Science & TechnologyS


Evil Rays

Quasiparticles imaged, half-light/half-matter could lead to faster circuits, higher bandwidths

Iowa State University
Science Daily
Wed, 07 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
Quasiparticles
© Zhe Fei/Iowa State UniversityThis image shows how researchers launched and studied half-light, half-matter quasiparticles called exciton-polaritons. A laser from the top left shines on the sharp tip of a nano-imaging system aimed at a flat semiconductor. The red circles inside the semiconductor are the waves associated with the quasiparticles.
Zhe Fei pointed to the bright and dark vertical lines running across his computer screen. This nano-image, he explained, shows the waves associated with a half-light, half-matter quasiparticle moving inside a semiconductor.

"These are waves just like water waves," said Fei, an Iowa State University assistant professor of physics and astronomy and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory. "It's like dropping a rock on the surface of water and seeing waves. But these waves are exciton-polaritons."

Exciton-polaritons are a combination of light and matter. Like all quasiparticles, they're created within a solid and have physical properties such as energy and momentum. In this study, they were launched by shining a laser on the sharp tip of a nano-imaging system aimed at a thin flake of molybdenum diselenide (MoSe2), a layered semiconductor that supports excitons.

Excitons can form when light is absorbed by a semiconductor. When excitons couple strongly with photons, they create exciton-polaritons.
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Ice Cube

Earth's atmosphere is more chemically reactive in cold climates, glacial maximums

University of Washington
Science Daily
Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00 UTC
Becky Anderson
© Mark Stone/University of WashingtonBecky Anderson in UW's IsoLab cold room analyzing sections of an ice core from Antarctica to see if they show the same trend as the Greenland cores.
Unseen in the air around us are tiny molecules that drive the chemical cocktail of our atmosphere. As plants, animals, volcanoes, wildfires and human activities spew particles into the atmosphere, some of these molecules act as cleanup crews that remove that pollution.

The main molecules responsible for breaking down all these emissions are called oxidants. The oxygen-containing molecules, mainly ozone and hydrogen-based detergents, react with pollutants and reactive greenhouse gases, such as methane.

A University of Washington study published May 18 in the journal Nature finds that during large climate swings, oxidants shift in a different direction than researchers had expected, which means they need to rethink what controls these chemicals in our air.
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Magnify

100 million-year-old amber holds tiny feathered chick

Mindy Weisberger
Live Science
Fri, 09 Jun 2017 11:20 UTC
chick foot
© Lida XingA close-up view of hatchling's feet shows its digit pads and claws
Much of the body of a wee Cretaceous-era chick was preserved in incredible detail in a piece of Burmese amber, and bears "unusual plumage," according to the researchers who described the unique find in a new study.

Excavated from a mine in what is now northern Myanmar, the precious lump of fossilized tree sap is estimated to be about 98 million years old, and holds the most complete specimen to date representing a group of extinct toothed birds called enantiornithines (eh-nan-tee-or-NITH'-eh-neez), which died out at the end of the Cretaceous period (about 145 million to 65.5 million years ago).
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Airplane

Is frequent flying worth the radiation exposure?

Timothy J. Jorgensen
The Conversation
Wed, 07 Jun 2017 14:06 UTC
airplane interior
This past April, business traveler Tom Stuker became the world's most frequent flyer, logging 18,000,000 miles of air travel on United Airlines over the last 14 years.

That's a lot of time up in the air. If Stuker's traveling behaviors are typical of other business flyers, he may have eaten 6,500 inflight meals, drunk 5,250 alcoholic beverages, watched thousands of inflight movies and made around 10,000 visits to airplane toilets.

He would also have accumulated a radiation dose equivalent to about 1,000 chest x-rays. But what kind of health risk does all that radiation actually pose?

Cosmic rays coming at you

You might guess that a frequent flyer's radiation dose is coming from the airport security checkpoints, with their whole-body scanners and baggage x-ray machines, but you'd be wrong. The radiation doses to passengers from these security procedures are trivial.

The major source of radiation exposure from air travel comes from the flight itself. This is because at high altitude the air gets thinner. The farther you go from the Earth's surface, the fewer molecules of gas there are per volume of space. Thinner air thus means fewer molecules to deflect incoming cosmic rays - radiation from outer space. With less atmospheric shielding, there is more exposure to radiation.

Comment: Space weather causes airline pilots, passengers to be exposed to radiation

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Camcorder

Germany train station to test face recognition software to target terrorist suspects


RT
Sun, 11 Jun 2017 10:19 UTC
Cameras
© Paul Zinken / DPA / Global Look Press
Germany will start testing facial recognition software at a Berlin train station this summer to help police track down and identify terrorist suspects, criminal offenders, and other security threats.

The software will initially be tested with volunteers at Berlin's Suedkreuz Station. If the new system proves effective, its use will not be limited to railway stations, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said.

"We already have video surveillance in train stations," Maiziere said on Saturday in an interview with German Tagesspiegel newspaper.

"We are not able, however, to put a picture of a terrorist on the run into software that would alert us when he appears somewhere at a station," de Maiziere said. "If this software proves to be reliable, it should also be used for serious crimes in other public places equipped with surveillance cameras."

The chances are low that the facial recognition software will run into legal obstacles, the Tagesspiegel report said, as it is primarily designed to target terrorist suspects and would not infringe on the rights of others.

Security authorities should also be allowed to access encrypted messages in services like WhatsApp, the minister said.

Comment: See also: Snowden's epic rant smashes the police state, 'Terrorists don't take our rights, government does'

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Info

Russian researchers predict human age based on carotid artery health


Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Thu, 08 Jun 2017 17:46 UTC
Common Cartoid Arteries
© Book Med Info
Russian researchers have provided a new method of determining human biological age. The group hails from the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian Clinical Research Center for Gerontology, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and other prestigious research centers. The survey was carried out at the National Research Center for Preventive Medicine, as well as the Center for Gerontology. The article was published in the journal Aging. The researchers emphasize determining biological age will play a major role in the development of anti-aging medicine.

Biological age is a concept used to describe the state of a human organism. An average healthy individual has their biological age no different from their chronological age, i.e., the age on their ID. However, with age, these two indicators are likely to become mismatched due to different reasons: environmental factors, bad habits, manifestations of hereditary diseases, etc. So far, there is no established method of predicting biological age. Both medical and scientific researchers are looking for a marker that could accurately and consistently reflect if not the general state of the body then at least that of its systems.

The study is based on a combination of carotid ultrasound and tonometry data. Using machine learning, a model was developed capable of determining the biological age of healthy men and women with a mean absolute error of 6.9 and 5.9 years, respectively. The test set also included subjects with hypertension and Type 2 diabetes, whose biological age turned out to be, on average, three years greater than their actual age.
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2 + 2 = 4

Mathematically-based model for a viable time machine

University of British Colombia, Okanagan Campus
Science Daily
Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00 UTC
TARDIS
© Wallpaper SafariTruth or Fiction?
After some serious number crunching, a researcher says that he has come up with a mathematical model for a viable time machine: a Traversable Acausal Retrograde Domain in Space-time (TARDIS). He describes it as a bubble of space-time geometry which carries its contents backward and forwards through space and time as it tours a large circular path. The bubble moves through space-time at speeds greater than the speed of light at times, allowing it to move backward in time.

Ben Tippett, a mathematics and physics instructor at UBC's Okanagan campus, recently published a study about the feasibility of time travel. Tippett, whose field of expertise is Einstein's theory of general relativity, studies black holes and science fiction when he's not teaching. Using math and physics, he has created a formula that describes a method for time travel.
"People think of time travel as something as fiction," says Tippett. "And we tend to think it's not possible because we don't actually do it. But, mathematically, it is possible."

Comment: Dr. Who knows if this is true and can be done!

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Beaker

Turn car plastics into foam with coconut oil

American Chemical Society
Science Daily
Wed, 07 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
Car pileup
© Dominican News Online
End-of-life vehicles, with their plastic, metal and rubber components, are responsible for millions of tons of waste around the world each year. Now, one team reports in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering that the plastic components in these vehicles can be recycled with coconut oil and re-used as foams for the construction, packaging and automotive industries.

Recycled polycarbonate (PC) and polyurethane (PUR) are ideal for building insulation, refrigerators, cushions and packaging products. But it can be challenging for plastic car components to get to that point. Some plastic wastes from vehicles can be easily reprocessed; however, PC and PUR materials require a more arduous chemical recycling method. In addition, paints and coatings on PC and PUR plastics from cars typically interfere with the process, causing the recycled product to deteriorate. And simply adding some types of recycled PC and PUR materials to existing insulation foams, for example, can make the foams too dense or brittle.

Although researchers have developed various chemical recycling techniques, very few have tried to make useable products with them. Hynek Beneš, Aleksander Prociak and colleagues wanted to take a new approach to converting PC and PUR into recycled materials, with the hopes of increasing their applications.

The researchers previously had shown that coconut oil could degrade PC. Here, the team developed a way to recover PC and PUR from waste car plastics with coconut oil and microwaves. This created a renewable and recycled product that did not degrade. This product can be combined with an existing foam and the integrity of the insulation foam is maintained. Furthermore, this new material was stable at high temperatures, making it ideal for incorporation into insulating materials for the construction industry.

Comment: Waste not. Repurpose.

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Airplane

Pilotless commercial jetliners coming soon


Sputnik News
Fri, 09 Jun 2017 01:22 UTC
Jet Engine
© AP Photo/Elaine ThompsonWorker maneuver the cover of a engine into place on a Boeing 777 jet at the company's manufacturing plant, Monday, Feb. 14, 2011, in Everett, Wash.
Aerospace company Boeing, the world's largest planemaker, wants to put pilotless jetliners to flight tests in 2018.

"The basic building blocks of the technology clearly are available," Boeing's vice president of product development Mike Sinnett said at a briefing ahead of the Paris Air Show later this month, pointing out that self-flying drones are already available for less than $1000.

The number of pilots helming a jetliner has dropped from three to two in recent years, and onboard flight computers already have the ability to take off, cruise and land without human operation.

According to the Aviation Safety Network, regulators still need to be sold on the idea, as certification for the technology doesn't yet exist. The planes would also need to meet air travel safety standards.

"I have no idea how we're going to do that," Sinnett, a pilot himself, said. "But we're studying it right now and we're developing those algorithms."
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Magnify

Babies are attracted to face-like images while still in the womb


RT
Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:58 UTC
human fetus
© Ton Koene / Global Look Press
Fetuses are attracted to face-like images before they have encountered any real-life face, according to a groundbreaking study. The research found that they turn their heads towards such images more than other shapes while still in the womb.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, projected light in the form of red dots through the uterine walls of 39 women who were 34 weeks pregnant.

The three dots were presented in both upright and inverted positions. The upright positions resembled face-like stimuli with the dots acting as two eyes and a mouth.

The scientists observed the fetuses' responses to the light by using a 4D ultrasound, and found that they turned their heads more often to look at the face-like stimuli.

Comment: See also: Babies learn to recognize words in the womb

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