The phenomenon, described as thermopower waves, “opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare,” said Michael Strano, MIT’s Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, who was the senior author of a paper describing the new findings.

Like a collection of flotsam propelled along the surface by waves traveling across the ocean, it turns out that a thermal wave — a moving pulse of heat — traveling along a microscopic wire can drive electrons along, creating an electrical current. The key ingredient in the recipe is carbon nanotubes — submicroscopic hollow tubes made of a chicken-wire-like lattice of carbon atoms.

In the new experiments, each of these electrically and thermally conductive nanotubes was coated with a layer of a highly reactive fuel that can produce heat by decomposing.

This fuel was then ignited at one end of the nanotube using either a laser beam or a high-voltage spark, and the result was a fast-moving thermal wave travelling along the length of the carbon nanotube like a flame speeding along the length of a lit fuse.

According to Strano, in the group’s initial experiments, when they wired up the carbon nanotubes with their fuel coating in order to study the reaction, “lo and behold, we were really surprised by the size of the resulting voltage peak” that propagated along the wire.

After further development, the system now puts out energy, in proportion to its weight, about 100 times greater than an equivalent weight of lithium-ion battery.

While many semiconductor materials can produce an electric potential when heated, through something called the Seebeck effect, that effect is very weak in carbon.

“There’s something else happening here. We call it electron entrainment since part of the current appears to scale with wave velocity,” Strano said.

The thermal wave appears to be entraining the electrical charge carriers (either electrons or electron holes) just as an ocean wave can pick up and carry a collection of debris along the surface, he explained.

“This important property is responsible for the high power produced by the system,” Strano said.

Strano suggests that one possible application would be in enabling new kinds of ultra-small electronic devices.

Or it could lead to “environmental sensors that could be scattered like dust in the air,” he said.

ANI

The finding was made by Brown University physicist Vesna Mitrovic and colleagues at Brown and in France.

At the quantum level, the forces of magnetism and superconductivity exist in an uneasy relationship.

Superconducting materials repel a magnetic field, so to create a superconducting current, the magnetic forces must be strong enough to overcome the natural repulsion and penetrate the body of the superconductor. This relationship is pretty well known. But why it is so remains mysterious. Now, physicists at Brown University have documented for the first time a quantum-level phenomenon that occurs to electrons subjected to magnetism in a superconducting material.

They report that at under certain conditions, electrons in superconducting material form odd, fluctuating magnetic waves.
Apply a little more magnetic force, and those fluctuations cease. The electronic magnets form repeated wave-like patterns promoted by superconductivity.

The discovery may help scientists understand more fully the relationship between magnetism and superconductivity at the quantum level.

The insight also may help advance research into superconducting magnets, which are used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and a host of other applications.

When a magnetic field is applied to a superconducting material, vortices measured in nanometers (1 billionth of a meter) pop up.

These vortices, like super-miniature tornadoes, are areas where the magnetic field has overpowered the superconducting field state, essentially suppressing it.

Crank up the magnetic field and more vortices appear.

At some point, the vortices are so widespread the material loses its superconducting ability altogether.

At an even more basic level, sets of electrons called Cooper pairs form superconductivity. But, scientists believe there also are other electrons that are magnetically oriented and spin on their own axes like little globes.

These electrons are tilted at various angles on their imaginary axes and move in a repeating, linear pattern that resembles waves, Mitrovic and her colleagues have observed.

“These funny waves most likely appear because of superconductivity, but the reason why is still unsettled,” Mitrovic said. The researchers saw that the waves fluctuated under certain conditions.

Mitrovic and her colleagues also observed that when more magnetic energy is added, the fluctuations disappear and the waves resume their repeating, linear patterns.

The researchers next want to understand why these fluctuations occur and whether they crop up in other superconducting material.

ANI

This traditional portrait of Athanasius Kircher gives his age as 76. The engraver has emphasized the energy in Kircher’s inquiring eyes. A professor of eloquence in Rome added the flowery inscription: “The painter or poet would declare only in error: ‘This is the man.’ But the farthest Antipodes know his name and face.”

Above, a detail from a page in Athanasius Kircher’s “Musurgia Universalis,” printed in 1650. A large part of the book is devoted to the history of instrumentation, including the anatomy of voice and hearing, and an extensive theory on acoustics entitled ‘Magia Phonocamptica, sive de Echo’, in which he described sound as ‘the ape of light.’

Invented device for the deaf and a megaphone. Described the phosphorescence and fluorescence. Designed magnetic watch.

Made some music of hydraulic machines.  Has constructed the prototype of the synthesizer, which it was possible to obtain different timbres of wind, string instruments and noise, as well as programmed melodies within the scale tool.

The first used a microscope to examine the blood of patients with plague, and came to the conclusion that the disease is caused by microorganisms.  He also suggested that effective measures to combat the disease – isolation, quarantine, burning clothes and diseased wearing protective masks.

Descended into the crater of the volcano Etna on Sicily. Created the theory of volcanism and water circulation within the body of the Earth.

Invented the world’s first projector, and includes a light source, and a slide, and an optical system, and the screen .

To study the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs taught Syriac, Chaldean, Arabic and Coptic.

In fact, opened for Christian Kabbalah – presenting an image kabbalah  sefirot of the tree is in the form in which it would be accessible and understandable to Christian readers.

Released the “Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Chinese Empire,” which summarized all the information known about China – Kircher was in correspondence with more than 760 scientists.

Created the “machine metaphor”.

Calculated that if the Tower of Babel reach the sky, she would have turned the Earth. Calculated the size of Noah’s Ark .

During the 30-year war against the Protestants fled first to Avignon, and then to Rome. Has published 40 books: arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, algebra, the theory of logarithms, Astronomy, Chronograph, geography, acoustics, and anaclastics catoptrics, mechanics, statics, hydrology, hydraulic engineering, pyrotechnics, cryptography, fortification, topography, chemistry, architecture, construction mechanics , music, telescopes, microscopes, magnets and their properties, fluid bodies, machines, pneumatic machines, diving bells, military tactics and strategy, and so on.

A week before Christmas, Magnus Bladh of the Ottenby bird station, located on Öland’s southern cape, was strolling along the beach with a colleague when he saw something he’d never seen before.

“Temperatures were below freezing and there was a light wind, but it was very cold! In the seaweed we noticed at least 200 large ice balls,” he said in a report to Swedish meteorological agency SMHI.

“The balls varied in size but the biggest ones were quite large, some larger than a football.”

What mystified Bladh was that the balls were resting on the west side of a bed of seaweed, even though the prevailing winds were from the east.

When Bladh and his colleagues later broke open one of the ice balls, they discovered that it consisted of a 2 to 5 centimetre thick shell of ice, which covered a core of soft, wet snow.

According to SMHI, the ice balls likely form when rolls of light snow are blown from the shore into water which is at or just below freezing, but fails to form uniform ice due to strong winds.

The rolls of snow are then tossed about in the chilly waters, where wave action eventually shapes them into balls of ice.

“It’s hard to say just how common ice balls are, since we are reliant on witness reports,” SMHI spokeswoman Alexandra Ohlsson told The Local.

A review by SMHI of weather conditions on southern Öland in the days leading up to Bladh’s ice ball discovery revealed that temperatures in the area were generally below freezing, with snowfall, and winds from the north and northeast averaging 50 kilometres per hour.

According to SMHI, it was possible that rolls of snow near the shore remained soft due to warmth emanating up from the ground, which could have then been blown into the water by the strong winds.

Once formed, the balls likely came back to shore and, rather than floating out to open water, remained there due to a change in sea conditions in the days before the ice balls were discovered. Water levels sunk several decimetres between December 17th and December 18th when Bladh and his colleagues found the ice balls lying on the shore.

Beside’s Bladh’s discovery, SMHI’s website only mentions two other reported instances of ice balls being discovered in Sweden since the 1950s.

thelocal.se

The fish was found during the first hour of the researchers’ first day by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV).

“The finding is very surprising. The fish was found live and free swimming in its habitat,” said Prof Alex Masengi, the Sam Ratulangi University’s dean of fishery and marine science faculty.

On June 27, 2007, the same team found a coelacanth fish at Malalayang waters of North Sulawesi’s Manado Bay in 190 meter-depth.

The second finding location in Talise is about 120 kilometer north of the first one.

The coelacanth fishes’ habitat is in depth of more than 180 meter with maximum temperature of 18 celcius degree inside underwater volcanic concaves.

The fishes only live in western South Africa waters and eastern Indonesian waters, called Latimeria chalumnae and Latimeria menadoensis, respectively.

The new species identification from Manado in 1999 surprised the world because since 1940 it had been recognized only one coelacanth species from western Madagascar.

The coelacanth is categorized as prehistoric fish and living fossil because it has been allegedly living since Devonian era of 380 million years ago.

source

The woolly rat, an over-sized vegetarian rodent, measures 82 cm long and weighs in at 1.5 Kg. Its size makes it amongst the largest species of rat known anywhere in the world.

The creature was discovered by an expedition team filming for BBC program Lost Land of the Volcano.

But the large rat is only one of dozens of new creatures found in the shadow of the Bosavi volcano. The team also found scores of strange spiders and around 20 species of insect.

“Highlights include a camouflaged gecko, a fanged frog and a fish called the Henamo Grunter, so named because it makes grunting noises from its swim bladder,” Steve Greenwood, series producer for Lost Land of the Volcano, said. The fanged frog is only one of some 16 new frogs discovered.

The area in which the animals were found is particularly inaccessible and the team spent several weeks scaling the 2,800 meter summit with the help from local trackers.

(Agencies)

source

Good bye element 112 and ununbium, its placeholder name. Hello “Copernicium.”

By choosing to honor the father of the heliocentric solar system, element 112 discovery team leader Sigurd Hofmann wanted to avoid the divisive names selected for past elements, salute an influential scientist who didn’t receive any accolades in his own lifetime, and highlight the link between astronomy and Hofmann’s own field of nuclear chemistry.

The idea was to go backwards, to honor someone who was not greatly honored in his lifetime,” said Hofmann. “[Copernicus] had to be very careful when he was publishing his works. His book was published the day of his death. He was afraid to make his announcements during his lifetime, so he wasn’t honored when he was alive.”

Sticking with that theme, the team almost named the element after Galileo, but when Hofmann suggested Copernicus, everyone on the team instantly agreed.

Element 112 is the sixth element discovered by Hofmann’s institution, the GSI, and the last four previously discovered elements were named after cities or states in Germany. By naming element 112 after a Polish scientist, Hofmann broke that nationalistic streak.

“After we have named elements after our city and our state, we wanted to make a statement with a name that was known to everyone,” said Hofmann. “We didn’t want to select someone who was a German. We were looking world wide.”

Additionally, Hofmann wanted to highlight the contribution of nuclear chemistry to other fields, astrophysics in particular. Much of the most cutting edge astrophysics research deals with the formation of the universe during and shortly after the Big Bang. In particular, astrophysicists look to explain how the fundamental particles if of matter condensed into the heavy elements that make up the world as we know it. And any model regarding the creation of heavy elements rely on the research performed by scientists like Hofmann.

To that end, Hofmann bucked the trend of naming new elements after nuclear physicists like Niels Bohr, and picked a scientists who spent more time looking up at the heavens than down at the earth.

But to Hofmann himself, this is already ancient history. Notoriously unsentimental about the opportunity to carve a new name in the Stanley Cup of science, Hofmann has already put naming element 112 in the rear view mirror.

Said Hofmann, “we will wait for the IUPAC to rule on the new name, but the aim is now to look for element 120.”

source: http://www.popsci.com/

Unlike most liquids, water becomes less rather than more dense when it freezes — and it is densest not when it is coldest (at 0 degrees Celsius, just before it freezes) but at 4 degrees C.

These are just two of water’s host of anomalous properties, some of which are crucial to its behaviour in the natural environment.

In 1992, Gene Stanley of Boston University, Massachusetts, and his co-workers carried out computer simulations of water, which suggested that hydrogen bonds in water might produce two different types of liquid if water was made very cold and squeezed to high pressures.

In one form, the hydrogen bonds create a rather open, sparse network of water molecules, called low-density liquid (LDL) water. In the other, water molecules press closer at the cost of breaking some hydrogen bonds, forming a high-density liquid (HDL).

Stanley and his colleagues found that the two types of liquid water changed from one to the other in an abrupt ‘phase transition’, like the freezing/melting transition that separates ice and ordinary liquid water.

In this view, anomalies such as the density maximum at 4 degrees C are a reflection of the same competition between dense and less-dense states that creates the phase transition at much lower temperatures.

Now, Dino Leporini of the University of Pisa in Italy and his co-workers at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore say they have seen the two phases that Stanley’s team proposed in 1992.

The team used a technique called electron spin resonance to study the mobility of water molecules within tiny pockets of liquid trapped between crystallites of ice at temperatures down to around –183 degrees C.

They report that between about –140 and 0 degrees C, they can see two types of ‘liquid-like’ motion of the TEMPOL probes, presumably reflecting the presence of two types of water in the ice pockets.

One is slower than the other, and they interpret this as evidence for the presence of two distinct types of water: the more viscous LDL form, and the more fluid HDL.

According to Debenedetti, the results seem to reveal two different types of water, whose relative amounts change as the temperature changes.

source: http://www.aniin.com/