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Lightning Strike in Africa Helps Take Pulse of Sun

ScienceDaily
Sat, 14 Nov 2009 04:00 EST

Sunspots, which rotate around the sun's surface, tell us a great deal about our own planet. Scientists rely on them, for instance, to measure the sun's rotation or to prepare long-range forecasts of Earth's health.

But there are some years, like this one, where it's not possible to see sunspots clearly. When we're at this "solar minimum," very few, if any, sunspots are visible from Earth. That poses a problem for scientists in a new scientific field called "Space Weather," which studies the interaction between the sun and Earth's environment.

Thanks to a serendipitous discovery by Tel Aviv University's Prof. Colin Price, head of TAU's Department of Geophysics and Planetary Science, and his graduate student Yuval Reuveni, science now has a more definitive and reliable tool for measuring the sun's rotation when sunspots aren't visible -- and even when they are. The research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research -- Space Physics, could have important implications for understanding the interactions between the sun and Earth. Best of all, it's based on observations of common, garden-variety lightning strikes here on Earth.

Alicia Chang
The Associated Press
Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:28 EST

The lunar dud for space enthusiasts has become a watershed event for NASA.

Spacecraft that crashed into the moon last month kicked up a relatively small plume. But scientists have confirmed the debris contained water - 25 gallons of it - making lunar exploration exciting again.

Experts have long suspected there was water on the moon. So the thrilling discovery announced Friday sent a ripple of hope for a future astronaut outpost in a place that has always seemed barren and inhospitable.

Alexis Madrigal
Wired Science
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:51 EST

This gorgeous image of a blue arc of the Earth against the blackness of space was captured by the Rosetta spacecraft as it swung by our planet.

The European Space Agency mission is on its way to intercept the comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The ship will deploy a lander onto the comet's surface, the first such attempt to be made.

Click HERE to read the rest of this article on wired.com.

Danielle Reeves
Medical News Today
Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:00 EST

Research into designing and building unique 'metamaterials' has received a £4.9 million funding boost from The Leverhulme Trust. Metamaterials can be used for invisibility 'cloaking' devices, sensitive security sensors that can detect tiny quantities of dangerous substances, and flat lenses that can be used to image tiny objects much smaller than the wavelength of light.

The new grant has been made to a team of Imperial College London scientists and engineers, who, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Southampton, will develop new applications for metamaterials that can bend, control and manipulate light and other kinds of electromagnetic waves. Metamaterials is a new, emerging field of science lying at the borders of physics and materials science. The concept relies not on clever chemistry, which is normally used to create new materials, but instead on creating clever patterns on the surface of existing materials, particularly metals.

The new grant is one of two The Leverhulme Trust is awarding for 'embedding emerging disciplines'. The project team is led by two of Imperial College London's Professors: Sir John Pendry, a world-leading physicist and pioneer in the field, who first proposed that metamaterials could be used to build an invisibility 'cloak' in 2006, and Professor Stefan Maier who is a leading experimentalist in the field of plasmonics. Also collaborating in the Project is Professor Nikolay Zheludev's team at the University of Southampton.

Lewis Page
The Register
Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:02 EST

A top boffin at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) says that the titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or "unknown unknowns" - for instance "an extra dimension".

"Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it," said Sergio Bertolucci, who is Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, briefing reporters including the Reg at CERN HQ earlier this week.

The LHC, built inside a 27-km circular subterranean tunnel deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva, functions like a sort of orbital motorway for extremely high-speed hadrons - typically either protons or lead ions.

ScienceDaily
Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:00 EST

Danish nanophysicists have developed a new method for manufacturing the cornerstone of nanotechnology research -- nanowires. The discovery has great potential for the development of nanoelectronics and highly efficient solar cells.

It is PhD student Peter Krogstrup, Nano-Science Center, the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, who developed the method during his dissertation.

"We have changed the recipe for producing nanowires. This means that we can produce nanowires that contain two different semiconductors, namely gallium indium arsenide and indium arsenide. It is a big breakthrough, because for first time on a nanoscale, we can combine the good characteristics of the two materials, thus gaining new possibilities for the electronics of the future," explains Peter Krogstrup.

Fadi Allafi Ghossoun
Archaeology News
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:38 EST

Homs (central Syria) Museums and Antiquities Department recently discovered a cave in Wadi al-Zahab that includes a cemetery of three tombs which are not completed because no one was buried in them. The cemetery dates back to the Byzantine era.

Head of the Department Farid Jabbour said the cemetery was discovered during the excavations carried out by the General Establishment for Water studies to keep off floods.

Moreover, The Syrian-Lebanese-Spanish joint expedition concluded archeological surveys which began in mid September in the villages of Qazhal, al-Rabiyeh, al-Mashahdeh, al-Rabieaa and Khurbat Ghazi north of the city of Homs.

Tom Simonite
New Scientist
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:31 EST

On 6 December 1957 a hollow aluminium sphere the size of a small melon burst from a blazing fireball, rose a mere metre or so above Florida before landing with a thump. The US was in trouble. A month earlier, the Soviet Union had sent a 500-kilogram capsule bearing a dog called Laika into space. But here was the US unable to even notch up its first foray into orbit.

President Dwight Eisenhower responded by creating a new research agency tasked with ensuring such "technological surprises" like Sputnik would never be sprung on the US again. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), conceived in February 1958 not only still exists, it has consistently made the US military the most advanced on Earth and unleashed life-changing technologies such as the internet, GPS and the computer mouse along the way.

Under the control of the Pentagon, DARPA has always maintained a low profile, but now journalist Michael Belfiore has written the first book about the agency. He spent time with the engineers charged with realising some very far-fetched ideas, which, if past performance is anything to go by, may also create society-changing spin-offs. He also gained unprecedented access to the agency's director, Tony Tether (now retired).

The current projects that Belfiore visits have typically ambitious goals - ones which dedicated New Scientist readers will be familiar with. He talks with two groups working to make prosthetic arms as nimble and light as the real thing, watches driverless cars work their way through real traffic in a bid to win a $2-million prize, and meets the creators of a portable robotic emergency room intended to keep injured soldiers alive long enough to reach hospital. He also learns about efforts to build scramjets able to race around the world in just a few hours.

Backward star ain't from around here

Ken Croswell
New Scientist
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:03 EST

Here's an apple that landed far from the tree. A dim star just 13 light years from Earth was born in a cluster 17,000 light years away.

Discovered in 1897, Kapteyn's Star is the 25th nearest star system to our sun, but it is no local, says Elizabeth Wylie-de Boer of Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra.

The cool star's composition is tricky to study, but astronomers can look at 16 other stars in the same "moving group", all of which orbit the galaxy backwards and are very old. The odd motion marks them as members of the Milky Way's ancient population of halo stars.

Of the stars, 14 had the same abundance of elements - such as sodium, magnesium, zirconium, barium - as Omega Centauri, the galaxy's most luminous globular cluster. The cluster emits a million times more light than the sun.

"It's long been thought that Omega Centauri is the left-over nucleus of a dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way," says Wylie-de Boer, whose paper will appear in the Astronomical Journal. "During the merger, the outer regions of this dwarf galaxy were stripped."

Anil Ananthaswamy
New Scientist
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:49 EST

As damp squibs go, it was quite a spectacular one. Amid great pomp and ceremony - not to mention dark offstage rumblings that the end of the world was nigh - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's mightiest particle smasher, fired up in September last year. Nine days later a short circuit and a catastrophic leak of liquid helium ignominiously shut the machine down.

Now for take two. Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the LHC's home on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is worried. It's not that he thinks the LHC will create a black hole that will engulf the planet, or even that the restart will end in a technical debacle like last year's. No: he's actually worried that the LHC will find what some call the "God particle", the popular and embarrassingly grandiose moniker for the hitherto undetected Higgs boson.

"I'm terrified," he says. "Discovering just the Higgs would really be a crisis."

Why so? Evidence for the Higgs would be the capstone of an edifice that particle physicists have been building for half a century - the phenomenally successful theory known simply as the standard model. It describes all known particles, as well as three of the four forces that act on them: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces.

It is also manifestly incomplete. We know from what the theory doesn't explain that it must be just part of something much bigger. So if the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing but the Higgs, the standard model will be sewn up. But then particle physics will be at a dead end, with no clues where to turn next.

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