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Tube-shaped solar cells could be weaved into clothing - 0 views

  • semiconducting nanorods grown on the surface of carbon fibers look more like bristles on a tiny hairbrush than a solar cell
  • the flexible tube-shaped cells can capture light from all directions and even have the potential to be weaved into clothing and paper for novel applications
  • current stage of development, researchers are trying to find a simple, low-cost method for fabricating high-quality tube-shaped solar cells.
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  • recently developed a new method for preparing uniform titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanorods on carbon fibers
  • advantages over the commonly used sol-gel method, which requires high temperatures and can cause cracks in the materials.
  • Fabricating tube-like solar cells is challenging due to the multiple steps involved
  • an ideal solution for preparing TiO2 nanostructures on carbon fibers is to grow them directly on the fiber’s surface
  • results showed that the rectangular bunched nanorod configuration achieved an energy conversion efficiency of 1.28%, compared with 0.76% for the unbunched configuration
  • attribute the difference to the larger surface area of the bunched nanorods, which enables more dye molecules to be adsorbed,
  • large surface area gives the tube-shaped solar cells the ability to capture light from all directions
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Exotic material shows promise as flexible, transparent electrode - 0 views

  • An international team of scientists with roots at SLAC and Stanford has shown that ultra-thin sheets of an exotic material remain transparent and highly conductive even after being deeply flexed 1,000 times and folded and creased like a piece of paper.
  • first practical applications: flexible, transparent electrodes for solar cells, sensors and optical communications devices.
  • basic structural unit for bismuth selenide is a five-layer sandwich made up of alternating single-atom sheets of selenium (orange) and bismuth (purple).
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  • stacked on top of each other as thicker samples are made
  • selenium-selenium bonds between the units are weak
  • overall material to flex durably without being damaged
  • researchers made and tested samples of a compound in which sheets of bismuth and selenium, each just one atom thick, alternate to form five-layer units. The bonds between the units are weak, allowing the overall material to flex while retaining its durability
  • topological insulator
  • the material conducts electricity only on its surface while its interior remains insulating
  • it is an exceptionally good electrical conductor – as good as gold
  • bismuth selenide is transparent to infrared light, which we know as heat
  • about half the solar energy that hits the Earth comes in the form of  infrared light, few of today’s solar cells are able to collect it
  • transparent electrodes on the surfaces of most cells are either too fragile or not transparent or conducting enough
  • experiments also showed that bismuth selenide does not degrade significantly in humid environments or when exposed to oxygen treatments that are common in manufacturing.
  • bismuth selenide may be useful in communications devices. This material could also improve infrared sensors common in scientific equipment and aerospace systems.”
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Sun Fires Off 2 Huge Solar Flares in One-Two Punch | Space Weather | Space.com - 0 views

  • Tuesday
  • One of the flares is the most powerful solar eruption of the year, so far.
  • Both of the huge flares ranked as X-class storms, the strongest type of solar flares the sun can have
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  • followed several weaker, but still powerful, sun storms on Tuesday
  • came just days after another major solar flare on Sunday night
  • When aimed directly at Earth, X-class solar flares can endanger astronauts and satellites in orbit, interfere with satellite communications and damage power grids on Earth
  • also amplify the Earth's display of northern and southern lights, also known as auroras
  • five categories: A, B, C, M and X. The A-class flares are the weakest sun storms, while the X-class events are the most powerful solar flares
  • subsets, from 1 to 9, to pinpoint a solar flare's strength. Only X-class solar flares have subcategories that go higher than 9.
  • most powerful solar flare on record occurred in 2003 and was estimated to be an X28 on the solar flare scale
  • The sun is currently going through an active phase of its 11-year weather cycle
  • expected to reach its peak level of activity in 2013
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Astronomers Identify the Largest Yellow "Hypergiant" Star Known - 0 views

  • A recent analysis of a star in the south hemisphere constellation of Centaurus has highlighted the role that amateurs play in assisting with professional discoveries in astronomy.
  • The stats for
  • the binary system weighs in at a combined 39 solar masses, has a radius of over 1,300 times that of our Sun, and is a million times as luminous
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  • Located 3,600 parsecs or over 11,700 light years distant, the star is 50% larger than the famous red giant Betelgeuse
  • down into the center of our own solar system, and it would extend out over 6 astronomical units (A.U.s) past the orbit of Jupiter
  • also has a relatively small companion star orbiting across our line of sight once every 1300 days
  • The companion star
  • is also a large star in its own right at around six solar masses and 400 solar radii in size.
  • the surface-to-surface distance for the A and B components of the system are “only” about 2.8 A.U.s apart
  • This all means that these two massive stars are in physical contact, with the expanded outer atmosphere of the bloated primary contacting the secondary, giving the pair a distorted peanut shape.
  • yellow hypergiants are some of the brightest stars known
  • That’s just 16x times fainter than the apparent visual magnitude of a Full Moon but over 100 times brighter than Venus
  • if you placed a star like HR 5171 A 32 light years from the Earth, it would easily cast a shadow.
  • the discovery of a companion around such a bright star was a big surprise since any ‘normal’ star should at least be 10,000 times fainter than the hypergiant
  • the hypergiant was much bigger than expected
  • What we see is not the companion itself, but the regions gravitationally controlled and filled by the wind from the hypergiant
  • These latest measurements place HR 5171 A firmly in the “Top 10” for largest stars in terms of size known, as well as the largest yellow hypergiant star known
  • Only eight yellow hypergiants have been identified in our Milky Way galaxy
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It's Official: Voyager 1 Is Now In Interstellar Space - 0 views

  • NASA says the most distant human made object — the Voyager 1 spacecraft — is in interstellar space
  • It actually made the transition about a year ago
  • there is a bit of an argument on the semantics of whether Voyager 1 is still inside or outside of our Solar System
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  • it is not farther out than the Oort Cloud
  • it will take 300 more years reach the Oort cloud and the spacecraft is closer to our Sun than any other star
  • the plasma environment Voyager 1 now travels through has definitely changed from what comes from our Sun to the plasma that is present in the space between stars.
  • debate
  • There’s also been a
  • between the latest various science papers and their authors
  • Scientists thought that when the spacecraft had crossed over into interstellar space, the magnetic field direction would change
  • that didn’t happen
  • scientists determined they needed to look at the properties of the plasma instead
  • The Sun’s heliosphere is filled with ionized plasma from the Sun
  • Outside that bubble, the plasma comes from the explosions of other stars millions of years ago
  • The main tell-tail difference is the interstellar plasma is denser.
  • the real instrument that was designed to make the measurements on the plasma quit working in the 1980’s
  • Instead they used the plasma wave instrument, located on the 10-meter long antennas on Voyager 1 and
  • from the Sun
  • a massive Coronal Mass Ejection
  • The antennas have radio receivers at the ends – “like the rabbit ears on old television sets
  • The CME erupted from the Sun in March 2012, and eventually arrived at Voyager 1′s location 13 months later, in April 2013
  • Because of the CME, the plasma around the spacecraft began to vibrate like a violin string
  • The pitch of the oscillations helped scientists determine the density of the plasma
  • the particular oscillations meant the spacecraft was bathed in plasma more than 40 times denser than what they had encountered in the outer layer of the heliosphere
  • The plasma wave science team reviewed its data and found an earlier, fainter set of oscillations in October and November 2012 from other CMEs
  • extrapolation of measured plasma densities from both events, the team determined Voyager 1 first entered interstellar space in August 2012
  • certainly in a new region at the edge of the solar system where things are changing rapidly
  • not yet able to say that Voyager 1 has entered interstellar space
  • the data are changing in ways that the team didn’t expect
  • after further review, the Voyager team generally accepts the August 2012 date as the date of interstellar arrival
  • The charged particle and plasma changes were what would have been expected during a crossing of the heliopause
  • expect the fields and particles science instruments on Voyager will continue to send back data through at least 2020
  • , it was first questioned in August of 2012, with more speculation in December 2012, then in March of 2013
  • Then about a month ago
  • Voyager 2, launched before Voyager 1, is the longest continuously operated spacecraft
  • emitted signals are currently very dim, at about 23 watts — the power of a refrigerator light bulb
  • Voyager mission controllers still talk to or receive data from Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 every day
  • planetary alignment that only happens every 176 years enabled the two spacecraft to join together to reach all the outer planets in a 12 year time period
  • By the time the signals get to Earth, they are a fraction of a billion-billionth of a watt
  • Data from Voyager 1′s instruments are transmitted to Earth typically at 160 bits per second
  • signal from Voyager 1 takes about 17 hours to travel to Earth.
  • After the data are transmitted to JPL and processed by the science teams, Voyager data are made publicly available
  • Scientists do not know when Voyager 1 will reach the undisturbed part of interstellar space where there is no influence from our Sun
  • They also are not certain when Voyager 2 is expected to cross into interstellar space, but they believe it is not very far behind.
  • While Voyager 1 will keep going, we will not always be able to communicate with it, as we do now
  • In 2025 all instruments will be turned off, and the science team will be able to operate the spacecraft for about 10 years after that to just get engineering data
  • In the year 40,272 AD, Voyager 1 will come within 1.7 light years of an obscure star in the constellation Ursa Minor
Mars Base

Researchers at Harvard University and MIT discover previously unobserved state of matte... - 0 views

  • The discovery
  • goes against what scientists previously understood of photons: that elementary light particles are massless loners that do not interact with each other.
  • Most of the properties of light we know about originate from the fact that photons are massless, and that they do not interact with each other
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  • researchers fired a couple of photons into a cloud of rubidium – a chemical element belonging to the metal group – in a vacuum chamber cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero.
  • When the photons exited the other side of the cloud of atoms
  • were surprised to see the pair emerge as a single molecule.
  • special type of medium in which photons interact with each other
  • so strongly that they begin to act as though they have mass, and they bind together to form molecules
  • Rydberg blockade
  • states that when an atom has energy imparted to it, nearby atoms cannot be excited to the same degree
  • the pair of photons moved through the cloud of atoms, the first photon excited atoms, but had to move forward before the second photon could do the same.
  • the pair of photons pushed and pulled each other through the cloud
  • atomic interaction
  • makes these two photons behave like a molecule
  • team is hoping to use their newly discovered state of matter in the advancement of quantum computing
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SOHO shows new images of Comet ISON - 0 views

  • scientists have been watching through many observatories to see if the comet has already broken up under the intense heat and gravitational forces of the sun
  • The comet is too far away to discern how many pieces it is in, so instead researchers carefully measure how bright it is,
  • Less light can sometimes mean that more of the material has boiled off and disappeared, perhaps pointing to a disintegrated comet
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  • a disintegrating comet sometimes gives off more light, at least temporarily, so researchers look at the comet's pattern of behavior over the previous few days to work out what it may be doing.
  • At times observations have suggested ISON was getting dimmer and might already be in pieces
  • over Nov. 26-27, 2013, the comet once again brightened. In the early hours of Nov. 27, the comet appeared in the view of the European Space Agency/NASA mission the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory in the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph instrument
  • If the comet has already broken up, it should disintegrate completely as it makes its slingshot around the sun
  • This would provide a great opportunity for scientists to see the insides of the comet, and better understand its composition
Mars Base

Faraway moon or faint star? Possible exomoon found - 0 views

  • NASA-funded researchers have spotted the first signs of an "exomoon," and though they say it's impossible to confirm its presence
  • The discovery was made by watching a chance encounter of objects in our galaxy, which can be witnessed only once
  • won't have a chance to observe the exomoon candidate again
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  • can expect more unexpected finds like this.
  • international study
  • using telescopes
  • technique, called gravitational microlensing, takes advantage of chance alignments between stars
  • When a foreground star passes between us and a more distant star, the closer star can act like a magnifying glass to focus and brighten the light of the more distant one
  • These brightening events usually last about a month
  • If the foreground star—or what astronomers refer to as the lens—has a planet circling around it, the planet will act as a second lens to brighten or dim the light even more
  • carefully scrutinizing these brightening events, astronomers can figure out the mass of the foreground star relative to its planet.
  • the foreground object could be a free-floating planet, not a star
  • astronomers are actively looking for exomoons—for example, using data from NASA's Kepler mission - so far, they have not found any.
  • In the new study, the nature of the foreground, lensing object is not clear. The ratio of the larger body to its smaller companion is 2,000 to 1.
  • That means the pair could be either a small, faint star circled by a planet about 18 times the mass of Earth—or a planet more massive than Jupiter coupled with a moon weighing less than Earth.
  • astronomers have no way of telling which of these two scenarios is correct
  • One possibility is for the lensing system to be a planet and its moon
  • The answer to the mystery lies in learning the distance to the circling duo
  • A lower-mass pair closer to Earth will produce the same kind of brightening event as a more massive pair located farther away
  • once a brightening event is over, it's very difficult to take additional measurements of the lensing system and determine the distance
  • The true identity of the exomoon candidate and its companion, a system dubbed MOA-2011-BLG-262, will remain unknown
  • In the future, however, it may be possible to obtain these distance measurements during lensing events
  • NASA's Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes, both of which revolve around the sun in Earth-trailing orbits, are far enough away from Earth to be great tools for the parallax-distance technique.
  • The basic principle of parallax can be explained by holding your finger out, closing one eye after the other, and watching your finger jump back and forth
  • A distant star, when viewed from two telescopes spaced really far apart, will also appear to move
  • When combined with a lensing event, the parallax effect alters how a telescope will view the resulting magnification of starlight
  • Though the technique works best using one telescope on Earth and one in space, such as Spitzer or Kepler, two ground-based telescopes on different sides of our planet can also be used
  • Meanwhile, surveys
  • are turning up more and more planets
  • These microlensing surveys have discovered dozens of exoplanets so far, in orbit around stars and free-floating
  • A previous NASA-funded study, also led by the MOA team, was the first to find strong evidence for planets the size of Jupiter roaming alone in space, presumably after they were kicked out of forming planetary systems
  • The new exomoon candidate, if real, would orbit one such free-floating planet.
Mars Base

Cartilage, made to order: Living human cartilage grown on lab chip -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

  • The first example of living human cartilage grown on a laboratory chip has been created by scientists
  • The researchers ultimately aim to use their innovative 3-D printing approach to create replacement cartilage
  • Osteoarthritis is marked by a gradual disintegration of cartilage, a flexible tissue that provides padding where bones come together in a joint
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  • is one of the leading causes of physical disability in the United States
  • some treatments can help relieve arthritis symptoms, there is no cure. Many patients with severe arthritis ultimately require a joint replacement
  • artificial cartilage built using a patient's own stem cells could offer enormous therapeutic potential
  • replacement cartilage could also be a game-changer for people with debilitating joint injuries, such as soldiers with battlefield injuries
  • Creating artificial cartilage requires three main elements: stem cells, biological factors to make the cells grow into cartilage, and a scaffold to give the tissue its shape
  • Tuan's 3-D printing approach achieves all three by extruding thin layers of stem cells embedded in a solution that retains its shape and provides growth factors
  • The ultimate vision is to give doctors a tool they can thread through a catheter to print new cartilage right where it's needed in the patient's body
  • other researchers have experimented with 3-D printing approaches for cartilage,
  • method represents a significant step forward because it uses visible light, while others have required UV light, which can be harmful to living cells.
  • In another significant step
  • used the 3-D printing method to produce the first "tissue-on-a-chip" replica of the bone-cartilage interface
  • the chip could serve as a test-bed for researchers to learn about how osteoarthritis develops and develop new drugs
  • Housing 96 blocks of living human tissue 4 millimeters across by 8 millimeters deep
  • As a next step, the team is working to combine their 3-D printing method with a nanofiber spinning technique they developed previously
  • They hope combining the two methods will provide a more robust scaffold and allow them to create artificial cartilage that even more closely resembles natural cartilage
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Images - Mars Science Laboratory - 0 views

  • NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) instrument on its robotic arm to illuminate and record this nighttime view of the sandstone rock target "Windjana."
  • The rover had previously drilled a hole to collect sample material from the interior of the rock and then zapped a series of target points inside the hole with the laser of the rover's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument
  • The hole is 0.63 inch (1.6 centimeters) in diameter.
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  • That instrument provides information about the target's composition by analysis of the sparks of plasma generated by the energy of the laser beam striking the target
  • This view combines eight separate MAHLI exposures, taken at different focus settings to show the entire scene in focus
  • The exposures were taken after dark on the 628th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (May 13, 2014)
  • MAHLI includes light-emitting diodes as well as a color camera.
  • Using the instrument's own lighting yields an image of the hole's interior with less shadowing than would be seen in a sunlit image
  • The camera's inspection of the interior of the hole provides documentation about what the drill bit passed through as it penetrated the rock -- for example, to see if it cut through any mineral veins or visible layering
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Mars Exploration Rover Mission: The Mission - 0 views

  • Opportunity is conducting
  • science campaign at a location where orbital observations show the presence of clay minerals
  • rover is positioning near a large, light-toned block of exposed rock outcrop, called "Whitewater Lake."
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  • Sol 3092 (Oct. 4, 2012), the rover moved, likely the smallest amount ever, with less than an inch (1 centimeter) of total motion in order to position the robotic arm favorable on a dark-rind surface target
  • n Sol 3094 (Oct. 6, 2012), Opportunity performed a 15-minute brush of a surface target with the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT)
  • followed with the collection of a Microscopic Imager (MI) mosaic
  • then the placement of the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) for an overnight integration
  • Total odometry is 21.78 miles (35,050.07 meters)
Mars Base

'Orphan' Alien Planet Found Nearby Without Parent Star | Space.com - 0 views

  • The free-floating object
  • is likely a gas giant planet four to seven times more massive than Jupiter,
  • Astronomers have discovered a potential "rogue" alien planet wandering alone just 100 light-years from Earth
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  • And if the discovery team is right about CFBDSIR2149's age, the body is likely a planet, with an average temperature of 806 degrees Fahrenheit (430 degrees Celsius), researchers said
  • There's still a slight chance that CFBDSIR2149 is a brown dwarf 
  • Additional observations should help decide the matter.
  • With a good distance measurement and a more accurate proper motion, we will be able to increase (or decrease) the probability that it is indeed a planet
  • One 2011 study, for example, estimated that rogue worlds outnumber "normal" planets with obvious host stars by at least 50 percent throughout the Milky Way
  • The discovery of a starless alien planet would not be shocking
  • In the last year or so, astronomers have spotted a number of such orphan worlds
Mars Base

Curiosity providing new weather and radiation data about Mars - 0 views

  • might
  • During the first 12 weeks after Curiosity landed
  • researchers analyzed data from more than 20 atmospheric events with at least one characteristic of a whirlwind recorded
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  • can include a brief dip in air pressure, a change in wind direction, a change in wind speed, a rise in air temperature or a dip in ultraviolet light reaching the rover
  • Two of the events included all five characteristics.
  • dust-devil tracks and shadows have been seen from orbit, but those visual clues have not been seen in Gale Crater
  • possibility is that vortex whirlwinds arise at Gale without lifting as much dust as they do elsewhere
  • The rover is just north of a mountain called Mount Sharp
  • air movement up and down the mountain's slope governed wind direction, dominant winds generally would be north-south
  • east-west winds appear to predominate. The rim of Gale Crater may be a factor
  • If we don't see a change in wind patterns as Curiosity heads up the slope of Mount Sharp—that would be a surprise."
  • may be seeing more of the wind blowing along the depression in between the two slopes, rather than up and down the slope of Mount Sharp
  • The atmosphere provides a level of shielding, and so charged-particle radiation is less when the atmosphere is thicker. Overall, Mars' atmosphere reduces the radiation dose compared to what we saw during the flight to Mars
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Mars Science Laboratory: Images - 0 views

  • white-balanced color adjustment that makes the sky look overly blue but shows the terrain as if under Earth-like lighting
  • White-balancing helps scientists recognize rock materials based on their experience looking at rocks on Earth
  • White balancing yields an overly blue hue in images that have very little blue information, such as Martian landscapes, because the white balancing tends to overcompensate for the low inherent blue content.
Mars Base

Universe is a teeny bit older than thought | Matter & Energy | Science News - 0 views

  • Launched by the European Space Agency in 2009, the Planck satellite scans the sky for the cosmic microwave background, radiation that dates back to about 380,000 years after the Big Bang
  • Planck is essentially a supersensitive thermometer that can probe the temperature of this radiation to millionths of a degree
  • The red spots in the map are about 1 part in 100,000 hotter than the average temperature, while the blue spots are slightly colder
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  • the theory of inflation, which posits that, around 10-30 seconds after the Big Bang, the universe briefly expanded faster than the speed of light.
  • Researchers who analyzed the telescope’s data announced that the universe is about 13.81 billion years old, or 80 million years older than previously thought
  • The telescope is still making observations, and in about a year researchers will add
  • data t
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True colors of some fossil feathers now in doubt (w/ Video) - 0 views

  • evidence for the colors of feathers—especially melanin-based colors—can be altered during fossilization
  • past reconstructions of the original colors of feathers in some fossil birds and dinosaurs may be flawed
  • In modern birds, black, brown, and some reddish-brown colors are produced by tiny granules of the pigment melanin
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  • These features—called melanosomes—are preserved in many fossil feathers, and their precise size and shape have been used to reconstruct the original colors of fossil feathers.
  • had no idea whether melanosomes could survive the fossilisation process intact
  • experiments show that this is not the case. Our results cast a cautionary light on studies of fossil feather color and suggest that some previous reconstructions of the original plumage colors of fossils may not be accurate
  • experimental technique pioneered in the group's recent study on the colors of fossil insects
  • simulated high pressures and temperatures that are found deep under the Earth's surface
  • team used feathers of different colors and from different species, but the geometry of the melanosomes in all feathers changed during the experiments
  • This study will lead to better interpretations of the original plumage colors of diverse feathered dinosaurs and fossil birds
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