Tech Suki

DailyTech - IBM Creates Tunable Nanolaser

IBM continues its march towards creating an optical computer with another breakthrough.

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Stem cells ‘created from teeth’

Japanese scientists say they have created human stem cells from tissue taken from the discarded wisdom teeth of a 10-year-old girl.

DailyTech - Physicists Theorize New Method for Faster than Light Travel

he physicists — Gerald Cleaver and Richard Obousy — have theorized a new idea for faster than light travel that involves manipulating dark energy to propel a spacecraft. According to Space.com the universe — in theory — moved faster than light for a short time after the Big Bang, propelled by dark energy which represents about 74% of the mass energy budget in the universe. Space.com goes on to say that, 22% of the mass energy budget consists of dark matter and what remains of the mass-energy budget in the universe being made up of stars, planets and other things we see.

Some current evidence supports the theory that the fabric of space-time can expand faster than the speed of light. This is said to be because the reality which light travels is expanding itself.

DailyTech - Cassini Spacecraft Investigates Saturn’s Enceladus

“Icy Jets” Suggest Liquid Water May Be Beneath Surface
New pictures taken by the Cassini Spacecraft of Saturn’s moon Enceladus have revealed stunning new features of the moon’s surface. The images display the so-called “tiger stripes” that span the south pole, and reveal the features to be V-shaped cracks a thousand feet deep. Seen for the first time are the sources of active jets inside the features, which are hurling plumes of ice particles high into space.

DailyTech - New Ribosomal Research Offers Fresh Evidence, Understanding of Evolution

Skepticism aside, evolution is steadily being verified and analyzed thanks to cutting edge computing

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Cern lab set for beam milestone

A vast physics experiment - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - reaches a key milestone this weekend ahead of an official start-up on 10 September.

DailyTech - Commercially Developed Plasma Engine Soon to be Tested in Space

New Vasimir engine could cut Mars travel to 60-70 days, allow greater rocket fuel economy

The new rocket is named Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR).  A traditional rocket can produce a specific impulse of around 450 seconds, or in other words 1 pound of thrust from 1 pound of fuel for 450 seconds.  VASIMR can produce several times this amount, cutting a trip to Mars from 6 to 9 months with conventional rockets down to a mere 2 to 3 months.  It could do this by being able to burn fuel continuously the whole trip accelerating on the first half of the journey to Mars and decelerating on the second leg of the journey, preparing to enter orbit.

The rocket consists of three critical units or cells.  The first is the plasma generator.  It sits deepest into the rocket and consists of a generator which ionizes heated light gases such as hydrogen, creating plasma — atoms stripped of their electrons.  The plasma, at a modest temperature of 10,000 °C, is then pumped into the second unit, the amplifier.  In the amplifier cell the plasma is blasted with electromagnetic waves via radio waves.  These waves heat the plasma burning hot similar to how food is heated in a microwave.  Finally the ultra-hot plasma is channeled in magnetic containment fields to the final cell, the magnetic nozzle.  This nozzle is the critical control which controls how much fuel exits, and how fast the exiting plasma is going.

The nozzle also protects the spacecraft from the burning hot plasma.  How hot is the plasma exactly??  Well, early estimates are that it will be around 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million degrees Celsius), only about 25,000 times hotter than the burning gases exiting the space shuttle.  However, thanks to the magnetic nozzle the plasma can be tamed and channeled into useful impulse.

Dr. Chang-Diaz explains, “Rockets tend to work much better the hotter the exhaust is and the plasma allows you to go to temperatures millions of degrees rather than thousands of degrees in a conventional rocket engine.”

DailyTech - Scientists Find Ways to Cloak 3D Materials

Researchers at the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Berkeley have for the first time found a way to cloak 3D materials.

BBC NEWS | Health | Cell change ‘keeps organs young’

Researchers may have found a way to halt the biological clock which slows down our bodies over the decades.

DailyTech - Revolutionary Nanoantenna Skin to Provide Next Gen PC Cooling, Solar Cells

New technology could one day cool PC components and recharge consumer electronics, collecting energy even at night

DailyTech - “Tuned Light” Turns Opaque Materials Transparent.

It’s been a long-standing prediction of physics that visible light can actually pass through such “opaque” scattering mediums, using transparent channels known as eigenchannels. That theory has now been experimentally verified, thanks to a pair of researchers at the optical physics department of the University of Twente, Netherlands.

The two, Ivo Vellekoop and Allard Mosk, exploit the fact that such “disorded” mediums are fixed in time, and thus the seemingly random scattering process can be partially reversed. The process requires tuning relative phases of portions of a light beam so that they constructively interfere with each other.

Physicists spooked by faster-than-light information transfer : Nature News

Physicists at the University of Geneva achieved the weird result by creating a pair of ‘entangled’ photons, separating them, then sending them down a fibre optic cable to the Swiss villages of Satigny and Jussy, some 18 kilometres apart.

The researchers found that when each photon reached its destination, it could instantly sense its twin’s behaviour without any direct communication. The finding does not violate the laws of quantum mechanics, the theory that physicists use to describe the behaviour of very small systems. Rather, it shows just how quantum mechanics can defy everyday expectation, says Nicolas Gisin, the researcher who led the study. “Our experiment just puts the finger where it hurts,” he says.

DailyTech - Scientists Discover Virus that Infects Other Viruses

The discovery began more than a decade prior when researchers found a massive parasite in an amoeba from a cooling tower in Bradford, UK.  The little creature was frozen, as it was thought to be run-of-the-mill parasitic bacteria.  However, upon closer inspection, years later the scientists recognized it as a virus, with a gigantic genome, capable of encoding over 900 proteins.  The virus was named Acanthamoeba polyphaga mimivirus (for mimicking microbe).  It was over three times bigger than any previous virus.

The discovery brought great excitement to some nontraditional biologists who had long believed viruses to be living.  Says Eugene Koonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Maryland, “It was the cause of great excitement in virology.  It crossed the imaginary boundary between viruses and cellular organisms.”

DailyTech - Stretchable Electronics Yield First Electronic Eyeball

Artificial eyeball could find its way into war robots and humans alike as a vision replacement or enhancement

DailyTech - Toxin in Soil May Mean no Life on Mars

The existence of a toxic chemical discovered in the Martian soil could reduce the chances of life being found on the planet.