Science and Education
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European Synchrotron Radiation Facility succesfully analyzes zeolites
June 27, 2008 In a world first, scientists at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility have determined the distribution of aluminum in zeolites, an important step towards understanding the versatile volcanic material used in water purification, nuclear waste removal, and the spin cycle of your washing machine. (read more...)
SkyScout Personal Planetarium for $299.99 at Amazon
June 11, 2008 There are few things that reinforce the unfathomable wonder of our existence as much as pointing a telescope at the night sky and that goes double if you happen to be using a Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium. As we have written before, SkyScout technology uses GPS to provide information and history on what you are looking at through the viewfinder – an invaluable educational tool your child, available for $299.99 (51% off) for the next 22 hours at Amazon
Touchdown! Phoenix spacecraft lands on Mars
May 26, 2008 NASA has announced the successful touchdown of the Phoenix spacecraft on arctic plains in the north of the Red Planet. The completion of the 10 month journey was confirmed with the detection of a radio signal from Phoenix (a signal which takes more than 15 minutes to reach Earth) indicating that it had reached the Martian surface. The spacecraft reached speeds of approximately 12,000 mph before entering the top of the planet's atmosphere and beginning its decent towards a soft touchdown on its three-legs made possible by parachute deployment and finally, the use of controlled thrusters. Launched on August 4, 2007, Phoenix is the sixth lander to touch down on Mars with only five of the 11 previous international attempts having succeeded including the first successful landing of the Viking program in 1976. (read more...)
Space engineers to explore next gen lunar rovers
May 1, 2008 The development of a new generation of lunar rovers has been given a boost thanks to funding for an exchange program between the Surrey Space Centre and the University of Beijing. The exchange will pave the way for future moon projects such as the UK‘s proposed Moonraker lander mission and the second phase of China's Chang'e programme. (read more...)
FIRST crowns science and tech champions
April 22, 2008 FIRST, an organization inspiring kids to engage in science and technology, has crowned this year’s champions at its annual science showdown. The 2008 FIRST Championship at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta recognized winners across three categories: Robotics Competition, Tech Challenge, and LEGO League. (read more...)
The world's most powerful laser
April 17, 2008 A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin has demonstrated the highest powered laser in the world. With greater than one quadrillion watts of laser power, the level of output achieved on March 31 by the Texas Petawatt laser is equivalent to more than 2,000 times the output of all power plants in the United States and brighter than the Sun's surface, according team leader and physicist at The University of Texas at Austin, Dr.Todd Ditmire. (read more...)
Laser Triggers Electrical Activity in Thunderstorm
April 14, 2008 A team of European scientists has deliberately triggered electrical activity in thunderclouds for the first time, according to a new paper in the latest issue of Optics Express, the Optical Society’s (OSA) open-access journal. They did this by aiming high-power pulses of laser light into a thunderstorm. The laser beams were supplied by the Teramobile - a nine-ton portable terawatt and femtosecond laser which fits inside a standard six-meter freight container. Its pulses have an instantaneous power of 5 terawatts (5TW = 5 x 1012W or the power equivalent of a thousand nuclear reactors) and a duration of approximately 100 femtoseconds (1013 s.). (read more...)
The Fukang Pallasite for sale
April 9, 2008 Meteorite enthusiasts the world over know of the Fukang Meteorite. Discovered in the Gobi desert (near Fukang) in China eight years ago, the extremely rare and beautiful Pallasite meteorite is thought to have originated at the mantle-core boundary of very large differentiated asteroids that were destroyed during the early formation of the solar system over 4.5 billion years ago, give or take a hundred millennia or so. Fukang’s unique crystalline structures formed as the metal matrix cooled, with no gravitational influence, at a rate of only a few degrees per million-year period. Now the “main mass” of the meteorite, a distinction considered highly desirable by meteorite collectors, is to be sold at auction by international fine art auctioneers Bonhams on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at its salerooms in New York. (read more...)
Mathematica Player Pro - new Application Delivery System for Mathematica
April 2, 2008 Wolfram has a new runtime environment for Mathematica applications named Mathematica Player Pro. Player Pro gives access to any Mathematica-6-based files, allowing full interaction with Mathematica's capabilities such as performing adaptive visualization, controlling dynamic interface elements and connecting to real-time data. Developers can now build applications in Mathematica and deploy them cost-effectively via Player Pro. Until now, developing with Mathematica has almost always meant deploying with Mathematica but using the free Player and Player Pro, it’s now possible to deploy to almost anyone. (read more...)
Researchers develop health-screening nanodevice
March 28, 2008 Arizona State University researcher Wayne Frasch has designed a method of DNA detection that is faster and more portable than any other current model. The result is a biosensing nanodevice that could transform security screening and health testing. (read more...)
Hubble breakthrough boosts search for life outside our solar system
March 26, 2008 In another first for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST), an organic molecule has been detected in the In another first for atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a star 63 light-years (or somewhere in the vicinity of 370 trillion miles) away. Given that the molecule found was methane, a key chemical player in the "primeval soup" from which life was formed on this planet, the discovery represents a significant breakthrough in the search for life outside our solar system. (read more...)
The largest explosion ever seen
March 22, 2008 Gamma-Ray Bursts are the most powerful explosive events in the Universe. They thankfully occur in far-off galaxies and hence are usually faint, but on the morning of March 19, 2008 the Swift satellite found a burst which was so bright it could be seen without binoculars or a telescope even though it was seven thousand times further away than the Andromeda galaxy. Put simply, it could be seen with the naked eye from a distance of over twenty billion light years from Earth. It turned out to be a great day for GRB hunters. The Swift satellite typically finds only two GRBs a week, but for the first time found five bursts within 24 hours. The second burst of the day was the new record holder. The enormous energy released in the explosion – brighter than the light from all of the stars in five million Milky Way Galaxies – was caused by the death of a massive star which collapsed to form a black hole. (read more...)
NASA may support UK in ground-breaking MoonLITE mission
February 20, 2008 A new report has outlined the possibility of US support for the planned UK-led MoonLITE mission, a project that aims to use a solar-powered spacecraft to fire four suitcase-sized “penetrators” at the surface of the moon at speeds of 300m/s. The penetrators would be deployed to the far side of the Moon, and one of the poles, where they would sink to depths of up to two metres beneath the moon’s surface, and analyse “Moonquakes”, study heat flows, and determine the chemical and physical structure of the Moon’s interior. (read more...)
Hubble detects galaxy from the infancy of the universe
February 18, 2008 The Hubble telescope’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer has detected an infant galaxy from the “dark ages” of the universe. Named A1689-zD1, the galaxy originated just 700 million years after the Big Bang, and is believed to be one of the galaxies responsible for reheating the cold clouds of hydrogen that formed as a result of the rapid expansion of the universe. (read more...)
New digital microscopes from Celestron
January 11, 200 Celestron, the people who brought us the SkyScout Scope refractor telescope has released two new microscopes, a USB-powered handheld digital microscope (HDM) and a new LCD Digital Microscope (LDM) aimed at hobbyists. The HDM allows you to view and capture still or video images at 20 to 400 times magnification power and view on your computer screen via the USB cable while the LDM has a high-resolution 3.5” (88mm) LCD screen so users can view the images and video they have captured and saved. (read more...)
Antarctic record for scientific balloons
January 7, 2007 A record three long-duration, sub-orbital flights were launched and operated in Antarctica during this current Southern-Hemisphere summer, marking a new milestone for the almost 20-years of scientific ballooning in the region. The achievement was the result of a partnership between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) with NSF providing infrastructure and logistics and NASA providing the satellite communications link. (read more...)
Researchers reveal the biggest digital survey of the Milky Way to date
December 31, 2007 More than 50 astronomers from the UK, Europe, USA and Australia have joined forces to produce the first comprehensive optical digital survey of the plane of the Galaxy. The Initial Data Release (IDR) from the INT Photometric H-Alpha Survey (IPHAS) includes around 200 million unique objects available via an online database, forming a huge resource designed to boost our understanding of stellar evolution and further the study of stellar demographics of the Milky Way and of its three-dimensional structure. (read more...)
Education news goes paperless in Houston
December 20, 2007 Texas students have access to a customized education portal from the Houston Chronicle that includes an online daily newspaper and numerous education-specific programs. By making the news paperless the Chronicle estimates in the first year of the program it will eliminate nearly one million hard copies delivered to schools. (read more...)
New research sheds light on Solar Wind
December 11, 2007 New images and data from the Hinode space mission have provided a better understanding of the sun’s magnetic field and the origin of solar winds that blast through the solar system. Eruptions of magnetic energy from solar winds threaten satellites, telecommunications and electric power grids on Earth and a better understanding of the solar winds, which are propelled from the sun at speeds of almost one million miles per hour, could aid in the early prediction of damaging radiation waves before they reach satellites. (read more...)
Spitzer Space Telescope locates youngest solar systems
December 3, 2007 Infrared imaging technology on NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has been used to locate some of the youngest solar systems yet detected. Astronomers at the University of Michigan made the discovery when using the telescope to more closely observe gaps in protoplanetary disks of gas and dust surrounding the young stars UX Tau A and LkCa 15 in the Taurus star formation region. (read more...)
ORION helium ion microscope
October 31, 2007 A revolutionary type of microscope that uses a beam of helium ions to provide significantly higher resolution images than commonly used electron microscopes promises a new era in sub-nanometer, ultra-high resolution scanning microscopy. (read more...)
SOLiD System - a next-gen DNA sequencing platform announced
October 27, 2007 At the 57th annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, Applied Biosystems announced the worldwide commercial availability of SOLiD, the company’s next-generation DNA sequencing platform. The SOLiD System is an end-to-end next-generation genetic analysis solution comprised of the sequencing unit, chemistry, a computing cluster and data storage which promises unparalleled throughput, scalability, accuracy, and application flexibility. (read more...)
Chang'e-1 launch to expand lunar exploration
October 29, 2007 The Chang’e-1 spacecraft successfully blasted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre, Sichuan, atop a Long March 3A rocket last week bound for lunar orbit. The launch by the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA), is China’s first step in a program that aims to land robotic explorers on the Moon before 2020. (read more...)
UK's third National Identity Fraud Prevention Week
October 9, 2007 Identity fraud is an increasingly prevalent global problem and this week marks the third annual National Identity Fraud Prevention Week in the UK. The campaign, backed by both the public and private sectors, aims to educate consumers and businesses as to the dangers of identity fraud and the preventative steps that can be taken. (read more...)
50th anniversary of Sputnik satellite launch
October 4, 2007 Today marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Sputnik satellite. Even half a century on, the impact of the October 4th 1957 launch that saw the Soviet Union’s satellite became the first to be put into orbit still resonates as a momentous achievement in the history of human endeavor. Considered the first real blow in the "Space race" between the USSR and the USA, the launch provided the springboard for an exciting period of space exploration carried out by the two countries. (read more...)
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