Experience total lunacy on Thursday, May 15, as the moon moves completely into the Earth’s shadow. Lunar eclipses occur, on average, twice a year. A good viewing, however, happens only every few years. Barring clouds the eclipse should be one of the best since January 2000. The next one will occur this year on Nov. 8.
The sixth crew of the International Space Station returned to Earth just after 10 p.m. EDT on May 3, the first time U.S. astronauts have landed in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
Russian Mission Control reported at approximately 2:45 a.m. May 4 that the support helicopters reached the crew and all three astronauts were in good health. The capsule appeared to touch down about 276 miles from its planned landing zone.
Scientists may have peeled away another layer of mystery about materials floating in deep space. Tiny multilayered balls called “carbon onions,” produced in laboratory studies, appear to have the same light-absorption characteristics as dust particles in the regions between the stars. “It’s the strongest evidence yet that cosmic dust has a multilayered onionlike carbon structure,” said Manish Chhowalla, assistant professor of ceramic and materials engineering at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Chhowalla used transmission electron microscopes to study radiation absorption of the laboratory-produced onions and found characteristics virtually identical to those reported by astrophysicists studying dust in deep space.
A study in the journal Science is offering new insights into a long-standing mystery about plant growth. The scientists who conducted the experiment say their results could open new avenues of research for developing more effective herbicides and pharmaceuticals. Plant biologists from Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution of Washington report their new findings in the April 24 online edition of Science Express. The researchers are the first to witness the birth and growth of individual “microtubules” ? nanosize tubes of protein that form inside living plant cells.
North Carolina chemists have developed a method of growing one-atom-thick cylinders of carbon, called “nanotubes,” 100 times longer than usual, while maintaining a soda-straw straightness with controllable orientation. Their achievement solves a major barrier to the nanotubes’ use in ultra-small “nanoelectronic” devices, said the team’s leader. The researchers have also grown checkerboard-like grids of the tubes which could form the basis of nanoscale electronic devices.
Scientists from Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory have created a hybrid “nanodevice” composed of a “scaffolding” of titanium oxide nanocrystals attached with snippets of DNA that may one day be used to target defective genes that play a role in cancer, neurological disease and other conditions.
The titanium oxide nanocrystals, which are less than a few billionths of a meter in diameter and are the same material used in artificial hips and knees, may provide the ideal means of overcoming current limitations of gene therapy, such as adverse reactions to genetically modified viruses used as vehicles to deliver genes into cells.
New distance measurements from faraway galaxies further strengthen the view that the strongest burst of star formation in the universe occurred about two billion years after the Big Bang. Reporting in the April 17 issue of the journal Nature, California Institute of Technology astronomers Scott Chapman and Andrew Blain, along with their United Kingdom colleagues Ian Smail and Rob Ivison, provide the redshifts of 10 extremely distant galaxies which strongly suggest that the most luminous galaxies ever detected were produced over a rather short period of time.
The life of the silicon chip industry may last 10 or more years longer, thanks to a new manufacturing process developed by NASA scientists. The novel method, announced in the April 14 issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters, includes use of extremely tiny carbon ‘nanotubes’ instead of copper conductors to interconnect parts within integrated circuits (ICs). Carbon nanotubes are measured in nanometers, much smaller than today’s components. A nanometer is roughly 10,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair. ICs are very small groups of electronic components made on silicon wafers.
A basic discovery in magnetic semiconductors could result in a new generation of devices for sensors and memory applications — and perhaps, ultimately, quantum computation — physicists from the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Santa Barbara have announced. The new phenomenon, called the giant planar Hall effect, has to do with what happens when the spins of current-carrying electrons are manipulated. For several years scientists have been engaged in exploiting electron spin for the creation of a new generation of electronic devices –hence the term “spintronics” — and the Caltech-UCSB breakthrough offers a new route to realizing such devices.
Drug-primed contact lenses could deliver medicine more safely and effectively than eyedrops, researchers have reported. At the national meeting of the American Chemical Society, researchers described a process for manufacturing soft contact lenses containing timed-release capsules for drug delivery. The medicine is encapsulated in oil-based nanoparticles so small they are invisible to the eye and will not cloud the lenses.
Armed with one of the most advanced scientific instruments of all time, physicists are now watching the universe intently for the first evidence of gravitational waves. First predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 as a consequence of the general theory of relativity, gravitational waves have never been detected directly. In Einstein’s theory, alterations in the shape of concentrations of mass (or energy) have the effect of warping space-time, thereby causing distortions that propagate through the universe at the speed of light. A new generation of detectors, led by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), is coming into operation and promises sensitivities that will be capable of detecting a variety of catastrophic events, such as the gravitational collapse of stars or the coalescence of compact binary systems.
Using the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope and helped by a gigantic cosmic lens conveniently provided by nature, an international team of astronomers has discovered that a young galaxy had a central disk of gas in which hundreds of new stars were being born every year — at a time when the Universe was only a fraction of its current age.
Physicists have successfully measured the angular momentum carried by tiny rings of light called optical vortices, an important step in harnessing their energy to power microelectromechanical (MEMs) devices. Industry observers say that MEMs devices could lead to the production of everything from nanorobots to laboratories-on-a-chip by bringing together silicon-based microelectronics with micromachining technology.