientists trap antimatter long enough to study how it works

In science fiction stories, antimatter pops up everywhere as a power source for spaceships or the active ingredient in diabolical bombs. In real life, though, this mysterious substance is elusive and scientists have never had much of it to play around with.
But that is to change: at the Cern particle collider in Geneva, physicists have created and trapped atoms of antihydrogen for more than a thousand seconds, it was announced late on Sunday. It might not sound like long, but it is enough time for experiments that could help answer some of the most fundamental questions in physics.
The same scientists, based at the Alpha collaboration in Cern, were the first to trap antihydrogen last year when they created and held on to 38 atoms of the stuff for 172 milliseconds in a strong magnetic field. In their latest work,published in this month's edition of Nature Physics, they trapped 309 antihydrogen atoms for varying amounts of time up to 1,000 seconds (just over 16 minutes).

 

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Physicists Unveil First Quantum Interconnect
An international team of physicists has found a way to connect quantum devices in a way that transports entanglement between them.

One of the unsung workhorses of modern technology is the humble interconnect. This is essentially a wire or set of wires that link one part of an electronic system to another. In ordinary silicon chips, interconnect can take up most of the area of a chip; and the speed and efficiency with which information can travel along these interconnects, is a major limiting factor in computing performance.
So it’s no wonder that physicists and engineers are creating new generations of interconnect that will become the backbone of information processing machines of the future.
One of the most promising forms of number crunching is the quantum computer and its various associate quantum technologies, such as quantum communication, quantum cryptography, quantum metrology, and so on.
Physicists have made great strides in building proof-of-principle devices that exploit the laws of quantum physics to perform feats that would be impossible with purely classical mechanics. And yet a significant problem remains. These devices must work in isolation since nobody has perfected a way of joining them together effectively.
Today, that changes thanks to the work of Mark Thompson at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and a few pals around the world. These guys have built and tested a quantum interconnect that links separate silicon photonic chips and carries photons and, crucially, entanglement between them.

 

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Ideal nanostructure for hydrophobic surfaces that stay dry for months underwater
By David Szondy - August 19, 2015 8 Pictures

By mimicking nanostructures found in nature in everything from water striders and spiders to lotus leaves, scientists have created hydrophobic surfaces that could prove invaluable for everything from pipes to boats and submarines. Now researchers at Northwestern University have deduced the optimal texture roughness required to achieve this property and keep surfaces dry underwater for months at a time.

 

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Elon Musk's Hyperloop Is Actually Getting Kinda Serious

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies announced today that it has signed agreements to work with Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum and

THE HYPERLOOP SOUNDS like science fiction, Elon Musk’s pipe dream: leapfrog high speed rail and go right to packing us into capsules that fling us across the country in hours using what are, essentially, pneumatic tubes. It sounds crazy, when you think about it.

It’s starting to look a little less crazy.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies announced today that it has signed agreements to work with Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum and global engineering design firm Aecom. The two companies will lend their expertise in exchange for stock options in the company, joining the army of engineers from the likes of Boeing and SpaceX already lending their time to the effort.

“It’s a validation of the fact that our model works,” says Dirk Ahlborn, CEO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. “It’s the next step.”

 

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Scientists grow high-quality graphene from tea tree extract
August 21, 2015 by Lisa Zyga feature

(Left) Tea tree leaf. (Right) Microscope images of graphene grown from tea tree oil for (a) 1 second, (b) 1 minute, (c) 2 minutes, and (d) 4 minutes. Credit: Jacob, et al. ©2015 American Chemical Society

(Phys.org)—Graphene has been grown from materials as diverse as plastic, cockroaches, Girl Scout cookies, and dog feces, and can theoretically be grown from any carbon source. However, scientists are still looking for a graphene precursor and growth method that is sustainable, scalable, and economically feasible, since these are all requirements for realizing widespread commercialization of graphene-based devices.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-scientists-high-quality-graphene-tea-tree.html#jCp

 

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Construction of next-gen hurricane-hunting satellites begins
By David Szondy - August 21, 2015 2 Pictures

What is small enough to fit in an airliner carry-on bin and has the potential to save thousands of lives and millions of dollars worth of property? The answer is the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) – NASA’s next-generation hurricane-observing microsatellites, which are now being assembled at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, Texas.

 

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Magnetic Wormhole Created in Lab

Ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, physicists have crafted a wormhole that tunnels a magnetic field through space.[/size]
"This device can transmit the magnetic field from one point in space to another point, through a path that is magnetically invisible," said study co-author Jordi Prat-Camps, a doctoral candidate in physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. "From a magnetic point of view, this device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an extra special dimension."
The idea of a wormhole comes from Albert Einstein's theories. In 1935, Einstein and colleague Nathan Rosen realized that the general theory of relativity allowed for the existence of bridges that could link two different points in space-time. Theoretically these Einstein-Rosen bridges, or wormholes, could allow something to tunnel instantly between great distances (though the tunnels in this theory are extremely tiny, so ordinarily wouldn't fit a space traveler). So far, no one has found evidence that space-time wormholes actually exist

 

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A brain-computer interface for controlling an exoskeleton

19 August 2015

Scientists working at Korea University, Korea, and TU Berlin, Germany have developed a brain-computer control interface for a lower limb exoskeleton by decoding specific signals from within the user's brain.

Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap, the system allows users to move forwards, turn left and right, sit and stand simply by staring at one of five flickering light emitting diodes (LEDs).

The results are published today (Tuesday 18th August) in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

Each of the five LEDs flickers at a different frequency, and when the user focuses their attention on a specific LED this frequency is reflected within the EEG readout. This signal is identified and used to control the exoskeleton.

http://www.spacedail...eleton_999.html

 

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New record set for high-temperature superconductivity
New record set for high-temperature superconductivity

By David Szondy - August 24, 2015

Apparatus used in developing the record high temperature superconductor (Credit: Thomas Hartmann)

With their zero electrical resistance and remarkable magnetic and thermal conductive properties, superconductors have the potential to revolutionize numerous technologies. The trouble is, they work best at cryogenic temperatures in the neighborhood of absolute zero (-273° C, -460° F). As part of the quest to come up with a room temperature superconductor, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz have developed a new record-high-temperature superconductor – and it smells like rotten eggs.

Superconductors have all manner of uses, from MRI scanners to fusion reactors, but they're application is limited by the fact that most only work at temperatures below -234º C (-290º F). Ideally, engineers want a superconductor to work at room temperature, but until now, the best available have been copper oxide ceramics or cuprates that superconduct at -140º C (-220º F) at normal pressure and -109º C (310º F) at high pressures.

The new record holder produced by the Max Planck-led team is hydrogen sulfide (H₂S); a colorless and most definitely not odorless gas that gives rotten eggs their smell. The researchers caused the compound to superconduct by cooling it and subjecting it to high pressures by means of a diamond anvil. This is a super high-pressure chamber made of two flat-faced diamonds. Super-cooled liquid hydrogen sulfide was placed in a one-cubic centimeter cryogenic cell between the diamonds and pressure is applied. As the diamonds squeeze together, the mixture is subjected to a pressure of 1.5 megabars (which is half the pressure found at the Earth's core) at which point is starts to superconduct at a record new high temperature of -70º C (-94º F).

 

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Progress to Smaller, Cheaper Particle Colliders and efficient antimatter production

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of California, Los Angeles have demonstrated a new, efficient way to accelerate positrons, the antimatter opposites of electrons. The method may help boost the energy and shrink the size of future linear particle colliders – powerful...