Science & Technology

Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder - Welcome to the Dead Zone

Claire Connell
News Com, Australia
Mon, 06 Jun 2011 16:57 UTC

Welcome to the Dead Zone.

I was one of the very last people to take my mobile phone onto the site which Australia and New Zealand hope will become the epicentre of the world's largest radio telescope array.

Not that my phone was very much use. You'd be better off with a carrier pigeon eight hours northeast of Perth, at a place called Boolardy Station in Murchison Shire.

There are already six radio dishes here, of a total of 36 which will form the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder. The other 30 dishes are due to be built by the end of the year.

However authorities hope the site will also become the epicentre of a much larger project - SKA, the largest array of radio telescopes ever built, with 3000 dishes stretching 5500km from Boolardy to New Zealand.

With the processing power of "about a billion PCs", the SKA hopes to play the central role in unlocking the mysteries of how our universe came into being - from the nature of gravity to the evolution of our galaxies.

On Thursday I joined a gaggle of journalists, stakeholders, indigenous leaders and CSIRO scientists - along with their video cameras, phones and digital recording devices - to visit Boolardy Station.

Moving Mirrors Make Light From Nothing

Geoff Brumfiel
Nature News
Mon, 06 Jun 2011 16:26 UTC

A team of physicists is claiming to have coaxed sparks from the vacuum of empty space.¹ If verified, the finding would be one of the most unusual experimental proofs of quantum mechanics in recent years and "a significant milestone", says John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study.

The researchers, based at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, will present their findings early next week at a workshop in Padua, Italy. They have already posted a paper on the popular pre-print server arXiv.org, but have declined to talk to reporters because the work has not yet been peer-reviewed. High-profile journals, including Nature, discourage researchers from talking to the press until their findings are ready for publication.

Nevertheless, scientists not directly connected with the group say that the result is impressive. "It is a major development," says Federico Capasso, an experimental physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has worked on similar quantum effects.

Ephemeral Antimatter Trapped for Amazingly Long 16 Minutes

LiveScience
Sun, 05 Jun 2011 14:00 UTC

© Katie Bertsche
A strong magnet was critical to trapping antihydrogen atoms by using their small magnetic moments. This simplified version shows how the north and south poles of strategically arranged magnets can immobilize neutral antimatter that has a magnetic moment equivalent to a tiny bar.

Antimatter, an elusive type of matter that's rare in the universe, has now been trapped for more than 16 minutes - an eternity in particle physics.

In fact, scientists who've been trapping antihydrogen atoms at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva say isolating the exotic particles has become so routine that they expect to soon begin experiments on this rare substance.

Antimatter is like a mirror image of matter. For every matter particle (a hydrogen atom, for example), a matching antimatter particle is thought to exist (in this case, an antihydrogen atom) with the same mass, but the opposite charge.

"We've trapped antihydrogen atoms for as long as 1,000 seconds, which is forever" in the world of high-energy particle physics, said Joel Fajans, a University of California, Berkeley professor of physics who is a faculty scientist at California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) experiment at CERN.

Mysterious Origins of Dark Sunspots Explained

Live Science
Sun, 05 Jun 2011 06:09 UTC

© The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, V.M.J. Henriques (sunspot), NASA Apollo 17 (Earth)
An image of the sunspot with the Earth shown to scale. The image has been colorized for aesthetic reasons. This image with 0.1 arcsecond resolution from the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope represents the limit of what is currently possible in terms of spatial resolution.

By gazing at the edges of sunspots, astronomers now are pinpointing key details of how these mysterious dark marks form.

Sunspots are blotches on the sun that appear dark because they are cooler than the rest of the solar surface. Astronomers do know they are linked to intense magnetic activity on the sun, which can suppress the flow of hot matter, but much about their structure and behavior remains enigmatic.

The dark heart of a sunspot, called the umbra, is surrounded by a brighter edge known as the penumbra, which is made of numerous dark and light filaments more than 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) long. They are relatively thin, at approximately 90 miles (150 km) in width, making it difficult to resolve details that could reveal how they arise.

Comment: While 'gas flows' may help astronomers make sense of the forces within a singular sunspot, there is still a lot to be learned from these sunspots and why they occur in the cycles that they do.

For another perspective on this topic see:

Planetary Alignments and the Solar Capacitor - Things are heatin' up!

New Male Birth Control Concept Shows Promise

Wynne Parry
LiveScience
Sat, 04 Jun 2011 12:16 UTC

Equality for men may be on the horizon, contraceptive equality, that is. For just over a half century, women have been able to pop a pill to prevent pregnancy, but a pharmaceutical alternative has never emerged for men.

Now, research to interfere with the body's ability to use vitamin A is showing some promise, because, in men, vitamin A is necessary for the production of sperm.

One recent study found that a compound that interferes with the body's ability to use vitamin A rendered male mice sterile while they were receiving 8- or 16-week courses. But once the mice were taken off the compound, they resumed making sperm. Significantly, the researchers found no side effects, and the testosterone levels of the mice stayed normal, meaning no fluctuations in mousey libido.

"Our mice, they mate quite happily, so that is not something we have interfered with," said Debra Wolgemuth, one of the study researchers and a professor of genetics and development at Columbia University Medical Center.

'Werewolf' Gene May Explain Excess Hair Disorder

LiveScience
Fri, 03 Jun 2011 16:49 UTC

Scientists have discovered a genetic mutation responsible for a disorder that causes people to sprout thick hair on their faces and bodies.

Hypertrichosis, sometimes called "werewolf syndrome" is a very rare condition, with fewer than 100 cases documented worldwide. But researchers knew the disorder runs in families, and in 1995 they traced the approximate location of the mutation to a section of the X chromosome (one of the two sex chromosomes) in a Mexican family affected by hypertrichosis.

Men with the syndrome have hair covering their faces and eyelids, while women grow thick patches on their bodies. In March, a Thai girl with the condition got into the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's hairiest child.

A man in China with congenital hypertrichosis helped researchers break the case. Xue Zhang, a professor of medical genetics at the Peking Union Medical College, tested the man and his family and found an extra chunk of genes on the X chromosome. The researchers then returned to the Mexican family and also found an extra gene chunk (which was different from that of the Chinese man) in the same location of their X chromosomes.

Woman Feeds Great White Shark by Hand

Natalie Wolchover
Life's Little Mysteries
Fri, 03 Jun 2011 12:41 UTC

Circling the Web this week is an incredible video showing Valerie Taylor, a world-renowned shark expert, hand-feeding a great white shark off the side of a boat. After placing a fish into the fearsome creature's mouth, she even leans down and pats it on the nose.

"I think the shark and I had an understanding," Taylor says in a voiceover of the footage, which aired in a TV documentary called Shadow of the Shark. "This one, I had a feeling for."

Great white sharks, according to Yannis Papastamatiou, a research biologist in the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History, are intelligent and good learners. Despite the great white's reputation as a vicious hunter, like many wild animals, with enough practice and patience (and fish), researchers can condition them to take handouts from research vessels. It isn't unheard of, Papastamatiou said, for researchers to hand-feed them.

In the video, Taylor does just that, first coaxing the shark progressively closer to the boat using line baited with fish before finally feeding the shark by hand.

While this footage might be hair-raising to most of us, it's all in a day's work for Taylor, who, along with husband Ron, has worked in close quarters with great white sharks for decades. She even once swam among great whites with tuna filets stuffed in her chainmail diving suit just to learn more about the way they bite and feed.

The secret lives of photons revealed

Tushna Commissaria
Physics World
Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:38 UTC

An international team of researchers has, for the first time, mapped complete trajectories of single photons in Young's famous double slit experiment. The finding takes an important first step towards measuring complimentary variables of a quantum system - which until now has been considered impossible as a consequence of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

In the double slit experiment, a beam of light is shone onto a screen through two slits, which results in an interference pattern on the screen. The paradox was that one could not tell which slit single photons had passed through, as measuring this would directly distort the interference pattern on the screen. "In most science, it is possible to look at what a system is doing presently and so, determine its past or future. But in quantum mechanics, it is considered inconceivable to consider the past at all." says physicist Aephraim Steinberg of the Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control at the University of Toronto, Canada who has led this new research.

Now, using a technique known as "weak measurement" Steinberg and his team say they have managed to accurately measure both position and momentum of single photons in a two-slit interferometer experiment. The work was inspired by one of Steinberg's colleagues, Howard Wiseman of Griffith University, Australia, who proposed in 2007 that it may be possible to use weak measurements to determine momenta and positions in the double slit experiment. Steinberg was immediately fascinated and began to see how this would become experimentally viable.

Hot Rocks: Magnetic "Poles" Once at The Equator

The Daily Galaxy
Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:07 UTC

It has been 780,000 years since the last reversal, so we may be long overdue one. But will lethal radiation from space bombard the Earth, as it drops its protective magnetic shield during the reversal? Italian scientists studying one of the most mysterious natural phenomena say that polarity reversals seem to occur in clusters, indicating some kind of "memory" of previous events.

Scientists now say that the Earth's magnetic poles were once near the equator, which could explain puzzling changes in the magnetism of rocks millions of years ago.

The Earth's magnetic poles are aligned along roughly the same axis as its rotational poles. Geologists have assumed this was also true in the past, so they use volcanic rocks, which when they formed took on an imprint of the direction and strength of the Earth's magnetic field, to deduce the rocks' original latitude and to trace continental motions over the past billion years, which has created a puzzle for rocks in North America and eastern Europe. In both regions, there appear to be rocks that were at the equator at some points between 550 and 600 million years ago and near the poles for other parts of this time period.

Supernova Discovered in M51 The Whirlpool Galaxy

Adrian West
Universe Today
Fri, 03 Jun 2011 13:56 UTC

A new supernova (exploding star) has been discovered in the famous Whirlpool Galaxy, M51.

M51, The Whirlpool galaxy is a galaxy found in the constellation of Canes Venatici, very near the star Alkaid in the handle of the saucepan asterism of the big dipper. Easily found with binoculars or a small telescope.

The discovery was made on June 2nd by French astronomers and the supernova is reported to be around magnitude 14. More information (In French) can be found here or translated version here.

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Science & Technology

Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder - Welcome to the Dead Zone

Moving Mirrors Make Light From Nothing

Ephemeral Antimatter Trapped for Amazingly Long 16 Minutes

Mysterious Origins of Dark Sunspots Explained

New Male Birth Control Concept Shows Promise

'Werewolf' Gene May Explain Excess Hair Disorder

Woman Feeds Great White Shark by Hand

The secret lives of photons revealed

Hot Rocks: Magnetic "Poles" Once at The Equator

Supernova Discovered in M51 The Whirlpool Galaxy

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