"(ScienceDaily May 21, 2012) - It may not be intuitive, but a coating of reflective metal can actually make something less visible, engineers at Stanford and UPenn have shown. They have created an invisible, light-detecting device that can "see without being seen."

At the heart of the device are silicon nanowires covered by a thin cap of gold. By adjusting the ratio of metal to silicon -- a technique the engineers refer to as tuning the geometries -- they capitalize on favorable nanoscale physics in which the reflected light from the two materials cancel each other to make the device invisible.

Pengyu Fan is the lead author of a paper demonstrating the new device published online May 20th in the journal Nature Photonics. He is a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering at Stanford University working in Professor Mark Brongersma's group. Brongersma is senior author of the study.

Cloak of invisiblity

Light detection is well known and relatively simple. Silicon generates electrical current when illuminated and is common in solar panels and light sensors today. The Stanford device, however, is a departure in that for the first time it uses a relatively new concept known as plasmonic cloaking to render the device invisible. . ."

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"(phys.org May 16, 2012) For decades, scientists have studied Caenorhabditis elegans – tiny, transparent worms – to glean clues about how neurons develop and function. A new Harvard study suggests that the worms' nervous system is much more capable and complex than previously thought, and has a way to monitor its own motion, a model one day could serve to develop treatments for disorders like schizophrenia.

While most research into the worms' neurons has shown that each performs as a single functional unit, Yun Zhang, Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Brain Science, together with her colleagues Michael Hendricks, Heonick Ha and Nicolas Maffey, has uncovered evidence that, in some neurons, different compartments of a single neuron exhibit activities independently of each other. These local activities within the individual neurites represent self-motion signals and control movement. The work is described in a paper published on May 13 in Nature.

Such "compartmentalized" neural activity is typically only found in higher organisms; however, Zhang and her colleagues have now demonstrated that the simple unbranched axons of nematode neurons can also generate such compartmentalized local activity. In the interneurons that the researchers study, named RIA, the worms use these local activities to encode "corollary discharge" – a phenomenon in which motor neurons send a "copy" of a motor instruction back to the central nervous system – to monitor their body position and guide their movement about their environment. . ."

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"(nature.com May 15 2012) A field trial for a novel UK geoengineering experiment has been cancelled amid questions about a pre-existing patent application for some of the technology involved.

The Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) project is a collaboration among several UK universities and Cambridge-based Marshall Aerospace to investigate the possibility of spraying particles into the stratosphere to mitigate global warming. Such particles could mimic the cooling produced by large volcanic eruptions, by reflecting sunlight before it reaches Earth’s surface.

But the field-trial arm of SPICE — which would have seen around 150 litres of water pumped into the atmosphere through a 1-kilometre hosepipe attached to a balloon — has now been abandoned. . ."

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"(BBC 16 May 2012) Centaurus A, a bright galaxy in southern skies, once bemused scientists with its shape, now known to result from elliptical and spiral galaxies merging. The European Southern Observatory's 2.2m telescope has now given the deepest image yet. Young stars and hydrogen-rich star-forming areas lie at the ends of the central "dust lane"."

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"(BBC 16 May 2012) Search giant Google has patented the design of its augmented-reality glasses, known as Project Glass.

Three patents for a "wearable display device" with characteristics of the much-talked about futuristic glasses were submitted last autumn.

The patents reference such functions as displaying data in front of the wearer's eyes and playing audio.

In April, Google revealed details of its research into the glasses and showed a demo video of a prototype.

The patents show images of different versions of augmented reality glasses, some with lenses and some without.

Cyborg eye

Google is working on the project in its research lab, Google X.

The prototypes are currently being tested by the firm's executives, including Sergey Brin and Vic Gundotra.

The demo video showed science fiction-like glasses equipped with a microphone and partly transparent tiny screen right above the user's right eye. . ."

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"(ScienceDaily May 21, 2012) — two ink sacs from 160-million-year-old giant cephalopod fossils discovered two years ago in England contain the pigment melanin, and that it is essentially identical to the melanin found in the ink sac of a modern-day cuttlefish.

The study is published online in the May 21 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The finding -- in an extremely rare case of being able to study organic material that is hundreds of millions of years old -- suggests that the ink-screen escape mechanism of cephalopods -- cuttlefish, squid and octopuses -- has not evolved since the Jurassic period, and that melanin could be preserved intact in the fossils of a range of organisms.

"Though the other organic components of the cephalopod we studied are long gone, we've discovered through a variety of research methods that the melanin has remained in a condition that could be studied in exquisite detail," said John Simon, one of the study authors, a chemistry professor and the executive vice president and provost at U.Va.

One of the ink sacs studied is the only intact ink sac ever discovered. . ."

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"Looking like a bright star streaking up into a black sky, a rocket took off before dawn today from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida carrying an unmanned capsule filled with food, clothes and other supplies for astronauts on the International Space Station.

But this robotic cargo ship doesn't belong to NASA. Instead, it's owned by a company called SpaceX, which made history by launching the first ever private spacecraft on a mission to the station.

SpaceX has a $1.6 billion cargo-delivery contract with NASA, which is turning routine flights to the station over to industry so that the veteran space agency can start to focus on more ambitious exploration efforts.

After the company's capsule, called Dragon, reached orbit and its solar arrays deployed without a hitch, engineers at SpaceX's launch control room in Florida clapped and hugged each other.

Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 after making a fortune with the Internet company PayPal, wrote on his Twitter feed: "Feels like a giant weight just came off my back :)"

Musk watched the rocket blast off from his company's mission control in Hawthorne, Calif. "Every bit of adrenalin in my body released at that point," he said later during a post-launch press briefing. "It's obviously an extremely intense moment."

This is the third successful flight in a row for the company's Falcon 9 rocket, and the second test flight of a Dragon capsule. In December 2010, a Dragon capsule orbited Earth twice, then splashed down in the Pacific. . ."

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“(www.popsci.com, Rebecca Boyle, 05.17.2012) With no meal for 86 million years, and barely enough oxygen to sustain metabolism, can a single-celled organism really be considered alive? Yes, but only just, according to a new study. A microbial community buried under the ocean floor since the mid-Jurassic era is still hanging on. Their tenacity could pose some interesting questions for the hunt for alien life.

Plenty of microbes live beneath ocean sediments — about 90 percent of the planet’s unicellular organisms are found there, and they’ve long been subjects of study among biologists interested in extreme environments. Hans Røy and colleagues wanted to dig even deeper to examine the most barren places, where food supplies are scarce or nonexistent and where oxygen barely reaches.

Røy and colleagues from Denmark and Germany surveyed red clays buried deep in the Pacific Ocean, along the equator and into the North Pacific Gyre current system. From the research R/V Knorr, they drilled core samples 92 feet into the ocean floor, dating to the time of the dinosaurs, and tested the cores with oxygen sensors. They found that organisms live in the deepest parts of these sediments and that they’re using oxygen for respiration — only incredibly slowly. The deeper the sediments, the less food and oxygen is present, and the less oxygen is used up, too. These organisms have not had access to a fresh food supply since their burial, 70 to 86 million years ago.

It takes the microbes about 1,000 years to double their biomass, which could also mean it takes them 1,000 years to divide, Røy and his colleagues found. E. coli, by contrast, takes 17 to 30 minutes. Put another way, to be sure these things were actually living — meaning undergoing metabolic processes and growing biomass — you would have to wait 1,000 years.

Røy and colleagues believe these microbial communities are living at the absolute limit — they have the bare minimum energy required to keep their DNA intact and their proteins functioning. This is interesting for a couple reasons. First, these life forms are definitely odd, and they suggest that scientists’ knowledge of prokaryotes is incomplete at best. The way unicellular organisms live in the lab is nothing like the way they live beneath the ocean. Second, they once again prove that live persists where it would seem physically impossible — and that is an interesting finding if you’re interested in astrobiology. Even in the harshest environments on this planet, where access to any form of energy is limited at best, microbes can live. Could they live somewhere off this planet, too?

The study appears in the journal Science.”

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“(LiveScience.com – Wed, May 9, 2012) Carnivorous plants can have valuable allies in ants, benefiting from their poop and janitor, bodyguard and cutthroat services, researchers say.

The carnivorous pitcher plant Nepenthes bicalcarata dwells in the nutrient-poor peat swamp forests of Borneo. It is not a very effective carnivore by itself — its pitcher-shaped leaves lack the slippery walls and viscous, elastic and strongly corrosive fluid that make those of its relatives such effective deathtraps.

However, N. bicalcarata does apparently have unusual support on its side — the ant Camponotus schmitzi. The carnivorous plant has swollen tendrils at the base of each pitcher that serve as homes for the insects, and a food source in the form of nectar secreted on the pitcher rims.

In return, the ants apparently provide a host of services for the pitcher plants. They clean the pitcher mouth to keep it slippery enough to help catch prey. They attack weevils that would otherwise munch on the plant. They cart off the remains of large prey from the pitchers that would otherwise rot. They lie in ambush under pitcher rims and systematically attack any of the plant's prey that attempt to escape the traps. And their droppings fertilize the plants. . .”

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“(Phys.org, May 16, 2012) -- Researchers at the University of Vienna have discovered that carrion crows are able to distinguish between familiar and unknown human voices. They also found, as they write in their paper published in the journalAnimal Cognition, that the birds are able to do the same with other birds outside of their species, though they react in different ways.

Suspecting that crows, which are among the smartest of all birds, are able to tell the difference between people they know and those they don’t based on voice alone, the team set up an experiment to find out. They recorded the voices of five people who care for a group of carrion crows living in the university’s aviary, speaking the word “hey.” They then recorded the voices of five other people who the birds had never heard, speaking the same word. Later, when the recordings were played back for the birds, the researchers noted that the crows responded much more clearly to the unfamiliar voices, turning to look right away, investigating its source. The team suggests this is because crows see humans as a potential threat and thus any voice they hear that they can’t identify needs to be paid special attention.

Wondering if the birds displayed similar tendencies when interacting with other animals besides humans, the team repeated the experiment using bird calls instead of human voices. Because carrion crows tend to live and interact with other birds in the crow family, the team recorded calls from jackdaws and magpies, both of which are also considered highly intelligent. This time, when they played back the recordings for the carrion crows, they got the opposite reaction. The birds responded more clearly to the calls of other birds that they’d heard many times as opposed to calls from birds they’d never heard before. In this instance, the researchers suggest that the carrion crows on occasion team up with other such birds in cooperative efforts to find food or sound the alarm when threats are identified. This confirms prior work by other groups that had found that corvids (birds in the crow family) tend to work purposely with some birds when foraging, while ignoring others. . .”

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‘(2012/05/03 www.planetary.org) As winter began to retreat in the southern hemisphere of the Red Planet, Opportunity was commanded to finish up her science assignments in April in preparation for leaving its refuge, and the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission rolled through its 100th month of exploration.

One hundred months Opportunity has been driving around Meridiani Planum, Mars. That’s 97 months beyond its three-month primary mission. Wow.

On Mars, mere survival would be a huge accomplishment, but this rover has turned its first 100 months into an adventure story with all the right stuff to warrant a banner headline of acknowledgement. From bouncing to a landing inside a crater making “the world’s first 300 million mile hole-in-one,” as Steve Squyres, principal investigator described it, and then opening her eyes to find the evidence for past water it had come looking for, Opportunity drove on to become the first robot to inspect its own jettisoned heat shield, the first to find meteorites on Mars, the first drive into a crater, the first robot to be caught by and escape the grip of a life-threatening sand dune, the first to survive the eye of a global dust storm, and so much more.

Yet, there were no bells or whistles or fanfare for this ‘100’ milestone, like there was for say The Simpsons’ 100th episode or any number of other ‘100’ achievements. No notice or press release from NASA, and no Tweet went viral.

In fact, MER’s 100-month milestone went all but unnoticed even by team members who continue to work with Opportunity every day, and whose responsibilities have only intensified because the mission has endured beyond all expectation and so many of the MER crew are now doing double-duty on other missions, including Mars Science Laboratory, which is to deliver Curiosity, the next-gen bigger, faster, stronger rover to Mars in August...’

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“This mottled landscape showing the impact crater Tycho is among the most violent-looking places on our moon. Astronomers didn't aim NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study Tycho, however. The image was taken in preparation to observe the transit of Venus across the sun's face on June 5-6.

Hubble cannot look at the sun directly, so astronomers are planning to point the telescope at the Earth's moon, using it as a mirror to capture reflected sunlight and isolate the small fraction of the light that passes through Venus's atmosphere. Imprinted on that small amount of light are the fingerprints of the planet's atmospheric makeup.

These observations will mimic a technique that is already being used to sample the atmospheres of giant planets outside our solar system passing in front of their stars. In the case of the Venus transit observations, astronomers already know the chemical makeup of Venus's atmosphere, and that it does not show signs of life on the planet. But the Venus transit will be used to test whether this technique will have a chance of detecting the very faint fingerprints of an Earth-like planet, even one that might be habitable for life, outside our solar system that similarly transits its own star. , Venus is an excellent proxy because it is similar in size and mass to our planet.

The astronomers will use an arsenal of Hubble instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, Wide Field Camera 3, and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, to view the transit in a range of wavelengths, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. During the transit, Hubble will snap images and perform spectroscopy, dividing the sunlight into its constituent colors, which could yield information about the makeup of Venus's atmosphere.

Hubble will observe the moon for seven hours, before, during, and after the transit so the astronomers can compare the data. Astronomers need the long observation because they are looking for extremely faint spectral signatures. Only 1/100,000th of the sunlight will filter through Venus's atmosphere and be reflected off the moon.

This image, taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, reveals lunar features as small as roughly 560 feet (170 meters) across. The large "bulls-eye" near the top of the picture is the impact crater, caused by an asteroid strike about 100 million years ago. The bright trails radiating from the crater were formed by material ejected from the impact area during the asteroid collision. Tycho is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide and is circled by a rim of material rising almost 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the crater floor. The image measures 430 miles (700 kilometers) across, which is slightly larger than New Mexico.

Because the astronomers only have one shot at observing the transit, they had to carefully plan how the study would be carried out. Part of their planning included the test observations of the moon, made on Jan. 11, 2012, as shown in the release image.

Hubble will need to be locked onto the same location on the moon for more than seven hours, the transit's duration. For roughly 40 minutes of each 96-minute orbit of Hubble around the Earth, the Earth occults Hubble's view of the moon. So, during the test observations, the astronomers wanted to make sure they could point Hubble to precisely the same target area.

This is the last time this century sky watchers can view Venus passing in front of the sun. The next transit won't happen until 2117. Venus transits occur in pairs, separated by eight years. The last event was witnessed in 2004.”

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‘ScienceDaily (May 1, 2012) — On 5 and 6 June this year, millions of people around the world will be able to see Venus pass across the face of the Sun in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

It will take Venus about six hours to complete its transit, appearing as a small black dot on the Sun's surface, in an event that will not happen again until 2117.

In this month's Physics World, Jay M Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College, Massachusetts, explores the science behind Venus's transit and gives an account of its fascinating history.

Transits of Venus occur only on the very rare occasions when Venus and Earth are in a line with the Sun. At other times Venus passes below or above the Sun because the two orbits are at a slight angle to each other. Transits occur in pairs separated by eight years, with the gap between pairs of transits alternating between 105.5 and 121.5 years -- the last transit was in 2004.

Building on the original theories of Nicolaus Copernicus from 1543, scientists were able to predict and record the transits of both Mercury and Venus in the centuries that followed…’

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‘New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) is one of the world's premier destinations for artistic and historical exhibitions. But this epicenter of worldly culture is not above admitting the occasional mistake. Even when the correction comes from one curious 13-year-old boy.

The Hartford Courant reports that 13-year-old Benjamin Lerman Coady found an error in the Met's Byzantine Gallery during a recent visit. The seventh-grader is a fledgling history buff who recently studied the Byzantine Empire in school.

While checking some of the dates on the map, Coady noticed that sections featuring Spain and Africa were missing.

Before leaving the museum, Coady attempted to inform the museum that the map was inaccurate. "The front desk didn't believe me," he told the paper. "I'm only a kid."

However, Coady received an email from the museum's senior vice president for external affairs, notifying him that his request was being forwarded to the museum's medieval affairs department for further review…’

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‘(PHYS.ORG May 2, 2012) Forty times stronger than steel and conducting electricity ten times better than silicon, graphene is the wonder material that could one day replace silicon in microchips. Now the University is opening a new Graphene Centre Laboratory that will study its amazing properties and develop its potential applications.

Graphene could be used to develop faster electronic devices, for example more advanced mobile phones and super-fast computers, flexible touch screens, and medical sensor devices.

The new laboratory, officially opened by our Vice-Chancellor Professor Dame Glynis Breakwell on Tuesday 1 May, forms part of the Centre for Graphene Science, which brings together expertise at the Universities of Bath and Exeter.

Professor Simon Bending from the University’s Department of Physics said: “Graphene is a remarkable material made of a single layer of carbon atoms. Combining high strength, transparency and flexibility with excellent electrical and thermal conductivity, it has many potential applications.”

The new laboratory at Bath is home to a range of state of the art equipment, including a specially adapted scanning probe microscope – nicknamed the “nano-factory” – that can build new materials and create rapid prototypes of novel devices that have never been made before…’

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