Electric cars in Houston

Mars Express acquires sharpest images of martian moon Phobos

Mars Express closed in on the intriguing martian moon Phobos at 6:50 CEST on 23 July, flying past at 2.96 km/s, only 100 km from the centre of the moon. The ESA spacecraft’s fly-bys of the moon have returned its most detailed full-disc images ever, also in 3-D, using the High Resolution Stereo Camera on board.

Phobos is what scientists call a ‘small irregular body’. Measuring 27 km × 22 km × 19 km, it is one of the least reflective objects in the Solar System, thought to be a captured asteroid or a remnant of the material that formed the planets.

More HERE.

Titan Has Liquid Surface Lake

Scientists have confirmed that at least one body in our solar system, other than Earth, has a surface liquid lake. Using an instrument on NASA's Cassini orbiter, they discovered that a lake-like feature in the south polar region of Saturn's moon, Titan, is truly wet. The lake is about 235 kilometers, or 150 miles, long.

The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, or VIMS, an instrument run from The University Arizona, identifies the chemical composition of objects by the way matter reflects light.

When VIMS observed the lake, named Ontario Lacus, it detected ethane, a simple hydrocarbon that Titan experts have long been searching for. The ethane is in liquid solution with methane, nitrogen and other low-molecular weight hydrocarbons.

More HERE.

Thermoelectric Materials Double Efficiency

A team of researchers led by Dr. Joseph Heremans at Ohio State University has developed a new thermoelectric (TE) material with twice the efficiency of TE materials currently on the market. The most efficient commercial material in thermoelectric power generators is sodium-doped lead telluride (Na-PbTe), which has a thermoelectric figure of merit (zT) of 0.71. The new material, thallium-doped lead telluride (Tl-PbTe), has a zT of 1.5. The new material is most effective between 450° and 950°F—a typical temperature range for power systems such as automobile engines.

More HERE.

Definition: Brocken Spectre

A Brocken spectre (German Brockengespenst), also called Brocken bow or mountain spectre is the apparently enormously magnified shadow of an observer, cast upon the upper surfaces of clouds opposite the sun. The phenomenon can appear on any misty mountainside or cloud bank, or even from an aeroplane, but the frequent fogs and low-altitude accessibility of the Brocken, a peak in the Harz Mountains in Germany, have created a local legend from which the phenomenon draws its name.

More HERE. And HERE.

Warehouse robots

Will We Recognize The Future?

Interview with futurist Ray Kurzweil. Audio broadcast from Science Friday.

New Mexico cavers chart 'Snowy River' formation

Thought to be the longest continuous cave formation in the world. The survey expedition by members of the Fort Stanton Cave Study Project in early July added several thousand feet to the measurement of the spectacular formation, which is at least four miles long. The explorers who have been following the passage under the rolling hills of southeastern New Mexico say there's still more of Snowy River to be discovered.

See a photo gallery HERE.
Learn more about the cave HERE.

MMALV: Morphing Micro Air & Land Vehicle

Bio-fuel power boat makes world record

Sagunto, Spain, 27 June 2008, 12.24.00 GMT/14.24.00 CET: Earthrace, the world’s fastest eco-boat, has smashed the world speed record for a powerboat to circumnavigate the globe, knocking almost 14 days off the previous record.

The boat crossed the finish line in Sagunto having taken 60 days 23 hours and 49 minunutes to travel almost 24,000 nautical miles fuelled by biodiesel to demonstrate the efficiency of, and draw global attention to, the potential for alternative fuel sources.

More HERE.

And more HERE.

Cell calls in Japan outnumber others

Mobile phones are gradually making land-line telephones a thing of the past in Japan. For the first time, fixed-line telephones accounted for less than half of all calls made in a fiscal year, losing out to mobile units and Internet-based services, a government report said this week.

Calls placed from fixed-line phones at home, offices or public phones fell 6.4 percent to 59.6 billion, some 49.7 percent of the total calls made in Japan between April 2006 and the end of March 2007, the report said. Mobile and Internet calls accounted for 50.3 percent.

More HERE.

V598 Puppis, the star that everyone missed

On 9 October 2007, ESA’s orbiting X-ray observatory XMM-Newton was turning from one target to another. As it did so, it passed across a bright source of X-rays that no one was expecting. The source was not listed in any previous X-ray catalogue, yet XMM-Newton was receiving some 50 X-rays every second from this mysterious object.

Calculations show that the explosion must have been clearly visible to the unaided eye but was missed by the legions of star watchers around the planet.

More HERE.

Pathologists Believe They Have Pinpointed Achilles Heel Of HIV

The weak spot is hidden in the HIV envelope protein gp120. This protein is essential for HIV attachment to host cells, which initiate infection and eventually lead to Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome or AIDS. Normally the body’s immune defenses can ward off viruses by making proteins called antibodies that bind the virus. However, HIV is a constantly changing and mutating virus, and the antibodies produced after infection do not control disease progression to AIDS. For the same reason, no HIV preventative vaccine that stimulates production of protective antibodies is available.

More HERE.

First 100% Wind-powered Community In USA

Rock Port Missouri, with a population of just over 1,300 residents, has announced that it is the first 100% wind powered community in the United States. Four wind turbines supply all the electricity for the small town.

Rock Port’s 100% wind power status is due to four wind turbines located on agricultural lands within the city limits of Rock Port (Atchison County). The city of Rock Port uses approximately 13 million kilowatt hours of electricity each year. It is predicted that these four turbines will produce 16 million kilowatt hours each year.

Excess wind generated electricity not used by Rock Port homes and businesses is expected to be move onto the transmission lines to be purchased by the Missouri Joint Municipal Utilities for use in other areas.

More HERE.

Goodbye to faulty software?

“The software industry is still very immature compared to other branches of engineering,” says Dr Bengt Nordström, a computer scientist at Chalmers University in Göteborg. “We want to see programming as an engineering discipline but it’s not there yet. It’s not based on good theory and we don’t have good design methods to make sure that at each step we produce something that’s correct.”

Nordström believes that the whole approach to software design needs to be rethought. The usual approach is to validate a program via a lengthy testing process. Instead, he would like to see a design philosophy that guarantees from first principles that a program will do what it says on the box.

The key lies in an esoteric reformulation of mathematics called ‘type theory’ based on the notion of computation. In this approach, the specification for a computational task is stated as a mathematical theorem. The program that performs the computation is equivalent to the proof of the theorem. By proving the theorem the program is guaranteed to be correct.

More HERE.

Definition: Neutron star

A neutron star is a type of remnant that can result from the gravitational collapse of a massive star during a Type II, Type Ib or Type Ic supernova event. Such stars are composed almost entirely of neutrons, which are subatomic particles with zero electrical charge and roughly the same mass as protons. Neutron stars are very hot and are supported against further collapse because of the Pauli exclusion principle. This principle requires that no two neutrons can occupy the same quantum state simultaneously.

In general, compact stars of less than 1.38 solar masses, the Chandrasekhar limit, are white dwarfs; above 2 to 3 solar masses (the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit), a quark star might be created, however this is uncertain. Gravitational collapse will always occur on any star over 5 solar masses, inevitably producing a black hole.

More HERE.

New Method To Fabricate Ultra-thin Silicon Solar Cells

IMEC is developing a new method to produce ~50µm thin crystalline silicon wafers for use in solar cells. The process involves mechanically initiating and propagating a crack parallel to the surface of a Si wafer. In this way, Si foils with an area of 25cm² and a thickness of 30-50µm have already been produced. The method makes use of industrially available tools (screen printer, belt furnace) and is potentially kerf-loss free.

Adding an ultra-thin wafer or foil of active silicon on top of a low-cost substrate is a promising solution to reduce the amount of high-grade silicon used in solar cells. IMEC is pursuing different paths to produce such foils of crystalline Si at an acceptable cost. One of the promising methods is a lift-off process that only requires the use of a screen printer and a belt furnace; no ion-implanted or porous layer is needed.

More HERE.

Dust Storms In Sahara Sustain Life In Atlantic

Scientists mapped the distribution of nutrients including phosphorous and nitrogen and investigated how organisms such as phytoplankton are sustained in areas with low nutrient levels.

They found that plants are able to grow in these regions because they are able to take advantage of iron minerals in Saharan dust storms. This allows them to use organic or ‘recycled’ material from dead or decaying plants when nutrients such as phosphorous – an essential component of DNA – in the ocean are low.

More HERE.

Democracies with separation of powers less likely to stop using torture

As repugnant as torture is, the fact is most countries -- even those with democratic governments -- do it. FSU political science professor Will Moore and graduate student Courtenay Ryals wanted to find out what makes governments stop doing it. They presented their study, "What Stops the Torture?" at a recent meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.

The researchers were not surprised to learn that governments in which the citizens have a right to vote and freedom of expression are more likely to stop using torture. But it was another finding that, at first glance, seems to fly in the face of common sense: A system of checks and balances, an important dimension of liberal democracy, lessened the likelihood that a country terminated its use of torture.

Why? Because a separation of power often means it is harder to effect change.

"Checks on executive authorities are viewed as a positive attribute of liberal democracies," Moore said. "Unfortunately, they are also associated with the continuation of the status quo. So this liberal democratic institution that at first pass one might expect to be positively associated with the termination of the use of torture is actually a hurdle to be overcome."

More HERE.

DEFINITION: Cosmic Rays

Cosmic rays are energetic particles originating from space that impinge on Earth's atmosphere. Almost 90% of all the incoming cosmic ray particles are protons, about 9% are helium nuclei (alpha particles) and about 1% are electrons (beta minus particles). The term "ray" is a misnomer, as cosmic particles arrive individually, not in the form of a ray or beam of particles.

The variety of particle energies reflects the wide variety of sources. The origins of these particles range from energetic processes on the Sun all the way to as yet unknown events in the farthest reaches of the visible universe. Cosmic rays can have energies of over 10²⁰ eV, far higher than the 10¹² to 10¹³ eV that man-made particle accelerators can produce.

More HERE.

Understanding Hearing, Molecule By Molecule

Berkeley Lab scientists have for the first time pieced together the three-dimensional structure of one of nature’s most exquisite pieces of machinery, a gossamer-like filament of proteins in the inner ear that enables the sense of hearing and balance.

The filaments help transform the mechanical vibrations of sound into electrical signals that can be interpreted by the brain. They are only four nanometers wide and 160 nanometers long (one nanometer is one-billionth of a meter), but if enough of them break, the world becomes silent.

The work opens the door for a more fundamental understanding of how hearing works. It may also lead to improved ways to treat some forms of hearing loss, which affects about ten percent of people.

More HERE.

New 'Window' Opens On Solar Energy

Imagine windows that not only provide a clear view and illuminate rooms, but also use sunlight to efficiently help power the building they are part of. MIT engineers report a new approach to harnessing the sun's energy that could allow just that. The work, reported in the July 11 issue of Science, involves the creation of a novel "solar concentrator." "Light is collected over a large area [like a window] and gathered, or concentrated, at the edges," explains Marc A. Baldo.

As a result, rather than covering a roof with expensive solar cells (the semiconductor devices that transform sunlight into electricity), the cells only need to be around the edges of a flat glass panel. In addition, the focused light increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell "by a factor of over 40," Baldo says.

More HERE.

First DNA Molecule Made Of Artificial Parts

Chemists in Japan report development of the world's first DNA molecule made almost entirely of artificial parts. The finding could lead to improvements in gene therapy, futuristic nano-sized computers, and other high-tech advances, they say.

The researchers used high-tech DNA synthesis equipment to stitch together four entirely new, artificial bases inside the sugar-based framework of a DNA molecule. This resulted in unusually stable, double-stranded structures resembling natural DNA.

More HERE.

New Mercury Images Show Volcanoes, Magnetic Field, More

Mercury is full of volcanoes and other surprises, reveals initial data from NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft—the first to conduct an in-depth investigation of the solar system's smallest planet in more than 30 years. MESSENGER—which stands for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, GEochemistry, and Ranging—is Earth's second envoy to Mercury, after the Mariner 10 mission that launched in 1973.

In January MESSENGER made its first of three flybys planned before 2011, when the spacecraft settles into orbit around the enigmatic planet. During the pass, MESSENGER snapped more than 1,200 images of Mercury's scorched sunlit side, including 21 percent of the surface Mariner 10 never saw.

The images reveal a dynamic surface pockmarked by craters and volcanoes. They also shed more light on Mercury's magnetic field, which mirrors Earth's on a tiny scale.

More HERE.

'Rubber Snake' wave generators

More HERE.

New Antibiotic Beats Superbugs At Their Own Game

The problem with antibiotics is that, eventually, bacteria outsmart them and become resistant. But by targeting the gene that confers such resistance, a new drug may be able to finally outwit them.

Rockefeller University scientists tested the new drug, called Ceftobiprole, against some of the deadliest strains of multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria, which are responsible for the great majority of staphylococcal infections worldwide, both in hospitals and in the community.

More HERE.

Alcohol-outlet density and violence are clearly linked over time

While previous studies have confirmed a relationship between alcohol-outlet density and violence, few have looked at what happens within a suburb as outlet density changes. An Australian study examined this relationship over time … finding that increasing the density of all kinds of alcohol outlets in a suburb leads to increasing rates of violence in that suburb.

More HERE.

Suntory wave-powered boat

Yutaka Terao from Tokai University in Japan, has engineered a way to put wave power to its most obvious use — to power boats! He has created a propulsion system that will power the Suntory Mermaid II’s trip from Hawaii to Japan using wave power, the expertise of eco-sailor Kenichi Horie, and a little bit of sun.

More HERE.

Terao has completed his journey. See HERE.

Laugh at High Gas Prices With a 282-MPG VW

With gas prices going through the roof and regulators requiring cars to be ever more miserly, Volkswagen is bringing new meaning to the term "fuel efficiency" with a bullet-shaped microcar that gets a stunning 282 235 mpg.

Volkswagen's had its super-thrifty One-Liter Car concept vehicle -- so named because that's how much fuel it needs to go 100 kilometers -- stashed away for six years. The body's made of carbon fiber to minimize weight (the entire car weighs just 660 pounds) and company execs didn't expect the material to become cheap enough to produce the car until 2012.

But VW's decided to build the car two years ahead of schedule.

More HERE.

Prof. Richard Muller explains fission

Researchers open secret cave under Mexican pyramid

Archeologists are opening a cave sealed for more than 30 years deep beneath a Mexican pyramid to look for clues about the mysterious collapse of one of ancient civilization's largest cities.

The soaring Teotihuacan stone pyramids, now a major tourist site about an hour outside Mexico City, were discovered by the ancient Aztecs around 1500 AD, not long before the arrival of Spanish explorers to Mexico.

But little is known about the civilization that built the immense city, with its ceremonial architecture and geometric temples, and then torched and abandoned it around 700 AD.

More HERE.

Physicists Create Millimeter-sized 'Bohr Atom'

Nearly a century after Danish physicist Niels Bohr offered his planet-like model of the hydrogen atom, a Rice University-led team of physicists has created giant, millimeter-sized atoms that resemble it more closely than any other experimental realization yet achieved.

"In a sufficiently large system, the quantum effects at the atomic scale can transition into the classical mechanics found in Bohr's model," said lead researcher Barry Dunning, Rice's Sam and Helen Worden Professor of Physics and Astronomy. "Using highly excited Rydberg atoms and a series of pulsed electric fields, we were able to manipulate the electron motion and create circular, planet-like states."

More HERE.

Where do US lawmakers stand on science?

From Short Sharp Science blog -
Enter the non-profit Scientists and Engineers for America, which is asking voters to help get candidates on the record by asking seven questions about science and technology policy.

Some candidates have already written back with their positions. Congressman Danny Davis (D-IL), for example, has come right out in favour of an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. That, incidentally, is presidential hopeful Barack Obama's position, too.

More HERE.

Super Atoms Turn Periodic Table Upside Down

Researchers at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in The Netherlands have developed a technique for generating atom clusters made from silver and other metals. Surprisingly enough, these so-called super atoms (clusters of 13 silver atoms, for example) behave in the same way as individual atoms and have opened up a whole new branch of chemistry.

If a silver thread is heated to around 900 degrees Celsius (shown at left), it will generate vapour made up of silver atoms. The floating atoms stick to each other in groups. Small lumps of silver comprising for example 9, 13 and 55 atoms appear to be energetically stable and are therefore present in the silver mist more frequently that one might assume. Prof. Andreas Schmidt-Ott and Dr. Christian Peineke of TU Delft managed to collect these super atoms and make them suitable for more detailed chemical experiments.

More HERE.

Metals Self-assemble Into Porous Nanostructures

Cornell researchers have developed a method to self-assemble metals into complex nanostructures. Applications include making more efficient and cheaper catalysts for fuel cells and industrial processes and creating microstructured surfaces to make new types of conductors that would carry more information across microchips than conventional wires do.

The method involves coating metal nanoparticles -- about 2 nanometers (nm) in diameter -- with an organic material known as a ligand that allows the particles to be dissolved in a liquid, then mixed with a block co-polymer (a material made up of two different chemicals whose molecules link together to solidify in a predictable pattern). When the polymer and ligand are removed, the metal particles fuse into a solid metal structure.

More HERE.

Scientists Fix Bugs In Our Understanding Of Evolution

What makes a human different from a chimp? Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute [EMBL-EBI] have come one important step closer to answering such evolutionary questions correctly. In the current issue of Science they uncover systematic errors in existing methods that compare genetic sequences of different species to learn about their evolutionary relationships.

They present a new computational tool that avoids these errors and provides accurate insights into the evolution of DNA and protein sequences. The results challenge our understanding of how evolution happens and suggest that sequence turnover is much more common than assumed.

"Evolution is happening so slowly that we cannot study it by simply watching it. That's why we learn about the relationships between species and the course and mechanism of evolution by comparing genetic sequences," says Nick Goldman, group leader at EMBL-EBI.

More HERE.

Bottled water debate hits a boiling point

A debate over water is boiling over in the United States and elsewhere amid growing environmental concerns about bottled water and questions about safety of tap water. The US Conference of Mayors in June passed a resolution calling for a phasing out of bottled water by municipalities and promotion of the importance of public water supplies.

While largely symbolic, the vote highlighted a growing movement opposing regular use of bottled water because of its plastic waste and energy costs to transport drinking supplies. Janet Larsen, director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, cites a "backlash against bottled water as more people are realizing what they get out of the bottles is not any better than what they get out of the faucet."

More HERE.

Study: World Gets Happier

"It's a surprising finding," said University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who headed up the survey. "It's widely believed that it's almost impossible to raise an entire country's happiness level."

Denmark is the happiest nation and Zimbabwe the the most glum, he found. (Zimbabwe's longtime ruler Robert Mugabe was sworn in as president for a sixth term Sunday after a widely discredited runoff in which he was the only candidate. Observers said the runoff was marred by violence and intimidation.)

The United States ranks 16th.

More HERE.

Geneticists Shake the Avian Family Tree

“With this study, we learned two major things,” said Sushma Reddy, lead author and a fellow at The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois. “First, appearances can be deceiving. Birds that look or act similar are not necessarily related. Second, much of bird classification and conventional wisdom on the evolutionary relationships of birds is wrong” [AFP].

Scientists believe birds, which first appeared roughly 150 million years ago, evolved from small feathered carnivorous dinosaurs. “Modern birds as we know them evolved really rapidly, probably within a few million years, into all of the forms we see. That happened 65 to 100 million years ago,” Reddy said in a telephone interview. Reddy said these quick changes have made bird evolution hard to pin down [Reuters].

More HERE.

Revising HIV's History

The first clues that researchers were on the wrong track about the SIV that led to HIV-2 came last year. Researchers had assumed that because most monkey species infected with SIV don't get sick, the virus has been coevolving with the primates for millions of years, allowing the host and pathogen to peaceably coexist. If that were the case, the branching of the monkey family tree should match the branching of the SIV tree. But last year, University of Arizona, Tucson, graduate student Joel Wertheim, his adviser, Michael Worobey, and colleagues found that not to be the case for the African green monkey and its SIV. "The work suggested that the virus was not millions of years old," Wertheim said at the meeting.

More HERE.