Magnetotactic Bacteria: Bacteria which can detect magnetic field.

In nature, organisms use a variety of methods to figure out where they are and where they need to be going. Plants use sunlight and the force of gravity to determine which direction they should grow, birds migrate in part using the sun and stars to guide their path, and we humans can simply ask for directions at the nearest gas station. Some organisms use the earth's geomagnetic field to orient themselves and navigate through their environment. Organisms that use the earth's geomagnetic field have some type of internal compass. The smallest organisms that use this navigational method are called magnetotactic bacteria.

Magnetotactic bacteria were discovered in 1975 by Richard P. Blakemore. Blakemore noticed that some of the bacteria that he observed under a microscope always moved to the same side of the slide. If he held a magnet near the slide, the bacteria would move towards the north end of the magnet. These bacteria are able to do this because they make tiny, iron-containing, magnetic particles. Each of these particles is a magnet with a north pole and a south pole. The bacteria arrange these tiny magnets in a line to make one long magnet. They use this magnet as a compass to align themselves to the earth's geomagnetic field.


Why would these bacteria need a compass? Like many other types of bacteria, magnetotactic bacteria don't like oxygen very much. They will move away from areas with high oxygen and toward areas with low or no oxygen. In an aquatic environment, the level of oxygen decreases as one moves deeper into the water. So, magnetotactic bacteria like to live in the deeper parts of their aquatic environments. They use their magnetic compass to tell them which way is down.

How do they do this? It has to do with the direction of the geomagnetic field. In the Northern Hemisphere; the geomagnetic north actually points down at an angle. So, magnetotactic bacteria that are aligned to this field are also pointing down. By moving north along this field, they move deeper into the water, and into areas with less oxygen. Interestingly, in the Southern Hemisphere, the geomagnetic north actually points up and at an angle. So, magnetotactic bacteria in this half of the world are "south-seeking", which points them downward. At the equator, the geomagnetic north doesn't point up or down, so the magnetotactic bacteria found there are a mixture of north-seeking and south-seeking bacteria.

Scientists are also interested in practical applications involving these magnetic microbes. While it isn't likely we'll be using these bacteria to stick notes to our refrigerators, they could prove to be useful to humans. The tiny magnets that these simple organisms make are far superior to those produced by people. So, scientists and engineers are trying to develop ways to use this magnetic material in places where tiny magnets are much better than big magnets.

Artist creates beautiful indoor clouds

Cloud gazing is no longer an activity reserved for the outdoors, thanks to these life-like but surreal indoor clouds created by artist Berndnaut Smilde.

The clouds are generated using a smoke machine, but Smilde must carefully monitor a room's humidity and atmosphere in order to get the smoke to hang so elegantly, and with such life-like form. Backlighting is used to bring out shadows from within the cloud, to give it that look of a looming and ominous rain cloud.

What Is Fire Glass?

Fire glass is a product which is designed to be used in gas fireplaces to mask the housing of the gas jets and to help reflect light and heat. It is designed as an alternative to the rocks and fake logs which are often used in gas fireplaces. Numerous companies make and sell fire glass, and consumers should be aware that because there are some safety concerns involved with glass, they should purchase this product from a reputable company.

Converting sea water to Navy jet fuel

Navy scientists and researchers say they are close to a breakthrough toward turning seawater into jet fuel.

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory is working to extract the carbon dioxide and produce hydrogen gas from the seawater. The key is then converting the carbon dioxide and hydrogen into hydrocarbons that can then be used to develop JP-5 fuel stock.

JP-5 is what fuels Navy jet fighters and results in multiple fuel transfers to aircraft carriers to maintain their on board fuel stock. Producing that fuel from the abundant sea water would save the Navy from executing those sometimes risky transfers.

“The potential payoff is the ability to produce JP-5 fuel stock at sea reducing the logistics tail on fuel delivery with no environmental burden and increasing the Navy’s energy security and independence,” said Heather Willauer, a research chemist with NRL.

Navy officials estimate the process used to convert the seawater to fuel would cost the Navy between $3 and $6 per gallon.

             

Earth-sized planet in Alpha Centauri and another planet with 4 Suns !

Sadly, no. But one of Earth’s nearest stellar neighbours has an Earth-sized planet going round it

_EXOPLANETS_—those that orbit stars other than the sun*—are one of the hottest topics in astronomy. *The first was found in 1992, going round a neutron star (a strange beast made of matter as dense as that in an atomic nucleus) 1,000 light-years from Earth with the rather pedestrian name of PSR 1257 +12. Planets going round more conventional stars turned up three years later, and since then the initial trickle of discoveries has become a flood. The present tally is 841 confirmed (through a mix of ground-based searches and space-based telescopes) and another couple of thousand probables.

So it takes a lot, these days, for news of a freshly discovered planet to raise eyebrows. But it still happens from time to time. And October 16th was one of those times. On that day a paper was published by Nature, in which a team from the European Southern Observatory claimed to have found evidence of an Earth-sized planet orbiting a star called Alpha Centauri B.

If the name sounds familiar, that is because, at just over four light-years away, the Alpha Centauri system—a group of three gravitationally bound stars—is the sun’s nearest neighbour. The planet, therefore, is not only the closest to Earth ever discovered, it is just about as close to Earth as any exoplanet can be. Only if it were orbiting Proxima Centauri, the third member of the system after Alpha Centauri A and B, could it be closer. It is small, too, with a minimum estimated mass just 1.13 times that of Earth. And the star it circles is very like the sun: 93% as massive, and with a surface temperature just a few hundred degrees cooler.

There, though, the similarities with Earth end. The new planet is very close to its parent star, completing an orbit every 3.2 Earth days. (By way of comparison Mercury, the scorched innermost planet in the Solar System, has a year that is 88 days long.) It is also almost certainly tidally locked to its parent, meaning that one side is constantly baked and blasted by stellar radiation, while the other faces the freezing blackness of space. Life on such a body is, presumably, out of the question.

Some needle; some haystack
How did they find the planet?

That Xavier Dumusque (the paper's lead author) and his colleagues were able to find the thing at all, however, is newsworthy of itself. They ran their quarry to ground using what is known as the radial-velocity method, which examines stars for the tiny wobble caused by the gravitational pull exerted by the planets that circle them. The method itself is well established. But the smaller a planet relative to its star, the smaller the wobble it induces, which makes looking for Earth-sized tiddlers with this technique particularly difficult. To be exact, the team managed to discover a wobble of 0.5 metres a second in a star that is roughly 41,300,000,000,000km away, the most precise such measurement ever taken.

Indeed, the tininess of the measurement is cause for caution among some planet-hunters, made wary by past experiences of planets being announced and then evaporating on closer inspection. In this case, a great deal of statistical gymnastics was necessary to extract the wobble caused by the planet from the bigger wobbles that arise from the star’s internal churnings, noise in the instruments, the motion of Earth (and therefore of the scientists and their telescope) through space, and contamination of the signal with light from Alpha Centauri A, the biggest and brightest star in the Alpha Centauri system. “My reaction to this paper is...maybe,” says Hugh Jones, a planet-hunter at the University of Hertfordshire, in Britain. “A very small signal is being extracted from a not particularly quiet star, with a very nearby companion that is three times brighter.”

Others are more sanguine. Gregory Laughlin, of the University of California, Santa Cruz—a pioneer of planet-hunting—argues that were these results from any star less famous than Alpha Centauri, they would be accepted without a murmur. Debra Fischer, of Yale, who has also been searching for Earth-sized planets around nearby stars, has already analysed some of Dr Dumusque's data with help from Rebekah Dawson, a graduate student. “We do not rule out the possibility that this signal is real,” she says, with guarded optimism.

Dr Dumusque’s team, for their part, reckon that the probability of a false alarm is less than one in a thousand. Their observations were painstaking, taking place over four years. One condition of their paper’s publication by Nature was that their data be made immediately available to other researchers, who will be able to double-check the team’s sums.

Assuming the planet is real, other astronomers will be keen to study it further. As Dr Dumusque's team point out in their paper, enough exoplanets have been found for people to begin detecting statistical patterns. One pattern seems to be that if a star has one smallish planet, it is quite likely to have several more. So confirmation of the team’s discovery would boost the odds that more worlds are circling Alpha Centauri B, perhaps even in the so-called habitable zone where the temperature would allow liquid water to exist on the surface. The team's technique is sensitive enough to detect a planet about four times the mass of Earth within the habitable zone, although it would require around a decade of observations to confirm.

The radial-velocity method used Dr Dumusque and his colleagues will reveal the presence of a planet and its mass. But in order to characterise it better, astronomers will be looking for a transit, in which the planet crosses in front of its sun, as seen from Earth, slightly dimming the star's light. Whether they will get one is a matter of luck—it depends on the orientation of the planet's orbit relative to Earth. But if they do, the dimming will allow them to estimate the planet's size. And because the new planet is so close, it may even be possible to isolate sunlight that has travelled through its atmosphere—if it has one. That would give astronomers a list of the chemicals present in the atmosphere, which would in turn provide hints about the planets’ geology. And, to top off the chain of speculation, Alpha Centauri's relative proximity means it is just about conceivable that, in the far future, a sufficiently committed and well-financed group of scientists could send a probe to take a closer look—although the trip would take several decades at the very least.

Something new under the suns

Exciting as Dr Dumusque's news was, not all eyes have been turned to Alpha Centauri. On October 15th, at a planetary-science conference in Reno, Nevada, hosted by the American Astronomical Society, another unusual planet was announced. Named PH1, it is notable both for the fact that it boasts four suns and for the method by which it was found. As is described in a paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal by Meg Schwamb, another astronomer at Yale, and her team, it was discovered by two members of Planet Hunters (whence its name), a web-based citizen-science project in which ordinary people are given access to data from NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope and encouraged to look for planets that the computer programs which crunch Kepler’s data might have missed.

The planet hunters in question are Kian Jek, a web developer, and Robert Gagliano, a doctor. The discovery was a textbook example of the usefulness of having people check the data alongside computers, says Chris Lintott, an astronomer at Oxford who helps to manage the Planet Hunters project. Kepler detects planets by noting the drop in light caused when one of them passes in front of its parent star. That works well for single-star systems, and can even be made to work with binaries. In PH1’s case, however, the variations in light generated by a planet interacting with four separate stars were enough to baffle the computers—but not the eagle-eyed humans.

Besides being fascinating in its own right, such exotic finds are a good test of astronomers’ theories about how planets form. In PH1’s case, its four stars are actually a pair of binaries. Conventional planetary-formation theory holds that worlds condense out of a disc of dust and rubble early in a star’s life. But in this case, “the second binary would sit right at the edge of the protoplanetary disc,” notes Dr Lintott.

Computer models suggest that the gravitational influence of the second pair of stars ought to disrupt the disc and prevent the formation of planets. Reality, in this case, disagrees with the models—and that is how science advances.

The Door to Hell: 41 years and still burning !!!!!

While drilling in 1971, Soviet geologists tapped into a cavern filled with natural gas.The ground beneath the drilling rig collapsed, leaving a large hole with a diameter of 70 metres (230 ft). To avoid poisonous gas discharge, it was decided the best solution was burn it off.Geologists had hoped the fire would use all the fuel in a matter of days, but the gas is still burning today. Locals have dubbed the cavern "The Door to Hell".


   "The Door To Hell"

The Solar Neutrino Problem

For more than twenty years, the Homestake Solar Neutrino Experiment in the Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota has been attempting to measure neutrino fluxes from space; in particular, this experiment has been gathering information on solar neutrino fluxes. The results of this experiment have been checked against predictions made by standard solar models and it has been discovered that only one-third of the expected solar neutrino flux has been detected. This "Where are the missing neutrinos?" question is known as the Solar Neutrino Problem.

And it is not just the Homestake experiment that is detecting a shortage of neutrinos. Several other experiments, including Kamiokande II, GALLEX, and SAGE, have noticed a definite neutrino shortfall.

This list explores a variety of fascinating scientific facts that you probably are unaware of. Science is still a very mysterious subject so there are millions of trivial facts about it this will be the first of many scientific fact lists in the future.

  "The Human Heart"

1. There are 62,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body – laid end to end they would circle the earth 2.5 times.

2. At over 2000 kilometers long, The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth.

3. The risk of being struck by a falling meteorite for a human is one occurrence every 9,300 years.

4. A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.

5. A typical hurricane produces the energy equivalent of 8,000 one megaton bombs.

6. Blood sucking hookworms inhabit 700 million people worldwide.

7. The highest speed ever achieved on a bicycle is 166.94 mph, by Fred Spielberg.

8. We can produce laser light a million times brighter than sunshine.

9. 65% of those with autism are left handed.

 "The Finnish Pine Tree"

10. The combined length of the roots of a Finnish pine tree is over 30 miles.

11. The oceans contain enough salt to cover all the continents to a depth of nearly 500 feet.

12. The interstellar gas cloud Sagittarius B contains a billion, billion, billion liters of alcohol [J.F. Rater is planning to move there in the near future].

 "The Polar Bear In The Arctic Region"

13. Polar Bears can run at 25 miles an hour and jump over 6 feet in the air.

 14. 60-65 million years ago dolphins and humans shared a common ancestor.

15. Polar Bears are nearly undetectable by infrared cameras, due to their transparent fur.

16. The average person accidentally eats 430 bugs each year of their life.

17. A single rye plant can spread up to 400 miles of roots underground.

"Mercury,The Closest Planet To The Sun"  

18. The temperature on the surface of Mercury exceeds 430 degrees C during the day, and, at night, plummets to minus 180 degrees centigrade.

19. The evaporation from a large oak or beech tree is from ten to twenty-five gallons in twenty-four hours.

20. Butterflies taste with their hind feet, and their taste sensation works on touch – this allows them to determine whether a leaf is edible.

My blog~~~~

Science for me is everything. It is the most essential part of my life because I think that I won't be able to live without learning at least one new thing a day.So I think I can share things with you often.  Science holds in front of us as a real life examples of vast aspects of the the world.Like, one of the greatest scientists, Dr. Albert Einstein Said, "Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."

"....Explore The Possibilities To Explore More...."