Posted: 7/20/2015
- Super-Magnetic Stars Forged in High-Energy Blasts Scientists find that the biggest, brightest bursts of light herald the creation of the universe’s most magnetic objects (“Magnetars ... A recent study suggests that these highly magnetized stars make their cosmic debut amid the brightest flares of radiation in the universe, called ultra long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs).”)
- 'Speed cells' in brain track how fast animals run (Amazing stuff! After place cells, grid cells, now they discovered speed cells in our brain. “To search for such cells, the Mosers and their team delved into the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), a slim arc of deep brain tissue where they had discovered the grid cells in 2005. They implanted the rats with electrodes that could record from thousands of MEC neurons, then put the rodents on a moveable treadmill ... In all three tests, 13% to 15% of the recorded cells showed firing patterns that were significantly correlated with the animals' speed, the scientists report online today in Nature.”)
- Why screams are so scary (“Few people have studied human or animal screams of terror in the past. … Poeppel and his colleagues decided to explore screams in more detail, turning to a third level of analysis that has only recently been applied to sounds. Called a modulation power spectrum, it charts how quickly the volume of a sound changes over tiny amounts of time. The scientists applied the analysis to both normal speech and screams of fear or terror collected from movies, YouTube videos, and volunteers in the lab. Whereas typical speech changes less than 5 hertz per second—meaning it stays around the same volume—the loudness of screams quickly fluctuates by anywhere from 30 to 150 hertz per second, Poeppel’s group discovered. The fluctuations give the sound a quality dubbed “roughness” that isn’t found in any other human speech—whether male, female, or child. … Furthermore, when the team observed the brains of 16 participants with functional MRI as they listened to vocalizations, screams that were rougher more effectively activated the amygdala, where the brain’s fear circuits live. Most other sounds, by comparison, initially activate only the auditory cortex of the brain.”)
- Ancient owl vomit may show 'dramatic' human impact on ecosystem (The cave containing layers of owl vomit collected over several millennia is phenomenal, but the conclusions drawn by scientists based on some energy measure appear dubious and preconceived. Is it not possible that the owls just moved on as an explanation instead of harping on human impact etc..)
- Antineutrino Detectors Could Be Key to Monitoring Iran's Nuclear Program (“The technology, which has been in the works since the early 2000s, has improved tremendously in the past five years, and it is now almost ready for practical use, says Patrick Huber, a physics professor at the Center of Neutrino Physics at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg … By measuring the number of antineutrinos produced and their energy spectrum, researchers can calculate reactor power and the amount of uranium and plutonium isotopes in the core. So an antineutrino detector would reveal if plutonium was removed or more uranium was added, even if the monitoring was interrupted for a period and then restarted.”)
- First Transistor Fabricated From Black-Arsenic Phosphorus (“An international team of researchers from Germany and the US have fabricated for the first time a field effect transistor made of black-arsenic phosphorus. ... have developed a new method for synthesizing black-arsenic phosphorous that doesn’t require the high pressure typically needed, lowering energy requirements for the process and thereby costs. ... but recently it has been synthesized as a two-dimensional material—dubbed phosphorene in reference to its two-dimensional cousin, graphene. Black phosphorus is quite attractive for electronic applications like field-effect transistors because of its inherent band gap and it is one of the few 2-D materials to be a natively p-type semiconductor.”)
- First snapshot of elusive intermediate supplies surprise (“But a team at IBM’s research laboratories in Ruschlikon, near Zurich in Switzerland, has been able to take a single-molecule snapshot of such an intermediate in a common class of organic reactions, simply by binding the flat molecules to a solid surface and using a specially prepared atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the stick-like molecular framework.”)
- Boeing Patents Laser Nuclear Fusion Jet Engine (Can you believe it! “Boeing is not* actively developing a laser-triggered fusion powered jet engine. … the fact that we have tested nuclear powered jet aircraft before. Sort of. The Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Program ran from 1946 to 1951, and a Convair B-36 spent a total of 89 hours in the air with a fully operational nuclear reactor chugging along in the back. ”)
- Ultra-thin membranes for solute separation (“Now, a team led by Andrew Livingston at Imperial College London, UK, have developed novel membranes that they say are strong and effective at molecular separations. The polyamide nanofilms they made are less than 10nm thick – almost as thin as biological cell membranes – but are rigid and strong enough to act as effective filters.To fabricate them, the team used an interfacial polymerization process, creating gel-like polymer networks at the interface between layers of diamine and an acid chloride.”)
- Ultra-bright x-rays film molecular reaction (“To watch it happen, the researchers used a classic ‘pump-probe’ approach. After initiating the ring-opening in a vapour of cyclohexadiene with a blast of UV laser light (the pump pulse), they fired a series of x-ray probe pulses into the reaction chamber, each lasting just 30 femtoseconds (10-15 s) and containing about a trillion x-ray photons. Changes in the shape of the molecule as the ring opens and unravels are reflected in the pattern of scattered x-rays.”)
- Live Streaming: Social Control from Afar Apps like Periscope will create a complex new relationship between broadcaster and audience. (The future of media? “These applications are revolutionary because they shift the role of the audience from passive observers of distant events to active participants in them. ”)
- http://news.sciencemag.org/sifter/2015/07/tiny-plankton-has-humanlike-eye (“Scientists have discovered a tiny, humanlike eye in single-celled plankton called warnowiids, The Telegraph reports. With its collection of subcellular organelles that resemble the lens, cornea, iris, and retina, the eyelike structure is startlingly similar to multicellular eyes found in humans and other animals”)
- http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/jun/26/could-lasers-guide-and-control-the-path-of-lightning (What an upgrade to Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod!)
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