... Hello every one _ Faster - than - light electric currents could explain pulsars. ...

Faster-than-light electric currents could explain pulsars

A very interesting idea that looks quite plausible.

Shame about the questionable journal!


Thanks for a good thread,

Keep searchin',
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

NASA Science News for July 15, 2010

Researchers are puzzling over a sharper-than-expected
collapse of Earth's upper atmosphere during the deep solar minimum of 2008-09



Layers of Earth's upper atmosphere.



July 15, 2010: NASA-funded researchers are monitoring a big event in our planet's atmosphere. High above Earth's surface where the atmosphere meets space, a rarefied layer of gas called "the thermosphere" recently collapsed and now is rebounding again.

"This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years," says John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab, lead author of a paper announcing the finding in the June 19th issue of the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). "It's a Space Age record."

The collapse happened during the deep solar minimum of 2008-2009—a fact which comes as little surprise to researchers. The thermosphere always cools and contracts when solar activity is low. In this case, however, the magnitude of the collapse was two to three times greater than low solar activity could explain.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/

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Latest Look at Mercury Reveals Surprises

Younger volcanoes, stronger magnetic storms and a more intriguing exosphere: three new papers from data gathered during the MESSENGER spacecraft's third flyby of Mercury in September of last year provide new insights into the planet closest to our Sun. The new findings make the science teams even more anxious for getting the spacecraft into orbit around Mercury. "Every time we've encountered Mercury, we've discovered new phenomena," said principal investigator Sean Solomon. "We're learning that Mercury is an extremely dynamic planet, and it has been so throughout its history. Once MESSENGER has been safely inserted into orbit about Mercury next March, we'll be in for a terrific show ... read more here ...

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-07/ci-nra071310.php
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-07/ci-nra071310.php



Enhanced color image of Caloris Basin on Mercury.
A double-ring basin named Rachmaninoff reveals young volcanism on Mercury

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Senate's New NASA Plan:
Heavy Lift, Extra Shuttle Mission,
Less Commericial and Tech Development



The U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation today unanimously approved legislation that would add a shuttle mission and jump start work on a heavy-lift rocket next year. The NASA Reauthorization Act effectively cancels the Constellation program, but directs NASA to begin work immediately on a new heavy-lift vehicle to be ready by 2016, along with a crew vehicle. The new legislation takes money away, however, from two main focuses on Obama's proposed budget: commercial space development and funding for innovation and breakthrough technologies ... read more here ...

http://www.americaspace.org/?p=3383
http://www.americaspace.org/?p=3383

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Boatload of Herschel Science Papers Released



Herschel was launched on 14 May 2009! It is the fourth `cornerstone' mission in the ESA science programme. With a 3.5 m Cassegrain telescope it is the largest space telescope ever launched. It is performing photometry and spectroscopy in approximately the 55-671 µm range, bridging the gap between earlier infrared space missions and groundbased facilities.



Love to read science papers? Here's a batch that will keep you busy for a while. 152 papers were released this morning highlighting the Herschel telescope's first science results. A few papers describe the observatory and its instruments, and the rest are dedicated to observations of many astronomical targets from bodies in the Solar System to distant galaxies. Herschel is the only space observatory to cover a spectral range from the far infrared to sub-millimeter, so there's a wide range of objects and topics covered, including star formation, galaxy evolution, and cosmology.

And you thought you'd have nothing to do this weekend ;) ... read more here ...

Click here - To follow Herschel, check out the Herschel Science Centre Latest News webpage

Click here - To Find all the papers at this Astronomy and Astrophysics webpage

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Chinese Supercomputer
Is Ranked World’s Second-Fastest,
Challenging U.S. Dominance

A Chinese supercomputer has been ranked as the world’s second-fastest machine, surpassing European and Japanese systems and underscoring China’s aggressive commitment to science and technology. The Dawning Nebulae, based at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, has achieved a sustained computing speed of 1.27 petaflops — the equivalent of one thousand trillion mathematical operations a second — in the latest semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest 500 computers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/science/01compute.html?ref=science
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/science/01compute.html?ref=science

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Finding frugal aliens:
‘Benford beacons’ concept could
refocus search for intelligent extraterrestrial life


Astrophysicist Gregory Benford — standing before the UCI Observatory
believes an alien civilization would transmit “cost-optimized” signals
rather than the kind sought for decades by the SETI Institute.

UC Irvine astrophysicist Gregory Benford and his twin, James — a fellow physicist specializing in high-powered microwave technology — suggest that signals from ET would not be continuously blasted out in all directions but rather would be more cost-effective “Benford beacons”: pulsed, narrowly directed and broadband in the 1-to-10-gigahertz range.

For 50 years, humans have scanned the skies with radio telescopes for distant electronic signals indicating the existence of intelligent alien life. The search — centered at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. — has tapped into our collective fascination with the concept that we may not be alone in the universe.

... read more here ...

http://www.physorg.com/news198835228.html
http://www.physorg.com/news198835228.html

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New Supernova
Is Discovered by Young Citizen Scientist



There is no age restriction on the chance to make a significant contribution
to our understanding of the universe. Caroline Moore, a 14-year-old from Warwick, N.Y.
has made such a mark on astronomy with the discovery of Supernova 2008ha.
Not only is she the youngest person to discover a supernova,
but this particular supernova has been identified as a different type of stellar explosion.

Check out the slide show about Caroline in this Discovery

read more here ...

http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=115097
http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=115097

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Imagine a star so luminous that it would burn the Earth up if it were anywhere near, a star that outshines the sun as much as the sun outshines the moon. A monster even in the abyss of space.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/07/21/monster.star/index.html?hpt=C1

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

Large Hadron Collider gets yet more exotic 'to-do' list
The Large Hadron Collider could throw up evidence of
new physics earlier than expected.

As if the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) didn't have enough to look for. It is already charged with hunting for the fabled Higgs boson, extra dimensions and supersymmetry, but physicists are now adding even more elaborate phenom­ena to its shopping list--including vanishing dimensions that could explain the accelerating expansion of the Universe. Some argue that signs of new and exotic physics could show up in the LHC far sooner than expected.


In March, the LHC, sited at CERN, Europe's particle-physics facility near Geneva, Switzerland, began colliding protons at energies of 7 trillion electronvolts--half the final target but already three times greater than its nearest rival, the Tevatron in Batavia, Illinois. This week, particle physicists gather at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Paris to discuss what they hope to find--and when the discoveries might emerge.

Still topping physicists & apos; wish lists is the Higgs boson, the elusive particle thought to be part of the mechanism that gives other particles their mass. If the standard model of particle physics has correctly predicted its characteristics, gathering enough data to find the Higgs should take about two more years, says Albert de Roeck, deputy spokesman for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC.

read more here ...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=large-hadron-collider-goals&sc=CAT_SPC_20100722
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=large-hadron-collider-goals&sc=CAT_SPC_20100722

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P ≠ NP? It's bad news for the power of computing

Has the biggest question in computer science been solved? On 6 August 2010, Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, sent out draft copies of a paper titled simply "P ≠ NP".

This terse assertion could have profound implications for the ability of computers to solve many kinds of problem. It also answers one of the Clay Mathematics Institute's seven Millennium Prize problems, so if it turns out to be correct Deolalikar will have earned himself a prize of $1 million.

The P versus NP question concerns the speed at which a computer can accomplish a task such as factorising a number. Some tasks can be completed reasonably quickly – in technical terms, the running time is proportional to a polynomial function of the input size – and these tasks are in class P.

read more here

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Engineering and Music:
A Powerful Duet for Art and Science

These engineers and musicians are hitting just the right notes
An engineer with a love of music and a musician who likes technology, Mark Bocko and Dave Headlam are both professors at the University of Rochester. For more than 10 years, their collaboration has been moving both fields forward.

"We very quickly realized that the things he was interested in and the things I was interested in, in music theory, were actually very similar," says Headlam, who teaches music theory at Rochester's Eastman School of Music.

Both are part of the university's Music Research Lab (MRL). Its goal is "to perform musically-informed research and to develop technologies that reflect the expertise of musicians as well as scientists and engineers."

Bocko, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, uses a computer to figure out with extraordinary precision what a musician is doing to create the sound.

"And so, the whole idea is you want to capture the essence of the physics of how the instrument works," he says.

For instance, Bocko can study every aspect of how a clarinet player interacts with an instrument.

"So, what the computer learns is how hard they were blowing, the blowing pressure at every instant in time, what their mouth clamping force was on the reed, and the fingering they used," continues Bocko. "But, it's really how the more subtle inputs and the changes of the blowing pressure over time, and how things are connected together. It is learning those parameters from a performance that is the essential part of this."

read more here ...

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/musicman.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_196
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/musicman.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_196

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NASA Science News for August 19, 2010

NASA's Dawn spacecraft is now less than a year away from giant asteroid Vesta. Today's story from Science@NASA offers a sneak preview of an "alien, unexplored world" that seems sure to amaze.



FULL STORY at

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/19aug_dawn2/
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/19aug_dawn2/

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Amazing video. Please follow the link below.

http://gizmodo.com/5623462/every-asteroid-discovered-in-the-last-30-years

Asteroids! No not the video game—I'm talking about all those old rocks floating around up in space. Here's a mesmerizing video that tracks every single one of them that's visited our solar system since 1980. Space: busy place!

The video's description notes:

As the video moves into the mid 1990's we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you'll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.

Amazing video. Please follow the link below.

http://gizmodo.com/5623462/every-asteroid-discovered-in-the-last-30-years

Asteroids! No not the video game—

:-) Couldn't resist!

I'm talking about all those old rocks floating around up in space. Here's a mesmerizing video that tracks every single one of them that's visited our solar system since 1980. Space: busy place!

The video's description notes:

As the video moves into the mid 1990's we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you'll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.

Since we started looking, the discovery rate looks to be startling. All we need do is look and there's lots out there.


One of the comments there exclaiming about the numbers of space rocks is rather apt:

"We're soo f**ked!"


Keep searchin',
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Silicon nanocrystals break miniaturization barrier for memory chips
Rice University scientists have created the first two-terminal memory chips that use only silicon to generate nanocrystal wires as small as 5 nanometers

— far smaller than circuitry in even the most advanced computers and electronic devices. The technology breakthrough promises to extend the limits of miniaturization subject to Moore’s Law, and should be easily adaptable to nanoelectronic manufacturing techniques.

Jun Yao, a graduate student in Rice Professor James Tour’s lab, confirmed his idea when he sandwiched a layer of silicon oxide, an insulator, between semiconducting sheets of polycrystalline silicon that served as the top and bottom electrodes.

Applying a charge to the electrodes created a conductive pathway by stripping oxygen atoms from the silicon oxide and forming a chain of nano-sized silicon crystals. Once formed, the chain can be repeatedly broken and reconnected by applying a pulse of varying voltage.

“The beauty of it is its simplicity,” said Tour, Rice’s T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science. That, he said, will be key to the technology’s scalability. Silicon oxide switches or memory locations require only two terminals, not three (as in flash memory), because the physical process doesn’t require the device to hold a charge.




read more here ...

http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=14695
http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=14695

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Physicists Build A Memory That Stores Entanglement

The first quantum memory that stores and releases entanglement has been built
by researchers at the University of Geneva.

Entanglement is the strange, ghostly phenomenon in which quantum particles share the same existence (actually, the same wave function). So a measurement on one instantaneously influences the other, no matter how far apart they might be.

So-called action-at-a-distance lies at the heart of many of modern physic's most dramatic new technologies: quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation and quantum computation all rely on it.
That makes entanglement important stuff.

"Stuff" is the way many physicists are beginning to think of entanglement: as a resource, rather like water or energy, to be called upon when needed in the new quantum world. These physicists want to be able to create entanglement, use it and store it whenever they need to.

The first two of these--creating and using entanglement--has been the subject of intense research for the last 30 or 40 years. But the ability to store entanglement in a useful way has eluded physicists. Until now.

Today, Christoph Clausen and buddies at the University of Geneva demonstrate not only how to store entanglement but how to release it again in fully working order.

Their device consists of a load of neodymium atoms buried in a crystal of ytterbium silicate, which when cooled, can absorb and store photons. The question that Clausen and co attempt to answer is whether this device can store entanglement too.

So they created a pair of entangled photons, sent one into the crystal and waited until it was emitted again. They were then left with this new photon and the original member of the pair. They then carried out a standard experiment, known as a Bell test, and proved that the pair were still entangled.

That's impressive for several reasons. For a start, for the entanglement to be preserved, the entire crystal has to be involved. This crystal is about a centimetre in size and the idea that entanglement can be exchanged between a photon and an object of this size is amazing.

Next is the ability to transfer entanglement form a flying qubit--the photon--to a stationary one, the crystal. And to do it with photons with a wavelength of 1338nm, the so-called telecommunications wavelength that can pass easily through fibre optic cables. Any other wavelengths are interesting but practically useless for communications.


But the most exciting aspect of all this is that the entanglement survives the process of storage and release at all. Notoriously fragile, entanglement leaks into the environment like water through a sieve. Being able to store and release it is the enabling technology that could make devices such as quantum repeaters work.

There's not shortage of uses for this kind of ability. The quantum internet, to name just one, will require the ability to store and send on entangled photons. At one time, it looked more or less impossibile to do this. Entanglement was just too fragile. Now it looks merely a matter of time before we'll have it on tap.

read more here ...

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25718/#comment-224284
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25718/#comment-224284

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$10 million for Project 10^100 winners

Google has announced the winners of Project Project 10^100 (ideas for changing the world by helping as many people as possible). Thousands of people from more than 170 countries submitted over 150,000 ideas, and Google is providing at total of $10 million funding to the five winners that received the most votes:

The Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos;

FIRST, a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition;
Public.Resource.Org, a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States;

Shweeb, a concept for short to medium distance, urban personal transport, using human-powered vehicles on a monorail;

The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), a center for math and science education and research in Cape Town, South Africa.

http://www.project10tothe100.com/
http://www.project10tothe100.com/

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China successfully launched their second robotic mission, Chang’E-2, to the Moon. A Long March 3C rocket blasted off from Xichang launch center just before 1100 GMT on October 1. The satellite is scheduled to reach the Moon in five days, and so far, all the telemetry shows everything to be working as planned. It will take some time for Chang’E-2 to settle into its 100-km (60-mile) orbit above the lunar surfaces, although the China space agency also said the spacecraft will come as close as 15km above the surface during its mission in order to take high-resolution imagery of potential landing sites for Chang’E-3, China’s next lunar mission that will send a rover to the Moon’s surface, scheduled for 2013.

http://www.universetoday.com/74740/china-launches-second-moon-mission/
http://www.universetoday.com/74740/china-launches-second-moon-mission/

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It looks like Einstein@home has discovered a second pulsar in the Arecibo data, a binary system where the companion star has 0.93 solar masses and an orbital period of 9.41 hours. It has been closely watched since September but the names of its discoverers (one British and another Russian) have not been so far announced.
Tullio

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