Giant landslides on Saturn’s icy moon makes scientists curious

A giant landslide on Iapetus reaches halfway across a 75-mile (120 kilometer) impact crater.(c) NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Planetary scientist Kelsi Singer initially studied satellite photographs of  Saturn’s icy moon Iapetus‘ surface looking for stress fractures in the moon’s ice, what she found in process however was far more interesting. Huge landslides, stretching across tens of miles across the moon’s surface were observed, not in one, but multiple locations, hinting this is a common phenomenon on the ice covered satellite. Very broad landslides have been recorded on Earth as well, although nowhere near this magnitude, and the study at hand might serve to hint towards the mechanisms involved in these natural formations.

Iapetus is one of the oddest cosmic bodies in the solar system. Barren, cold and mostly covered in very thick ice, the satellite presents a highly rugged terrain, with ridges that can reach as much as 12 miles in height or two times the altitude of Mount Everest. Like the ubiquitous yin-yang, the moon’s surface is half covered in darkness, while the other side is much brighter. Moreover, it has the most eccentric geometry out of all the solar system’s planets or moons, made evident by a mountainous ridge that bulges out at its equator – this is why it’s commonly referred to as the “walnut”.

Because of this incredibly odd topography, Iapetus  has more giant landslides than any Solar System body other than Mars. So far, evidence of 30 massive landslides have been found – 17 along crater walls and 13 along the giant equatorial ridge, however even more might be encountered if an exhaustive observation were to be performed.

“Not only is the moon out-of-round, but the giant impact basins are very deep, and there’s this great mountain ridge that’s 20km (12 miles) high, far higher than Mount Everest,” explained Prof William McKinnon, also from Washington University,.

“So there’s a lot of topography and it’s just sitting around, and then, from time to time, it gives way.”

The icy landslides are similar to long-runout landslides on Earth known as sturzstroms (German for fallstreams) – massive landslides can move up 20 to 30 times the height they fall from. Typically, on Earth, conventional landslides only travel around two times the height they fall from.

Apparently, the mechanism that governs the formation of these massive landslides, on Iapetus or here on Earth, has yet to reach an consensus from scientists. Various theories have been suggested from  riding on a cushion of trapped air, to sliding on groundwater or mud, to sliding on ice, or slipping caused by strong acoustic vibrations.

According to Singer, a graduate student in earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and lead author of the paper presently discussed, the massive landslides most likely  occur by frictional heating of the ice. Since it doesn’t have an atmosphere, the coefficient of friction – a measure of how much the slip-sliding of material in a landslide tends to slow it down – on Iapetus is far lower than expected for ice.

Despite the ice on Iapetus is as a solid as rock, scientists hypothesize that  tiny contact points between bits of ice debris in such a landslide may heat up considerably,leading to a thin layer of ice crystals that melts. This might cause the huge landslides on Saturn’s icy moon, but could also serve to explain how sturzstroms form on Earth.

“The landslides on Iapetus are a planet-scale experiment that we cannot do in a laboratory or observe on Earth,” Ms Singer said.

“They give us examples of giant landslides in ice, instead of rock, with a different gravity, and no atmosphere. So any theory of long-runout landslides on Earth must also work for avalanches on Iapetus.”

Electronics revolution?

It seems scientists have yet to draw the line on where graphene, man’s greatest material ever discovered, ceases to amaze with its new abilities, since apparently new properties and uses for the carbon allotrope are found constantly. Most of the contributions come fromUniversity of Manchester, where the material has been recognized for its true history-shaping potential and where a state-of-the-art National Graphene Institute is currently being built. The latest discovery, indeed, hails from the same Manchester University where scientists were baffled themselves to find that graphene, a 2D structured material, can be used as basic building block for creating 3D crystal structures which are not confined by what nature can produce. The potential impact this could have on the electronics industry development is significant, by increasing efficiency.

This method may well open up a new aspect of physics research. The research shows that a new side-view imaging technique is able to be used to visualize the individual atomic layers of graphene inside the devices they have built. They discovered that the structures were nearly perfect, even when in excess of 10 different layers were used to build the stack, resulting in multilayer heterostructures and devices with designed electronic properties.

The side view imaging approach works by extracting a thin slice from the centre of the device. The researchers used a beam of ions to cut into the surface of the graphene and dig a trench on either side of the section they wanted to isolate.

“The difference is that our slices are only around 100 atoms thick and this allows us to visualise the individual atomic layers of graphene in projection,” commented Dr Sarah Haigh at the University of Manchester’s school of materials. “We have found that the observed roughness of the graphene is correlated with their conductivity.”

This result indicates that the latest techniques of isolating graphene could be a big step forward for engineering at the atomic level as well as giving more weight to graphene’s suitability for next gen computer chips.

The scientists’ results suggest a leap forward for atomic-level engineering, and add more weight to the possibilitiy of seeing graphene as a sustainable solution for next-generation’s computer chips.  Graphene can actually repair its structure automatically simply by substituting carbon atoms from its environment.

“It’s so thin, it can be molded into sheets just 1 atom thick, yet despite this, it’s so strong that you can actually pick it up. It has the highest current density (a million times that of copper) at room temperature, the highest intrinsic mobility (100 times more than in silicon), and conducts electricity in the limit of no electrons. Also, graphene now holds the record for conducting heat — it’s better than any other known material. But wait, there’s more – graphene is the most impermeable material ever discovered – so neatly packed together, that not even helium atoms can squeeze through.”

Yes, we’re pretty excited about graphene. If you understand what graphene can do for technology and human kind in the following decades, you’d be as well.  *Demonstrating graphene’s remarkable properties won Professor Andre Geim and Professor Kostya Novoselov the Nobel prize for Physics in 2010.*

Professor Novoselov said: “Although the exciting physics which we have found in this particular experiment may have an immediate implementation in practical electronic devices, the further understanding of the electronic properties of this material will bring us a step closer to the development of graphene electronics.”

Professor Geim added: “The progress have been possible due to quantum leap in improvement of the sample quality which could be produced at The University of Manchester.”

* Chemical lets blind mice see instantly – no surgery, chips or genetic alteration. *

Remarkably, researchers University of California, Berkeley  have discovered that a chemical called AAQ can temporarily restore the vision in blind mice.The find might help people suffering from inherited genetic blindness or age-related macular degeneration, and bring back light into their world.

The process isn’t quite as easy as applying eye drops, but it’s a whole lot less intrusive than surgery, bio-chips or optogenics, which make the patient susceptible to side effects or various other complications. Here’s how it works.

Only the specific targeted 60-micron area of the retina in AAQ-treated blind mice fires when stimulated by flashes of violet light (credit: A. Polosukhina et al./Neuron)

Both retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that is the most common inherited form of blindness, and age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of acquired blindness in the developed world, the eye’s photoreceptors become dysfunctional because the light sensitive cells in the retina — the rods and cones — die.

The AAQ (acrylamide-azobenzene-quaternary ammonium) chemical works its magic by making other cells in the eye, like the retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), which are inherently blind, act as photoreceptors,turning them light sensitive. When switched on by light, AAQ alters the flow of potassium ions through the channels and activates RGCs much the way rods and cones are activated by light.

In the paper, published in the journal Neuron, the scientists write that AAQ basically acts as  a “photoswitch” that binds to protein ion channels on the surface of retinal cells.

To test the chemical out, the researchers applied it on the retina of  blind mice, which had genetic mutations that made their rods and cones die, as well as inactivated other photopigments in the eye. When the AAQ was injected into their eyes, in very small amounts, the team of scientists lead by Richard Kramer, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology, noticed that sight was restored. They could tell this was the case since the mice’s pupils contracted in bright light, and the mice showed light avoidance, a typical rodent behavior impossible without the animals being able to see some light.

“The photoswitch approach offers real hope to patients with retinal degeneration,” said co-author Dr. Russell Van Gelder, an ophthalmologist and chair of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Washington, Seattle.. “We still need to show that these compounds are safe and will work in people the way they work in mice, but these results demonstrate that this class of compound restores light sensitivity to retinas blind from genetic disease.”

An alternative to curing blindness

The scientists involved in the study herald AAQ as a potential alternative to the current methods of restoring sight, deeming it safer because of its temporary nature.

“The advantage of this approach is that it is a simple chemical, which means that you can change the dosage, you can use it in combination with other therapies, or you can discontinue the therapy if you don’t like the results,” and perhaps with improved spectral or kinetic properties, Kramer said. ”

“A several month supply of AAQ could be packaged into an tiny device inserted into the eye cavity like those currently used for long-term steroid treatment of ocular inflammation,” the researchers explain in their Neuron paper.

This might just be an extraordinary advance in science’s long-lasting battle against blindness, and currently new versions of AAQ are being tested, which have already deemed better results. They activate neurons for days rather than hours using blue-green light of moderate intensity, and these photoswitches naturally deactivate in darkness, so that a second color of light is not needed to switch them off. “This is what we are really excited about,” he said.

Tokelau: Will be world's first completely solar powered place. Go Green!

Tokelau is a small island near Samoa, not far from New Zealand; at a first glance, it wouldn’t seem significantly different from other beautiful atolls in that part of the world, but Tokelau has something very special: they are on track to become the first territory entirely powered by solar energy.

The Diesel dependent country will rely on solar energy not only for heating and electricity, but also for cars – powering its entire fleet of cars straight from the Sun; but being fully straight here – there are no more than three cars on Tokelau, and under 2000 people. Still, the accomplishment is quite significant, especially from a symbolic point of view.

Lead contractor Powersmart Solar is helping Tokelau replace its diesel generators, replacing its diesel generators which burn 200 liters of fuel daily with 4032 solar panels, 392 inverters and 1344 batteries.

“All across the Pacific there are clear issues with the current and expected future costs of electricity generated using diesel, not to mention the environmental costs and risks of unloading diesel drums on tropical atolls,” said Powersmart Solar director Mike Bassett-Smith. “Energy costs underpin the economic and social development of these nations and making a positive impact on these issues is the single most important reason we started this business.”

All in all, while it might not seem like a major accomplishment, Tokelau has definitely set a remarkable example, which will hopefully be followed by many other nations.

Evidence of a Massive crater in Canada

Researchers have found evidence that the crater was formed when the ground was slammed by a massive meteorite, millions of years ago.

Measuring about 25 kilometers across, Prince Albert crater was named after the peninsula in which it was discovered. Researchers never were really sure when it was formed, the likely period being between 130 million and 350 million years old, according to geologists from the University of Saskatchewan.

A team spotted this newly identified crater totally random, while surveying the area for mineral and energy resources. Initially, they were intrigued by steeply tilted strata visible in river gorges, as well as other strange features of the area.

“Unless you recognized the telltale clues, you wouldn’t know what you were looking at,” researcher Brian Pratt explained in the statement. “You might see a bunch of broken rocks and wonder how they got there, but we found abundant shatter cones.”

Shatter cones are extremely rare geological features which form only in the bedrock beneath meteorite impacts or nuclear explosions. Shatter cones have a distinctively conical shape that radiates from the top (apex) of the cones repeating cone-on-cone in large and small scales in the same sample.

Analyzing shatter cones

“Impact craters like this give us clues into how the Earth’s crust is recycled and the speed of erosion, and may be implicated in episodes of widespread extinction of animals in the geological past,” Pratt said. “It’s an exciting discovery.”

The biggest and oldest crater

At the moment, there are some 180 known impact craters on Earth – geologists would have found many more by now, if it hand’t been for the continuous action of plate shifting, erosion, crust recycling and volcanic activity.Earlier this year, researchers from Greenland reported the finding of what may be the oldest and largest meteorite crater ever found on Earth.

Location of meteorite cratere in Greenland

Researchers estimate the crater is some 3 billion years old, and measures 100 kilometers from one side to another; however, given the extremely old age, it probably measured over 500 kilometers in its ‘glory days’. The team believes it was caused by a meteorite 30 kilometers wide, which, if would hit Earth today, would pretty much wipe out all advanced life on our planet.

Mutant butterflies found near Fukushima linked to radiation exposure

Immediately after the incident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, as a result of the devastating tsunami which swept the country resulting thousands of casualties and damage amount to $40 billion, Japanese authorities quickly evacuated the local human population such that exposure to radiation could be kept at a minimum. The local wildlife, however, wasn’t treated with the same privilege. A month after the tsunami, scientists collected butterfly specimens in the vicinity of the nuclear power plant and found that the insects presented a number of peculiar mutations. Six months later the same check was made for the same species, and findings suggest that the mutations actually multiplied, as an evident effect of radiation exposure.

Some 144 pale grass blue butterfly were collected, of which 12% of them showed a number of strange mutations, like dented eyes and deformed wings.  When they mated, the offspring showed a mutation rate of 18%, and when one ‘infected’ butterfly was mated with a healthy one, that rate jumped to 34%.*This suggested that the butterflies’ germ line, or the cells that turn from egg to sperm, had *suffered irremediable damage,which get transmitted to the offspring. Scientists say these mutations will get passed down for many generations.

“Our results are consistent with the previous field studies that showed that butterfly populations are highly sensitive to artificial radionuclide contamination in Chernobyl and Fukushima. Together, the present study indicates that the pale grass blue butterfly is probably one of the best indicator species for radionuclide contamination in Japan,” researchers wrote in the report published in the journal Nature.

The species is notoriously sensitive to environmental contaminants, which is why scientists decided to study them to begin with, so the fact that the pale grass butterfly has suffered mutations isn’t a indicator that other local fauna may have been subjected to the same genetic anomalies, though possible. I’d like to see, personally, a similar research catering to other species, insects or mammals.

The levels of radiation absorbed by the butterflies are not enough to harm humans, however. In fact, Japanese researchers have found very low amounts of radioactivity in the bodies of about 10,000 people who lived near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant when it melted down. The threat appeared to be considerably lower than in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident, the experts agreed.

“Out of 10,000 people with a dose of 1 millisievert, the radiation would cause two to get cancer during their lifetimes, but about 3,500 would get cancer also without any radiation,” said Roy Shore, chief of research at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima, Japan. “The jury is still out, but I expect the public health impact from radiation to turn out to be considerably lower than that of Chernobyl.”

Hottest temperature on Earth reached after scientists create quark-gluon particle soup

Not one, but two independent high-energy particle physics laboratories in New York (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider – RHIC) and Geneva ( Large Hadron Collider – LHC) have managed to create quark-gluon plasma after smashing particles into another at very high speeds. The resulting plasma, which only lasted for a fraction of a moment,  is the hottest matter ever recorded – somewhere between 4 trillion and 6 trillion degrees Celsius.

“We now have created matter in a unique state, composed of quarks and gluons that have been liberated from inside protons and neutrons,” said Steven Vigdor, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which hosts the RHIC.

Any proton or neutron, the building blocks of an atom, is made out of three quarks bound together by gluons, which are mass-less and hold the quarks together like a sort of glue (Hence, the name "gluons"). After colliding lead ions at extremely high velocities, a quark–gluon plasma was created, denser than a neutron star and the hottest man-made matter ever. This subatomic soup and unique state of matter is thought to have existed just moments after the Big Bang. Evidently, better understanding this incipient phase of the Universe would help unravel a number of secrets.

Scientists theorize that during a similar state to the one experimented by scientists at both RHIC and CERN, quarks and gluons would have combined to form protons and neutrons, which would have grouped with electrons a while later to form atoms. Eventually, this would latter on form cosmic dust, gas and lead to the birth of cosmic bodies like stars, galaxies and so on.

Concerning the exact temperature at which the matter was recorded, things aren't exactly certain yet. One can imagine, keeping in mind the extremely fast decay time and record breaking temperature levels, that measuring such an experiment requires technology and innovation at the forefront of science. Spokesmen from ALICE,  a heavy-ion experiment and a lesser-known sibling to ATLAS (one of the teams which announced the Higgs boson discovery), say their data shows  an estimated 5.5 trillion degrees measured temperature or 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun.  “It’s a very delicate measurement,” Paolo Giubellino, Alike spokesman says. “Give us a few weeks and it will be out.”

If you’re curious as to what’s the maximum possible temperature, well it is believed to be 1.416833(85) x 1032 Kelvin degrees, and at temperatures above it, the laws of physics just cease to exist.

Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have been studying the plasma from 2005, around the time when the first experiments were conducted. In terms of properties, they found that the plasma behaves like perfect, frictionless liquids. Meaning zero viscosity – no friction! This plasma is also extremely dense, with particles packed in more tightly than neutron stars.

“We do have now the tools in place to really experiment with it …and figure out precisely what kind of stuff this really is and why it has these extraordinary properties,” said Jurgen Schukraft, a physicist at the CERN physics lab in Geneva, home of the LHC

Spintronics breakthrough at IBM!!

Spintronics, or spin transport electronics, is a sort of emerging technology that scientists have been studying for a while in an attempt to leverage the encoding posibilities in an electron’s spin, in addition to its electrical charge. Recently, researchers at IBM Zurich have made a huge leap forward in turning spintronics into a viable technology for commercial solid-state memory devices implementation. Their findings show a 30 times increase in stability, compared to previous attempts.

Conventionally, information is stored and read from the electrical charge of electrons. In the case of spintronics, electron spins can be used to represent data, with a shift in orientation corresponding to either a one or a zero dictated by a magnetic field. However, this is a forefront technology still in its infancy, with previous research that couldn’t make a conclusive claim whether electron spins could actually preserve encoded information for long enough before rotating – until now.

The IBM scientists synchronizing electrons extends the spin lifetime of the electron by 30 times, up to 1.1 nanoseconds, or the same time it takes for an existing 1 GHz processor to cycle.  To achieve this, the researchers locked the electrons in what’s called a “persistent spin helix”, which allowed them to monitor in a constant fashion the electron movement – otherwise the erratic spin of the electrons would have made their efforts useless. This movement is then tracked using ultra-short lasers, allowing monitoring for a much longer time than previously attempted, signifying a big step towards an electronically programmable spin-based transistor.

As a metaphor, the IBM scientists  see this technique very similar to a couple dancing the waltz.

“If all couples start with the women facing north, after a while the rotating pairs are oriented in different directions. We can now lock the rotation speed of the dancers to the direction they move,” explains IBM’s Dr Gian Salis.

“This results in a perfect choreography where all the women in a certain area face the same direction. This control and ability to manipulate and observe the spin is an important step in the development of spin-based transistors that are electrically programmable.”

It might take some time, though, before this breakthrough can be transferred on the commercial market. For one, the researchers were  unable to perform the extended spin tracking at higher temperatures; to be more precise, this particular study of “waltz” electron movement was tracked at very low temperatures of 40 degrees Kelvin or -233 degrees Celcius. A bit far fetched from your typical room temperature. Still their findings are very much impressive, and will undoubtedly serve as solid building ground for future research.

Galaxies similar to Milky Way found.

Scientists have found the first group of galaxies that is just like ours, a rare sight in the local universe. 

The Milky Way is a fairly typical galaxy on its own, but when paired with its close neighbours -- the Magellanic Clouds -- it is very rare, and could have been one of a kind, until a survey of our local universe found another two examples just like us. 

Astronomer Dr. Aaron Robotham, jointly from the University of Western Australia node of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, searched for groups of galaxies similar to ours in the most detailed map of the local universe yet, the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey. 

“We've never found another galaxy system like the Milky Way before, which is not surprising considering how hard they are to spot! It's only recently become possible to do the type of analysis that lets us find similar groups,” said Dr. Robotham. 

“Everything had to come together at once: we needed telescopes good enough to detect not just galaxies but their faint companions, we needed to look at large sections of the sky, and most of all we needed to make sure no galaxies were missed in the survey,” he stated. 

Sophisticated simulations of how galaxies form don't produce many examples similar to the Milky Way and its surrounds, predicting them to be quite a rare occurrence. Astronomers haven't been able to tell just how rare until now, with the discovery of not just one but two exact matches amongst the hundreds of thousands of galaxies surveyed. 

“We found about 3 percent of galaxies similar to the Milky Way have companion galaxies like the Magellanic Clouds, which is very rare indeed. In total we found 14 galaxy systems that are similar to ours, with two of those being an almost exact match,” said Dr. Robotham. 

The Milky Way is locked in a complex cosmic dance with its close companions the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are clearly visible in the southern hemisphere night sky. Many galaxies have smaller galaxies in orbit around them, but few have two that are as large as the Magellanic Clouds. 

Dr. Robotham's work also found that although companions like the Magellanic Clouds are rare, when they are found they're usually near a galaxy very like the Milky Way, meaning we're in just the right place at the right time to have such a great view in our night sky. 

“The galaxy we live in is perfectly typical, but the nearby Magellanic Clouds are a rare, and possibly short-lived, occurrence. We should enjoy them whilst we can, they'll only be around for a few billion more years,” added Dr. Robotham. 

Dr. Robotham and colleagues have been awarded further time on telescopes in New South Wales and Chile to study these Milky Way twin systems now that they've been found. 

Scientists Invent Oxygen Particle That If Injected, Allows You To Live Without Breathing

New Medical Discovery -

A team of scientists at the Boston Children’s Hospital have invented what is being considered one the greatest medical breakthroughs in recent years.

They have designed a microparticle that can be injected into a person’s bloodstream that can quickly oxygenate their blood. This will even work if the ability to breathe has been restricted, or even cut off entirely.

This finding has the potential to save millions of lives every year. The microparticles can keep an object alive for up to 30 min after respiratory failure. This is accomplished through an injection into the patients’ veins. Once injected, the microparticles can oxygenate the blood to near normal levels. This has countless potential uses as it allows life to continue when oxygen is needed but unavailable. For medical personnel, this is just enough time to avoid risking a heart attack or permanent brain injury when oxygen is restricted or cut off to patients.

Physicists quantum teleport photons over 143 kilometers

The big question: Are humans next to teleport?

Last May, European scientists managed to teleport photons using quantum phenomena over a distance of 143 kilometers, across two Canary islands; however, it is only now that their paper was accepted in a peer reviewed magazine.

While the technology used in Star Trek is still only science-fiction, the quantum teleportation of photons is a reality – and it definitely has its magic. The researchers, associated with the Austrian Academy of Sciences, as well as other scientific organizations made some key innovations to the already existing systems, most notably replacing optic fiber as a solution for teleportation due to signal degradation.

As Xiao-song Ma, one of the scientists involved in the experiment puts it, “The realization of quantum teleportation over a distance of 143 km has been a huge technological challenge” – and that’s putting it mildly; but the work was absolutely worth it, especially considering this can pave the way for a new age in global and extraterrestrial communication.

Lead scientist Anton Zeilinger, explained:

“Our experiment shows how mature quantum technologies are today and how useful they can be for practical applications. The next step is satellite-based quantum teleportation, which should enable quantum communication on a global scale. The next step is satellite-based quantum teleportation, which should enable quantum communication on a global scale.”

I’ve written about quantum entanglement several times, and I still find it counter intuitive – because mostly, quantum phenomena seem illogical to our day to day, macroscopic life. The process, with direct applications in quantum computing, occurs when particles (such as photons, electrons, small molecules and even small diamonds), interact physically and then become separated. The two particles, after entangled, remain intimately connected, even when separated over vast distances – the information contained in the photon’s quantum state is transmitted from one photon to another through quantum entanglement, without actually travelling the distance. The photons remain the same until one of them is measured, which causes the receiver’s entangled particle to instantly change. Basically, when they are entangled, what you do to one of them affects the other one, regardless of distance.

In order to teleport the photon, scientists started out with three particles – two entangled, and one to be teleported; all three photons started out in the island of La Palma, and one of the particles was sent to the Canary Island of Tenerife. Here’s how the process works, quoting from Wikipedia:

1. An EPR (entangled) pair is generated and distributed to two separate locations, A and B.
2. At location A, a Bell measurement of the EPR pair qubit and the qubit to be teleported (for example, quantum state of a photon) is performed, yielding two classical bits of information. Both qubits are destroyed.
3. Using the classical channel, the two bits are sent from A to B. (This is the only potentially time-consuming step, due to speed-of-light considerations.)
4. At location B, the EPR pair qubit is modified (if necessary), using the two bits to select the correct one of four possible quantum states. A qubit identical to that chosen for teleportation (for example, quantum state of a photon) results.

This is probably making your head spin, right? Quantum teleportation defeats common sense, and as a matter of fact, it makes physicists’ head spin too – especially given that matter isn’t teleported, only quantum states; but it’s extremely useful, and could bring a myriad of advancements in numerous fields.

“The quantum internet is predicted to be the next-generation information processing platform, promising secure communication and an exponential speed-up in distributed computation,” the researchers write in a paper detailing their experiment published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

What this means is you could potentially send messages throughout the entire solar system, like maybe start talking to the base you just set up on Mars, or keep in touch with those robots you sent on asteroids to mine platinum. Or even more, you could create instantaneous internet connections. But all that is a long time from happening.

“The future goal of our research work will be to do such experiments on the satellite level,” Ma explained. “This will enable intercontinental quantum information exchange.”

LEAFY SEA DRAGONS

Leafy sea dragons are also called as Phycodurus eques. These marine fishes resemble a piece of drifting seaweed as they float in the seaweed-filled water. The Leafy sea dragon, with green, orange and gold shades along its body, is covered with leaf-like addition, making it remarkably camouflaged. Only the flickering of tiny fins or the moving of an independently swiveling eye, reveals its presence.

Like the seahorse, the male sea dragon carries as many as 150-200 eggs. After being deposited by the female, the eggs are carried in the honeycomb-shaped area (known as the brood patch) under the male's tail for approximately eight weeks. Sea dragons have no teeth or stomach and feed exclusively on mysidopsis shrimp. Known as "Australian seahorses" in Australia, they are found in calm, cold water that is approximately 50-54° F (10-12° C). Leafy sea dragons have been protected by the South Australian government since 1982.

See chemical bonds by molecular imaging!

Atomic level imaging has come a long way in the past decade, and after scientists first managed to image molecular structure and even electron clouds, now a group of researchers at IBM Research Center Zurich have visually depicted how chemical bonds differentiate in individual molecules using a technique called non-contact atomic force microscopy (AFM).


If you look closely you can see that some C-C chemical bonds are more highlighted than others. This is because in reality and practice, the  bonds between individual atoms differ slightly and subtly in length and strength, and for the first time we’ll now able to distinguish the different types of bonds from one another, visually.  The bright and dark spots correspond to higher and lower densities of electrons.

“In the case of pentacene, we saw the bonds but we couldn’t really differentiate them or see different properties of different bonds,” said lead author of the study Dr.  Leo Gross.

“Now we can really prove that… we can see different physical properties of different bonds, and that’s really exciting.”


How did they do it?

To create the images, the IBM researchers used an atomic force microscope with a tip that ended with a single carbon monoxide molecule. The CO molecule traces the image by oscillating between the tip and the sample. By measuring its wiggle and inter-molecular force  the AFM can slowly build up a very detailed image. The technique made it possible to distinguish individual bonds that differ by only three picometers, which is one-hundredth of an atom’s diameter.

“We found two different contrast mechanisms to distinguish bonds. The first one is based on small differences in the force measured above the bonds. We expected this kind of contrast but it was a challenge to resolve,” said IBM scientist Leo Gross. “The second contrast mechanism really came as a surprise: Bonds appeared with different lengths in AFM measurements. With the help of ab initial calculations we found that the tilting of the carbon monoxide molecule at the tip apex is the cause of this contrast.”

Face reconstruction with help of DNA

No person is the same, thanks to genetic variation. While skin color, hair, or body proportions are elements that might be exactly the same for two persons,you can be sure that one’s face is unique – even in identical twins, if you look extremely closely. While life style, body weight, diet, accidents and so on influence the shape and general appearance of one’s face, the classic elements like skin color, facial hair, the distance between eye sockets, symmetry, cheek bone and so on are entirely genetically driven. With this in mind, with a highly established genome map, scientists could be capable of recreating a person’s face based solely on his DNA sample, and this is exactly what an international team of researchers have been seeking out to do.

A wanted criminal could be identified much easier, based on the DNA ‘footprint’ he left behind at the crime scene and thus lead to a swifter apprehension. A victim of a calamity could be identified and offer peace to the family. Applications would be numerous, especially for secret services.

It’s worth noting, however, that this type of research is still in its infancy. So far, scientists have managed to pinpoint five genes (PRDM16, PAX3, TP63, C5orf50, and COL17A1) that contribute to facial shape and features,although they caution that the genes they found only have small effects, and are only linked with a limited number of features, limiting their use until more genes of relevance are found.

Predicting eye, hair and skin color are fairly well established, however where it truly gets complicated is in facial features. For instance, the researchers found  that a certain gene called TP63 was a predictor of the gap between the centers of each eye socket being narrower by about nine millimeters. PAX3 contributes to facial shape variation at the genome-wide scale and so on. Once these parameters are well correlated and identified, facial features could be predicted just as accurate as eye or hair color can be today. If anything, something like a sort of portrait sketch could be recreated.

“It’s a start,” says Manfred Kayser from the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. “But we are far away from predicting what someone’s face looks like.”

Kayser and colleagues surveyed DNA samples from 10,000 Europeans and looked at nine specific facial “landmarks” in three-dimensional MRI scans of their heads. Another eight landmarks were subsequently analyzed, but from portrait photos.

The Flying Fish

The Oriental Flying Gurnard or Dactyloptena orientalis is an unbelievable salt water fish that actually has a pair of wings and also has the ability to walk on the ocean floor. These fish are often found in the Indo-Pacific Oceans at depths of up to 100 meters. They are quite small only growing to about 40cm in maximum length. The Oriental Flying Gurnard wings are actually massive pectoral fins that flare up when the creature is threatened. These wings have are dark with bright blue on the edges.

Also known as the Oriental Flying Sea Robin, their pelvic fins act as legs as they slowly make their way across the bottom in search of food. If that weren't weird enough this fish is also said to be able to make a grunting sound which they use to communicate with one another.

These salt water fish often feed on small bony fish, clams and small crustaceans. Oriental Flying Gurnard are often eaten by Mackerels and Sea Breams.

Mind Control

In a remarkable feat of science, scientists at Harvard University have surpassed seemingly insurmountable technological challenges have managed to take over the behavior of a lab worm. Using precisely targeted laser pulses at the worm’s neurons, scientists were able to direct it to move in any directions they wanted, and even trick it in thinking there’s food nearby. These fantastic results provide an important milestone in the quest to understand how sensory information is transmitted into behavior.

The researchers used the favored lab testing specimen, the common Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) worm, to test their theories, which they genetically altered in order for its neurons to give off fluorescent light, allowing them to be tracked during experiments. Also, genes in the worm were altered to make its neurons sensitive to light, so they could be stimulated with pulses of light – this is optogenetics.

“If we can understand simple nervous systems to the point of completely controlling them, then it may be a possibility that we can gain a comprehensive understanding of more complex systems,” said team leader Sharad Ramanathan, an Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and of Applied Physics. “This gives us a framework to think about neural circuits, how to manipulate them, which circuit to manipulate and what activity patterns to produce in them.

“Extremely important work in the literature has focused on ablating neurons, or studying mutants that affect neuronal function and mapping out the connectivity of the entire nervous system. ” he added.

“Most of these approaches have discovered neurons necessary for specific behavior by destroying them. The question we were trying to answer was: Instead of breaking the system to understand it, can we essentially hijack the key neurons that are sufficient to control behavior and use these neurons to force the animal to do what we want?”

Taking over a worm’s brain

Targeting the worm’s neurons with laser pulses, however proved to be an incredible challenge. The researchers manage to overcome the difficulties they faced though, like developing a movable table which keeps the worm centered to the laser beam no matter how fast or in what direction it might move, and implementing a custom-built computer hardware and software to insure the laser pulses fire at the required split-second speeds – once every 20 milliseconds, or about 50 times a second.

“The goal is to activate only one neuron,” Ramanathan said. “That’s challenging because the animal is moving, and the neurons are densely packed near its head, so the challenge is to acquire an image of the animal, process that image, identify the neuron, track the animal, position your laser and shoot the particularly neuron”

They discovered that controlling the dynamics of activity in just one interneuron pair (AIY) was sufficient to force the animal to locate, turn towards, and track virtual light gradient. What was mind blowing, for me to learn at least, was that the scientists didn’t only manipulate the worm’s behavior, but its senses also. They proved this by tricking the worm’s brain into believing food was nearby, causing it to make a beeline toward the imaginary meal.

“By manipulating the neural system of this animal, we can make it turn left, we can make it turn right, we can make it go in a loop, we can make it think there is food nearby,” Ramanathan said. “We want to understand the brain of this animal, which has only a few hundred neurons, completely and essentially turn it into a video game, where we can control all of its behaviors.”

Before you form any modern Manchurian candidate paranoia influenced ideas, consider that C. elegans has one of the most primitive brains, as far as complex organisms are concerned – boosting a disappointing 302 neurons. It’s impossible for a similar set-up to render similar results for a snake, let alone a human. Still, the Harvard researchers intend of improving their system and test on more complex organisms.

Groundwater extraction:Cause of Earthquake? Scientists think so.

Groundwater removal may have caused the deadly 2011 earthquake in Lorca, scientists studying the fault beneath the Spanish city have said.

Detailed surface maps from satellite studies allowed the scientists to infer which parts of the ground moved where.

Scientists found that those shifts correlate with locations where water has been drained for years, a media report found.

The study highlights how human activity such as drainage or borehole drilling can have far-reaching seismic effects.

Researchers led by Pablo Gonzalez of the University of Western Ontario used satellite radar data to trace the ground movements of the Lorca event back to their source, finding that the earthquake resulted from slippage on a comparatively shallow fault that borders a large water basin south of the city.

That the slippage happened at a depth of just 3 kms explains why the fairly mild magnitude 5.1 quake caused so much damage in the area.

The team went on to study potential reasons for the slippage, finding that the water table in the adjacent Alto Guadalentin basin had dropped by some 250 metres over the last 50 years as water was drained for irrigation in the region.

The study calculations show that this created stresses on the fault that initially triggered the earthquake and defined its eventual magnitude.

However, the area lies on a seismically active region, and the data suggest only that the water drainage sped up and eventually triggered a process that would have eventually happened anyway.

Antimatter. Is it same as Dark matter?

Antimatter matters, because it is one of the fundamental building blocks of nature.

Every elementary particle in the Universe appears to have a partner particle called its antiparticle with which it shares some characteristics, but has other characteristics that are opposite to it.

For example, the electron has as its antiparticle the anti-electron. The electron and the anti-electron have exactly the same masses, but they have exactly opposite electrical charges.
Imagine a hot metal sheet from which you are cutting out circular disks. When you cut a disk from the sheet, you are leaving behind a hole (you may call it an ‘anti-disk’) with exactly the same dimensions.

Matter and antimatter (particle and antiparticle) are related to each other the same way.
Antiparticles are denoted my placing a bar above the symbol for a given particle. For example, the proton is denoted p, so the anti-proton is denoted as p with a bar over it.

Mass-Energy Equivalence

Considering the vast amount of energy hidden in matter, we may say matter is simply a reservoir of energy, which can be calculated using Einstein’s equation:E=mc².

Can energy be converted into mass or vice-versa?

Yes, they can be.

Let’s first take the case of converting energy into mass, a phenomenon called ‘pair production‘ and which has fascinated people with the idea of creating something from nothing – ‘nothing’, because you do not see the energy that created the matter.

Energy to Mass: Pair production

Nuclei are made up of protons and neutron. Due to very small distance between two protons, they exert a very large force of repulsion on each other. Therefore to prevent nucleus from bursting, certain amount of energy needed to bind the nucleus. This energy needed is known as Binding Energy.

It has been found that the mass of a nucleus is always less than the sum of the individual masses of the protons and neutrons which constitute it. This mass defect provides the required binding energy. The binding energy is the energy equivalent to mass defect. Binding energy of a nucleus may also be defined as the amount of work required to separate the nucleons at infinite distance.

Similarly, the negatively charged electron is attracted to the positively charged nucleus. The amount of energy that is required to be given to the electron to pull it away from this attractive (Coulombic) force is called the binding energy of the electron.

Tractor Lasers. Now a reality!

Physicists Invent (Tiny) Working Tractor Beam, World Becomes Instantly More Awesome

You guys, hold the phone. Drop whatever you’re doing right now. Is it dropped? Yes? Good. We have tractor beams now! Like where you zap a thing with a laser and pull it toward you with beam power? Yeah, those! We have those now. Even though they are super tiny and effective only on microscopic items like silica spheres suspended in water for right now, they are still working tractor beams, and now that we have the principle down, they are pretty much only going to get cooler from here. If you can’t get excited about that, I don’t even know what to say, as I have to assume you are already dead inside.


The new tractor beam design uses a special type of laser known as Bessel beams. Rather than a single beam, Bessel beams are transmitted as concentric circles that converge around the point they’re directed at. This gives the beams a unique quality. If you place a small object between the source of the beam and its destination, the concentric rings of the Bessel beam can reform around the object. That makes it possible for Bessel beams to pull or push objects — a quality of the beams that had been hypothetical until now.

After working with single Bessel beams to try and perfect a tractor beam and failing, New York University physicists David Ruffner and David Grier assembled a device that overlaps two Bessel beams. That overlap, combined with a slight distortion of the beams from a specialized lens, creates a strobing effect in the beams, producing enough energy to pull tiny grains of silica back toward the source of the beams.

The researchers’ work may not be right for tractor beams of the future, which will be used to assemble our space stations and hold extraterrestrial ships in place so we can board and raid them. Scaling up the current design would mean using a ton of energy, and probably destroying whatever objects you were attempting to manipulate with the beam. It opens the door to a really sweet new technology pulled right from the screens of science fiction, though, and most days, that’s good enough for us.