Science News
Not much force: Researchers detect smallest force ever measured
DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
What is believed to be the smallest force ever measured has been detected by researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. Using a combination of lasers and a unique optical trapping system that provides a cloud of ultracold atoms, the researchers measured a force of approximately 42 yoctonewtons. A yoctonewton is one septillionth of a newton and there are approximately 3 x 1023 yoctonewtons in one ounce of force.
"We applied an external force to the center-of-mass motion of an ultracold atom cloud in a high-finesse optical cavity and measured the resulting motion optically," says Dan Stamper-Kurn, a physicist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and the UC Berkeley Physics Department. "When the driving force was resonant with the cloud's oscillation frequency, we achieved a sensitivity that is consistent with theoretical predictions and only a factor of four above the Standard Quantum Limit, the most sensitive measurement that can be made."
|
New Study Provides Strong Evidence that Neanderthals Ate Plants
Analysis of sediment samples from El Salt – a known site of Neanderthal occupation in Spain that dates back 50,000 years – suggests that Neanderthals predominantly consumed meat, but also had significant intake of plants, such as tubers, berries, and nuts.
by Sci-News.com
While zooarchaeological and stable isotope data have conveyed an image of Homo neanderthalensis as meat-eaters, some studies on microfossils trapped in Neanderthal teeth suggest they may have led a more complex lifestyle, harvesting and cooking plants in addition to hunting prey.
For a more direct approach, anthropologist Ainara Sistiaga from the University of La Laguna and her colleagues looked for fecal remains at the El Salt site in Alicante, Spain, where remnants of multiple Neanderthal occupations have been unearthed.
The scientists collected five small samples of soil at El Salt and analyzed them for metabolized versions of animal-derived cholesterol as well as phytosterol, a cholesterol-like compound found in plants.
While all samples contained signs of meat consumption, two samples showed traces of plants – the first direct evidence that Neanderthals may have enjoyed an omnivorous diet.
|
Technology News
Breakthrough in solar panel manufacture promises cheap energy within a decade
Steve Connor
A breakthrough in the production of solar cells will make the next generation of solar panels cheaper and safer, and promises to accelerate the development of solar energy over the next decade, scientists said.
A technical advance based on an edible salt used in the manufacture of tofu could revolutionise the production of future solar panels to make them less expensive, more flexible and easier to use than the current models seen on millions of roofs across Britain.
Researchers believe they have found a way of overcoming one of the most serious limitations of the next generation of solar panels, which are based on toxic cadmium chloride, by simply adding magnesium chloride, an abundant salt found in seawater.
A study has shown that the solar cells produced with magnesium chloride – which is also found in bath salts as well as used to coagulate soya milk into tofu – work just as efficiently as conventional cadmium cells but at a fraction of the cost and with much lower toxicity.
|
‘Sensing Skin’ Quickly Detects Cracks, Damage in Concrete Structures
NC State University
Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Eastern Finland have developed new “sensing skin” technology designed to serve as an early warning system for concrete structures, allowing authorities to respond quickly to damage in everything from nuclear facilities to bridges.
“The sensing skin could be used for a wide range of structures, but the impetus for the work was to help ensure the integrity of critical infrastructure such as nuclear waste storage facilities,” says Dr. Mohammad Pour-Ghaz, an assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work.
The skin is an electrically conductive coat of paint that can be applied to new or existing structures. The paint can incorporate any number of conductive materials, such as copper, making it relatively inexpensive.
|
Environmental News
New NASA images highlight U.S. air quality improvement
NASA
Anyone living in a major U.S. city for the past decade may have noticed a change in the air. The change is apparent in new NASA satellite images unveiled this week that demonstrate the reduction of air pollution across the country.
After ten years in orbit, the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura satellite has been in orbit sufficiently long to show that people in major U.S. cities are breathing less nitrogen dioxide -- a yellow-brown gas that can cause respiratory problems.
Nitrogen dioxide is one of the six common pollutants regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to protect human health. Alone it can impact the respiratory system, but it also contributes to the formation of other pollutants including ground-level ozone and particulates, which also carry adverse health effects. The gas is produced primarily during the combustion of gasoline in vehicle engines and coal in power plants. It's also a good proxy for the presence of air pollution in general.
|
Wind Power Production Record Broken in Texas
The Lone Star State might have set a national record for a state's wind power production too
By Bobby Magill and Climate Central
Texas, the nation’s largest wind power producer, hit a major milestone in March when it produced more wind power in a given moment than ever before, according to a new Energy Information Administration report.
It may have set a national record for a state’s wind power production, too.
The Lone Star State hit “peak wind” at 8:48 p.m. on March 26, when the state’s wind farms produced 10,296 megawatts of electricity. At that moment, wind turbines provided enough electricity to supply power for 29 percent of the total electricity load of the state’s main power grid.
Texas’ self-contained power grid, operated by ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, supplies power to all the state’s major cities — about 85 percent of the state’s electric power customers — except El Paso, Amarillo, Lubbock and those along Texas' eastern border.
|
Medical News
Controlling body movement with light: Neuroscientists inhibit muscle contractions by shining light on spinal cord neurons
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
For the first time, MIT neuroscientists have shown they can control muscle movement by applying optogenetics -- a technique that allows scientists to control neurons' electrical impulses with light -- to the spinal cords of animals that are awake and alert.
Led by MIT Institute Professor Emilio Bizzi, the researchers studied mice in which a light-sensitive protein that promotes neural activity was inserted into a subset of spinal neurons. When the researchers shone blue light on the animals' spinal cords, their hind legs were completely but reversibly immobilized. The findings, described in the June 25 issue of PLoS One, offer a new approach to studying the complex spinal circuits that coordinate movement and sensory processing, the researchers say.
|
Fighting parasitic infection inadvertently unleashes dormant virus
Washington University in St. Louis
Signals from the immune system that help repel a common parasite inadvertently can cause a dormant viral infection to become active again, a new study shows.
Further research is necessary to understand the clinical significance of the finding, but researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis said the study helps illustrate how complex interactions between infectious agents and the immune system have the potential to affect illness.
The results appear online June 26 in Science Express.
The scientists identified specific signals in mice that mobilize the immune system to fight tapeworms, roundworms and other helminths, parasites that infect nearly a quarter of all humans. The same signals cause an inactive herpes virus infection in the mice to begin replicating again.
|
Space News
Star-eating star spotted
by Christopher Crockett
A star in a neighboring galaxy might have swallowed another star. Sitting about 200,000 light-years away in the constellation Tucana, the star HV 2112 appears to be a red supergiant that has engulfed a neutron star. This strange pair, called a Thorne-Żytkow Object, or TŻO, was largely theoretical until now. Sitting in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, HV 2112 is the first TŻO to be seen.
A TŻO starts with two massive stars orbiting one another. When the more massive of the two explodes in a supernova, its core is left behind as a neutron star. One scenario posits that as the other star ages, it swells and swallows the neutron star, which gets dragged down into the heart of its sibling. Alternatively, the neutron star might be shot out of the supernova into its companion. TŻOs are hard to find because they look nearly identical to other red supergiants. Emily Levesque, an astronomer at the University of Colorado, Boulder and colleagues discovered the TŻO by looking for unusual amounts of certain elements in the star’s atmosphere. The strange chemistry, the team reported May 30 on arXiv.org, is created when gas inside the supergiant meets the hot surface of its inner neutron star.
|
Astronomers Discover Rare Triple Supermassive Black Hole System
A team of scientists led by Dr Roger Deane from the University of Cape Town in South Africa has discovered a system of three supermassive black holes – with two of them orbiting each other rather like binary stars – in a galaxy more than 4 billion light-years away from Earth. The discovery could help astronomers in the search for gravitational waves (the ripples in space-time) predicted by Albert Einstein.
by Sci-News.com
“Einstein’s General Relativity predicts that merging black holes are sources of gravitational waves and in this work we have managed to spot three black holes packed about as tightly together as they could be before spiraling into each other and merging,” said Prof Matt Jarvis from the University of Oxford, who is a co-author of the discovery paper published in the journal Nature.
“The idea that we might be able to find more of these potential sources of gravitational waves is very encouraging as knowing where such signals should originate will help us try to detect these ripples in space-time as they warp the Universe.”
In their study, Dr Deane, Prof Jarvis and co-authors examined six galaxies thought to contain binary supermassive black hole systems.
The astronomers found that one of these galaxies, SDSS J150243.09+1111557.3 (J1502 for short), they thought contained two black holes (J1502P and J1502S) actually contained a triple system with a very compact double supermassive black hole.
|
Odd News
Chimps like listening to music with a different beat
American Psychological Association (APA)
While preferring silence to music from the West, chimpanzees apparently like to listen to the different rhythms of music from Africa and India, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
"Our objective was not to find a preference for different cultures' music. We used cultural music from Africa, India and Japan to pinpoint specific acoustic properties," said study coauthor Frans de Waal, PhD, of Emory University. "Past research has focused only on Western music and has not addressed the very different acoustic features of non-Western music. While nonhuman primates have previously indicated a preference among music choices, they have consistently chosen silence over the types of music previously tested."
|