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A space researcher has offered what he believes is the correct solution to a mystery that’s been flying around cyberspace for the past week: A strange tangle of white lines in China’s Gobi desert discovered in Google Map images. Military pundits, armchair investigators, and conspiracy theorists have had a field day with the strange set of lines.
Floscularia ringens is king of its castle. Brick by brick, this microscopic rotifer – or “wheel animal” – builds the tube it inhabits. To make its home, the rotifer gathers organic debris from the water it lives in through a socket in its head. This detritus is formed into round, reddish pellets inside its body. Here you can see a rolled “brick” inside the rotifer, ready to be deposited on the wall around it.
This species of rotifer lives submerged in freshwater near plants, attaching to surfaces like the underside of the leaves of water lilies. They’re no bigger than 2 millimetres long and their Mickey-Mouse-style lobes are lined with fast-moving hairs called “cilia” which give the illusion that their round protrusions are spinning. The cilia propel food from the surrounding water into the rotifer’s mouth.
Charles Krebs of Issaquah, Washington created this portrait of the tiny creature using a special flash to freeze the cilia’s rapid motion. He has also produced a video that shows the cilia moving and the Floscularia ringens depositing debris pellets onto its surrounding tube.
Materials that emit visible light after being exposed to sunlight are commonplace and can be found in everything from emergency signage to glow-in-the-dark stickers. But until now, scientists have had little success creating materials that emit light in the near-infrared range, a portion of the spectrum that only can be seen with the aid of night vision devices.
In a paper just published in the early online edition of the journal Nature Materials, however, University of Georgia scientists describe a new material that emits a long-lasting, near-infrared glow after a single minute of exposure to sunlight. Lead author Zhengwei Pan, associate professor of physics and engineering in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of Engineering, said the material has the potential to revolutionize medical diagnostics, give the military and law enforcement agencies a “secret” source of illumination and provide the foundation for highly efficient solar cells.
“When you bring the material anywhere outside of a building, one minute of exposure to light can create a 360-hour release of near-infrared light,” Pan said. “It can be activated by indoor fluorescent lighting as well, and it has many possible applications.”
via Scientists invent long-lasting, near infrared-emitting material.
Swedish divers have discovered the wreck of one of the largest 17th century warships. Found off the coast of the Baltic island of Öland at a depth of between 160 and 320 feet, the wooden wreck is believed to be that of the royal warship Svärdet. According to Deep Sea Productions, the underwater research team who identified the wreck, the vessel is “a prime example of richly decorated ‘gaudy’ ships, built largely to impress the enemy.”
The 82-foot Svärdet (the Sword) sank in 1676 in the largest naval battle in the Baltic, when Sweden was defeated by a Danish-Dutch fleet. After fighting for five hours, the Svärdet was set afire by a Dutch ship.
“The commander, admiral Claes Uggla, chose to go under with his ship, rather than surrender to the enemy,” Deep Sea Productions said in a statement. The Svärdet went down with its sister ship the Kronan (the Crown), whose wreck was discovered in 1981. It has yielded more than 30,000 archaeological artifacts, many of which are displayed at the Kalmar County Museum in Sweden.
Resting on the bottom of the sea, the Svärdet boasts “important portions still intact, huge guns still protruding from the gun-ports,” Deep Sea Productions said. Indeed, the Baltic Sea lacks the shipworm that destroys woodenwrecks in saltier oceans. Little doubt remains about the vessel’s identity. According to the researchers, wood from the wreck indicates it dates from the 17th century. Moreover, the fact that the stern of the ship is missing, is consistent with historical reports of explosions at the stern.
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Reynold Brown (b. William Reynold Brown in Los Angeles in 1917 – d. 1991) was a prolific American realist artist who drew many Hollywood film posters.
He attended Alhambra High School and refined his drawing under his teacher Lester Bonar. A talented artist, Brown met Hal Forrest, who hired him to ghost draw the comic strip Tailspin Tommy from 1936-1937. Norman Rockwell’s sister was a teacher at Alhambra High, and Brown later met Rockwell who advised him to leave cartooning if he wanted to be an illustrator. The talented Brown soon won a scholarship to the Otis Art Institute.
Scientists at Chalmers University of Technology have succeeded in creating light from vacuum – observing an effect first predicted over 40 years ago. The results will be published in the journal Nature. In an innovative experiment, the scientists have managed to capture some of the photons that are constantly appearing and disappearing in the vacuum.
The experiment is based on one of the most counter-intuitive, yet, one of the most important principles in quantum mechanics: that vacuum is by no means empty nothingness. In fact, the vacuum is full of various particles that are continuously fluctuating in and out of existence. They appear, exist for a brief moment and then disappear again. Since their existence is so fleeting, they are usually referred to as virtual particles.
Chalmers scientist, Christopher Wilson and his co-workers have succeeded in getting photons to leave their virtual state and become real photons, i.e. measurable light. The physicist Moore predicted way back in 1970 that this should happen if the virtual photons are allowed to bounce off a mirror that is moving at a speed that is almost as high as the speed of light. The phenomenon, known as the dynamical Casimir effect, has now been observed for the first time in a brilliant experiment conducted by the Chalmers scientists.
These pictures of Alpine ibex goats scaling the 160ft face of the Cingino Dam in northern Italy are fascinating, but not unusual. Its a classic illustration of how well this species has adapted to its environment.Ibex spend their life climbing up mountains to graze; then, at a certain time of day, they climb down again. They get different foods this way. They go uphill because the grass is better there in the summer, while in the winter it is better below. Here, I think, they are licking the stone for its minerals and salts. At a lower level theres plenty of grass, but they do need salts and minerals, and this must be a favourite place for them.The ibex have soft, split hooves that can grip like a pincer. Big and supple with shortish, powerful legs, they are very sure-footed and have good eyesight. In the north of Italy or the Alps, there are predators – their calves, for instance, are eaten by eagles – so they have to be on the lookout all the time.
A new mouthwash developed by a microbiologist at the UCLA School of Dentistry is highly successful in targeting the harmful Streptococcus mutans bacteria that is the principal cause tooth decay and cavities. In a recent clinical study, 12 subjects who rinsed just one time with the experimental mouthwash experienced a nearly complete elimination of the S. mutans bacteria over the entire four-day testing period. The findings from the small-scale study are published in the current edition of the international dental journal Caries Research.
Dental caries, commonly known as tooth decay or cavities, is one of the most common and costly infectious diseases in the United States, affecting more than 50 percent of children and the vast majority of adults aged 18 and older. Americans spend more than $70 billion each year on dental services, with the majority of that amount going toward the treatment of dental caries.
Legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart most likely died on an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, according to researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).
Tall, slender, blonde and brave, Earhart disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937 in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator. Her final resting place has long been a mystery. For years, Richard Gillespie, TIGHAR’s executive director and author of the book “Finding Amelia,” and his crew have been searching the Nikumaroro island for evidence of Earhart. A tiny coral atoll, Nikumaroro was some 300 miles southeast of Earhart’s target destination, Howland Island.
A number of artifacts recovered by TIGHAR would suggest that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, made a forced landing on the island’s smooth, flat coral reef. According to Gillespie, who is set to embark on a new $500,000 Nikumaroro expedition next summer, the two became castaways and eventually died there.
Of the approximately 1,500 exoplanets found so far, only a few are in the so-called habitable zone around their parent star. It’s also called the “Goldilocks zone,” a coveted sweet-spot where the amount of radiation coming from a star is “just right” for liquid water to exist on the surface of a rocky planet.
For example, Earth is within the present habitable zone around our sun, which is a comparatively narrow swath 18 million miles across. Enthusiasm about finding other worlds nestled inside other stars’ habitable zones is so strong that in 2008 a radio message was beamed to a planet known to exist in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Gliese 581, located 20 light-years away.
The signal contains 501 greetings that were selected through a competition on a social networking site. The tight noose defined by a habitable zone is one of the important variables in the famous Drake Equation, which tries to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.
If you are a regular visitor to Deskarati you may remember other posts on the ‘Antikythera Mechanism’. They can be found here and here. We recently came across this excellent video commissioned by watchmaker Hublot explaining the finding of this interesting piece and their new design based on the ancient mechanism. It really is worth a watch – sorry – Deskarati
A fiercely contested experiment that appears to show the accepted speed limit of the Universe can be broken has yielded the same results in a re-run, European physicists said. But counterparts in the United States said the experiment still did not resolve doubts and the Europeans themselves acknowledged this was not the end of the story.
On September 23, the European team issued a massive challenge to fundamental physics by saying they had measured particles called neutrinos which travelled around six kilometres (3.75 miles) per second faster than the velocity of light, determined by Einstein to be the highest speed possible. The neutrinos had been measured along a 732-kilometre (454-mile) trajectory between the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland and a laboratory in Italy. The scientists at CERN and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy scrutinised the results of the so-called OPERA experiment for nearly six months before cautiously making the announcement.
Ultra-lightweight materials are an incredibly cool area of materials science, bringing us crazy substances like aerogel. And now, for the first time, scientists have produced a metal that’s so light it can balance on the fluff of a dandelion. Here’s why this material is revolutionary — and how it’s made.
Ultralight materials are usually made up of chaotic structures, like the bubbles in aerogel. But this metal is created out of a solid, repeating structure. It’s called an ultralight metallic microlattice, and it’s produced in an intriguing way. The method involves using a liquid photopolymer which solidifies when hit by ultraviolet radiation. Scientists shine light on the liquid through a pattern. Only the exposed bits of the liquid become solid, creating a lattice-work scaffold, which is then coated with nickel-phosphorous. Once the photopolymer is etched away, all that is left is a 3D, hollow lattice of metal which is more air than anything else.
This stuff weighs less than one milligram per cubic centimeter, completely bounces back after compression, and is made of a repeating lattice. It has incredible potential for use as thermal insulation; acoustic, vibration or shock dampening; energy absorption and recovery; and electronic parts. Me? I just want a chunk of this stuff to play with.
Santa Domenica is the saint who takes care of and protects the small town of Scorrano, in the heart of Salento in the south of Italy. As the story goes, many centuries ago Santa Domenica saved the town from a great bubonic plague epidemic which threatened to kill the population. Santa Domenica worked her magic and the town was saved. To give thanks to her, everyone in the town put a little candle outside their window to light up the dark and be grateful to the saint.
Now every year the town becomes the ‘capital of light’, with the most impressive light exhibition in Italy! With stunning colours, beautiful fireworks and traditional songs, there are also many stands with foods and typical products.
Deskarati
Demonstrated during this month’s International Robot Exhibition (IREX) in Tokyo, Jukusui-Kun is a polar bear-shaped robotic pillow that, like Paro the seal-bot, masks a serious purpose beneath its cute and cuddly exterior. Jukusui-Kun is designed to help snorers and those who live with them – whenever snoring becomes too loud (and sleep apnea becomes a danger), the robot raises its paw and gently touches the sleeper’s face to trigger a change of sleeping position.
While we’ve seen numerous treatments for sleep apnea, such as anti-snoring pillows and even smartphone apps, Jukusui-Kun is arguably the first and only anti-snoring robot.
As well as being quite irritating for family members, snoring might be a sign of sleep apnea. These dangerous pauses in breathing during sleep effect an estimated 2 million people in Japan alone – and it cannot be underestimated.
More here Gadgarati.
The birth of the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains buried beneath the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet – a puzzle mystifying scientists since their first discovery in 1958 – is finally solved. The remarkably long geological history explains the formation of the mountain range in the least explored frontier on Earth and where the Antarctic Ice Sheet first formed. The findings are published this week in the journal Nature.
A seven-nation team of scientists explored the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains – buried beneath up to 3 km of ice – during the International Polar Year (2007- 09) by using two twin-engine aircraft equipped with ice penetrating radars, gravity meters and magnetometers. By analyzing the new data, the researchers describe the extraordinary processes – which took place over the last billion years – that created and preserved a root beneath the mountains and the East Antarctic rift system – a 3,000 km long fracture in the earth’s surface that extends from East Antarctica across the ocean to India.
More here Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains enigma unraveled in East Antarctica.
Well, silly, it comes from oil wells, of course! Sorry, that was just too easy to pass up (and in some respects the best answer out there)! Really now, where does oil come from?
The truth is, no one is completely certain how oil originated, migrated and accumulated.
It took over a year to construct at a cost of $2.7 million, but the world’s least thrilling roller coaster is now open in Duisburg, Germany, ready for tourists looking to avoid thrills or anything exciting during their travels.
Rising 66 feet into the air, the ‘Tiger & Turtle – Magic Mountain’ was designed by artists Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth to contrast the sense of speed usually associated with thrill rides (the tiger) with the slow, methodical steps (the turtle) needed to complete its 722 feet of coasterless track.
The coaster sits atop a hill 280 feet above sea level, so I’m sure it at least provides some lovely views of the surrounding countryside. And since you’re not racing along the track, pulling heavy Gs in the corners, it’s easy to stop and snap a photo at your leisure. As for that giant loop, I have no idea how that’s supposed to work. Maybe you just need to get a good running start?
via Walkable Roller Coaster Offers Good Exercise, Zero Thrills.
A former Nazi bunker located in the Wilhelmsburg district of Hamburg, Germany is about to get a full-scale makeover. The building, which sorta looks like a giant LEGO, is set to become Europe’s largest renewable energy power plant.
When it’s all said and done, the power plant will supply 3,000 homes with heating and 1,000 of those with electricity, cutting 6,600 tons of CO2 per year.
How? The nine story structure (called a Flaktürme in German) will boast a 110 kWh rooftop photovoltaic system and a south-facing 0.6 GWh solar-thermal unit come 2012. The building’s interior is being reserved for even further expansion. By 2013 the structure will house a 10.5 GWh woodchip combined heat and power plant (CHP), and a 3.7 GWh biomethane plant powered by a nearby industrial plant, for example. Waste heat will also be stored. That sounds like a lot but this building could house around 80 single family homes. It is that big.
via Nazi Bunker to Become Europe’s Largest Solar Power Plant
A 70-million-year-old nest of the dinosaur Protoceratops andrewsi has been found with evidence that 15 juveniles were once inside it, according to a paper in the latest Journal of Paleontology. While large numbers of eggs have been associated with other dinosaurs, such as the meat-eating Oviraptor or certain duck-billed hadrosaurs, finding multiple juveniles in the same dino nest is quite rare.
“I, for one, cannot think of another dinosaur specimen that preserves 15 juveniles at its nest in this way,” lead author David Fastovsky told Discovery News.
Fastovsky, who is chair of the University of Rhode Island’s Department of Geosciences, and his colleagues analyzed the dinosaur remains along with the nest, which measured about 2.3 feet in diameter and was round and bowl-shaped. All were found at Djadochta Formation, Tugrikinshire, Mongolia, where it’s believed sand “rapidly overwhelmed and entombed” the youngsters while they were still alive. The researchers conclude that the 15 dinosaurs all show juvenile characteristics. These include short snouts, proportionately large eyes, and an absence of adult characteristics, such as the prominent horns and large frills associated with adults of this species. At least 10 of the 15 fossil sets are complete.
The nest and its contents imply that Protoceratops juveniles remained and grew in their nest during at least the early stages of postnatal development. The nest further implies that parental care was provided.
We’ve had our eyes on contact lenses which aim to deliver medicine for several years. Now, a team of biomedical and chemical engineers from Alabama’s Auburn University (AU) claims to have designed the first disposable lenses capable of delivering controlled doses of medication for as long as they’re being worn.
One incentive for developing these wearable drug-delivery devices (they can be corrective or merely transparent) is the short-lived nature of medication in drop form. Typically, drugs applied to the eyes in that manner are largely washed out after only thirty minutes or so, whereas “wearing your meds” can be far more effective. Certainly, it makes sense that chronic dosing would yield more benefits than sporadic, not to mention the added convenience of potentially being able to forget about medicating for days at a time.
More here Experimental contact lenses deliver eye medication in controlled doses.
What a beautiful picture. (Click the picture for a hi-res version.)
In the foreground flows Iceland’s 200-foot-tall Skógafoss waterfall — but the spray from the falls has become illuminated by the beams of an intensely bright full moon, giving rise to a rare sight known as a moonbow, or lunar rainbow (no direct sunlight in this photo). And to top it all off, in the background there are green streaks of aurorae dancing across a star-studded night sky.
This mind-blowing scene was captured last month by landscape photographer Stévan Vetter, and is one of literally hundreds of absolutely incredible photographs of the Earth, sky, and Universe featured on his site. Do yourself a favour and check it out — here.
via Feast your eyes on a rare lunar rainbow — against the Northern Lights!.
Korean architect Eun Young Yi’s proposal was selected in 1999 from 235 competition entries as the plan for the new central library of the City of Stuttgart. The building of the 80-million Euro (about $108 mil. US) Stadtbibliothek am Mailänder Platz began three years ago and the opening ceremonies took place last month.
Since 2006, Tokyo-based Aerial Burton Inc. has been working on Aerial 3D, a technology that makes it possible to produce pictures in 3D in mid-air or underwater – without using a screen (that’s what I call “True 3D Technology” indeed). Burton says their laser-based system is the only one of its kind.
The current system projects 3D objects at 50,000 dots per second (up from around 1,000 in 2006) and with a frame rate of 10-15. The Aerial 3D works by focusing laser light, producing “plasma excitation from the oxygen and nitrogen in the air”.
via Gadgarati: Amazing System Shows 3D Objects In Mid-Air (with Video).
Many have tried, but none have succeeded. For at least a hundred years, scientists looking at hydrogen have scratched their chins when musing over the fact that it, as an alkali metal, by all rights should exist as a metal under the right circumstances. But thus far, no one has been able to figure out what the right circumstances might be. Until now. Maybe. Mikhail Eremets and Ivan Troyan of the Max-Planck Institute describe in their paper published in Nature Materials, how they subjected a sample of hydrogen to high pressure and low temperature and found it then demonstrated properties generally ascribed to a metal.
Researchers from the Large Hadron Collider have shown off results that may help explain why the Universe is made largely of matter, not antimatter. Particles called D-mesons seem to decay slightly more often into one kind of particle rather than another, LHCb physicist Matthew Charles told the HCP 2011 meeting on Monday. The phenomenon may help explain our matter-dominated Universe. The team stresses that further analysis will be needed to shore up the result.
At the moment, they are claiming a statistical certainty of “3.5 sigma” – suggesting that there less than a 0.5% chance that the result they see is down to chance. The team has nearly double the amount of data that they have analysed so far, so time will tell whether the result reaches the “five-sigma” level that qualifies it for a formal discovery.
Daniela Caceta works on computer-generated artwork in Brazil. When using an electron microscope, she encounters interesting features such as formation, growth, development and mostly, the morphology of nanostructures. She talks of her works as an extension of the ancient Greek manipulation of dyes and pottery. She said they "were unaware of the size of the particles with which they were dealing, (but) they created colorful pottery glazes by manipulating nano-sized particles." Birth of the World came in fifth.
NanoArt is a glimpse into an unbelievably tiny world that only a small number of scientists have viewed. For the average person, the realm of nanotechnology — that is, structures smaller than a billionth of a meter — is as remote and inaccessible as the moon.
But nanoartist Cris Orfrescu wanted to change that. He created the NanoArt Exhibition to share the beauty of the nano-world with those of us living in the macro-world.
Using electron microscopes, scientists capture images of nano-sized landscapes and then colorize them with digital photography software in order to create pieces of art.
Thanks to Deskarati’s travelling reporter - Phil Krause.
Phantasmagoria was a form of theatre which used a modified magic lantern to project frightening images such as skeletons, demons, and ghosts onto walls, smoke, or semi-transparent screens, frequently using rear projection. The projector was mobile, allowing the projected image to move and change size on the screen, and multiple projecting devices allowed for quick switching of different images. Invented in France in the late 18th century, it gained popularity through most of Europe (especially England) throughout the 19th century.
The magic lantern has been credited to both Athanasius Kircher and Christiaan Huygens in the early to mid-17th century, respectively. Kircher’s device consisted of a lantern with a candle and concave mirror inside. A tube was fitted into the side of the lantern and held convex lenses at either end. Near the center of the tube, a glass slide of the image to be projected was held. Huygens’ magic lantern has been described as the predecessor of today’s slide projector and the forerunner of the motion picture projector. Images were hand painted onto the glass slide until the mid-19th century when photographic slides were employed. Though Huygens’ magic lantern was often used for amusement by projecting quaint and pastoral imagery, phantoms, devils, and other macabre objects were also sometimes projected, thus giving rise to phantasmagoria.
On October 30, 1938 Orson Wells broadcast a radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds and it brought him instant fame. The combination of the news bulletin form of the performance with the between-breaks dial spinning habits of listeners from the rival and far more popular Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy program, was later reported in the media to have created widespread confusion among listeners who failed to hear the introduction. Panic was reported to have spread among many listeners who believed the news reports of a Martian invasion. The myth of the result created by the combination was reported as fact around the world and disparagingly mentioned by Adolf Hitler in a public speech a few months later. The 1970s “docu-drama” The Night That Panicked America was based on events centering around the production of, and events that resulted from, the program.
Edited from Orson Welles
Scientists have demonstrated that a superconducting detector called a transition edge sensor (TES) is capable of counting the number of as many as 1,000 photons in a single pulse of light with an accuracy limited mainly by the quantum noise of the laser source. The findings, which are being prepared for publication, could eventually find use in quantum information processing, telecommunications and optical metrology at low light levels when information is embodied in readily detectable numbers of photons.
“When the uncertainty of the photon-number determination is sufficiently low and the detection efficiency is close to unity, by detection one can decode information that was encoded in the amplitude (photon number) of a pulse of light,” says Thomas Gerrits of PML Many detectors can sense single-photon pulses, and some (including the TES) can even resolve a few tens of photons in a single pulse. Accurate counts above approximately 50 photons, however, have not been achieved until now. The new PML research extends the photon-number resolution range as high as 1,000 and dramatically decreases the associated measurement uncertainties.
Besides surgery, chemotherapy and radiation are the foundation of modern day cancer treatment. Although effective, these therapies often have debilitating and damaging side effects. But scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland have been experimenting with a new form of therapy using infrared light to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors without damaging healthy tissue.
The photoimmunotherapy (PIT) treatment works by combining cancer-specific antibodies with a fluorescent dye. A near infrared light is then administered which heats up the dye, burns a hole in the cancer cell is has attached to, and essentially kills it.
Scientists have targeted tumor cells in mice by using the antibodies that bind to proteins that are often over-expressed in cancers. The researchers specifically targeted HER2, a protein over-expressed by some breast cancers; EGFR, which is over-expressed by some lung, pancreatic, and colon cancers; and PSMA, which is over-expressed by prostate cancers.
