Taming the Butterfly

Scientists at CERN have announced that they've been able to trap 309 atoms of antihydrogen for over 15 minutes. This is long enough that soon, they'll be able to figure out whether antimatter obeys the law of gravity, or whether it's repelled by normal matter and falls "up" instead. It would be antigravity, for real.

Invisibility appears to be the next possible advance in the use of Terahertz radiation in medicine, security, and communications.

Using simple robots to simulate genetic evolution over hundreds of generations, Swiss scientists provide quantitative proof of kin selection and shed light on one of the most enduring puzzles in biology: Why do most social animals, including humans, go out of their way to help each other? In next week's issue of the online, open access journal PLoS Biology, EPFL robotics professor Dario Floreano teams up with University of Lausanne biologist Laurent Keller to weigh in on the oft-debated question of the evolution of altruism genes.

Watching things disappear "is an amazing experience," admits Joachim Fischer of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. But making items vanish is not the reason he creates invisibility cloaks. Rather, the magic-like tricks are attractive demonstrations of the fantastic capabilities that new optical theories and nanotechnology construction methods now enable.

The terse announcement came just after 9:45 p.m. Sunday from Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. "POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10:30 PM Eastern Time," he wrote on Twitter, sharing the same message that had just been transmitted to the White House press corps. According to Brian Williams, the "NBC Nightly News" anchor, some journalists received a three-word e-mail that simply read, "Get to work.

The concept of time as a way to measure the duration of events is not only deeply intuitive, it also plays an important role in our mathematical descriptions of physical systems. For instance, we define an object's speed as its displacement per a given time. But some researchers theorize that this Newtonian idea of time as an absolute quantity that flows on its own, along with the idea that time is the fourth dimension of spacetime, are incorrect. They propose to replace these concepts of time with a view that corresponds more accurately to the physical world: time as a measure of the numerical order of change.

Dr. Yuri Lvov, professor of chemistry and T.C. Pipes endowed chair in micro and nanosystems at Louisiana Tech University, recently led a symposium at the 241st Conference of the American Chemical Society (ACS), discussing his application of a more eco-friendly and cost-effective nano-material that can be used to significantly improve the properties of plastics, paints and other synthetic composites.

Researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and their colleagues have discovered that massive, swirling ocean eddies -- known to be up to 500 kilometers across at the surface -- can reach all the way to the ocean bottom at mid-ocean ridges, some 2,500 meters deep, transporting tiny sea creatures, chemicals, and heat from hydrothermal vents over large distances.

A group of Cornell-developed, fingernail-sized satellites may travel to Saturn within the next decade, and as they flutter down through its atmosphere, they will collect data about chemistry, radiation and particle impacts.

Researchers at Northwestern University have created a new kind of cloaking material that can render objects invisible in the terahertz range.

An interesting study by Netpop Research entitled Social Face-Off : A Comparison of U.S. and China Social Media Use finds that people in China are more involved in every type of social media activity of which they studied.  First, some general facts about the two internet communities: of the broadband users age 13 and above, the Chinese have a much younger, more educated internet population than the U.S.  They also spend more time online per weekday.

South Korea's largest business group Samsung signed an initial deal Wednesday to invest $7.04 billion in a state project to build a green energy complex on reclaimed wetland.

As manufacturers and other businesses step up efforts to cut waste, reduce energy use and improve the overall sustainability of their products and processes, the number of planet-friendly standards and regulations also is increasing at a rapid clip, creating a sometimes-confusing array of options for "going green." National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers have prototyped a framework to help organizations of all types sort through the welter of choices and evaluate and implement sustainability standards most appropriate for their operations and interests.

What are the major technology challenges to future growth in the solar-cell industry? Where are the big-bang-for-the-buck R&D investment opportunities? These and other questions were put to a group of 72 internationally recognized experts in the field at a 2010 special workshop. Their conclusions are summarized in a new National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) publication on Photovoltaic Technologies for the 21st Century.

University of Alberta-led research has confirmed that a relatively harmless inorganic form of mercury found worldwide in ocean water is transformed into a potent neurotoxin in the seawater itself.

Step back to 1960 when Trieste, the first and only manned vessel, reached the deepest known part of the ocean called Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench near Guam. No other vessel has ever managed to reach this depth of near 36,000 feet. In an announcement this week, Triton Submarines hopes to be the next to reach this great depth in a newly designed submersible.

Jane Poynter and seven compatriots agreed to spend two years sealed inside a 3-acre terrarium in the Sonoran Desert. Their mission back in the 1990s: To see whether humans might someday be able to create self-sustaining colonies in outer space.

On April 26, 1986, history's greatest nuclear accident took place northwest of the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl. Despite the scale of the disaster, 25 years later, we still do not know its real effects. An international team of investigators has shown for the first time that the colour of birds' plumage may make them more vulnerable to radioactivity.