An international team unveiled the origin of the giant gas ring in the Leo group of galaxies. With the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, the scientists were able to detect an optical signature of the ring corresponding to star forming regions. This observation rules out the primordial nature of the gas, which is of galactic origin. Thanks to numerical simulations made at CEA, a scenario for the formation of this ring has been proposed: a violent collision between two galaxies, slightly more than one billion years ago. The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Read the rest of Mysterious Giant Gas Ring Explained .....

http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/en/news/LeoRing/
http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/en/news/LeoRing/

A Star Is Born ... But How? Columbia researchers reveal the simple, key chemical formula enabling the formation of early stars Created in the first three minutes after the Big Bang, hydrogen and helium gave rise to all other elements in the universe. Stars made this possible. Through nuclear fusion, stars generated elements such as carbon, oxygen, magnesium and all the other raw materials necessary for making planets and ultimately life. But how did the first stars come to be? It all hinges on hydrogen atoms coming together to form hydrogen molecules. New research from Columbia University sheds light on this process .....


http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=117262&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=117262&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click

Communicating With The Universe

July 4, 2010 by Amara D. Angelica

Over the next million years, a descendant of the Internet will maintain contact with inhabited planets throughout our galaxy and begin to spread out into the larger universe, linking up countless new or existing civilizations into the Universenet, a network of ultimate intelligence ...

http://www.kurzweilai.net/communicating-with-the-universe?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=446afe0ae9-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email
http://www.kurzweilai.net/communicating-with-the-universe?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=446afe0ae9-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email

Using super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet, Washington State University researchers have created a compact, never-before-seen material capable of storing vast amounts of energy.

“It is the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy,” says Choong-Shik Yoo, a WSU chemistry professor and lead author of results published in the journal Nature Chemistry. “It shows it is possible to store mechanical energy into the chemical energy of a material with such strong chemical bonds. Possible future applications include creating a new class of energetic materials or fuels, an energy storage device, super-oxidizing materials for destroying chemical and biological agents, and high-temperature superconductors.”

The researchers created the material in a diamond anvil cell, a small, two-inch by three-inch-diameter …

http://wsunews.wsu.edu/pages/publications.asp?Action=Detail&PublicationID=20580&TypeID=1
http://wsunews.wsu.edu/pages/publications.asp?Action=Detail&PublicationID=20580&TypeID=1

A Data Deluge Swamps Science Historians



The next generation of experiments, like the Large Hadron Collider,
above, a powerful particle accelerator beneath the border of Switzerland and France, will be even more data-intensive.

London

In a vault beneath the British Library here, Jeremy Leighton John grapples with a formidable challenge in digital life. Dr. John, the library's first curator of eManuscripts, is working on ways to archive the deluge of computer data swamping scientists so that future generations can authenticate today's discoveries and better understand the people who made them.

His task is only getting harder. Scientists who collaborate via email, Google, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook are leaving fewer paper trails, while the information technologies that do document their accomplishments can be incomprehensible to other researchers and historians trying to read them. Computer-intensive experiments and the software used to analyze their output generate millions of gigabytes of data that are stored or retrieved by electronic systems that quickly become obsolete.

read more here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125139942345664387.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125139942345664387.html

Physicists demonstrate 100-fold speed increase in optical quantum memory



As with today's computers, future quantum computers will require more than just quantum information processing; they will also require methods to store and retrieve the quantum information. For this reason, physicists have been studying different types of quantum memories, which are capable of controllably storing and releasing photons. However, these memories still face several challenges in areas including storage time, retrieval efficiency, the ability to store multiple photons, and bandwidth.

An international team of physicists has achieved data rates that exceed 1 GHz, more than 100 times greater than the speed of existing quantum memories. The method also offers long coherence times of several microseconds. A signal containing the information and a write pulse are sent together into a cesium vapor cell. The vapor turns the...

http://www.physorg.com/news189320461.html
http://www.physorg.com/news189320461.html

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/

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

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

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 & apos;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

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

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

_


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/

_

Rich exoplanet system discovered

Astronomers have discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets that orbit a star called HD 10180, which is much like our own Sun.

The star is 127 light years away, in the southern constellation of Hydrus.

The researchers used the European Southern Observatory (Eso) to monitor light emitted from the system and identify and characterise the planets.

They say this is the "richest" system of exoplanets - planets outside our own Solar System - ever found.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11070991

National Science Foundation (NSF) Announces Future Internet
Architecture Awards

Awards will help develop new ideas and innovations towards
the development of a more robust, secure and reliable Internet


August 27, 2010

The Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today awards for four new projects, each worth up to $8 million over three years, as part of the Future Internet Architecture (FIA) program.

These awards will enable researchers at dozens of institutions across the country to pursue new ways to build a more trustworthy and robust Internet.

"As our reliance on a secure and highly dependable information technology infrastructure continues to increase, it is no longer clear that emerging and future needs of our society can be met by the current trajectory of incremental changes to the current Internet." said Ty Znati, director of the Computer and Network Systems Division within CISE. "Thus our call to the research community to propose new Internet architectures that hold promise for the future."

Earlier this year, NSF challenged the network science research community to look past the constraints of today's networks and engage in collaborative, long-range, transformative thinking inspired by lessons learned and promising new research ideas. The goal, according to Znati, was to encourage the community to design and experiment with new comprehensive network architectures and networking concepts that can meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century, taking into consideration the larger social, economic and legal issues that arise from the interplay between the Internet and society.

The four basic research and system design projects funded under FIA explore different dimensions of the network architecture design space and emphasize different visions of future networks. NSF anticipates that the teams will explore new directions and a diverse range of research thrusts within their research agenda but also work together to enhance and possibly integrate architectural thinking, concepts and components, paving the way to a comprehensive trustworthy network architecture of the future.

"Over the next three years the FIA effort will include the design, prototyping, and evaluation of different aspects of network architectures," said Victor Frost, Program Director for the FIA projects.

The FIA projects include leaders in computer science and electrical engineering as well as experts in law, economics, security, privacy, and public policy. The program will support 60 researchers at over 30 institutions across the country.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECTS

Named Data Networking
Principle Investigator: Lixia Zhang, UCLA
Collaborating Institutions: Colorado State University, PARC, University of Arizona, University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign, UC Irvine, University of Memphis, UC San Diego, Washington University, and Yale University


read more here ...

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=117611&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=117611&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click

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

500 years of science, reason and critical thinking
“to celebrate the achievements of the scientific method
through the age of reason, the enlightenment and modernity.”

Crispian Jago has developed a draft timeline (based on an original London underground map) showing the last 500 years of science, reason and critical thinking “to celebrate the achievements of the scientific method through the age of reason, the enlightenment and modernity.”

Some of the lines are still sketchy, such as the one for Mathematics and Computing. Jago welcomes comments

read more here ...

http://crispian-jago.blogspot.com/2010/08/modern-science-map.html
http://crispian-jago.blogspot.com/2010/08/modern-science-map.html

Tuesday September 07, 2010

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

Pushing ions through carbon nanotubes

The tiny, multitalented carbon tubes can carry single molecules, one at a time.

Anne Trafton, MIT News Office September 10, 2010

For the first time, a team of MIT chemical engineers has observed single ions marching through a tiny carbon-nanotube channel. Such channels could be used as extremely sensitive detectors or as part of a new water-desalination system. They could also allow scientists to study chemical reactions at the single-molecule level.

Carbon nanotubes — tiny, hollow cylinders whose walls are lattices of carbon atoms — are about 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. Since their discovery nearly 20 years ago, researchers have experimented with them as batteries, transistors, sensors and solar cells, among other applications.

In the Sept. 10 issue of Science, MIT researchers report that charged molecules, such as the sodium and chloride ions that form when salt is dissolved in water, can not only flow rapidly through carbon nanotubes, but also can, under some conditions, do so one at a time, like people taking turns crossing a bridge. The research was led by associate professor Michael Strano.

The new system allows passage of much smaller molecules, over greater distances (up to half a millimeter), than any existing nanochannel. Currently, the most commonly studied nanochannel is a silicon nanopore, made by drilling a hole through a silicon membrane. However, these channels are much shorter than the new nanotube channels (the nanotubes are about 20,000 times longer), so they only permit passage of large molecules such as DNA or polymers — anything smaller would move too quickly to be detected.

“From a molecular perspective, these are exceptionally long distances. This bridging of the gap between nano and the larger world could open up opportunities for harnessing nanoscale phenomena for macroscale applications — from water purification to nanofluidic networks, sensing and fuel cells,” says Shekhar Garde, professor of chemical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who was not involved with the research.

read more here ...

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/nanotube-channels-0910.html?tmpl=component&print=1
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/nanotube-channels-0910.html?tmpl=component&print=1

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is sponsoring a workshop
this week on the past and next 50 years of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)

Watch SETI Web Webcast This Week - Click here

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is sponsoring a workshop this week on the past and next 50 years of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) an (SETI), and they are webcasting many of the sessions on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, September 13-15. The workshop featuring leading scientific researchers as well as authors, historians, religious leaders, and biologists. Viewers will be able to send questions to the presenters. The webcasts begin at 8:30 a.m., EDT, on September 13, 14, and 15, and can be watched above, or at this link

You can see the workshop schedule at this link

Drake will webcast his views on “SETI in 2061 and Beyond”, at 8:30 a.m., EDT, on September 15.

“This workshop focuses on a topic that has a profound influence on the way we view ourselves and our place in the Universe,” said Dr. Glen Langston, NRAO astronomer and workshop organizer. “We are pleased to present this to the public through the webcast.”

read more here ...

http://www.universetoday.com/73529/watch-seti-webcast-this-week/

http://www.gb.nrao.edu/OZMA@50/agenda.shtml