Fortnightly Science News Digest - 31/10/12

Our nearest star has a planet: 

I still remember the times when the question of our loneliness in the universe was encircled by puzzling questions on the same train of thought about the solar system and its uniqueness. We saw many stars, as we always did, but no other planets other than the one in the solar system. That made us think we are a "special" one, and being (so far, at least) the only one with life in our solar system made us even more pretentious on being unique. There was no clear answer for why apparently only our sun had planets. There are trillions of sun in a galaxy and trillion of galaxies in the universe. Why didn't we see more planets around us? That made us feel astronomically lonely and misunderstood.

It was no more that two decades ago when the first confirmed planet outside the solar system was discovered. Since then, more than 800 extrasolar planets have been discovered. The planets were there, but our technology wasn't good enough to see them, next to the luminosity of stars, often many orders of magnitude brighter than ours. The science of looking for exoplantes has increasingly become a very hot topic in astronomy. Techniques are becoming finer and astonishingly precise.

This month, it has been announced that even our closest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, just 4.3 light years distant, has a planet. And it is a small and rocky one, even if too close to the star to be habitable and to even host water in liquid form. Nonetheless, it is an amazing discovery. Alpha Centauri - being the closest star - was heavily studied and it was the natural first place to look for another planet. Yet it was never found, because its planet is very close to the star and moving quickly.

This news not only is amazing for sci-fi lovers, for which Alpha Centauri has always been target of the creative fantasy of films and books writers, and still not only from a philosophical point of view, giving hints toward a more planet-populated universe, but also for scientists. The technique to make the discovery certain had to deal with measurements with precisions on the scales of half-a-meter per second. That is slower than walking speed. And remember that those measurements are from a source 40 millions of millions kilometers away from us.

From the uncertainty of having other planets at all in the universe to the certainty of having one on our closest star, it only took twenty years. How long will it take to discover the first one in the habitable zone and with life on it?


Dinosaur feathers 'developed for courtship'

Stunning nine gigapixel image is most detailed ever of our own galaxy

Fortnightly Science News Digest - 15/10/12

Skydiver breaks sound barrier:

it was a quite spectacular event, the one set up and performed by Felix Baumgartner, Austrian skydiver that pushed his passion a bit too far: farther than any of his colleagues before him, to be precise.

On 14 October, he jumped from a helium balloon at the height of  39,045m (breaking a world record) and reached the free-fall speed of 1,342.8km/h (breaking another world record).

With nothing on apart from his parachute and suit (which served a similar purpose to an astronaut suit), he fell freely for 93% of his 39km trip. It took less to fall for 36km (4'20") than to reach land with his parachute for 3km (4'43").

The skydiver claims he did the dive to collect scientific data on developments of high-altitude parachutes, but the event shook everyone for its spectacular altitudes.

It is fair to underline that the view from the stratosphere is not as fantastic as the one from the ISS. It is easy to be tricked by the high curvature of Earth in the pictures. Those are "fish-eye lens" picture which are distorted to include angles which would be otherwise left out. Nonetheless impressive, the height from which he jumped was still relatively very close to Earth, being only 0.6% of Earth's radius. At that height just a glimpse of curvature can be caught with perfect visibility.

In this picture, the height from which Felix jumped is exactly one pixel. I drew it on top, it might be visible with some zoom. This should give a good sense of the scales involved.

Physics Nobel goes to Serge Haroche and David Wineland

Planet with four suns discovered

Fortnightly Science News Digest - 30/09/12

Landau levels revealed: using scanning tunneling spectroscopy, physicists at University of Warwick revealed the first image of Landau's prediction for the homonymous levels. Those were predictions that made Landau win the Physics Nobel Prize in 1930, but we were only able to picture them now. Landau predicted that in a clean system, the electrons would take on the form of concentric rings. Interesting how this could also be used to give a definition of kilogram (which is still debated) as the spaces between the rings could be as universal marker for weight, being dependent on electron's mass.

Ig Nobel honours ponytail physics

'Meteors' sighted in skies across UK

Off-Peek: Radio Telescopes Edge In on Plasma Jet Spewing from Massive Black Hole


P.S.: as you might have noticed this was posted ridiculously late and it is missing description for most of the news. I apologize for the first, and about the second: from now on I decided to only write something about the first news and just post links about other major news. This is to keep the FSND feature alive as I will not have as much free time now. I just started a PhD, have mercy on me!

Fortnightly Science News Digest - 15/09/12

The Ulam spiral: when arranging numbers in a spiral, highlighting prime numbers,
they produce the (yet not fully understood) pattern showed above

Deep connection between prime numbers proved:  “If Mochizuki’s proof is correct, it will be one of the most astounding achievements of mathematics of the twenty-first century.” says Dorian Goldfeld, a mathematician at Columbia University, New York. Mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University, Japan claims to have proved the abc conjecture. It was one of the unsolved problems in number theory. The abc conjecture needs the concept of radicals to be understood. A radical of a number $n$, $rad(n)$ is the multiplication of the prime numbers dividing $n$ (e.g. $ 360 = 2^3 \cdot 3^2 \cdot 5$, then $rad(360) = 2 \cdot 3 \cdot 5 = 30$). The abc conjecture then states that, given three integers $a$, $b$, and $c$, such that $a+b=c$, the number $ \frac{rad(abc)^r}{c} $ is always greater than 0 for any $r>1$. The proof of this theorem is split between 4 papers and is based on many others, so it might take a while to verify, but Mochizuki was known for his deep mathematics proof and provides lot of confidence. The proof of this theorem will not only help solving similar problems in future, but also solves many other problems, such as the famous Fermat's Last Theorem.

First visible-light evidence for gravitational waves:  before this discovery, an evidence for the general theory of relativity in strong gravitational fields was the measurements of binary pulsars' (a bright x-ray source) periodicity. This was achieved measuring the shrink in the period of revolution, given by the loss of gravitational waves. For the first time, the model including Einstein's general relativity has been tested in a pair of white dwarves, which has spectrum in the visible light and a significantly lower mass. Direct detection of gravitational waves could be possible with an ambitious experiment involving building an interferometer into space with arms separated a million kilometers, but connected through lasers.

Proximity-induced high-temperature superconductivity using Scotch tape:  Scotch tape is proving to be a good friend to physicists, lately. After the discovery (following a Physics Nobel Prize in 2010) of an easier production of graphene, using Scotch tape, by Andre Geim, a research group from University of Toronto discovered another use of Scotch tape. High-temperature superconductivity is a property of a few materials only, which allows them to show superconductive properties at room temperature, without overheating and losing energy. Cuprates show this property, but were believed to be impossible to be incorporated as superconductors. Then, other techniques, as proximity effects were used to induce superconductivity (from Cuprates) into semiconductors, but this requires the two materials to be close in nearly perfect contact. Cuprates cannot be fabricated that way (chemically), hence here comes the tape: the team used it to tape glass slides and Cuprates to topological insulators, known to have semiconducting properties as a whole, but to be very metallic on the surface. This induced semi-conductivity into the the topological insulators, making it a first. These semi-conductors can be used to improve energy efficiency in quantum computation.

Heisenberg's uncertainty might not be that uncertain:  the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is one of the biggest pillars of quantum mechanics. A team from University of Toronto built a new experiment involving entangled photon pairs in order to try to determine the "indeterminacy" of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg is still right, but the quantitative aspect of the uncertainty was never singularly tested. According to results, the "outcome" blurred out less than expected.

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 31/08/12

Neil, tired but happy after the "walk" on the moon, in the Eagle lunar module still landed on the Moon

Neil Armstrong is dead:  Neil did not survive after complications of an operation on blocked coronary arteries, on 25 August 2012. The man that set the first step on the moon, announcing the famous line: "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" survived 82 years, but did not live in the shadow of his big mission. Before working in space and going to the moon, he was between the top pilots in the world. After, he decided to teach in Cincinnati University, continuing to inspire young students into the wonders of aeronautics. The news of his death saddened not just the US, but the whole world.

Fermilab proposes plans for neutrino experiment:  having served the world of particle physics thanks to its Tevatron, a proton-antiproton collider, Fermilab is proposing a new big experiment. Tevatron closed due to lack of funds and the advent of the bigger LHC at CERN, Geneva. Fermilab proposed a new neutrino experiment five months ago, which budget would have been 1.9 billion dollars. Due to the amount of money required, they were asked to rework their plans and on the 28th of August, they proposed a new plan, requiring only 789 million dollars. The new experiment would be called Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) and would research on one of the most mysterious particles: neutrinos, its oscillations (between three of his families: muon, electron and tau neutrinos) and differences between neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, which could shed some light on the CP violation, a fundamental law which could explain why more matter than antimatter exists in the universe.

Ice cover in arctic seas reaches new low:  a satellite survey by NASA reported that ice cover in the arctic seas reached a new low on August 2012, taken from a sample of recordings since 1979. It is also expected to be lower on September. Scientists at NASA say the increased sea ice lost is due to the increased temperatures last year. The survey recorded a surface of 1.58 million square miles, from 1.61 million square miles in September 2007. Professor Peter Wadhams, from Cambridge University, reported to BBC News that models and calculations show that the arctic sea could become ice-free by 2015 or 2016. The alarmist view of the professor has been criticized in the past, but this new measurement could show hints toward this prediction. The ice cover getting thinner is a positive feedback system - which accelerates when it starts - as warmer temperatures caused by less ice in the seas allows the generation of storms which destroys more ice and accelerate its melt. The implications of ice-free artic seas are serious, as lack of ice would decrease the reflected light by the planet increasing temperatures even further, and causing permafrost to melt, which would release copious amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

NASA plans new mars mission:  just after a few weeks from the launch of Curiosity, the new mars rover, NASA announces plans a 425 million dollars lander which scope would be drilling into the red planet to probe its mantle, crust and core. The analysis of the interior of Mars would help understand how it evolved from the stage of incandescent ball of magma. Earth's interiors have been unveiled analyzing seismic activity, but the structure of the other rocky planets (Venus, Mars and Mercury) is mostly unknown. Mars is big enough to have developed a crust, mantle and core, but does not show the expected tectonic activity.

Fortnightly Science News Digest - 15/08/12

NASA's Curiosity rover landed safely on Mars grounds:  on the 5th of August, 10:31pm PDT, after 7 minutes of terror, the newest NASA's jewel safely landed on the Mars surface. The landing itself was already a big mission and a show of the finest engineering, as the delicate equipment inside the capsule approaching Mars needed to decelerate from 21,000 kph to 0 kph without crashing on the ground. This required different systems to make the landing safe, but everything went well and the rover already sent the first high-resolution pictures from the red planet. The mission is one of NASA's biggest on Mars, due to its size and the funds spent on it. Its aim is to determine whether Mars hosted life once (or still!). The mission will last 2 years, but the plutonium on board Curiosity can provide energy up to 14 years. Hopefully, it will serve as well as Spirit.

Virtual sensation comes closer:  scientists at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign experimented a new device which could recreate virtual sensory touch using an electronic "fingertip". The device would consist of a silicon hollow tube to be placed around the fingers with a circuit inside which could provide electrical stimuli to the fingertips simulating sensation. These circuits were built only on flat surfaces, making impossible to give a full sensory experience. The new study is experimenting and opening the way to provide sensations such as temperature, pressure and texture. The potential applications are variate, the first being giving sensation back to people who have lost it due to burnt skin.

Triumph expression is universally recognized:  having seen many, recently thanks to London 2012, a study suggest that the expression of olympic triumph is an expression which is universally recognized, next to anger and happiness. Psychologists noted that it is present in cultures which have nothing in common and are different on many grounds.

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 30/07/12

Most powerful laser blast achieved:  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a fusion research laboratory, blasted their fuel pellet with the most powerful laser beam attained in history. The laboratory, holding already the record for the biggest and most powerful laser, generated 300 trillion watts of power. The technique used by the laboratory is firing 192 lasers within a few trillionths of a second onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target in order to reach pressures, inside the pellet, high enough to generate fusion. This would release an enormous amount of energy, which is cleaner than fission. Although we can already make fusion happen, the real problem in the fusion energy research is to take useful energy from it. Nobody managed yet to do it, but scientists at LLNL hope to reach a break-even point (in which energy expenditure to fire the lasers equals energy income from fusion) by the end of the year.


Bacteria consumes waste and produces energy:  A new microbial is capable of consuming organic waste and produce energy at the same time. The microbial consumes waste and an energetic potential is the end product. This technique constitutes about 2% of annual electrical American power consumption, but most of the energy produced is used to power the facilities. This is not a problem as the microbial still work on consuming waste. Unfortunately there are limits for these bacteria, as only organic waste can be consumed.


Furthest spiral galaxy discovered:  Hubble spots a new furthest spiral galaxy. About two-thirds of bright galaxies discovered is spiral. When astronomers at the university of Toronto discovered it, they immediately thought of an error, being 10.7 billion light-years distant from Earth. The distance was calculated from the light-shift and that puts the galaxy to an astounding age of 3 billion years after the Big Bang. The age of the universe now is around 14 billion years and that would make this galaxy the earliest spiral galaxy every found.

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 15/07/12

More hints towards the Higgs:  as you might have already heard, there is lots of excitement in the field of Particle Physics because of a new discovery. As announced on a CERN seminar on 4 July, a new particle at 126 GeV of mass was discovered to 5-sigmas. The particle resembles a lot the Standard Model Higgs, which is a particle predicted by the Higgs mechanism. This model assumes that we live immersed in a field which gives mass to particles and the Higgs would be a ripple in this field, that can be detected at particle accelerators. It is not certain yet, though, if this new particle is the Higgs we are looking for. For more info about the discovery itself, you can check out my in-depth easy-language article.

Arsenic bacteria might not live without phosphorous after all:  on December 2010, NASA claimed an extraordinary news, the news that life could substitute arsenic to phosphorous. There are 6 elements, without which life cannot exist, and phosphorous is one of them. Research by NASA showed that some bacteria were substituting phosphorous with arsenic and managing to live with arsenic. People were ready to "expand definition of life", but further research is showing that bacteria do not replace all the phosphorous with arsenic and there might be evidence that these bacteria cannot survive with no phosphorous at all. NASA stated that research is not complete yet.

Ocean acidification in California and CO2 in the atmosphere:  scientists from Gruber's group investigate, using a model, the acidification of the waters near the California Current System, which are susceptible to ocean acidification. The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere threatens the health of the ocean and its variate ecosystem, changing the saturation state of Argonite. If you still doubt about CO2 high levels having an effect on Earth, science says they do: http://www.co2science.org/.

Magnetic cells isolated for the first time:  magnetic cells are found in animals, such as birds and fishes. There are claims that these cells are used to perceive the Earth's magnetic field and have a sense of orientation (literally a sixth-sense based on magnetism). Walker et al. of the University of Auckland, performing studies on trout's nose cells, managed to isolate cells containing magnetite, which is the strongest magnet. The task was hard to accomplish because of the scarce availability of magnetic cells. As their magnetic field could interfere with each others one, each one of them is a distance apart, so only a few of those are found over a thousand normal cells. The magnetite found by the group was stronger than they expected and could also be used to get a sense of latitude and longitude (a small GPS). The next step is now to find whether this magnetic cells are linked to the brain and used for orientation.

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 30/06/12

Tractor Beams might be a reality:  the idea is be based on negative radiation pressure, using just light. In order to drag an object, negative pressure is needed. Previous ideas implemented gravitational pressure, heating air or inducing electrical or magnetic charges in objects. The latest proposal implements pressure differences created by light. This is already used in experiments as optical tweezers and can be used for making "tractor beams" thanks to unusual materials with negative refractive index. The mechanism depends on light that has group velocity and phase velocity travelling in opposite directions, which are able to create negative pressure. The applications can also span into the medical field, where it can be implemented in lung surgery as suction device.


Fuel cell runs on brain power:  the very idea under The Matrix movie might be right after all. Of course, with its limits. Scientists at MIT have developed an implantable fuel cell that generates electricity from the cerebrospinal fluid around the brain through glucose oxidation. This cell, unfortunately, with its hundreds of microwatts produced would not be able to power an electrical device through our body, but it can be a first step to more powerful machine being able to allow paralized patients to regain control of their arm and legs. The cell, which looks like a computer chip, strips electrons off the glucose and uses them to generate electricity.


Fracking can cause Earthquakes:  the National Research Council reports that fracking is linked to an increase in earthquakes magnitude and can even anticipate earthquakes which were due at a later time. The practice of fracking consist in pumping pressurised water and chemicals into cracks in the terrain and can create conducts to oil or gas reservoir. Shall we stop fracking then? Not really, as it is not the practice of fracking itself which causes the increase quakes chance, but the fact that the wastewater is stored into deep sandstone or other formations for permanent disposal, instead that on the surface. Most troubling, the committee found that there is no set of industry best practice in the operation, which might complicate the action of establishing rules on it.


Change in exoplanet atmosphere:  an international team of astronomers detected an abrupt change in an exoplanet atmosphere, using data from Hubble telescope. This exoplanet has been named HD 189733b and it was discovered in 2010 and classified as a gas giant bigger than Jupiter with an orbit very close to its sun, making it just a bit more than 2 Earth days. This incandescent fast ball of gas has been recently discovered to lose part of its atmosphere at rates of a thousand of tons a second! This was due to a solar flare, which due to the proximity of the planet made this catastrophic change to happen! The planet will still be a gas giant, since that much loss in gas is like a blow of wind for such big planets, but it was the first time we detected such a phenomenon and it is interesting to study planets with sudden changes in their atmosphere.


Chinese crew in space:  for the first time in history, on June 17 the Chinese launched and docked a crewed capsule in space. It is only the third nation being able to do that (US and Russia being ahead). This is a fantastic progress for Chinese space exploration and surely means that money and effort have been put to achieve it, and will be in the future. On the other side, Chinese effort in space exploration can be a worrying sign of a race similar to the one between US and Russia during the cold war. There is no doubt that it brings innovation, but space was becoming a peaceful target, especially with the construction of the ISS. It is good to know that there is another country being able to perform manned missions into space, especially now that cuts in NASA budget are killing most of the space missions in the US. Hopefully, China will be collaborative to space exploration with other nations, rather than an adversary.

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 15/06/12

Welcome to the very first FSND (Forthnightly Science News Digest)!

Every two weeks, I will group and give a brief comment about the news that I think are most relevant in science, so that you don't need to hunt for them or you won't feel ashamed the next time your geek friend will tell you "oh, have you heard...".

The past two weeks have been quite full of good exciting news and I've struggled to keep it short, but here we go:

Venus transit has happened:  it was all over the news the past week, so it was difficult to miss, but on the 6-7th of June, the Sun, Venus and Earth were in conjunction, which means that the Sun was "eclipsed" by Venus. Since the eclipse would be tiny, we call that transit, but we can still see the shadow of Venus passing in front of the Sun, creating the opportunity for fantastic shots. Unfortunately, if you want to see it again, you would have to wait until 2117, so this was a one-chance in a lifetime event. The strange periodicity of the transit is given by a simple recipe: Venus year being about 3/5 of Earth year and the Venus ecliptic being 3.4° tilted to the Earth ecliptic.
A peculiar event related to the transit puts some light on the thick Venus atmosphere (literally). A few days before the transit astronomer Daniele Gasparri took a shot of Venus, showing something we are not used to see: instead of seen one side of Venus illuminated by the Sun (like crescent Moon) there is a ring surrounding Venus. This is caused by refracted light.
And if you want to know more about the history behind the event.


Speeding neutrinos are not speeding:  you might remember the other big news from OPERA in Gran Sasso laboratory claiming the speed of neutrinos being faster than the speed of light according to measurements. This has shaken the scientific community, as Einstein's theory of relativity is solid and now scientifically accepted, because it explains many phenomena which are otherwise unexplained.
On the 8th of June, at the Neutrino 2012 conference in Kyoto, Japan, the OPERA collaboration announced that according to later measurements, the speed of neutrinos is almost the same as the speed of light (but not faster for sure). This is good news, even if kind of expected for two reasons: the precision of the experiment being ridiculously high for such speeds and Einstein's theory being rock solid. Case closed, now OPERA can focus on its real objective: finding tau neutrinos.


Higgs hunt is coming close to an end:  CERN is accumulating enough luminosity to be close to the statistical significance of a discovery for the Higgs boson. After the announcement of the past December there was lots of excitement about a peak building up in both ATLAS and CMS detectors around the masses of 124-126 GeV. It was a blinded experiment, meaning that ATLAS and CMS did not share any data in order to eliminate bias on the measurements.
Data collected over this months will be analysed in the summer and a major scientific achievement could be made this year: the discovery (or not) of the Higgs boson. Both outcomes are exciting and provide more research in both directions.
Even if I have personally worked in a group at ATLAS about W and Z bosons, and consequently the Higgs, my hope is that the Higgs boson will not be found and the peak will disappear into the background with enough statistics. My reasons for that is that the Higgs mechanism is a contrived theory in many ways and the theory being true, I think, would be a miracle itself, as it was developed as desperate theoretical model to explain the masses of the W and Z bosons.
Still, any news on the topic will be really exciting and the discovery of the most hideous particle would surely be something to celebrate and many people say, a sure Nobel Prize for Peter Higgs.


Fusion research funding restored in the US:  fusion research has been a dubious field for decades now. Since its advent, which predicted unlimited amount of energy, there has been only predictions of unlimited postponements. It is known, as a joke, that fusion has always been 20 years ahead. That is true, but it is also true that a success in fusion energy production would seriously solve the world's energy problem once and for all.
Two days ago, US Reps. Rush Holt visited the Princeton Plasma laboratory to announce that the $76 million funding has been restored for fusion energy research.
This is excellent news, as I think that even if fusion is not possible in reality, we need to get a clear answer, very soon, about its feasibility. A negative answer would be sad, but at least we could be able to move on and focus on alternatives. Holt said: “Fusion research is key to America’s energy future, and we are proud to have this important work in New Jersey”. I would replace America with World and I would agree on that. I hope that big news in the clean energies field will come soon.