Mysterious Metallic Space Ball Falls to Earth in Africa, Baffling Authorities

If you're missing a space ball, please contact Namibia

By Clay Dillow

Space Ball National Forensic Science Institute via PhysOrg

A large metallic ball has fallen from the heavens and landed in a remote region of Namibia, spurring a lot of speculation about its origins and spurring local authorities to get NASA and the European Space Agency on the horn. No one is sure where the hollow metallic object came from, but it definitely came down hard--it was found 60 feet away from its landing site, a hole more than a foot deep and 12 feet across.

Made of a “metal alloy known to man,” the 13-pound ball is about 43 inches in circumference and landed roughly 480 miles from the Namibian capital of Windhoek. And it turns out it’s not alone. Apparently several similar objects have fallen across the southern hemisphere (in Australia and Latin America as well as elsewhere in Africa) over the past couple of decades.

So far, it has not exploded, hatched, or started to glow with a faint, eerie white light. Nor has anyone descended from the sky looking for it. If that happens, we’ll be sure to post something about it here.

[AFP]

The First Direct Measurements of Earth's Rotation, Made With the World's Most Stable Ring Laser

By Clay Dillow

See That? It's Wobbling NASA via Wikimedia

Deep in an underground bunker near the German-Czech border, through a 65-foot tunnel and locked behind five cold storage doors, German scientists are building a laser so advanced, so precise, that there isn’t another laser in the world that can challenge it. But despite the sinister-sounding backdrop, there’s nothing nefarious going on here. Researchers there have built theworld’s most stable ring laser, and they’re using it to make unprecedentedly accurate measurements of the Earth’s rotation.

In other words, they’re trying to keep track of our planets wobble. And it is wobbling. In relation to space, the Earth is not rotating perfectly in one smooth, circular spin all the time. Relative to the surface, the rotational axis of the Earth moves around, pushed and pulled by all kinds of external influences ranging from the pull of the sun and the moon to atmospheric pressure and the effects of our elliptical orbit around the sun.

The shift isn’t so much that we notice it here at the surface--the migration of the axis has a radius of roughly 30 feet--but it complicates things like GPS mapping (it’s one reason why there’s a margin of error on your iPhone map) and the projection of space launch trajectories or the calculations of satellite orbits relative to Earth.

The work on the world’s most stable ring laser has been underway for more than a decade and is now returning its first direct measurements of the Earth’s rotational wobble--that is, THE first direct measurements of the Earth’s rotational wobble. Ever.

It does so via two counter-rotating lasers traveling around closed beam paths. When the entire apparatus rotates, the co-rotating light has farther to travel than the counter-rotating beam, and the beams adjust their wavelengths to compensate for this, which in turn affects their optical frequencies. By measuring that shift in frequency and doing some clever math, the researchers can measure the change in rotational velocity the entire apparatus is experiencing.

The deep-in-an-underground-bunker aspect stems from the fact that the world’s most stable ring laser is only stable if it is protected from outside influences like changes in air pressure and temperature. So it is buried some 20 feet underground in a pressurized cabin that compensates for any change in ambient pressure to keep the laser chamber stable.

The next step: making it even more accurate. Right now the ring laser can measure rotational wobble over time (its readings have been corroborated by radio telescopes), but the researchers want to make it so precise they can look at the change in wobble over a single day. Eventually, they want it to be so stable they can leave it underground and running for years on end without any deviation, so researchers can pop downstairs at any given time and check the rotational wobble as it stands right at that moment.

The LHC Has Discovered Its First New Particle

And no, it's not the Higgs boson

By Clay Dillow

Big Smash: Atlas's eight giant superconducting magnets, together powerful enough to crush a bus CERN

Though researchers think the Higgs boson is running out of places to hide, the LHC has yet to provide conclusive proof of its existence. But the ATLAS experiment at the LHC--one of the two main experiments taking precise measurements of particle collisions--has found what is thought to be the first observation of a new particle at the world’s largest science experiment. Known as c_b(3P)--or Chi-b (3P)--observations of the particle should yield new insights into the strong force that holds atomic nuclei together.

The c_b(3P) particle is a newly observed means of combing what’s known as a beauty quark with its antiquark equivalent. It’s considered a boson like the Higgs, and like the Higgs it has long been thought to be there, theoretically speaking. It’s a more excited state of Chi particles already witnessed in previous collider experiments. But no one had actually seen it until now.

The as-yet unpublished research should be a jumping off point toward a greater understanding of what holds the universe together. The Higgs gets a lot of air time, as it has proven the most elusive of the Standard Model puzzle pieces and is thought to be the particle that gives all others mass. But once a theory establishes how the universe got mass, it still has to demonstrate how that mass is held together at the fundamental level. That means understanding the strong force and the roles of particles like c_b(3P).

Geek out on some hard physics over at arXiv.

[University of Birmingham]

Self-Healing Electronics Use Liquid Metal to Fix Broken Circuits

Video: Self-Healing Electronics Use Liquid Metal to Fix Broken Circuits

By Rebecca Boyle

Self-Healing Circuit Microcapsules full of liquid metal sit atop a gold circuit. When the circuit is broken, the microcapsules rupture, filling in the crack and restoring the circuit. Scott White/University of Illinois

Over the weekend, faced with the dreaded Yellow Light of Death, I ripped apart a PlayStation 3 and blasted it with a 500-degree heat gun to re-flow the GPU and CPU. It was pretty fun and it worked, much to the delight of the member of my household who was this close to finishing “Batman: Arkham City.” Next time, this new self-healing circuit compound could make our work unnecessary.

Broken circuits could fix themselves using an emergency capsule of liquid metal, invented by researchers at the University of Illinois. As a crack propagates in a circuit, a microcapsule breaks open, spilling liquid metal into the gap and restoring electrical flow. The circuit would only be broken for a few microseconds, just as long as it takes for the capsule to fill in the cracks. During tests, 90 percent of the circuit samples healed to 99 percent of original conductivity, even when only a small amount of microcapsules were used, according to the U of I. Watch White explain the system in the video below.

Illinois professors Nancy Sottos, Scott White and Jeffrey Moore had already done lots of work on self-healing polymers and other types of structural repairs, but this is the first time anyone has tried self-healing conductivity. It works automatically and only at the point of a circuit failure. It’s so simple, you wonder why no one has thought of this before.

The method could replace some of the redundancies in complex circuits, perhaps making electronics cheaper, lighter and more sustainable. The researchers even hope it could be used to improve battery performance. The work was published in the journal Advanced Materials.

[University of Illinois via The Verge]

Eco-Friendly Battery Runs on Old Newspapers

By Dan Nosowitz

Paper-Powered Battery Sony

I'll start you guys off with a quote here: In talking about Sony's new battery technology, which uses old cellulose product like newspapers and cardboard to generate electricity, the BBC says: "Their work builds on a previous project in which they used fruit juice to power a Walkman music player." Thank you, crazy Sony recycling-engineers.

This new tech relies on turning cellulose products (including, lest we forget, the paper greeting cards all you Earth-hating monsters are exchanging this time of year) into glucose sugar. That's done by introducing the old paper products to a solution of water and cellulase, an enzyme found in nature, and, um, shaking it. The cellulase solution decomposes the cellulose to form that necessary glucose, which is in turn combined with oxygen and some other unnamed enzymes, producing electrons and hydrogen ions, the former of which is fed into batteries to charge them.

If you're wondering where in nature this wood-eating cellulase enzyme is found, look no further than the termite. Cellulase is naturally occurring in the wood-eating species, and in fact the Sony researchers involved in the project actually compared their technique to that of a termite.

As with all new battery tech, especially in the early stages like this one is, the battery isn't powerful enough to run high-demand gear. A portable music player, like the Walkman™, is about all it can handle at the moment. But as the byproducts are basically harmless (water and gluconolactone, a neutral product often used in anti-aging cosmetics), it's definitely a tech we'd like to see improve and become viable.

[BBC]

Video: Plasma Torch Toothbrush Successfully Used In Human Mouth

By Dan Nosowitz

Plasma Brush on Dentist Missouri University

Attentive followers of dentistry developments that we are, we've been following the story of theplasma brush for awhile now. And it seems like it's making some serious progress: human clinical trials are supposed to begin in early 2012, and there's also a video (below) of the World's Bravest Dentist shooting a plasma beam into his own mouth.

Some background, for anyone who doesn't subscribe to Dentistry Illustrated Weekly: the plasma brush isn't a toothbrush, but actually a tool dentists are hoping to use for two primary situations. The first is breaking up plaque; the plasma torch, though it's no hotter than room temperature, is excellent at breaking the bonds that adhere plaque to a tooth. The second is as a sort of primer for filling cavities.

There are certain kinds of cavities, according to Hao Li, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the Missouri University College of Engineering, that need to be refilled every five or seven years using current technology--and they can only be refilled a few times before having to be pulled. The plasma brush can prime a cavity for filling in sort of the same way pavers create those divots in roads before filling them in with new asphalt: it provides more surface area for the filling to stick to, and the research team claims plasma-assisted fillings could be 60% stronger than traditional fillings.

Human clinical trials are due to begin early next year at the University of Tennessee at Memphis, with the team hoping the tool could be approved by the FDA and available to dentists by 2013.

Study uncovers clues to what makes anesthetics work

Physicians use inhalation anesthetics in a way that is incredibly safe for patients, but very little is known about the intricacies of how these drugs actually work in children and adults. Now, researchers have uncovered what cells respond to anesthesia in an organism known as the C. elegans, according to a new study from the Seattle Children's Research Institute. C. elegans is a transparent roundworm used often in research. The study, "Optical reversal of halothane-induced immobility in C. elegans," is published in the December 20, 2011 issue of Current Biology.

"Our findings tell us what cells and channels are important in making the anesthetic work," said lead author Phil Morgan, MD, researcher at Seattle Children's Research Institute and University of Washington professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine. "The scientific community has attempted to uncover the secrets of how anesthetics work since the 1860s, and we now have at least part of the answer." Margaret Sedensky, MD, Seattle Children's Research Institute and a UW professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine, and Vinod Singaram, graduate student, Case Western Reserve University, are co-lead authors of the study.

The team studied the roundworm after inserting a pigment or protein typically found in the retina of a human eye — called a retinal-dependent rhodopsin channel — into its cells. The proteins in cell membranes act as channels to help movement. Researchers then used a blue light, activating channels in the roundworm that allowed the immediate reversal of anesthetics, and resulting in the roundworm waking up and seemingly swimming off the slide.

This video is not supported by your browser at this time.

A roundworm (known as C. elegans) is under anesthesia in the first part of the video. At 17 seconds, a blue light is turned on, with the effect of reversing the anesthesia.

The team's findings won't immediately translate into a discovery that would be available for humans, cautioned Dr. Morgan, who has been working in this field for some 25 years. "But it tells us what function we have to treat to try to do so," he said.

"We believe that there is a class of potassium channels in humans that are crucial in this process of how anesthetics work and that they are perhaps the ones that are sensitive to potential anesthesia reversal. There are drugs for blocking these channels and with these same drugs, maybe we can eventually reverse anesthesia." Potassium channels are found in all living organisms and in most cell types, and they control a wide variety of cell functions.

Anesthesia medications are used in both children and adults, but many are used more often in kids. Dr. Morgan and his colleagues plan to replicate the study in other animal models, starting with a mouse.

More information: The study "Optical reversal of halothane-induced immobility in C. elegans," in Current Biology can be found here:http://www.cell.co … 0960-9822(11

 

)01203-6

Provided by Seattle Children's

"Study uncovers clues to what makes anesthetics work." December 22nd, 2011. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-uncovers-clues-anesthetics.html

 

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek