| The University of Auckland |
Astronomers believe there are billions of Earth-sized planets closed to a parental star in the Milky Way.
The strategy uses a technique called gravitational microlensing, currently used by a Japan-New Zealand collaboration called MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) at New Zealand’s Mt John Observatory. Lead author Dr Phil Yock from the University of Auckland’s Department of Physics explains that the work will require a combination of data from microlensing and the NASA Kepler space telescope. “Kepler finds Earth-sized planets that are quite close to parent stars, and it estimates that there are 17 billion such planets in the Milky Way. These planets are generally hotter than Earth, although some could be of a similar temperature (and therefore habitable) if they're orbiting a cool star called a red dwarf.” “Our proposal is to measure the number of Earth-mass planets orbiting stars at distances typically twice the Sun-Earth distance. Our planets will therefore be cooler than the Earth. By interpolating between the Kepler and MOA results, we should get a good estimate of the number of Earth-like, habitable planets in the Galaxy. We anticipate a number in the order of 100 billion.” “Of course, it will be a long way from measuring this number to actually finding inhabited planets, but it will be a step along the way.” The first planet orbiting a Sun-like star was not found until 1995, despite strenuous efforts by astronomers. Dr Yock explains that this reflects the difficulty of detecting from a distance a tiny non-luminous object like Earth orbiting a bright object like the Sun. The planet is lost in the glare of the star, so indirect methods of detection must be used. Whereas Kepler measures the loss of light from a star when a planet orbits between us and the star, microlensing measures the deflection of light from a distant star that passes through a planetary system en route to Earth – an effect predicted by Einstein in 1936. In recent years, microlensing has been used to detect several planets as large as Neptune and Jupiter. Dr Yock and colleagues have proposed a new microlensing strategy for detecting the tiny deflection caused by an Earth-sized planet. Simulations carried out by Dr Yock and his colleagues – students and former students from The University of Auckland and France – showed that Earth-sized planets could be detected more easily if a worldwide network of moderate-sized, robotic telescopes was available to monitor them. Coincidentally, just such a network of 1m and 2m telescopes is now being deployed by Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT) in collaboration with SUPA/St Andrews (Scottish Universities Physics Alliance), with three telescopes in Chile, three in South Africa, three in Australia, and one each in Hawaii and Texas. This network is used to study microlensing events in conjunction with the Liverpool Telescope in the Canary Islands which is owned and operated by Liverpool John Moores University. It is expected that the data from this suite of telescopes will be supplemented by measurements using the existing 1.8m MOA telescope at Mt John, the 1.3m Polish telescope in Chile known as OGLE, and the recently opened 1.3m Harlingten telescope in Tasmania. The scientist’s proposal has been published online ahead of print in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (Oxford University Press). The Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT) is described here.
Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.
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The University of Wollongong
The researchers believe within a few
years it will be possible to manufacture living tissues such as skin,
cartilage, arteries and heart valves using a patient’s own cells.
Image: RDECOM/Flickr
Researchers from UOW’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) and St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne, announced in Melbourne today (Friday 3 May) that they are just three years away from printing custom-made body parts, including muscle and nerve cells and cartilage. And in just over a decade, they believe will be possible to print human organs. “It is already possible to print 3D biocompatible plastics and metals to manufacture patient-specific implants,” ACES Director Professor Gordon Wallace said. “Within a few years, we believe it will be possible to manufacture living tissues like skin, cartilage, arteries and heart valves using cells and biomaterials. Using a patient’s own cells to create this tissue avoids issues of immune rejection. By 2025, it is feasible that we will be able to fabricate complete functional organs, tailored for an individual patient.” Professor Wallace and his team are are meeting with clinicians, medical device manufacturers and policy makers this week in Melbourne to discuss the future of fabricated medical implants. Professor Wallace said 3D printing, or additive fabrication, uses machines to build 3D objects layer-by-layer from digital data. “While 3D printing is already being used in some medical applications, by bringing together the materials and scientists at ACES and the clinicians and researchers at SVH we have been able to accelerate our progress so that we are now on the verge of a new wave of technology leveraging 3D printing/additive fabrication techniques to deliver solutions to a number of medical challenges. These include bionic devices, the regeneration of nerve, muscle and bone, as well as epilepsy detection and control.” Professor Wallace said the research would receive a huge boost next month with the launch of an additive biofabrication unit at St Vincent’s hospital in Melbourne, expanding the program from its base at the University of Wollongong’s Intelligent Polymer Research Institute (IPRI), the lead node of ACES. The St Vincent’s facility will be the first of its kind in Australia to be located in a hospital. “This is an exciting development involving the establishment of a customised facility at St Vincent’s, Melbourne. [It] will put our scientists and engineers in direct contact with clinicians on a daily basis [and] is expected to fast track the realisation of practical medical devices and the reproduction of organs,” Professor Wallace said.
Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.
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| The University of New South Wales |
The team found a way to correct
deficiencies in silicon - by far the most expensive component used in
the making of solar cells. This will mean efficient solar cells can be
created that are cheaper but more efficient.
Image: Gencho Petkov/Shutterstock
The UNSW team has discovered a mechanism to control hydrogen atoms so they can better correct deficiencies in silicon – by far the most expensive component used in the making of solar cells. “This process will allow lower-quality silicon to outperform solar cells made from better-quality materials,” says Scientia Professor Stuart Wenham from the School of Photovoltaics and Renewable Energy Engineering at UNSW. Standard commercial silicon cells currently have a maximum efficiency of around 19%. The new technique, patented by UNSW researchers earlier this year, is expected to produce efficiencies between 21% and 23%, says Wenham. “By using lower-quality silicon to achieve higher efficiencies, we can enable significant cost reductions,” he says. The solar industry has long been focused on bringing down the cost of silicon. However, cheaper silicon also means lower-quality silicon, with more defects and contaminants that reduce efficiency. It’s been known for several decades that hydrogen atoms can be introduced into the atomic structure of silicon to help correct these defects, but until now, researchers have had limited success in controlling the hydrogen to maximise its benefits or even understanding why this happens. “Our research team at UNSW has worked out how to control the charge state of hydrogen atoms in silicon – something that other people haven’t previously been able to do,” says Wenham. Hydrogen atoms can exist in three ‘charge’ states – positive, neutral and negative. The charge state determines how well the hydrogen can move around the silicon and its reactivity, which is important to help correct the defects. “We have seen a 10,000 times improvement in the mobility of the hydrogen and we can control the hydrogen so it chemically bonds to things like defects and contaminants, making these inactive,” says Wenham. The UNSW team currently has eight industry partners interested in commercialising the technology, and is also working with manufacturing equipment companies to implement the new capabilities. The project, which has been generously supported by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, is expected to be completed in 2016. UNSW still holds the world-record for silicon cell efficiency at 25%, and last week, Scientia Professor and solar pioneer Martin Green, was elected into the Fellowship of the United Kingdom’s prestigious Royal Society.
Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.
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If phosphorus is not removed during wastewater treatment, it can lead to algal blooms in waterways.
Image: Singkham/Shutterstock
Phosphorus is a precious element, with all life depending on it. It is an essential nutrient for plant growth and an important constituent of fertiliser used in agriculture. Phosphorus is often removed during wastewater treatment because it can lead to algal blooms in waterways. It is traditionally removed from wastewater streams using chemical or biological processes before the water is discharged to the environment. Wastewater streams typically contain low concentrations of phosphorus, making direct recovery of phosphorus both technically and economically challenging. However, a team from CSIRO has developed a technique that can recover phosphorus from these low concentrations to provide a valuable resource. The conventional biological treatment process known as enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) removes phosphorus from wastewater by selectively enriching a group of bacteria known as polyphosphate accumulating organisms. CSIRO’s novel approach, termed enhanced biological phosphorus removal and recovery (EBPR-r), exploits this unique characteristic of the organisms to ‘carry’ the phosphorus from the diluted wastewater stream over to a concentrated recovery stream. The phosphorus concentration in the recovery stream was approximately four times that of the concentration in the original wastewater. The result was a phosphorus concentration in the recovery stream that was approximately four times that of the phosphorus concentration in the original wastewater. The novel approach has applications for wastewater treatment utilities and fertiliser producers alike. Further research is underway to increase the phosphorus concentration in the recovery stream. This research is being delivered through the Urban Water Technologies Stream of CSIRO’s Water for a Healthy Country Flagship.
Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.
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| The University of Waikato |
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'Thou', 'I', 'not' and 'we' are the amount
the 23 words that the controversial study identified have been in use
for the past 15,000 years.
Image: Andrea Danti/Shutterstock
"It's a new thing and won’t be accepted by everyone," Dr Andreea Calude says. Dr Calude, from the University's Department of General and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, was part of a team led by Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in England, which has come up with a list of words which can be traced to old forms around the time of the last Ice Age. These 'ultra-conserved' words suggest that separate language families - thought to be unique - can be traced back to a common ancestral language dating back centuries and used across much of Europe to North America and as far south as the Indian Sub-Continent. Dr Calude says it had been generally accepted that languages could be classified into families, but there was no good way of making links between the different families. "Most people think you can't reconstruct history beyond language families," she says. "They think going beyond a single language family is impossible. We had the sense that one should be able to go beyond a language family to a super language family. Language families do not 'know' that they are a family and not a language, so the process of reconstruction should be the same between families as it is across individual languages. That was the start of this idea. We thought, does it even make sense to look beyond a single language family? It could be rubbish but we looked to see what was in it." What they found was startling. They looked at cognates as established by the LWED database (Languages of the World Etymological Database) - words which have a similar sound and the same meaning in different languages - across language families, rather than within languages from the same family, and found systematic relationships where none had been thought to exist. "We constructed a language tree and what's cool about that is we got relationships between language families, not just languages," Dr Calude says. The researchers looked at cognates across several language families, including Indo-European; Dravidian (from southern India); Altaic (which includes Turkish, Uzbek and Mongolian); Uralic (which includes Finnish and Hungarian); Kartvelian (east European, Baltic area); Chukchi-Kamchatkan (from the far northeastern part of Siberia) and Inuit-Yupik (from the Arctic). The results showed that a 'proto-language' existed, which, over time, evolved into different language families, giving rise to many individual languages spreading all over the continent. The research, published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on some of the most common words. Dr Calude says she and her colleagues spent years coding words with similar sounds and meanings across different languages. She says the coding had to be right for the research to stand up to scrutiny and they had been hard on themselves throughout the process. "If the LWED database had a word meaning 'hand' in one language family as cognate with another meaning 'palm' in another family, how should we code these? If unsure, we tried to bias results against ourselves, so in such cases, we would not code these words as cognate unless they both had the exact same meaning." "We were really hard on ourselves, but it was a fun project," she says. And while some may not accept the findings, one of the world's most influential linguists, Professor William Croft from the University of New Mexico, has backed the research, telling The Washington Post the study supports the plausibility of an ancestral language whose audible relics cross tongues today. Twenty-three words that stand the test of time: Thou, I, not, that, we, to give, who, this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire,to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm.
Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.
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