“A large atomic nucleus is like a chocolate truffle with a gooey interior and a harder shell. Inside, the nucleus contains a mixture of protons and neutrons. Outside, it's covered with a nearly pure layer of neutrons—the "neutron skin." Now, for the first time, nuclear physicists have measured the thickness of that skin in a fairly direct way. More-precise future measurements could transform the study of all nuclei and even of neutron stars.

"This single piece of data would provide an extremely useful and extremely important constraint on theoretical models," says Witold Nazarewicz, a nuclear theorist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who was not involved in the new study.

In the past, experimenters have tried to measure the distribution of neutrons in nuclei by pelting the nuclei with protons, antiprotons, or particles called pions. These particles all interact with the nucleus through the strong nuclear force, which is so complicated that to interpret the results, researchers have to resort to approximate theoretical models. As a result, the answer you get depends on which model you use.

Now, one team has measured the neutron distribution in a way that relies a lot less on theory. At the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) in Newport News, Virginia, physicists with the Lead Radius Experiment (PREX) fired electrons at a thin sheet of lead-208. Each lead-208 nucleus has 82 protons and a whopping 126 neutrons, making it especially rich in the latter. Electrons do not feel the strong force but instead interact with the nucleus primarily through the electromagnetic force. So the tug of the protons' electric field deflects the trajectories of the electrons. By studying that deflection, researchers can measure the distribution of protons to determine a nucleus's "proton radius."

PREX researchers went a big step further to measure the neutron distribution and the "neutron radius" of lead-208 (from which they would subtract the proton radius to get the thickness of the neutron skin). To do that the team had to tease out the effects of a third, much fainter force, the weak nuclear force. Through that force, the electrons interact primarily with the neutrons in the nucleus. Unlike the electromagnetic force, the weak force affects electrons differently depending on which way they spin—whether spiraling to the right like a football thrown by a right-handed quarterback or to the left like a pigskin thrown by a southpaw. Thus, the weak force should produce a slight asymmetry in the deflection of right- and left-spinning electrons that can reveal the distribution of the neutrons.

So the PREX team bombarded lead-208 nuclei with pulses of electrons all spinning the same way—either to the right or to the left—and compared the results. "The thing that makes the experiment hard is that when you flip the spin [from one bunch to the next], you don't want to change anything else," says JLab's Robert Michaels, co-spokesperson for the PREX team. "If you change the energy or the trajectory of the beam, you introduce a systematic error" that could fake a signal.

PREX researchers measured a 0.656-parts-per-million asymmetry in the probability that right- or left-spinning electrons would be deflected by a certain angle. From that asymmetry, they deduced a neutron radius of 5.78 millionth of a nanometer, as they report in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters. Subtracting the known proton radius revealed a neutron skin 0.33 millionths of a nanometer thick, give or take about 50%.

So what's a measure of lead-208's neutron skin good for? Quite a lot. The incredibly complex mathematical theory of the nucleus contains terms that depend on the difference of the proton distribution and the neutron distribution. Measuring the neutron skin of lead-208 could bring key parameters in those terms into much sharper focus, Nazarewicz says. That, in turn, could lead to much better estimates of how many neutrons can be crammed into heavy nuclei or of which nuclei are involved in the so-called r process, a cascade of nuclear reactions inside exploding stars that forge half the elements heavier than iron throughout the universe, Nazarewicz says.

Nailing down such parameters would have equally big implications for the theory of neutron stars, says James Lattimer, a theoretical astrophysicist at Stony Brook University in New York state. "That directly tells you the radius of a neutron star [of a given mass] and a lot of other things like the thickness of its crust, the response of its surface to explosions, et cetera," Lattimer says.

Alas, the uncertainty on the PREX measurement is still too large to pin down the parameters, Lattimer says. "It's a very important experiment and has the potential to constrain theory very nicely, but it's not there yet," he says. JLab's Michaels says the PREX team will run the experiment next year and aims to reduce the uncertainty to one-third its current value. "Then it becomes a very interesting result," he says.

Something else physicists will be watching for: The PREX measurement suggests that the neutron skin of lead-208 is twice as thick as more-precise but model-dependent methods indicate. Right now, the PREX result has too much uncertainty to pose a direct challenge to earlier estimates. But if the new value holds up as the uncertainty shrinks, things could get really interesting, Nazarewicz says: "Then, there is something wrong with all theoretical models." There's a possibility to set your skin a-tingling.”

READ HERE

“Discovery News reports that Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest has distributed 55,000 condoms around local colleges and universities that feature implanted QR codes, which track when and where people have sex. The reported data is then collected on a website called WhereDidYouWearIt.com.

It's sort of the Foursquare of sex: each condom has a barcode which the user can scan with their Smartphone to upload their location as well as general details of their sexual experience (anonymously). An unconventional way to promote public health? Yes. But it does sound kind of fun, right?

A rep for Planned Parenthood says of the check-in system: "Condoms are an essential tool in preventing unintended pregnancy and stopping the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV... We hope the site promotes discussions within relationships about condoms and helps to remove perceived stigmas that some people may have about condom use. Where Did You Wear It attempts to create some fun around making responsible decisions."

Too futuristic for you? Would you participate in the safe-sex check-in game?”

-- Um, awesome...? o.O

READ HERE

“The tallest and heaviest ever known penguin stood nearly 5 feet tall and tipped the scales at around 130 pounds, according to a 27-million-year-old fossil found in New Zealand.

The penguin, Kairuku grebneffi lived in what is now New Zealand and likely speared fish and squid with its curved beak. In comparison, today's largest penguin is the Emperor penguin, which measures just over 3 feet tall and weighs approximately 85 pounds.

Yet another new big fossil penguin, Kairuku waitaki, was also recently discovered. It lived alongside K. grebneffi. The finds by an international team of researchers was described in the latest Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

"The Kairuku penguins were the last generation of so-called "giant penguins," the term indicating any fossil penguins that were much larger than the living largest Emperor penguin," co-author Tatsuro Ando of the Ashoro Museum of Paleontology in Japan told Discovery News.

Ando explained that these big flightless birds emerged around 50 million years ago and thrived for about 25 million years before dying out. It remains a mystery as to why they disappeared, "but probably the drastic change in paleoenvironment was the cause of their demise," he said.

The researchers, led by Daniel Ksepka of North Carolina State University, analyzed the near-complete fossils for the penguins, which were unearthed at New Zealand's Waitaki Region. This area was known as Zealandia during prehistoric times, and it was a veritable penguin paradise.

"For much of its history, New Zealand has been sitting in the middle of the Southern Ocean, the sea that circles Antarctica," co-author Ewan Fordyce of Otago University told Discovery News. "For millions of years, it has provided suitable land for rookeries (breeding grounds) and access to rich food resources in nearby seas."

To this day, New Zealand is a center of diversity for penguins. Out of the 17 existing species of penguin, six live and breed in New Zealand.

The two new fossil species, from a distance, would have looked like modern penguins, Fordyce said.

"Up close, however, it is clear that both species had relatively longer bills and a more slender body than in living species," he explained. "The wing was probably able to flex a little more."

Their long beaks would have enabled these penguins to spear prey, such as fish and squid. Sharks and shark-toothed dolphins, a type of prehistoric super strong dolphin with heavily toothed jaws, probably hunted the enormous penguins, which could have snapped back with their beaks.

The research team, which also included Craig Jones, mentioned that the oldest known penguin so far is Waimanu from New Zealand.

"It lived 55-60+ million years ago, not long after the extinction of dinosaurs," Fordyce said.

Ksepka said one theory holds that penguins lost their ability to fly after the Cretaceous mass extinction. DNA evidence indicates that the closest living relatives of penguins are tubenose seabirds, such as albatrosses and petrels. Since the latter can dive to significant depths, the scientists suspect that the first penguins could both fly and dive underwater.

Nicholas Pyenson, curator of Fossil Marine Mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, told Discovery News that the authors of the new paper "are spot on with their conclusions about the early evolution of penguins."

Stig Walsh, senior curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at National Museums Scotland, suspects that even taller penguins might be unearthed in the future but, for now, K. grebneffi is the height and weight champ.”

READ HERE

“(www.bbc.co.uk) Physicists have taken a step forward in their efforts to understand why the Universe is dominated by matter, and not its shadowy opposite antimatter.

A US experiment has confirmed previous findings that hinted at new phenomena outside our understanding of physics.

The results show that certain matter particles decay differently from their antimatter counterparts.

Such differences could potentially help explain why there is so much more matter in the cosmos than antimatter.

The findings from scientists working on the CDF experiment have been presented at a particle physics meeting in La Thuile, Italy.

CDF was one of two multi-purpose experiments at the now-defunct Tevatron particle smasher in Illinois.

Physicists think the intense heat of the Big Bang should have forged equal amounts of matter and its "mirror image" antimatter. Yet today we live in a Universe composed overwhelmingly of matter.

Antimatter is relatively uncommon, being produced at particle accelerators, in nuclear reactions or by cosmic rays. Getting to the bottom of where all this antimatter went remains one of the great endeavours of particle physics.

The latest results support findings from the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, which were announced in November 2011.

Both CDF and LHCb have been looking at the process by which sub-atomic particles called D-mesons decay - or transform - into other ones. For example, D mesons are made up of particles known as charm quarks, and can decay into kaons and pions.

Our best understanding of physics so far, known as the Standard Model, suggests the complicated cascades of decay of D-mesons into other particles should be very nearly the same - within less than 0.1% - as a similar chain of antimatter decays.

But the LHCb team reported a difference of about 0.8%, and the team from CDF have now presented data showing a difference of 0.62%.

Getting such a similar measurement as LHCb was "a bit of a surprise", according to CDF's spokesperson Giovanni Punzi, because it is a "very unusual result".

He told BBC News: "That two separate experiments have found this using different methods - different environments - is very interesting."

Prof Punzi, from the University of Pisa and Italy's National Nuclear Physics Institute (INFN), said this was likely to "change the minds of many people about this being just one of those effects, to something that will be considered a confirmed observation - because of this independent result"…”

READ HERE

SEE HERE

“(www.independent.co.uk) New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World.

A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land.

The new discoveries are among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades - and are set to add substantially to our understanding of humanity's spread around the globe.

The similarity between other later east coast US and European Stone Age stone tool technologies has been noted before. But all the US European-style tools, unearthed before the discovery or dating of the recently found or dated US east coast sites, were from around 15,000 years ago - long after Stone Age Europeans (the Solutrean cultures of France and Iberia) had ceased making such artefacts. Most archaeologists had therefore rejected any possibility of a connection. But the newly-discovered and recently-dated early Maryland and other US east coast Stone Age tools are from between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago - and are therefore contemporary with the virtually identical western European material.

What’s more, chemical analysis carried out last year on a European-style stone knife found in Virginia back in 1971 revealed that it was made of French-originating flint.

Professor Dennis Stanford, of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and Professor Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter, the two leading archaeologists who have analysed all the evidence, are proposing that Stone Age people from Western Europe migrated to North America at the height of the Ice Age by travelling (over the ice surface and/or by boat) along the edge of the frozen northern part of the Atlantic. They are presenting their detailed evidence in a new book - Across Atlantic Ice – published this month.

At the peak of the Ice Age, around three million square miles of the North Atlantic was covered in thick ice for all or part of the year.

However, the seasonally shifting zone where the ice ended and the open ocean began would have been extremely rich in food resources – migrating seals, sea birds, fish and the now-extinct northern hemisphere penguin-like species, the great auk.

Stanford and Bradley have long argued that Stone Age humans were quite capable of making the 1500 mile journey across the Atlantic ice - but till now there was comparatively little evidence to support their thinking.

But the new Maryland, Virginia and other US east coast material, and the chemical tests on the Virginian flint knife, have begun to transform the situation. Now archaeologists are starting to investigate half a dozen new sites in Tennessee, Maryland and even Texas – and these locations are expected to produce more evidence.

Another key argument for Stanford and Bradley’s proposal is the complete absence of any human activity in north-east Siberia and Alaska prior to around 15,500 years ago. If the Maryland and other east coast people of 26,000 to 19,000 years ago had come from Asia, not Europe, early material, dating from before 19,000 years ago, should have turned up in those two northern areas, but none have been found.

Although Solutrean Europeans may well have been the first Americans, they had a major disadvantage compared to the Asian-originating Indians who entered the New World via the Bering Straits or along the Aleutian Islands chain after 15,500 years ago…”

READ HERE

“Electronic Arts has taken video game marketing to scary new heights.

To commemorate the March 6th release of their highly-anticipated role-playing game Mass Effect 3, the company decided to launch a handful of advance copies into space. Literally. Like, they crammed them into weather balloons and shot 'em into the stratosphere.

The point? Each game contains a GPS tracking device; fans were told to follow those coordinates to find the games as they landed back on Earth. Locate a copy, and you've got a solid week with the game before it's in stores.

At least, that was the plan.

Mother Nature had her own plan, it seems. The first two copies sent into orbit, both launched from the San Francisco bay area, survived the insane round trip flight only to land in hard-to-reach spots a few hours away in Seaside, California. One copy wound up tucked away in a dense forest protected by overhead brambles and bushes while the other decided to hang out in the upper branches of a 150-foot tall tree.

A dozen or so diehard gamers spent two days trying to figure out how to get it down. Baseballs didn't work, nor did a slingshot. If ever we could use personal jetpacks, now is the time, science.But alas, science has officially failed us. According to a post on the Mass Effect Facebook page, the tree recovery attempt ended in vain due to safety concerns (and a distinct lack of jetpacks). From the post:

"It is unfortunate, but we have to require all participants halt further investigations due to legal and safety reasons. We are floored at the support, involvement, and contribution of the ME3 community in the last 48 hours, it has been nothing short of an amazing adventure."

Despite the rough start, the Mass Effect 3: Space Edition promotion seems to be faring much better in other cities. Packages launched in Las Vegas, New York and London have been recovered. Berlin is up next.

Update: EA has sent word that the first Seaside package -- the one trapped under fierce brambles -- has been found by a dedicated group of gamers, who hacked and slashed their way through the dense underbrush. The tree package, however, is still stuck in a tree.”

READ HERE

-- Still better than most dubstep.

“It took more than 200 astronauts from 12 countries more than a dozen years to build the International Space Station (ISS). Satoshi Furukawa, an astronaut from Japan, matched that feat in just about two hours — and he did it all while aboard the orbiting outpost itself.

It helped that his space station was made out of LEGO.

"It was a great opportunity for me to have built the LEGO space station," Furukawa, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) flight engineer, told collectSPACE.com in an interview after he returned to Earth. "I enjoyed building it."

"The ISS was put together in space, piece by piece," said Furukawa. "It's very similar to how you put together LEGO bricks on Earth."

The approximately two-foot (0.6-meter) long model, which replicated the nearly 360-foot (110-meter) space station was more than just a toy. Accompanied by other building brick sets that were launched last year, the LEGO space station was part of an educational collaboration between the Danish toy company and NASA.

After piecing together the toy brick-built station, Furukawa used it as a demonstration for a series of recorded videos aimed at engaging and educating children about living and working in space.

"Kids like LEGO and when they see LEGO floating in space, I'm sure they are excited," Furukawa said. "Well, I hope this experience inspires them to make greater efforts to study science and technology."

Not that the activity was all work and no play.

"He really enjoyed doing that and he kind of became 'the LEGO guy,'" NASA astronaut Michael Fossum said of his crewmate. Fossum was in command of the real station when Furukawa built the LEGO version.

Although building the LEGO space station was an activity aimed at students, it was not all child's play.

"There was actually some learning curve to that, believe it or not," Fossum told collectSPACE.com during a post-mission interview. "LEGOs are an example of something that is a lot of fun on the ground but it can be very frustrating when you have a lot of loose floating pieces."

To keep the bricks contained and to protect against some potentially serious dangers, Furukawa pieced together the model inside a glovebox — a sealed container with gloves built into its sides to allow the contents to be manipulated. Station crew members use a more complex glovebox to conduct science experiments with hazardous materials.

"A lot of the work dealing with the small pieces had to be done in an enclosure, like a simple payload glovebox," Fossum said. "A simple structural one with plastic sides so you could see inside, but a glovebox so you don't have all of these little pieces getting loose and becoming either lost or potentially getting jammed in equipment or even becoming a flammability hazard."

Fire is usually not one of the warnings that people find on the side of LEGO boxes.

"It's a little hard to comprehend, but there are flammability concerns about the LEGOs," Fossum said.

For Furukawa, he had his hands full just working with the enclosure without having to worry about it combusting.

"The challenging part was using the thick rubber gloves in the containment system because it made me clumsy in building the LEGO space station," he said. "I needed to use the system to put many small pieces of LEGO under control in microgravity."

Assembly complete

The real space station was declared "assembly complete" on May 29, 2011, during the penultimate mission of the space shuttle program. The same mission delivered the LEGO space station.

Furukawa, making his first spaceflight, arrived aboard the station a week later. Using a step-by-step building guide, he completed assembly of the LEGO station on Sept. 27.

Made up of hundreds of bricks, the model was launched in partially-preassembled "chunks" to help make up for the difficulties working with very small pieces in microgravity. The space station could not be launched fully-assembled, because like the real orbiting outpost, it could only be built in space.

"It's a solid model but I believe it can't bear its own weight under gravity," Furukawa said.

The LEGO station's time fully assembled was short lived however. Due to the flammability hazards, the toy bricks could only be exposed to the open cabin air for two hours.

Just like parents telling their kids to put away their toys when they are done playing, Mission Control instructed Furukawa to take the model apart and stow it after his educational videos were recorded.

"Per the ground's instruction, I needed to put it away," Furukawa said. "It is stowed in a drawer in the [European Space Agency's] Columbus module right now."

In addition to the ISS, Furukawa also built LEGO models of lunar exploration and Mars rovers, the Hubble Space Telescope and a communications and global positioning (GPS) satellite. He also constructed tools to demonstrate science principles, including a balance and fishing rod.”

READ HERE

“Playboy is about to launch into the final frontier, at least in its imagination.

The iconic adult-magazine company has dreamed up a vision of a Playboy Club in space — a sprawling sci-fi-inspired depiction of fun and games on a huge private space station – in conjunction with the space tourism company Virgin Galactic. The results appear in the March issue of Playboy magazine on newsstands now.

A zero-gravity dance club, a casino featuring "human roulette" and a restaurant for fine dining are just some of the amenities envisioned by artist Thomas Tenery and released by Playboy Tuesday (Feb. 22). The magazine worked with several futurists and scientists, including Virgin Galactic head designer Adam Wells, to illustrate the potential space Playboy Club.

"As Virgin Galactic gets closer to becoming the world's first commercial space line, Playboy is eagerly pondering the creation of the ultimate intergalactic entertainment destination," Playboy editorial director Jimmy Jellinek said in a statement. "This heaven-in-the-heavens will exceed starry-eyed travelers' wildest dreams, and guests will truly experience a party that's out of this world."

Founded by British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic is a private space company seeking to become the world's first passenger spaceliner service. The company has built the first commercial suborbital spacecraft, called SpaceShipTwo, and is selling tickets for flights at $200,000 per seat.

The first rocket-powered test flights of SpaceShipTwo are expected later this year. The air-launched spacecraft has already performed a series of unpowered drop tests and captive-carry flights with its massive mothership, the WhiteKnightTwo.

Playboy's clubs were launched by magazine founder Hugh Hefner in the 1960s. But every Playboy Club has the same limitation: It's stuck on Earth.

"The Playboy Club in space will be on a station in orbit, like a cruise ship," Playboy writers A.J. Baime and Jason Harper explain in a description. "Orbiting Earth is one idea, but it could also travel around other celestial bodies."

Tenery's paintings suggest the club could be built on a vast wheel-shaped space station that would spin to create a sort of artificial gravity. Unmanned cargo ships could be shot up to the space station to keep the club stocked with supplies.

"You could literally swing around the dark side of the moon," Wells told Playboy.

A big selling point would be the restaurant, which would be built into the spinning section so diners (and their food) wouldn't float off their seats and tables, explained Baime and Harper, who also sought input from futurist Thomas Frey of the Davini Institute think tank, and former NASA scientist Stan Kent.

A plethora of windows (Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rockets ships are covered with viewports) would also give diners the atmosphere – pun intended – of flying in space. In Tenery's depictions, the space game room would include a roulette system in which you are the ball, as well as zero-gravity bungee jumping and the obligatory space bar.

There would be no windows in the zero-gravity dance club, but there would be drinks, served by Playboy bunnies wearing jetpacks. And there would be exterior windows in the private "orbital pleasure dome," so clubgoers could gaze down at Earth during romantic interludes including, you guessed it, sex in space, the writers added.

"The entire Kama Sutra will have to be reimagined according to the rules of zero-gravity physics," Baime and Harper wrote.”

READ HERE

“These are the first photos of some of the countless treasures found in the extraordinary 298-million-year-old forest discovered under coal mine in Wuda, Inner Mongolia, China.The beautiful images show "the exceptional preservation of the fossil plants of the peat-forming swamp forest." The research team has found entire plants and trees, allowing them to confirm previously published reconstructions. It's also the first time ever that they have found fossilized tree and plant communities arranged in a forest.

A volcanic eruption buried the entire forest under ash, preserving it in this exquisite state, never seen before. The lead scientists classify it as a "Permian vegetational Pompeii" in the title of their research. According to University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn, it's an extraordinary "time capsule."

“It's marvelously preserved. We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That's really exciting.”

Here is the excavation site, located on the northern Helanshan Mountains of Inner Mongolia, 5 miles (8 kilometers) west of Wuda. The ash-covered area itself is estimated to be 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) from North to South, but scientists have only been able to work in a 10,763-square-foot (1000-square-meter) area. The entire mine is 7.72 square miles (20 square kilometers).”

-- Follow the link for more images and details!

READ HERE

?(PhysOrg.com) -- A spectacularly bright object recently spotted in one of the Milky Way's neighbouring galaxies is the result of a "normal" stellar black hole, astronomers have found.

An international team of scientists, led by Dr. Matt Middleton, of Durham University, analysed the Ultraluminous X-ray Source (ULX), which was originally discovered in the Andromeda galaxy by NASA's Chandra x-ray observatory. They publish their results in the journals Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Many ULXs are too far away for astronomers to study, but the relatively close proximity of Andromeda to the Milky Way ? around 2.5 million light years ? gave the team opportunity to study the phenomenon.

The researchers say their study could begin to answer the question about what causes ULXs. Some scientists believe they are caused by relatively small black holes, a few times the mass of our Sun. These black holes rapidly pull in gas and dust which forms an "accretion disc" and heats up causing the material to emit X-rays.

Other scientists say ULXs are caused by material being dragged in by an intermediate-sized black hole formed from the merger of many stellar black holes with a mass perhaps 1,000 times bigger than the Sun.

The Durham-led findings link the ULX spotted in Andromeda to a normal stellar black hole formed after a massive star exploded as a supernova.

Dr Middleton, of Durham University's Department of Physics, said: "ULX sources are still pretty exotic.

"But our work shows that at least some are linked to the normal black holes left behind after the death of massive stars, objects that are found throughout the Universe, and the way that they drag in surrounding material.

"The ULX in Andromeda flared up because of the black hole's voracious appetite for new material."

Using data from Chandra, the XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, the Swift gamma ray observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope the research team were able to watch a sharp decline in the outburst from the ULX that took place over the next few months.

This decline had not been seen in any ULX before, but is common in stellar-mass X-ray binaries in the Milky Way where a normal star is in close orbit around a black hole. Measurement of energy emissions from the ULX also allowed the team to rule out low rates of accretion that would be expected from an intermediate-mass black hole.They concluded that the Andromeda ULX had the mass of a large star, in this case about 13 times the mass of the Sun.

Dr. Middleton said: "We would like to follow up this work by watching another outburst from the Andromeda ULX. The problem is that these are likely to happen only every few decades so we could be in for a long wait before this source erupts again."

The team hope that the ongoing monitoring of Andromeda by orbiting X-ray observatories may find other ULXs in the same galaxy, giving them another chance to test their theory.Dr. Middleton said: "If we do manage to spot another ULX outburst in Andromeda it will be a big help in understanding the extreme behaviour ofblack holes and the way they pull in matter ? something of great importance in shaping the wider universe."

The research work in the UK was funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council.?

READ HERE

“You can shelf your designs for a warp drive engine (for now) and put the DeLorean back in the garage; it turns out neutrinos may not have broken any cosmic speed limits after all.

Ever since the news came out on September 22 of last year that a team of researchers in Italy had clocked neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, the physics world has been resounding with the potential implications of such a discovery — that is, if it were true. The speed of light has been a key component of the standard model of physics for over a century, an Einstein-established limit that particles (even tricky neutrinos) weren’t supposed to be able to break, not even a little.

Now, according to a breaking news article by Edwin Cartlidge on AAAS’ScienceInsider, the neutrinos may be cleared of any speed violations.

“According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos’ flight and an electronic card in a computer,” Cartlidge reported.

The original OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment had a beam of neutrinos fired from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, aimed at an underground detector array located 730 miles away at the Gran Sasso facility, near L’Aquila, Italy. Researchers were surprised to discover the neutrinos arriving earlier than expected, by a difference of 60 nanoseconds. This would have meant the neutrinos had traveled faster than light speed to get there.

Repeated experiments at the facility revealed the same results. When the news was released, the findings seemed to be solid — from a methodological standpoint, anyway.

Shocked at their own results, the OPERA researchers were more than happy to have colleagues check their results, and welcomed other facilities to attempt the same experiment.

Repeated attempts may no longer be needed.

Once the aforementioned fiber optic cable was readjusted, it was found that the speed of data traveling through it matched the 60 nanosecond discrepancy initially attributed to the neutrinos. This could very well explain the subatomic particles’ apparent speed burst.

Case closed? Well… it is science, after all.

“New data,” Cartlidge added, “will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.””

READ HERE

“(NYT) Australian and American physicists have built a working transistor from a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon crystal.

The group of physicists, based at theUniversity of New South Wales andPurdue University, said they had laid the groundwork for a futuristic quantum computer that might one day function in a nanoscale world and would be orders of magnitude smaller and quicker than today’s silicon-based machines.

In contrast to conventional computers that are based on transistors with distinct “on” and “off” or “1” and “0” states, quantum computers are built from devices called qubits that exploit the quirky properties of quantum mechanics. Unlike a transistor, a qubit can represent a multiplicity of values simultaneously.

That might make it possible to factor large numbers more quickly than with conventional machines, thereby undermining modern data-scrambling systems that are the basis of electronic commerce and data privacy. Quantum computers might also make it possible to simulate molecular structures with great speed, an advance that holds promise for designing new drugs and other materials.

“Their approach is extremely powerful,” said Andreas Heinrich, a physicist at I.B.M. “This is at least a 10-year effort to make very tiny electrical wires and combine them with the placement of a phosphorus atom exactly where they want them.”

Dr. Heinrich said the research was a significant step toward making a functioning quantum computing system. However, whether quantum computing will ever be harnessed for useful tasks remains uncertain, and the researchers noted that their work demonstrated the fundamental limits that today’s computers would be able to shrink to.

“It shows that Moore’s Law can be scaled toward atomic scales in silicon,” said Gerhard Klimeck, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue and leader of the project there. Moore’s Law refers to technology improvements by the semiconductor industry that have doubled the number of transistors on a silicon chip roughly every 18 months for the past half-century. That has led to accelerating increases in performance and declining prices. “The technologies for classical computing can survive to the atomic scale,” Dr. Klimeck said.

Demonstrations of single-atom transistors date from 2002, but the researchers from Purdue and New South Wales said they had made advances on two fronts: in the precision with which they placed the Lilliputian switch; and in the use of industry-standard techniques to build the circuitry, making it possible to read and write information from the tiniest conceivable switch.

The results were reported on Sunday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Until now, single-atom transistors have been created on a hit-or-miss basis, the scientists said.“But this device is perfect,” Michelle Simmons, a group leader and director of the ARC Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication at the University of New South Wales, said in a statement. “This is the first time anyone has shown control of a single atom in a substrate with this level of precise accuracy.”In the 1950s, the physicist Richard P. Feynman predicted a world where there would be “plenty of room at the bottom,” opening new vistas into engineering disciplines that would use individual atoms as bricks and mortar in fields as diverse as computing and biology.

Since then, computer designers have moved ever closer to the smallest components that are possible to fabricate. Now, with the publication of the New South Wales and Purdue research, the scientists said they had shown the fundamental limits to which the components of silicon-based computers would be able to shrink in the future. Currently, the smallest dimension in state-of-the-art computers made by Intel is 22 nanometers — less than 100 atoms in diameter.

If the semiconductor industry remains on its current pace, it might be possible to reach that limit within two decades, Dr. Klimeck noted.

The scientists placed the single phosphorus atom using a device known as a scanning tunneling microscope. They used it to essentially scrape trenches and a small cavity on a surface of silicon covered with a layer of hydrogen atoms. Phosphine gas was then used to deposit a phosphorus atom at a precise location, which was then encased in further layers of silicon atoms.

While offering astounding precision for research, these microscopes are not currently applicable as manufacturing tools to make chips that contain billions or even trillions of transistors. Moreover, the devices now operate at very low temperatures…”

READ HERE

“It was an Ice Age squirrel's treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists managed to resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way for the revival of other species.

The Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated, the researchers said, and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds.

The experiment proves that permafrost serves as a natural depository for ancient life forms, said the Russian researchers, who published their findings in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

"We consider it essential to continue permafrost studies in search of an ancient genetic pool, that of pre-existing life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the earth's surface," the scientists said in the article.

Canadian researchers had earlier regenerated some significantly younger plants from seeds found in burrows.

Svetlana Yashina of the Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy Of Sciences, who led the regeneration effort, said the revived plant looked very similar to its modern version, which still grows in the same area in northeastern Siberia.

"It's a very viable plant, and it adapts really well," she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from the Russian town of Pushchino where her lab is located.

She voiced hope the team could continue its work and regenerate more plant species.The Russian research team recovered the fruit after investigating dozens of fossil burrows hidden in ice deposits on the right bank of the lower Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia, the sediments dating back 30,000-32,000 years.

The sediments were firmly cemented together and often totally filled with ice, making any water infiltration impossible - creating a natural freezing chamber fully isolated from the surface.

"The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber," said Stanislav Gubin, one of the authors of the study, who spent years rummaging through the area for squirrel burrows. "It's a natural cryobank."

The burrows were located 125 feet (38 meters) below the present surface in layers containing bones of large mammals, such as mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, bison, horse and deer.

Gubin said the study has demonstrated that tissue can survive ice conservation for tens of thousands of years, opening the way to the possible resurrection of Ice Age mammals."If we are lucky, we can find some frozen squirrel tissue," Gubin told the AP. "And this path could lead us all the way to mammoth."

Japanese scientists are already searching in the same area for mammoth remains, but Gubin voiced hope that the Russians will be the first to find some frozen animal tissue that could be used for regeneration.

"It's our land, we will try to get them first," he said.”

READ HERE