Diamonds Are a Supercomputer’s Best Friend

Diamond sheets filled with holes could be the key to the next generation of supercomputers.

Scientists in California have used commercially available technology to pattern large sheets of diamonds with tiny, nitrogen-filled holes. The nitrogen-vacancy diamonds, as the sheets are called by scientists, could store millions of times more information than current silicon-based systems and process that information dozens of times faster.

Exactly how diamond-based computing would be used has yet to be determined, but applications could range from designing more efficient silicon-based computers to drug development and cryptography.

Nitrogen has been in diamonds for as long as their have been diamonds; it’s why some diamonds have a yellow hue. For years scientists have used these natural, nitrogen-infused diamonds to study various aspects of quantum mechanics.

“We’ve used well-known techniques to create atomic-size defects in otherwise perfect diamonds,” said David Awschalom, a scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-author of a new article in the journal ACS Nano Letters.

A supercomputer based on quantum mechanics requires more precision than nature can provide, so scientists have searched for a way to artificially implant arrays of precisely patterned nitrogen holes inside sheets of diamond.

Scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara, along with colleagues from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, created such an array by using an ion beam to first knock out two carbon atoms, and then replace them with one nitrogen atom. In one second, the scientists could inject about 4,000 glowing nitrogen atoms. In about one minute, the scientists had patterned several inches of flat diamond.

The scientists didn’t use any overly complicated techniques to accomplish this. “You can buy it online, send it to another company for the patterning, and then explore it yourself,” said Awschalom, whose students did exactly that to demonstrate the ease of the technology.

The key to a diamond-based quantum mechanical computer is an extra electron in the hole. In a traditional computer, information is encoded as either a “0″ or a “1.” In a diamond-based quantum computer, information could be stored in the spin of that electron. This means information could be stored as not only a “0″ or “1,” but also the direction the electron is spinning.

An exact number is hard to come by, but scientists say this would dramatically increase the computing power compared with existing silicon computers.

Diamonds likely wouldn’t replace the silicon used in today’s consumer computers, said Ray Beausoleil, a fellow in Information and Quantum Systems at HP. “A quantum computer won’t help you add two numbers faster,” said Beausoleil.

However, that doesn’t mean consumers won’t benefit from a diamond-based quantum computer. What it will do is help model certain extremely complex problems, says Beausoleil and David DiVincenzo, a scientist at IBM who is also familiar with the Nano Letters article.

“This points to the fruitful end of a very long search of all the things that you could put in diamond to make it electronically active,” said DiVincenzo.

Diamonds aren’t a sure bet for a quantum computer, said DiVincenzo, but they’re certainly in the running because of this research.

Source <http://tech-stories.findtechnews.net>

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Greeks 'discover Odysseus' palace in Ithaca, proving Homer's hero was real'

An 8th BC century palace which Greek archaeologists claim was the home of Odysseus has been discovered in Ithaca, fuelling theories that the hero of Homer's epic poem was real.

Odysseus – known to the ancient Romans as Ulysses – famously took 10 years to return home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy.

On his journey, he was twice shipwrecked and encountered a cyclops, the spirit of his mother and tempting Sirens before returning to Ithaca, where he found his wife, Penelope, under pressure to remarry from a host of suitors who had invaded the royal palace.

With the help of his father, Laertes, and his son, Telemachus, he slaughtered his rivals and re-established his rule.

But despite the fantastical details in the Greek epic, a team of archaeologists has claimed the tale is anchored in truth - and that they have discovered his home on the island of Ithaca, in the Ionian sea off the north-west coast of Greece.

Nearly 3,000 years after Odysseus returned from his journey, the team from the University of Ioannina said they found the remains of an extensive three-storey building, with steps carved out of rock and fragments of pottery. The complex also features and a well from the 8th century BC, roughly the period in which Odysseus is believed to have been king of Ithaca.

The location "fits like a glove" with Homer's description of the view from the fabled palace, the archaeologists claim.

The layout of the complex, where Professor Thanassis Papadopoulos and his team have been digging for 16 years, is very similar to palaces discovered at Mycenae, Pylos and other ancient sites.

The claim will be greeted with scepticism by the many scholars who believe that Odysseus, along with other key characters from the Homer's epic such as Hector and Achilles, were purely fictional.

"Whether this find has a connection with Ulysses or not is interesting up to a certain point, but more important is the discovery of the royal palace," said Adriano La Regina, an Italian archaeologist.

Further complicating the identification of the site is the doubt over whether the ancient kingdom of Ithaca was located on its modern day namesake, Ithaki.

A British researcher, Robert Bittlestone, has said Homer's descriptions bear little resemblance to the island and that ancient Ithaca was in fact located on the Paliki peninsula, on the island of Cephalonia.

He believes that Paliki was once an island, separated from the rest of Cephalonia by a marine channel that has since been filled in by rock falls triggered by earthquakes.

Enlisting the help of geologists and ancient historians, he documented the controversial theory in a 2005 book, Odysseus Unbound – The Search for Homer's Ithaca.

Source <www.telegraph.co.uk>

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Solar toothbrush doesn't need toothpaste

Canadian researchers have designed a toothbrush that cleans teeth by creating a solar-powered chemical reaction in the mouth, doing away with the need for toothpaste, said physorg.com.

Dr Kunio Komiyama, a dentistry professor emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan, designed the first model of the unconventional toothbrush 15 years ago. Today, Komiyama and his colleague Dr Gerry Uswak are seeking recruits to test their newest model, the Soladey-J3X.

The toothbrush, which is manufactured by the Shiken company of Japan, will soon be tested by 120 teenagers to see how it compares to a normal toothbrush.

The Soladey-J3X has a solar panel at its base that transmits electrons to the top of the toothbrush through a lead wire. The electrons react with acid in the mouth, creating a chemical reaction that breaks down plaque and kills bacteria.

The toothbrush requires no toothpaste, and can operate with about the same amount of light as needed by a solar-powered calculator.

Last month, the researchers presented their research at the FDI Annual World Dental Conference in Dubai, where their poster won first prize out of 170 entries.

Source <www.emerites247.com>

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New Solar System Discovered

European astronomers on Tuesday said they had found a distant star orbited by at least five planets in the biggest discovery of so-called exoplanets since the first was logged 15 years ago.

The star is similar to our sun and its planetary lineup has an intriguing parallel with own solar system, although no clue has so far been found to suggest it could be a home from home, they said.

The star they studied, HD 10180, is located 127 light-years away in the southern constellation of Hydrus, the male water snake, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said in a press release.

The planets were detected over six years using the world's most powerful spectograph, an instrument to capture and analyze light signatures, at ESO's telescope at La Silla, Chile.

The method consists of observing a star and seeing how the light that reaches Earth "wobbles" as a result of the gravitational pull of a passing planet.

The tiny fluctuation in light can then be used as a telltale to calculate the mass of the transiting planet.

The five detected planets are big, being the size of Neptune, although they orbit at a far closer range than our own gas giant, with a "year" ranging from between six and 600 days.

The astronomers also found tantalizing evidence that two other candidate planets are out there.

One would be a very large planet, the size of our Saturn, orbiting in 2,200 days.

The other would be 1.4 times the mass of Earth, making it the smallest exoplanet yet to be discovered. It orbits HD 10180 at a scorchingly close range, taking a mere 1.18 Earth days to zip around the star.

If confirmed, that would bring the distant star system to seven planets, compared with eight in our own solar system.

A total of 402 stars with planets have been logged since the first was detected in 1995, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The tally of exoplanets stands at 472.

None, though, is even remotely similar to Earth, which is rocky and inhabits the famous "Goldilocks zone" where the temperature is just right to enable water, the stuff of life, to exist in liquid form.

ESO astronomer Christophe Lovis said knowledge was progressing fast.

"We are now entering a new era in exoplanet research -- the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets," Lovis said. "Studies of planetary motions in the new system reveal complex gravitational interactions between the planets and give us insights into the long-term evolution of the systems.

Source <news.discovery.com>

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Did Churchill and Eisenhower cover up UFO encounter?

With a civilian population haunted by the Blitz and the Second World War still in the balance, it was one development Winston Churchill could have done without – an incursion into British airspace by an arrow-shaped metallic object feared to contain an invasion force of little green men.

Such was the sensitivity of an alleged UFO sighting by an RAF bomber crew returning to England from a mission over Germany that Churchill ordered it to be covered up with the words: "This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic amongst the general population and destroy one's belief in the Church."

This at least was the allegation put to the Ministry of Defence by relatives of a senior British military aide who claimed to have witnessed the cigar-chomping Prime Minister discuss the incident with General Dwight Eisenhower as part of a meeting about a succession of "foo fighter" sightings by Allied air crews in the Second World War.

The curious matter of visits by wartime aliens is one of hundreds of reports of strange celestial phenomena – from a space station covered in pulsating lights to an unusually agile rocket which buzzed a Boeing 737 at Manchester Airport – to be revealed in documents released today by the National Archives in Kew, west London.

The files are the latest tranche of 11,000 UFO sightings logged by the British Government between the early 1900s and 2000 to be released from Ministry of Defence files, providing a candid insight into a national obsession with suspected flying saucers and attempts by Whitehall functionaries to explain that they were – almost always – nothing of the sort.

Officials launched a investigation into the MoD files when the unnamed grandson of the British military aide to Churchill wrote in 1999 saying that the object seen by the RAF reconnaissance crew "appeared to hover noiselessly relative to the aircraft". The grandson, who described himself as a scientist, said: "It appeared metallic... the object very suddenly disappeared, leaving no trace of its earlier presence."

He added: "This event was discussed by Mr Churchill and General Eisenhower, neither of whom knew what had been observed. There was a general inability for either side to match a plausible account to these observations... another person raised the possibility of an unidentified flying object, at which point Mr Churchill declared the incident should be immediately classified for at least 50 years and its status reviewed by a future prime minister.

A trawl of documents revealed no existing record of the encounter. But it was one of many sightings of fireballs and moving lights by Allied aircraft during the Second World War. American pilots called them "foo fighters" after a comic strip character who often said, "where there's foo there's fire".

Any decision by Churchill to halt publicity about the sightings has also gone unrecorded but in July 1952, after a spate of reports in Britain and the US, he wrote to the Air Ministry saying: "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?" Unknown to Churchill, intelligence chiefs had formed The Flying Saucer Working Party in 1950 to investigate the reports, with the blessing of Lord Mountbatten, who thought the UFOs were alien craft.

The MOD has long stated it "knows of no evidence that substantiates the existence of these alleged phenomena".

Source <www.independant.co.uk>

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Shrinking moon may explain lunar quakes

The moon has shrunk in the past billion years, and may still be shrinking today, triggering moonquakes and making the moon a more active body than previously thought.

The shrinkage has wrinkled parts of the moon's surface like a raisin, creating pinched formations called lobate scarps.

Apollo astronauts imaged some of these wrinkles near the moon's equator 40 years ago. Now, new images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have revealed 14 more. Some of these lie near the poles, showing that the scarps occur all over the moon's surface.

Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and colleagues say the wrinkles likely formed as the moon cooled and contracted.

The features are surprisingly recent, having formed no more than 1 billion years ago. That estimate is based on the fact that they partly destroyed some pre-existing small craters that seem to be no more than 1 billion years old. "The moon may still be geologically and tectonically active and still shrinking today," Watters said in a teleconference with reporters on Thursday.

Growing pains

If so, the wrinkles might still be growing, and the contraction might have triggered some of the moonquakes recorded by seismometers placed on the moon in the 1970s by NASA astronauts, he said.

He and his colleagues are planning to see if the wrinkles have grown in the past few decades by comparing LRO images with those taken by Apollo astronauts.

The team calculates that the moon's diameter has shrunk by just 200 metres in the last billion years, suggesting the amount of recent cooling has been relatively small, he says. Mercury also has wrinkles, but they are "humungous", suggesting it has experienced much more cooling in its lifetime than the moon, he said.

The moon's rate of cooling is affected by its interior structure and composition, so the new data might teach us something about the moon's innards, said Patrick McGovern of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who was not involved in the study.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1189590

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Recurring UFO hides behind Weather Balloons, Irwin, PA (20th May, 2010)

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Daytime black UFO over Pennsylvania - 25 May 2010

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UFO Spiral Sighting In Australia - 7 News (5th June 2010)

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A Car for the Modern Fred Flintstone

Fred Flintstone could only dream of such a car. The HumanCar Imagine PS, a four-seater vehicle that uses hand cranks, can take on hills at 30 miles per hour, exceed 60 mph on flat terrain and is expected to hit the market next year.

The vehicle has electric plug-in capabilities, so it can still run if only one person is operating the hand-crank in a rowing-like motion (see the video showing the action, below). When four people are all rowing, it can run on human power alone. This thing is truly a "human-electric" hybrid. The chassis is adaptable, and can work with different kinds of batteries and technology in the future without requiring an entirely new vehicle.

Getting it going looks a little bit like those wind-up toys: a few front-to-back pulls on the two-hand crank and it's ready to take off. Despite the physical requirement, the company says online that a senior citizen in decent shape could handle it and paraplegics have made suggestions on adaptability. The sleek vehicle could use a larger windshield, although there is apparently an all-weather shell available. Airbags are on the list to be included in future models. In the meantime, I'd probably wear a helmet while driving it.

Others have been hard at work on human powered cars, too. The American Society ASME runs an annual international Human Powered Vehicle Challenge, where students build aerodynamic vehicles. Next month teams will compete in Venezuela. Based on speed-endurance events that took place this year, the vehicles' top speeds are closing in on 20 miles per hour.

Higher speeds make the Imagine PS impressive. I can hardly get any miles per hour going uphill on a bike. Zooming uphill using my own energy looks so much more enjoyable. The car will cost $15,500 when it goes on sale next year, according to the HumanCar site. Potential owners can put down a refundable $50 placeholder for when the vehicles become available. So far, the company says it has 100 pre-orders and that production will begin when they reach 800.

Source <news.discovery.com>

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Invisibility Cloak Made From Silk

For thousands of years people have worn shimmering silk to stand out in a crowd. Within the next few years people could wear silk to become invisible in a a crowd.

For the first time ever, scientists have created an invisibility cloak made from silk, and coated in gold.

The new metamaterial, as invisibility cloaks and their kin are technically called, only works on relatively long terahertz waves (a region of the electromagnetic spectrum between radio and infrared light), but the Boston-area scientists who developed the technology think that silk could work as an invisibility cloak at much smaller wavelengths, even in the visible range.

The research could lead to a wide range of optically unique materials for use in biomedicine or defense.

"This is an unusual angle for a metamaterial because of silk's ability to interface with the human body," something that no other metamaterial is currently capable of, said Fiorenzo Omenetto, a scientist at Tufts University who, along with colleagues at Boston University, helped develop the silk-based metamaterial and detail their new research in the journal Advanced Materials.

"On the sensing side it gives you a platform that is very adaptable."

Invisibility cloaks, along with their optically exotic cousins, perfect absorbers and perfect reflectors and others, belong to a special class of materials known as metamaterials. Unlike most materials, which derive optical properties like color from their chemical make up, metamaterials derive their properties from the physical structure.

A curly cue, or short spiral, is a common metamaterial structure. Scientists call them split ring resonators, or SSRs. Usually scrawled into metals, SSR can give ordinary materials extraordinary abilities, like absorbing or reflecting all the specific wavelengths of light, or bending a wavelength around an object.

To create their silk-based metamaterial, the Tufts and Boston University scientists, including Richard Averitt, started with a one-centimeter-square piece of silkworm silk. (In another recent paper, Omenetto's colleague and another co-author of the Advanced Material's paper, David Kaplan of Tufts, created silk-producing bacteria.) Onto that tiny piece of dielectric silk they stenciled 10,000 gold resonators.

Ordinarily when silk is exposed to terahertz waves they pass straight through it. When the new silk metamaterial was subjected to T-rays the scientists detected a resonance.

A metamaterial that works in the terahertz range is nothing new. But, unlike other metamaterials, silk is biocompatable -- the human body won't reject silk-based implants the way it does with most other materials. The scientists implanted the patterned silk into a muscle, and still detected a resonance.

The new silk research is "interesting," said Douglas Werner, a metamaterial scientist at Pennsylvania State University. "There is a lot of interest in using flexible substrates for metamaterials, and silk is a good candidate for that."

The potential applications of silk-based invisibility are huge. Omenetto and his colleagues at Tufts aren't even focused on Harry Potter or Star Trek-style invisibility materials, although he says that is one potential application.

Their main focus is in biomedical applications. One of the first biomedical uses could be as an implantable glucose sensor for diabetics. As the level of glucose changes inside the body, it changes the silk. Then as the silk changes, do does the metamaterial printed on the silk. That change would then be relayed to the person's cell phone; no needle prick necessary.

Silk-based invisibility would also allow doctors and radiologists to cloak various organs or tissues and see through them, said Omenetto, getting a better image of the organs or tissues usually hidden behind.

Source <news.discovery.com>

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Brazil air force to record UFO sightings

Brazil's government has ordered its air force to officially record any sighting of unidentified flying objects.A government decree said all military and civilian pilots as well as air traffic controllers should register any UFO sightings with the national aerospace defence command.

The information will be stored in the national archives in Rio de Janeiro.It will be made available to researchers, including those seeking evidence of extraterrestrial life.Anything unusual that is seen, photographed or video filmed in Brazil's air space will now have to be reported and catalogued.

But the air force said it would limit itself to collecting information, and would not be chasing UFOs."Air force command does not have a specialized structure to carry out scientific experiments on these phenomena and will limit itself to recording any events" the air force said in a statement."Any unexplained atmospheric event is worthy of at least being keep track of"

There have been several reports of UFOs in Brazil in recent decades.In 1986, air force jets were scrambled to investigate unidentified objects in the skies above Sao Paulo, but the phenomenon was never fully explained.And in 1977 the Amazon town of Vigia asked for military help after some residents said they had been attacked by extra-terrestrials.One anonymous air traffic controller told the Brazilian newspaper O Dia that sightings had been reported at the highest level."I have heard of ministers and even a president who said they had seen a UFO", he said.

Brazilian UFO watchers have welcomed the decision to make such information public in future.

Source <www.bbc.com>

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Gasoline from Thin Air?

An enzyme found in the roots of soybeans could be the key to cars that run on air.

Vanadium nitrogenase, an enzyme that normally produces ammonia from nitrogen gas, can also convert carbon monoxide (CO), a common industrial byproduct, into propane, the blue-flamed gas found on stoves across America.

While scientists caution the research is still at an early stage, they say that this study could eventually lead to new, environmentally friendly ways to produce fuel -- and eventually gasoline -- from thin air.

"This organism is a very common soil bacteria that is very well understood and has been studied for a long time," said Markus Ribbe, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and a co-author of the new paper that appears in the journal Science.

"But while we were studying it, we realized that the enzyme has some unusual behavior," he added.

The organism that the researchers studied was Azotobacter vinelandii, an economically important bacteria. A. vinelandii is usually found in the soil around the roots of nitrogen-fixing plants like soybeans.

Farmers like plants that contain A. vinelandii because the bacteria use a suite of enzymes to turn unusable atmospheric nitrogen into vital ammonia and other chemicals. Other plants can then take up those chemicals and use them to grow.

Ribbe and his co-authors isolated one particular enzyme, vanadium nitrogenase, to convert nitrogen into ammonia. Then the California scientists removed the nitrogen and oxygen the enzyme is used to and filled the remaining space with CO.

Without oxygen and nitrogen, the enzyme began to to turn the CO into short chains of carbon two and three atoms long. A three-carbon chain is more commonly referred to as propane, the blue-flamed gas used in kitchens across America.

Scientifically, the new function of vanadium nitrogenase is a "profound discovery," said Jonas Peters, a scientist at Cal Tech who said he nearly leapt from his chair when the results were announced at a recent conference.

The new research could have some very important industrial applications, Peters said.

"Obviously this could lead to new ways to create synthetic liquid fuels if we can make longer carbon-carbon chains," said Ribbe.

The new enzyme can only make two and three carbon chains, not the longer strands that make up liquid gasoline. However, Ribbe thinks he can modify the enzyme so it could produce gasoline.

If perfected, the technique could lead to cars partially powered on their own fumes. Even further into the future, vehicles could even draw fuel from the air itself.

That perfection won't happen anytime soon, say both Ribbe and Peters.

"It's very, very difficult," to extract the vanadium nitrogenase, said Ribbe.

Scientists have known about this enzyme for a long time because of its importance in agriculture. They even isolated the genes that encode for vanadium nitrogenase more than 20 years ago, which opens the door to genetic engineers and synthetic biologists.

But the technology to extract, grow and store large quantities of the enzyme has only developed within the last few years, which made this new research possible.

Further advances will be necessary before air and bacteria cars rule the road.

Source <news.discovery.com>

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World's largest flower

The flower with the world's largest bloom is the Rafflesia arnoldii. This rare flower is found in the rainforests of Indonesia. It can grow to be 3 feet across and weigh up to 15 pounds! It is a parasitic plant, with no visible leaves, roots, or stem. It attaches itself to a host plant to obtain water and nutrients. When in bloom, the Rafflesia emits a repulsive odor, similar to that of rotting meat. This odor attracts insects that pollinate the plant.

Source <www.loc.gov>

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Clownfish Change Size And Sex To Move Up The Ranks

What the movie "Finding Nemo" doesn't tell you about clownfish is that they're all transsexuals. In a study published in the journal Nature, evolutionary biologist Peter Buston and colleagues report that clownfish in Papua New Guinea reefs can change their sex at will for social reasons. Clownfish live in strict hierarchical communities. Each neighborhood is dominated by a top-ranking female breeder. Her male partner is next, followed by up to four progressively smaller, non-breeding fish. When the dominant female dies, her mate changes sex and becomes female. The top-ranking non-breeder becomes a sexually active male, and all the other fish shift up a rank. Clownfish also appear to regulate their size in order to remain part of the group. Each fish keeps its body mass 20 percent smaller than the fish directly above it in social rank, probably to avoid conflict. Fish who disrespectfully outgrow their rank are rejected by the clan.

Source <www.flmnh.ufl.edu>

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World's smallest flowering plant

The world's smallest fruit is naturally created by the world's smallest flowering plant, genus Wolffia, a part of the duckweed family., the smallest of which are the Australian Wolffia angusta and the Asian/African Wolffia globosa.

The plant itself measures about 1 mm long and the fruit is no bigger than a grain of salt.

A Bouquet on the Head of a Pin!

I can't overemphasize how tiny these little guys are, as a dozen Wolffia blooms could be arranged tastefully on the head of a pin. While they are flowering plants capable of producing seeds, Wolffia reproduces most commonly by vegetative means. A mature plant will produce a bud which will grow into an individual plant and separate off from the parent. Their capacity for vegetative reproduction is incredible, as the Indian species Wolffia microscopica can produce a smaller daughter plant every 30 to 36 hours. At this rate of reproduction, one plant could give rise to about 1 nonillion (a one followed by 30 zeros) in a period of only 4 months. Fortunately, these plants are edible and are similar to soybeans in their protein content. In fact, Wolffia is eaten by people in Thailand. It is known there as "water-eggs" or khai-nam.
A Large Future for such a Small Plant

Wolffia have the potential to help solve some of the world's most pressing problems, from bioremediation of polluted waters to serving as a food source for humans and animals, to even providing biofuel to lessen our dependence on oil. Such amazing possibilities for such a diminutive plant, and incurably cute, too!

Source <http://davesgarden.com>

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Lipstick Contains fish scales

The ingredient under discussion is called pearl essence. (Some sources give this as "pearlescence.") It's the silvery stuff found in fish scales that's used in some lipsticks, nail polishes, ceramic glazes, etc., to make them shimmery. Pearl essence is obtained primarily from herring and is one of many by-products of large-scale commercial fish processing. Synthetic versions have been developed, but to what extent they've supplanted the natural variety I hesitate to say. The cosmetics companies were not forthcoming and I got contrary stories from different industry observers. Fishermen still collect the stuff, though, and one presumes it's being put to good use.

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Huge Diamond in Space

When choosing a Valentine's Day gift for a wife or girlfriend, you can't go wrong with diamonds. If you really want to impress your favorite lady this Valentine's Day, get her the galaxy's largest diamond. But you'd better carry a deep wallet, because this 10 billion trillion trillion carat monster has a cost that's literally astronomical!

"You would need a jeweler's loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond!" says astronomer Travis Metcalfe (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), who leads a team of researchers that discovered the giant gem. "Bill Gates and Donald Trump together couldn't begin to afford it."

When asked to estimate the value of the cosmic jewel, Ronald Winston, CEO of Harry Winston Inc., indicated that such a large diamond probably would depress the value of the market, stating, "Who knows? It may be a self-deflating prophecy because there is so much of it." He added, "It is definitely too big to wear!"

The newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.) It is 2,500 miles across and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros.

"It's the mother of all diamonds!" says Metcalfe. "Some people refer to it as 'Lucy' in a tribute to the Beatles song 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.'"

The diamond star completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 530-carat Star of Africa which resides in the Crown Jewels of England. The Star of Africa was cut from the largest diamond ever found on Earth, a 3,100-carat gem.

The huge cosmic gem (technically known as BPM 37093) is actually a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.

For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallized, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently.

"The hunt for the crystal core of this white dwarf has been like the search for the Lost Dutchman's Mine. It was thought to exist for decades, but only now has it been located," says co-author Michael Montgomery (University of Cambridge).

The white dwarf studied by Metcalfe, Montgomery, and Antonio Kanaan (UFSC Brazil), is not only radiant but also harmonious. It rings like a gigantic gong, undergoing constant pulsations.

"By measuring those pulsations, we were able to study the hidden interior of the white dwarf, just like seismograph measurements of earthquakes allow geologists to study the interior of the Earth. We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy's largest diamond," says Metcalfe.

Our Sun will become a white dwarf when it dies 5 billion years from now. Some two billion years after that, the Sun's ember core will crystallize as well, leaving a giant diamond in the center of our solar system.

"Our Sun will become a diamond that truly is forever," says Metcalfe.

A paper announcing this discovery has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters for publication.

Source <www.universetoday.com>

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Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved

Computer studies of ocean floors around the world, particularly the area known as The Bermuda Triangle, reveal evidence of massive methane explosions in the past. For years, believers in the paranormal, aliens, and other outlandish theories pointed to the the disappearance of ships and aircraft as an indicator of mysterious forces at work in the “Devil’s triangle.” Scientists have finally pointed the rest of us to a more plausible cause.

The presence of methane hydrates indicates enormous eruptions of methane bubbles that would swamp a ship, and projected high into the air- take out flying airplanes, as well.

Any ships caught within the methane mega-bubble immediately lose all buoyancy and sink to the bottom of the ocean. If the bubbles are big enough and possess a high enough density they can also knock aircraft out of the sky with little or no warning. Aircraft falling victim to these methane bubbles will lose their engines-perhaps igniting the methane surrounding them-and immediately lose their lift as well, ending their flights by diving into the ocean and swiftly plummeting.

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