New batteries fix themselves

WASHINGTON — A newly created lithium-ion battery that can heal itself may improve the life span and safety of today’s energy-storage technologies, researchers report.

Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries power cell phones, laptops and other portable electronics. But, like any batteries, they tend to break down over time.

"There are many different types of degradation that happen, and fixing this degradation could help us make longer-lasting batteries," said Scott White, a materials engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who reported the details of the battery February 20 at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

One site of damage is the anode, a battery’s negatively charged terminal. As a battery charges and discharges, the anode swells and shrinks. Over time, this cycling causes damage, creating cracks that can interfere with the flow of current and, ultimately, kill the battery.

To counteract this cracking, White embedded tiny microspheres inside the graphite of an anode. As cracks formed in the anode, they tore open the plastic shells, releasing the contents within: a material called indium gallium arsenide. This liquid metal alloy seeped out of the spheres and filled the cracks in the anode, restoring the flow of electricity.

Damage to a battery — or a short circuit between its components — can cause problems other than a shorter life span. Out-of-control electrical currents have been known to create hot spots that grow into a raging fire.

“It’s not a common occurrence, but when it happens, the consequences are severe,” White said. Battery fires have prompted laptop recalls by Dell and Hewlett-Packard, and the U.S. Department of Transportation has proposed stricter rules for cargo planes that transport large quantities of lithium-ion batteries.

To safeguard against this type of failure, White developed a second kind of microsphere made of solid polyethylene, an inexpensive and widely available plastic. A small quantity of these spheres embedded in the anode and other battery components can function as a safety cutoff switch. If the temperature inside the battery rises above 105° Celsius, the spheres melt into a thin layer of insulating material that shuts off the flow of electricity, preventing a conflagration.

“We’ve tested this in real batteries,” said White, whose research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. “It works beautifully.” This safety feature, he said, could be useful for the electric cars emerging on the market.

"Lithium-ion batteries will continue to be the technology used for the next 10 to 15 years in electric cars," said Kristin Persson of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who is looking for new battery materials that not only have better energy storage but also avoid some of the pitfalls of traditional batteries. "It will take at least that amount of time to develop new materials."

Science News

Read more »

Need Forgiveness? - There is an app for that!

The Catholic Church has approved an iPhone app that helps guide worshippers through confession.

The Confession program has gone on sale through iTunes for £1.19 ($1.99).

Described as "the perfect aid for every penitent", it offers users tips and guidelines to help them with the sacrament.

Now senior church officials in both the UK and US have given it their seal of approval, in what is thought to be a first.

The app takes users through the sacrament - in which Catholics admit their wrongdoings - and allows them to keep track of their sins.

It also allows them to examine their conscience based on personalised factors such as age, sex and marital status - but it is not intended to replace traditional confession entirely.

Instead, it encourages users to understand their actions and then visit their priest for absolution.

A spokesperson from the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales told BBC News the app was a "useful tool to help people prepare for the Sacrament of Reconciliation".

"The Church believes in embracing new technology and this creative app will hopefully help people to make a good confession."

It is thought to be the first time the church has approved a mobile phone application, although it is not entirely unfamiliar with the digital world.

Source <www.bbc.co.uk>

Read more »

Are aliens here? Shining white 'UFO' spotted over Jerusalem shrine

A shining ball of light has been filmed hovering above a Jerusalem shrine, in footage which UFO enthusiasts say could finally prove aliens exist.
The clips show the pulsating orb descend and hover above the Dome of the Rock, an ancient Islamic shrine, before shooting up into the night sky. It then descends again and disappears.
Unusually, the sighting has been filmed from different viewpoints, meaning it has been more difficult to dismiss than most.

 

Object: The 'UFO' (ringed) has been filmed from several perspectives, making the sighting more difficult to dismiss than most

UFO?: The white light hovers over the Dome of the Rock

G-Force: The 'UFO' shoots up into the sky at a rate 'no living thing could survive' according to UFO expert Nick Pope

Highlighted: The mystery blob can be clearly seen in the night sky above the city

The footage was taken in Jerusalem at 1am on Saturday morning and has spread like wildfire on the internet.
It has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people and prompted fierce debate among UFO enthusiasts and skeptics.

Former Ministry of Defence UFO investigator Nick Pope told The Sun: 'If these are real, they are some of the most incredible videos ever shot.
'If they are not, then this is a very well-planned and coordinated hoax designed to eliminate elements of doubt.'
He said the way the object shoots up suggests it is unmanned: 'We know the Israeli army has some very high-tech drones at its disposal.
'If this is one, it is one of the most advanced pieces of technology created by man.'

Source Daily Mail

Read more »

New Invisibility Cloak Closer to Working "Magic"

Rachel Kaufman

for National Geographic News

Published January 28, 2011

Harry Potter and Bilbo Baggins, take note: Scientists are a step closer to conquering the "magic" of invisibility.

Many earlier cloaking systems turned objects "invisible" only under wavelengths of light that the human eye can't see. Others could conceal only microscopic objects. (See "Two New Cloaking Devices Close In on True Invisibility.")

But the new system, developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre, works in visible light and can hide objects big enough to see with the naked eye.
The "cloak" is made from two pieces of calcite crystal—a cheap, easily obtained mineral—stuck together in a certain configuration.

Calcite is highly anisotropic, which means that light coming from one side will exit at a different angle than light entering from another side. By using two different pieces of calcite, the researchers were able to bend light around a solid object placed between the crystals.

"Under the assembly there is a wedge-shaped gap," said MIT's George Barbastathis, who helped develop the new system. "The idea is that whatever you put under this gap, it looks from the outside like it is not there."



Invisibility Cloak a Boon for Drivers?
The new invisibility cloak still has its drawbacks: For one, it works best under green light. The researchers designed the cloak this way because the calcite can only be configured for a very narrow wavelength of light, and human eyes are most sensitive to green, Barbastathis said.

(Related: "'Electromagnetic Wormhole' Could Make Objects Invisible.")
In addition, the cloaking effect works only if you look at the hidden object from a certain direction. Viewing the object from another angle will make it "reappear."
Also, the system can only cloak objects that fit under the mineral wedge, which in this case is just two millimeters tall. Still, a larger piece of calcite should be able to hide larger objects.

Barbastathis is confident that his team or another group will come up with a true, three-dimensional invisibility cloak soon. In the meantime, he can think of at least one practical application from the system as it stands. (Also see "Acoustic 'Invisibility' Cloaks Possible, Study Says.")

"I live in Boston, and in Boston a lot of streets converge at very sharp angles, so when you look at the traffic light, it's confusing whether you're seeing the traffic light for you or the light that is for the other street," he said.

With the current cloak, "you could hide certain lights from drivers so they do not get confused."

Read more »

Sex enters robotics age

"Good morning, I'd like the 3-KPO-3XC, please!" "Is that the full 144-hour 3CX model sir or just the normal dateline 2-hour plug-in?"

This conversation may not belong to the too distant future. Research work by Terrence Aym* "Scientists predict sex robot partners in coming decades" points towards a not-so-distant world in which mankind cohabits with sexbots.

The idea is not that recent either. Ovid's Metamorphoses bring us the story of Pygmalion, a sculptor who fell in love with his creation. Indeed the idea permeates literature through the ages, culminating in Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's work, L'Eve Futur, in which a scientist creates a female machine with whom (which?) a British Lord falls in love.

We are reminded that the term robot was coined by the Czech Karel Capek in his 1920 play R.U.R. ("Rossum's Universal Robots"), using the Czech word for "work", "robota". Terrence Aym introduces us to a University of Maastricht researcher into Artificial Intelligence, David Levy, who tells us "My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots."

Other researchers speak of the Longevity Orgasm as sexbots perfect "sexplosive" devices and sex skills, honed on thousands of years and web-pages of inputs and coupled with near-carnal features. As robotics becomes more advanced, so do robots take on more and more human features, continues the article. For that reason, it would not be far-fetched to envisage a world where humans are head over heels in love with their sexbots.

Real Dolls, for instance, is a company that has been working on female sex androids for over a decade. Levy predicts that Artificial Partners will mimic all aspects of human behaviour and that "the robots humans design and build will become virtually indistinguishable from people. They will mimic humans in every way and some humans will literally fall in love with them, lust for them, and enter into sexual relationships with them".

And not far down the line will be the sexbot arriving twenty minutes late for her wedding with her human partner waiting nervously at the end of the aisle. Let us just hope she does not step on an electric cable, go "POING" and disintegrate before the distraught husband-to-be and his guests, because on her side of the church...
*Scientists predict sex robot partners in coming decades

Read more »

Three-dimensional moving holograms breakthrough

A team led by University of Arizona (UA) optical sciences professor Nasser Peyghambarian has developed a new type of “holographic telepresence” that allows remote projection of a three-dimensional, moving image without the need for special eyewear such as 3D glasses or other auxiliary devices.

The technology is likely to take applications ranging from telemedicine, advertising, updatable 3D maps and entertainment to a new level.

The journal Nature chose the technology to feature on the cover of its Nov. 4 issue.

“Holographic telepresence means we can record a three-dimensional image in one location and show it in another location, in real-time, anywhere in the world,” said Peyghambarian, who led the research effort.
“Holographic stereography has been capable of providing excellent resolution and depth reproduction on large-scale 3D static images,” the authors wrote, “but has been missing dynamic updating capability until now.”
“At the heart of the system is a screen made from a novel photorefractive material, capable of refreshing holograms every two seconds, making it the first to achieve a speed that can be described as quasi-real-time,” said Pierre-Alexandre Blanche, an assistant research professor in the UA College of Optical Sciences and lead author of the Nature paper.

The prototype device uses a 10-inch screen, but Peyghambarian’s group is already successfully testing a much larger version with a 17-inch screen. The image is recorded using an array of regular cameras, each of which views the object from a different perspective. The more cameras that are used, the more refined the final holographic presentation will appear.

That information is then encoded onto a fast-pulsed laser beam, which interferes with another beam that serves as a reference. The resulting interference pattern is written into the photorefractive polymer, creating and storing the image. Each laser pulse records an individual “hogel” in the polymer. A hogel (holographic pixel) is the three-dimensional version of a pixel, the basic units that make up the picture.

The hologram fades away by natural dark decay after a couple of minutes or seconds depending on experimental parameters. Or it can be erased by recording a new 3D image, creating a new diffraction structure and deleting the old pattern.

Peyghambarian explained: “Let’s say I want to give a presentation in New York. All I need is an array of cameras here in my Tucson office and a fast Internet connection. At the other end, in New York, there would be the 3D display using our laser system. Everything is fully automated and controlled by computer. As the image signals are transmitted, the lasers inscribe them into the screen and render them into a three-dimensional projection of me speaking.”

The overall recording setup is insensitive to vibration because of the short pulse duration and therefore suited for industrial environment applications without any special need for vibration, noise or temperature control.

One of the system’s major hallmarks never achieved before is what Peyghambarian’s group calls full parallax: “As you move your head left and right or up and down, you see different perspectives. This makes for a very life-like image. Humans are used to seeing things in 3D.”

The work is a result of a collaboration between the UA and Nitto Denko Technical, or NDT, a company in Oceanside, Calif. NDT provided the polymer sample and media preparation. “We have made major advances in photorefractive polymer film fabrication that allow for the very interesting 3D images obtained in our Nature article,” said Michiharu Yamamoto, vice president at NDT and co-author of the paper.

Potential applications of holographic telepresence include advertising, updatable 3D maps and entertainment. Telemedicine is another potential application: “Surgeons at different locations around the world can observe in 3D, in real time, and participate in the surgical procedure,” the authors wrote.

The system is a major advance over computer-generated holograms, which place high demands on computing power and take too long to be generated to be practical for any real-time applications.

Currently, the telepresence system can present in one color only, but Peyghambarian and his team have already demonstrated multi-color 3D display devices capable of writing images at a faster refresh rate, approaching the smooth transitions of images on a TV screen. These devices could be incorporated into a telepresence setup in the near future.

Source: http://www.kurzweilai.net

Read more »

Pope's astronomer says he would baptise an alien if it asked him

An alien – 'no matter how many tentacles it has' – could have a soul, says pope's astronomer

Aliens might have souls and could choose to be baptised if humans ever met them, a Vatican scientist said today. The official also dismissed intelligent design as "bad theology" that had been "hijacked" by American creationist fundamentalists.

Guy Consolmagno, who is one of the pope's astronomers, said he would be "delighted" if intelligent life was found among the stars. "But the odds of us finding it, of it being intelligent and us being able to communicate with it – when you add them up it's probably not a practical question."

Speaking ahead of a talk at the British Science Festival in Birmingham tomorrow, he said that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. "Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul." Would he baptise an alien? "Only if they asked."

Consolmagno, who became interested in science through reading science fiction, said that the Vatican was well aware of the latest goings-on in scientific research. "You'd be surprised," he said.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, of which Stephen Hawking is a member, keeps the senior cardinals and the pope up-to-date with the latest scientific developments. Responding to Hawking's recent comments that the laws of physics removed the need for God, Consolmagno said: "Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist and when it comes to theology I can say he's a brilliant physicist."

Consolmagno curates the pope's meteorite collection and is a trained astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican's observatory. He dismissed the ideas of intelligent design – a pseudoscientific version of creationism. "The word has been hijacked by a narrow group of creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn't originally mean at all. It's another form of the God of the gaps. It's bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning."

Consolmagno's comments came as the pope made his own remarks about science this morning at St Mary's University College in Twickenham. Speaking to pupils, he encouraged them to look at the bigger picture, over and above the subjects they studied. "The world needs good scientists, but a scientific outlook becomes dangerously narrow if it ignores the religious or ethical dimension of life, just as religion becomes narrow if it rejects the legitimate contribution of science to our understanding of the world," he said. "We need good historians and philosophers and economists, but if the account they give of human life within their particular field is too narrowly focused, they can lead us seriously astray."

The pope's astronomer said the Vatican was keen on science and admitted that the church had got it "spectacularly wrong" over its treatment of the 17th century astronomer Galileo Galilei. Galileo confirmed that the Earth went around the sun – and not the other way around – and was charged with heresy in 1633. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest in Tuscany. Only in 1992 did Pope John Paul admit that the church's treatment of Galileo had been a mistake.

Consolmagno said it was a "complete coincidence" that he was speaking at the British Science Festival at the same time as the papal visit.

Source <www.guardian.co.uk>

Read more »

Homer Simpson 'is a true Catholic'

The long-running cartoon series explores issues such as family, community, education and religion in a way that few other popular television programmes can match, according to L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's daily broadsheet.

The newspaper acknowledged that Homer snores through the sermons of the Reverend Lovejoy and inflicts "never-ending humiliation" on his evangelical neighbour, Ned Flanders.

But in an article headlined "Homer and Bart are Catholics", the newspaper said: "The Simpsons are among the few TV programmes for children in which Christian faith, religion, and questions about God are recurrent themes."

The family "recites prayers before meals and, in their own peculiar way, believes in the life thereafter".

It quoted an analysis by a Jesuit priest, Father Francesco Occhetta, of a 2005 episode of The Simpsons, The Father, the Son and the Holy Guest Star, which revolved around Catholicism and was aired a few weeks after the death of Pope John Paul II.

The episode starts with Bart being expelled from Springfield Elementary School and being enrolled in a Catholic school where he meets a sympathetic priest, voiced by the actor Liam Neeson, who draws him into Catholicism with his kindness.

Homer then decides to convert to Catholicism, to the horror of his wife Marge, the Rev Lovejoy and Ned Flanders. The episode touches on issues such as religious conflict, interfaith dialogue, homosexuality and stem cell research.

"Few people know it, and he does everything he can to hide it, but it is true: Homer J Simpson is a Catholic," insists L'Osservatore Romano.

It is not the first time that the Vatican newspaper has praised The Simpsons. Last December, as the television series celebrated its 20th anniversary, the paper said that "the relationship between man and God" is one of its most important themes and that it often mirrored the "religious and spiritual confusion of our times".

Once a staid and sober paper of record, L'Osservatore Romano has ventured into popular culture in the last three years under a new editor, commenting on everything from The Beatles and The Blues Brothers to the blockbuster film Avatar and the Harry Potter books and films.

Source <www.telegraph.co.uk>

Read more »

OLDEST MAN-MADE STRUCTURE FOUND IN GREEK CAVE

The oldest known example of a man-made structure was found within a prehistoric cave in central Greece, according to the Greek culture ministry.

The structure is a stone wall that blocked two-thirds of the entrance to the Theopetra cave near Kalambaka on the north edge of the Thessalian plain. It was constructed 23,000 years ago, probably as a barrier to cold winds.

“An optical dating test, known as Optically Stimulated Luminescence, was applied on quartz grains nested within the stones. We dated four different samples from the sediment and soil materials, and all provided identical dates,” Nikolaos Zacharias, director of the laboratory of archaeometry at the University of Peloponnese, told Discovery News.

According to a statement by the ministry of culture, “the dating matches the coldest period of the most recent ice age, indicating that the cavern’s inhabitants built the stone wall to protect themselves from the cold.”

Excavated since 1987, the Theopetra cave is well known to palaeontologists as it was used and inhabited continuously from the Palaeolithic period onwards (50,000 to 5,000 years ago).

“The newly discovered stone structure is important as it shows the technological level of humans at that time,” Zacharias said.

Source: http://news.discovery.com

Read more »

British Library posts Greek manuscripts to Web

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER 

LONDON — One of the world's most important caches of Greek manuscripts is going online, part of a growing number of ancient documents to hit the Web in recent years.

The British Library said Monday that it was making more than a quarter of its 1,000 volume-strong collection of handwritten Greek texts available online free of charge, something curators there hope will be a boon to historians, biblical scholars and students of classical Greece alike.

Although the manuscripts — highlights of which include a famous collection of Aesopic fables discovered on Mount Athos in 1842 — have long been available to scholars who made the trip to the British Library's reading rooms, curator Scot McKendrick said their posting to the web was opening antiquity to the entire world.
McKendrick said that London could be an expensive place to spend time poring over the Greek texts' tiny, faded script or picking through hundreds of pages of parchment.

"Not every scholar can afford to come here weeks and months on end," he said. The big attraction of browsing the texts online "is the ability to do it at your own desk whenever you wish to do it — and do it for free as well."

Although millions of books have been made available online in recent years — notably through Google Books' mass scanning program — ancient texts have taken much longer to emerge from the archives.

They don't suffer from the copyright issues complicating efforts to post contemporary works to the Web, but their fragility makes them tough to handle. They have to be carefully cracked open and photographed one page at a time, a process the British Library said typically costs about 1 pound ($1.50) per page.
John Franklin, an associate professor of classics at the University of Vermont, said that the British Library's efforts were "part of a quite general move to making manuscripts available online."

"Hundreds of institutions have done or are doing the same," he said, including his university.

Franklin said it was "wonderful that the general public can have an intimate view of so many manuscripts," but stressed the material's academic applications, noting that it could serve as a teaching aid for students learning to unravel medieval Greek handwriting, for example.

The British Library has worked aggressively to put much of its collection on the Internet, from 19th-century newspapers to the jewels of its collection — The Lindisfarne Gospels, a selection of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches and the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest surviving complete copy of the Christian Bible.
The library's Greek manuscript project was funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which supports Greek-related initiatives in arts and culture.
Another batch of about 250 documents is due to be published online in 2012.
___
Online:
The British Library: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation: http://www.snf.org

Source: Associated Press

Read more »

Mona Lisa's Childhood Home Found

Read more »

Forever young: Secret of eternal life revealed by Russian science?

Read more »

Halley's comet 'was spotted by the ancient Greeks'

A celestial event seen by the ancient Greeks may be the earliest sighting of Halley's comet, new evidence suggests. According to ancient writers, a large meteorite smacked into northern Greece between 466BC and 467BC. The writers also described a comet in the sky at the time the meteorite fell to Earth, but this detail has received little attention, say the researchers.

Comet Halley would have been visible for about 80 days in 466BC, researchers write in the Journal of Cosmology. New Scientist magazine reports that, until now, the earliest probable sighting of the comet was an orbit in 240BC, an event recorded by Chinese astronomers.

If the new findings are confirmed, the researchers will have pushed back the date of the first observation of Comet Halley by 226 years. The latest idea is based on accounts by ancient authors and concerns a meteorite that is said to have landed in the Hellespont region of northern Greece in 466-467BC.

The space rock fell during daylight hours and was about the size of "a wagon load", according to ancient sources. The object, described as having a "burnt colour", became a tourist attraction for more than 500 years.

In his work Meteorology, Aristotle wrote about the event about a century after it occurred. He said that around the same time the meteorite fell, "a comet was visible in the west".

Astronomer Eric Hintz and philosopher Daniel Graham, both of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, reconstructed the likely path of Halley's comet, to see whether it agreed with the ancient observations.

They calculated that Halley's comet could have been visible for about 80 days between early June and late August in 466BC - depending on atmospheric conditions and the darkness of the sky.

"It's tough going back that far in time. It's not like an eclipse, which is really predictable," co-author Eric Hintz, from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, told BBC News.

"But we feel fairly good about this. If the [sighting] in 240BC is accepted, this has a fairly solid possibility." He added: "If accepted, this would be three orbits earlier [than the Chinese sighting]."Halley's Comet on the Bayeux Tapestry (Getty) In the 11th Century, Halley's Comet was depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. The reconstruction of the comet's path agrees with the ancient reports, which say the comet was visible for about 75 days.

The researchers point out that while the Chinese and Babylonians kept meticulous records of heavenly phenomena for centuries, the ancient Greeks did not.Nevertheless, the Greek accounts do provide important information, say Graham and Hintz, such as the comet's period of visibility from Earth.

Source <www.bbc.co.uk>

Read more »

Highest Paid Athlete of All Time

Last fall, Forbes magazine was all atwitter as Tiger Woods closed in on becoming “the first athlete to earn over $1 billion” in the course of his career. Presumably his fortunes will now start to droop, but Forbes missed the mark—taking the long view, Tiger was never all that well paid to begin with when compared with the charioteers of ancient Rome.

rivers were drawn from the lower orders of society.They affiliated with teams supported by large businesses that invested heavily in training and upkeep of the horses and equipment. The colors of the team jerseys provided them with names, and fans would often hurl violent enthusiasms, as well as lead curse amulets punctured with nails, at the Reds, Blues, Whites, and Greens.

The equipment consisted of a leather helmet, shin guards, chest protector, a jersey, whip, and a curved knife—handy for cutting opponents who got too close or to cut themselves loose from entangling reins in case of a fall. They adopted a Greek style of long curly hair protruding from under their helmets and festooned their horses’ manes with ribbons and jewels. Races started when the emperor dropped his napkin and a hapless referee would try to keep order from horseback. After seven savage laps, those who managed not to be upended or killed and finish in the top three took home prizes.

The very best paid of these—in fact, the best paid athlete of all time—was a Lusitanian Spaniard named Gaius Appuleius Diocles, who had short stints with the Whites and Greens, before settling in for a long career with the Reds. Twenty-four years of winnings brought Diocles—likely an illiterate man whose signature move was the strong final dash—the staggering sum of 35,863,120 sesterces in prize money. The figure is recorded in a monumental inscription erected in Rome by his fellow charioteers and admirers in 146, which hails him fulsomely on his retirement at the age of “42 years, 7 months, and 23 days” as “champion of all charioteers.”

By today’s standards that last figure, assuming the apt comparison is what it takes to pay the wages of the American armed forces for the same period, would cash out to about $15 billion.

Source <www.lapshamquarterly.org>

Read more »

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>

Read more »

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>

Read more »

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>

Read more »

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>

Read more »

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>

Read more »

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

Read more »