OPERA :: Faster Than The Speed of Light

Scientists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research and the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics, under the experiment banner of OPERA  are reporting that sub-atomic particles known as neutrinos have the ability to travel faster than the speed of light, a discovery that if verified, would completely disassemble Einstein’s theory of special as well as general relativity. Or, at the outside these findings – if correct – may force science to re-calculate the speed of light :: Read the full article »»»»

Defrosting the Secrets of Superconductivity

In 1911, Kamerlingh Onnes conducted electrical analysis of pure metals - mercury, tin and lead - at very low temperatures. Onnes found that at 4.2 kelvin the resistance in a solid mercury wire immersed in liquid helium suddenly vanished. Some, such as William Thomson - Lord Kelvin – believed that electrons flowing through a conductor would come to a complete halt or, in other words, metal resistivity would become infinitely large at absolute zero. Onnes however felt that a conductor’s electrical resistance would steadily decrease and drop to nil.  On April 8, 1911, Kamerlingh Onnes found that at 4.2 kelvin/-270 degrees celsius, the resistance in a solid mercury wire immersed in liquid helium Suddenly Vanished. Onnes wrote in his note-pad that “Mercury has passed into a new state, which on account of its extraordinary electrical properties may be called the superconductive state“. He published more articles about the phenomenon, initially referring to it as “supraconductivity” and, only later adopting the term “superconductivity”

Fast Forward toSeptember 2011: A study undertaken by researchers at Laboratoire National des Champs Magnetique Intenses – Grenoble and published in Nature on September 7, reveals that superconductivity – the phenomenon where a normally conductive materials lose their electrical resistance when cooled – may be linked to the charge-order within the material, in this case copper dioxide. Researchers reported nuclear magnetic resonance measurements showing that high magnetic fields actually induce charge-order, without spin order. The observed static, unidirectional, modulation of the charge density breaks translational symmetry. These findings suggest that charge-order, although visibly pinned by CuO chains in YBa₂Cu₃O_y, is an intrinsic propensity of the superconducting planes of high-T_c copper oxides :: Read the full article »»»»

Science vs Philosophy: Forethought and Free Will?!

Preface to a Forethought: 2007 John-Dylan Haynes discovers pre-forethought; Each and every minute of every day our brains are seemingly forced to plan thousands of mundane actions that allow our lives to seamlessly flow. How and where the brain stores these Intentions has been apparently been revealed by John-Dylan Haynes. For the first time researchers were able to read participants’ intentions from their brain activity. Concluding that the brain makes a decision approximately 1-7 seconds before consciousness is aware of the decision!  This was made possible by a new combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging – MRI - and a set of sophisticated computer algorithms. Read the full article »»»»

Dust and Debris, The Middle Mystery of Planet Formation

How did this rocky outpost of life we call ‘Earth’ form, what process is capable of turning space dust and rubble into this picturesque blue planet we call home.  Science has a fairly good understanding of the beginning and end of the life-cycle of solar systems and their planets but the middle bit is still a huge mystery. How we go from a dusty cloud to what we on Earth a used to seeing, a working solar system that’s the question. A number of recent discoveries are helping us shape our understanding of this process, the formation of planets. Central to this new understanding is the information being collected by many radio telescopes and satellites. With these new modern tools we are seeing for the first time this process in action. Discoveries are also being made in unexpected places, theories are being expanded or replaced faster than ever.

One of the greatest mysteries and hardest to observe processes is the earliest stage of planet formation, how that initial clumping of dust occurs, starting the snow ball rolling. Discoveries often happen in funny and unexpected ways. This discovered was made by a mad scientists experimenting on the International Space Station – ISS -. Dr Don Pettit - NASA Astronaut - had become famous for his hands on experiments in zero gravity. Pettit filmed everyday things in zero gravity, with a desire to simply learn about this new set of rules, the laws of zero-gravity. Many of the experiments exhibited unexpected behaviour, pleasant surprises that are helping us define our understanding of space. This discovery almost went unnoticed until fellow NASA scientist Dr Stanley Love was watching some of Pettit’s video’s of plastic bags filled with salt. The salt inside the bag clumped almost instantly once Pettit stopped shaking it. The shaking caused the dust to bump into each other, building up a static charge which caused them to be attracted – electrostatic coalescence – once clumped together surface tension took over to hold it all together. Again Pettite has some interesting video to demonstrate this point, an interesting experiment with corn candy. Very cool video by the way. When particles bump around in space the impacts cause an exchange of electrons this along with a complete lack of ground to discharge static it just builds up, this coupled with the fact that static works very differently in space than it does on Earth may be the basis for a solution to this mysterious part of the plant formation process. Read the full article »»»»

A Long Way To Friday: Neptunes 165 Year Solar Rotation

For some of us the working week is a real hardship, Mondayitis, 8 hour days and a fatiguing stretch to Friday. Spare a thought for those poor Neptunian workers, where Monday to Friday takes a little over 2 Earth years to get through. On the upside a long weekend would stretch to 18 months!? Next week, Neptune will complete its very first full orbit of the Sun since it’s discovery in 1846. 165 years to make a complete orbit, now that puts a whole new spin on leap years.

Astronomers had pegged Neptune days – the farthest planet in our solar system – at 16 hours and 6 minutes. A in a new paper published in Icarus, Erich Karkoschka, a planetary scientist with the University of Arizona, now predicts a Neptune day at 15 hours, 57 minutes and 59 seconds. Calculating day lengths for neighboring planets like Mars is an ease, scientists simply look at their surfaces, in photos or radar images, and track the motion of identifiable geographic features. Unfortunately Neptune is made up mostly of dense gas cloud, there is no visible surface. The only visible features are storms. Until now, the best estimate of the planet’s day length came from radio signals measured during a 1989 passing of NASA’s Voyager 2. This method has proven to be almost completely inaccurate and intil recently was observed as a best guestimation.

“The best analogue is clouds moving over a mountain, each cloud moves, so if you track them you don’t get the rotation. But the feature as a whole remains stable“ Karkoschka. Calculating a planetary rotation-rate to such precision isn’t just interesting information, there are definite practical applications. “It constrains models of Neptune’s interior,if you know how fast the planet rotates, you can determine the mass distribution inside” Read the full article »»»»

Funkinwagnill: Protoscience

Protoscience: In the philosophy of science, a protoscience is an area of scientific endeavor that is in the process of becoming established. Protoscience is distinguished from pseudoscience by its standard practices of good science, such as a willingness to be disproven by new evidence, or to be replaced by a more predictive theory. Sometimes scientific skeptics refer to protoscience as “pathological sciences”. “Protoscience” is a term sometimes used to describe a hypothesis which has not yet been tested adequately by the scientific method, but which is otherwise consistent with existing science or which, where inconsistent, offers reasonable account of the inconsistency. Some protosciences go on to become an accepted part of mainstream science, for example; astrology and alchemy – at a time before invention of the scientific method – might be called “protosciences” by historians of science, but after the invention of the scientific method, when some practitioners refused to adopt the scientific method, the fields were then labeled “pseudoscience”. Several sciences started as branches of philosophy: mathematics, natural philosophy, economics, psychology, sociology, and the same may end up, historically, being the case for some cultural, traditional, or ancient practices. A “protoscience” may be a field where the hypothesis presented may or may not be in accordance with the known evidence at that time, and a body of associated predictions have been made, but the predictions have not yet been tested, or cannot be tested, due to current technological limitations. Such was the case for general relativity at the time of its proposal, which is now considered science, and the case for string theory, which at the time of this article writing is a protoscience. So why do we mention this – protoscience - because we’ve added it as a category.

Australian Researchers Develop Nanotech Paintable Solar Crystals

Printable, flexible solar cells that could dramatically decrease the cost of renewable energy have been developed by PhD student Brandon MacDonald in collaboration with his colleagues from CSIRO’s Future Manufacturing Flagship and the University of Melbourne’s Bio21 Institute.

Australian researchers have developed solar panels which can be painted or printed directly onto a surface. With help from the CSIRO, University of Melbourne PhD student Brandon MacDonald has produced solar cells so small they can be suspended in liquid, such as ink or paint. MacDonald hopes the new technology will be two to three times cheaper than solar cells currently on the market, Macdonald says he expects the cells to hit the market within 5 years. These solar panels will be made of nano-crystals with a diameter of just a few millionths of a millimetre. MacDonald says they will use just 1 per cent of the materials needed to make traditional solar panels.

“Using nano-crystal inks, they can be manufactured in a continuous manner, which increases throughput and should make the cells much cheaper to produce, we can then apply this ink onto a surface, so this could be glass or plastics or metals” Read the full article »»»»