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Albert Einstein's theory goes wrong

Albert Einstein's theory goes wrong as neutrinos, the subatomic particles exceeded the speed of light inside Large Hadron Collider!
read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

Chinese Scientists Plan to Pull an Asteroid into Orbit Around Earth

The idea isn’t simply to flirt with cataclysmic danger, but to bring a small object (they suggest a 10-meter object called 2008EA9 that will pass nearby in 2049) into a loop around the Earth so we can study it closely for a few years. If we can get the art of capturing asteroids orbitally down to a science, we could use it to temporarily make asteroids into Earth-bound satellites (orbiting at about twice the distance of the moon), mine them for minerals, and then send them on their ways.

Astronomers discover planet made of DIAMONDS

Scientists at the University of Manchester think they have unearthed a once-massive star in the Milky Way that has been transformed into a small planet made of the precious rock.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2030138/Is-biggest-rock-Astronomers-believe-entire-planet-diamonds.html#ixzz1W5CBN1Ns

Planets take shape in embryonic gas clouds

A radical new theory that planets are born within a massive veil of gas may help explain how recently discovered extrasolar planets developed their stunning diversity of sizes and locations.
In the theory, planets are born under wraps, hidden at the centers of giant gas clouds far from their parent stars. A star’s gravity then reels in the planetary cloud, stripping away some or all of the gas to reveal the planet inside.
Read more : http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/71776/title/Planets_take_shape_in_embryonic_gas_clouds

Bottoms up Antarctic ice growth discovered

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
AP SCIENCE WRITER

This undated handout photo provided by the journal Science shows a view of ice surface looking towards Gamburtsev Mountains and Dome A. The intense blue sky reflects the high altitude and thin atmosphere of the polar plateau. When it comes to ice, scientists are giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "bottoms up." Those massive ice sheets in Antarctica don't just grow from the bottom up, according to new research published Thursday. (AP Photo/Robin E. Bell--Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, New York)

WASHINGTON -- When it comes to ice, scientists are giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "bottoms up." Those massive ice sheets in Antarctica don't just grow on top when snow falls, they also grow from the bottom up, according to new research published Thursday.

Ice melts at the bottom of ice sheets, and the water helps the sheets slide across the ground below. But the water can refreeze to the bottom of the sheets and push them up, the researchers report in the online edition of the journal Science.

The base of a massive ice plateau on the East Antarctic ice sheet called Dome A is about 24 percent refrozen water, according to the team headed by Robin Bell, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

"The ice sheets are not simple layer cake structures. Water moves around underneath the ice sheet and deforms" it, Bell explained.

Fausto Ferraccioli, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey and co-author of the report, added that knowing how the ice is formed is critical in the search for the oldest ice and also in understanding how the ice moves.

Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, called the finding "totally new, at least at this scale."

"This is orders of magnitude larger than refreezing was imagined to be, and the concept that it could uplift the ice cap is completely new," said Scambos, who was not part of the research project.

In the past, deposits of refrozen water were only seen where there are lakes under the ice, said glacier researcher Sasha Carter of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

"Now it appears they are widespread in the East Antarctic interior," said Carter, who was not part of the research team.

The researchers discovered the refrozen ice during field work in 2008 and 2009, using radar that can see through the ice.

At first, "we thought they looked like beehives and were worried they were an error in the data," Bell said. But as they found more and more of the refrozen ice pieces it became clear that they were real.

Because the ice moves, it is essential to understand changes to the base, especially in response to climate changes, researchers say. The world's climate has been warming over the last century or so and the impacts are being first noted at the poles. Ice cores, long sections of ice drilled from glaciers, are often used to study past climates.

Bell suggested that the refreezing process "may push really old ice closer to the surface and make it easier to find."

However, Jeff Severinghaus, a geologist at Scripps Institution who was not involved in the study, said it could either mean older ice is better preserved or, it could make it harder to interpret the record, "if it's shuffled like a deck of cards."

Source: http://www.seattlepi.com/national/1501ap_us_sci_bottoms_up_ice.html?source=rss

Floating Solar Panels: Solar Installations on Water

Most of the solar energy systems on the market today bare two major weaknesses: they require vast land areas in order to be built, and the costs related to solar cells fabrication and maintenance are high. A new technology is about to overcome these challenges and many more: floating solar power plants.

Developed by a Franco-Israeli partnership,* this innovative solar power technology introduces a new paradigm in energy production. Solar power plays a dominant role in the world-wide effort to reduce greenhouse gases, it is considered a clean energy and is an efficient source of electricity. Yet several obstacles have been undermining the expansion of this sector and many of its actors are looking for a new approach towards the markets.

A win-win Situation

Soon after the design phase was over, at the end of March 2010, the fabrication of a prototype began and the team is now aiming to launch the implementation phase in September 2011. The tests will take place at Cadarache, in the South East of France, the site having a privileged position on the French electric grid and being close to a local hydro-electric facility providing the water surface to be used for the installation of the system. It will operate on-site during a period of nine months, while assessing the system's performances and productivity through seasonal changes and various water levels. The research team members believe that by June 2012, they will have all the information required to allow the technology's entry on the market.

As even leading photovoltaic companies struggle to find land on which to install solar power plants, the project team identified the almost untouched potential of solar installations on water. The water basins, on which the plants could be built, are not natural reserves, tourists' resorts or open sea; rather they are industrial water basins already in use for other purposes. By that, it is assured that the new solar plants will not have a negative impact on natural landscapes. "It's a win-win situation," declares Dr. Kassel, "since there are many water reservoirs with energy, industrial or agricultural uses that are open for energy production use."

After solving the question of space, the team also took on the problem of cost. "It sounds magical to combine sun and water to produce electricity, but we also have to prove that it carries a financial logic for the long run," explains Dr. Kassel. The developers were able to reduce the costs linked to the implementation of the technology by two means. First they reduced the quantity of solar cells used thanks to a sun energy concentration system based on mirrors, while keeping steady the amount of power produced.

Made of modules

Secondly, the team used a creative cooling system using the water on which the solar panels are floating. Thanks to this efficient cooling method, the photovoltaic system can use silicon solar cells, which tend to experience problems linked to overheating and need to be cooled down in order to allow the system to work correctly, unlike standard type more expensive cells. The particular type of solar cell used also allows a higher efficiency than the standard ones, achieving both reliability and cost reduction.

Still for the purpose of making the technology efficient and ready to market, the system is designed in such way that on a solar platform it is possible to assemble as many identical modules as needed for the power rating desired. Each module produces a standard amount of 200 kiloWatt electricity, and more power can be achieved by simply adding more modules to the plant.

The team also worked on the environmental impact of the technology. It works in fact as a breathing surface through which oxygen can penetrate to the water. This feature ensures that sufficient oxygen will maintain the underwater life of plants and animals. Dr. Kassel adds: "One of the implementation phase's goals is to closely monitor the possible effects of this new technology on the environment with the help of specialists" and "a preliminary check shows no detrimental environmental impact on water quality, flora or fauna. Our choices of materials were always made with this concern in mind."

*The project results from a collaboration between Solaris Synergy from Israel and the EDF Group from France. EUREKA provided the supporting platform which allowed to enhance both companies' partnership. After receiving the "EUREKA label" the project, called AQUASUN, found also support from the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor.

Source:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110225123026.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+sciencedaily+(ScienceDaily:+Latest+Science+News)

Is a Giant, Hidden Planet Orbiting Our Sun?

Tim Kiusalaas / Corbis

Credits: The following is first reported by http://www.time.com and is a copy of the original

The quest for Planet X always starts out with celestial objects behaving badly. Astronomers notice that a known planet, or a bunch of comets, begin moving in ways Newton's laws of motion can't explain. They propose that it's caused by the gravity of something massive and still undiscovered lurking out in the Solar System, and they head to their telescopes to search for it.

Most often it's all a big mistake; the unexplained motion turns out to be just an incorrect measurement. (The great exception concerned Neptune, spotted in 1846 after observers noticed Uranus wandering from its predicted path). So when a pair of University of Louisiana astronomers, writing in the journal Icarus, advanced their recent theory about a new mystery planet in our solar system — and a very, very big one — their colleagues mostly just listened politely, then went back to work.(See TIME's photoessay "Amazing Photos of the Sun")

They reckoned without the Web, though. A few days ago, the British Independent ran an article about the possible planet, and suddenly the idea went viral. The likely reason the story caught fire: a key sentence that read "But scientists now believe the proof of its existence has already been gathered by a NASA space telescope, WISE, and is just waiting to be analysed."

That's just close enough to the truth to be dangerous, something that John Matese, co-author of the Icarus paper, admits — sort of. "What we're really saying," he explains, "is that there's suggestive evidence there might be something out there." And if a new planet exists — something Matese is emphatically not claiming at this point — then the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite should already have an image of it stored somewhere in its enormous database.

How suggestive the evidence actually is, though, depends on whom you ask. If you ask Ned Wright, a UCLA astrophysicist and WISE principal investigator, he'll tell you, "It's really kind of flimsy. It's there, but they don't have super data."

The argument Matese and his colleague Dan Whitmire have been making since the late 1990s is that some comets seem to be moving in toward the Sun from a skewed direction. They start out in the Oort Cloud, a vast collection of perhaps trillions of small, icy chunks that hover at the very outer edges of the Solar System. Every so often, a passing star or the tidal effect of the Milky Way itself jostles the cloud, sending some of the chunks sunward to light up the night sky as comets.(See The Hubble Telescope's Greatest Hits)

When Matese and Whitmire analyzed the orbits of these Oort Cloud comets, about 20% of them seemed to come not from the random directions you'd expect, but from a narrower section of sky. This might suggest a giant planet, at least the size of Jupiter and maybe up to four times as big. Its size would not be its only remarkable feature; it's remote orbit would be another — a tidy trillion miles from the Sun, or more than a thousand times more distant than Pluto. "This is not a crazy idea" says Bad Astronomy blogger Phil Plait. And indeed, WISE project scientist Davy Kirkpatrick went so far as to propose a name for the possible new world: Tyche, for the Greek goddess of good fortune.

That might have been a subtle dig, though. In Greek mythology, Tyche was usually invoked along with Nemesis, the goddess of bad luck. Nemesis was also the name given to a mystery object that was in vogue in the 1980s, shortly after it was generally agreed that a comet might have killed the dinosaurs. A few astronomers thought they could see even more of a dino-cosmos link — a pattern of mass extinctions occurring like clockwork in the geologic record. Their explanation: a faint, far-off companion star to the Sun was sending down a rain of comets when it reached just the right point in its orbit. That sounds an awful lot like the current thinking about Tyche's possible influence — and thus the possible dig.See TIME's graphic: "Where Things Are Just Right for Life"

After a brief flurry of interest, most astronomers decided the evidence of Nemesis was pretty flimsy, and the idea went away. So did the long-ago speculation about another huge putative planet, one that was said to be messing with Neptune's orbit; astronomers who went looking for that version of Planet X in the 1920s could only scare up puny Pluto — whose influence on schoolchildren is huge, but which doesn't affect Neptune a whit (the original evidence for Neptune's orbital anomalies turned out to be wrong). And Pluto itself has recently lost its planetary distinction and been busted down to dwarf planet. Then too there was the mystery planet said to be orbiting Barnard's Star, detected via wobbles in the star's motion by Swarthmore astronomer Peter Van de Kamp in the 1960s.. Turns out that the wobbles were caused by the removal, cleaning and replacement of his telescope's mirror. No planet there either.

So while the latest version of Planet X could certainly exist in theory, it's way too early to start rewriting the textbooks. The evidence isn't even strong enough to have triggered an active search for Tyche; it's only because WISE happens to be surveying the heavens anyway that it could be found at all. If Tyche really is out there, says Wright, "we might be able to tell you something in a year or two."

Source//Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2049641,00.html#ixzz1E9FnUsN8

Love in Digital Age Offers Opportunity, Dangers

Digital connections can make - and break - relationships

In today’s fast-paced world there are more ways to communicate than ever - e-mail, text messaging, Facebook, Twitter and other types of social media. Relationship experts say such connections can help fuel passion and have already changed the way people date and fall in love. Yet, technology can cause people to fall out of love, too. 

Game changer

Digital connections have changed the dating game. As two young, single women from New York City, that's something Olivia Baniuszewicz  and Debra Goldstein learned firsthand.

"First of all we’re flirting more openly, a lot more often," says Baniuszewicz . "Things like your phone for texting, or even just the Internet on your phone just helping you plan a perfect night out." 

"So we decided we needed to figure out the world of texting and we wrote a book about how to navigate through this new love connection," says Goldstein.

'Flirtexting: How to Text Your Way into His Heart' explores how texting has changed the dating scene.

The two women named their book, "Flirtexting: How to Text Your Way into His Heart." During the course of their research, they interviewed dozens of people to find out what they thought about flirt-texting.

"It’s become like a convenient way for people to connect through busy, fast-paced lives," says Baniuszewicz. "Also, it eliminates the shyness factor. It makes us a lot more open to saying things that we normally wouldn’t in person."

Goldstein agrees. "It’s really cool. If you are in a long distance relationship, for I actually was, it really, really helps to stay connected."

Relationship expert David Coleman, who's known as the Dating Doctor, agrees - to a point.

"Still with things like Skype or I-chat and texting and phones - just all the things that are available - long distance relationships often don’t succeed," he says. "We really miss the other person’s presence. Up to a point, sure, I can see the other person on the screen, they can see me. We can keep a bit of our passion alive, but at some point in time, if we can’t be in each other’s physical presence, the pain of being in a long-distance relationship will finally outweigh the benefits of being in it."

Revolution

Coleman says technology has revolutionized the way people meet and date. 

"You can Google someone, you can go on Facebook, you can go on LinkedIn, you can go on Twitter, you can find out so much about these people before you even say ‘Hello,’" he says. "There should never again be a ‘blind date’, unless someone has completely voided their life of any social media."

That’s why, Coleman says, people should be careful about the image they create for themselves online. 

"If you go to most of younger women’s websites on Facebook, you will see their profiles, they got some provocative things put up there. So you have to be a bit careful of the pictures that you’re putting up. Never ever give people your land address and things like that, because you just don’t know who is reading that profile."

Coleman notes that even the older generations are dating digitally and finding love on-line.

"Many of them are finding their ex-high school sweethearts on Facebook or someone they used to date years and years and years ago. And those couples are reconnecting and they are marrying. Now conversely, people are finding past love on Facebook and telling their current spouses, ‘I’m so sorry, I thought I’d never find this person again, but Facebook brought us back together. We had something special and we want to try to have it again.’ I have a friend who is a lawyer. He says in most of his divorce cases now, Facebook is being cited as a reason for that divorce." 

Word of caution

Lovers, Coleman warns, should also realize that e-mails and text messages can be a double edged sword. 

"Let’s say that I say, ‘I don’t think we should be together anymore. I’m breaking up with you,’ and I text that. The person who gets that text message can read that over and over and over again. And the more they read it, the madder they get. That’s what social media has done. And conversely it can be, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ and they can go back and read that 50 times, too. So it works both ways."

With that caution in mind, Flirtexting authors Goldstein and Baniuszewicz have come up with some digital love do’s and don’ts.

"If somebody sends you a text message, you don’t have to respond back right away," says Goldstein. "In fact, we interviewed a lot of guys and they say that response time says a lot about the girl. Also abbreviations, our motto is 'if you don’t want a date, abbreviate.' So we say, spell your words out. You have the time to create a message that says exactly what you want to say in that space. And just because it’s accessible it doesn’t mean you need to be doing it 24/7. You do not want to get a marathon texting situation."

Baniuszewicz adds,"Have a healthy balance between everything; texting, Facebook, Twitter. It's a way to enhance a connection throughout the day. You need to use everything in moderation."

And, they add, even though texting is more convenient, writing a love letter, or sending a poem with a card gives a modern relationship a special personal touch that a message on Facebook just can’t match.
Source:http://www.voanews.com/english/news/science-technology/Love-in-the-Digital-Age-115927679.html 

First water map of Earth's leaky surface

This map  is the first-ever global survey of Earth's permeability: essentially, how leaky it is. It shows how easily water passes through surface rocks, which will help us understand the planet's water cycle and predict the sustainability of underground water sources.

Crucially, it could help reveal the hidden underground movements of 99 per cent of unfrozen fresh water - water which is not taken into account in computer models used to predict the climate.

The map was put together by Tom Gleeson of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and his colleagues. They assembled data on the kinds of rocks found in different regions, and, using information on how permeable each type of rock is, calculated how leaky different regions are.

Permeability varies over 13 orders of magnitude, so the figures are not very precise, but they offer a rough picture. Gleeson says the map should help hydrologists to work out how much groundwater moves from one basin or aquifer to another, which is important if the water is to be managed sustainably.

At the moment we don't know how much water is hiding underground, or where it is. As a result, groundwater gets left out of climate models. Gleeson says that is a significant omission, as the movements of groundwater could well affect regional climate:

Groundwater makes up 99 per cent of the fresh unfrozen water on Earth. That huge store could somehow modulate the climate. There may be really complex interactions that we don't appreciate.

The map is a "very good first step", says Richard Taylor of University College London. However he says the figures for North America are the most reliable, because that area has been heavily studied, whereas those for the rest of the world are more scanty.

Journal reference: Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2010GL045565

Source:http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/02/new-map-shows-the-leaks-in-our.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Light through a blocked hole? Plasmonics is the answer

How would you react if a tiny hole in a piece of foil let through more light after you had covered it – or painted the foil a different colour?

With surprise, probably, like the physicists who discovered that this is just what happens with some very small holes. Both findings could lead to light-based transistors and other components for high-speed optical computers.

Conventional optics forbids light from passing through holes that are much smaller than its wavelength, which for visible light means less than around 400 nanometres wide. But in 1998, Thomas Ebbesen at the University of Strasbourg, France, reported that some wavelengths of visible light stream through holes in gold foil that are less than 300 nanometres wide.

It turns out that this is due to ripples known as plasmons that are found on the surface of metals and formed by the oscillation of electrons.

Total eclipse

If the frequency of light hitting the surface of a metal happens to match the oscillation of that metal's surface electrons, the plasmons grab the photons, guide them through the holes and release them on the other side. The plasmons on gold surfaces, for example, are particularly adept at interacting with visible light.

Now a team led by Hiromi Okamoto at the Institute for Molecular Science in Okazaki, Japan, have found another way to coax photons through tiny holes – paradoxically, by obscuring the hole with a gold disc.

The team was shining light down an optical fibre that tapered to a 100-nanometre-wide aperture. At first, barely any light made it through the aperture; instead, it was reflected back up the fibre. But when the researchers placed a small gold disc very close to the aperture, so that it completely eclipsed the hole without actually touching it, the light started streaming through (see graphic, right).

They suspect that plasmons from the gold disc are leaping up through the hole, grabbing the photons stuck inside the fibre and dragging them through. These photons then stream around the edges of the disc.

Dye enhancement

Okamoto's team found that if the disc touched the hole, the effect did not work; widening the disc, however, caused still more light to come through. "When we observed that the larger disc gives higher transmission, we were really surprised," Okamoto says.

This ability to open or block a hole to light could be useful when building components for optical computers, which transmit signals using light instead of electrons.

"The novelty is in controlling this transmission with various 'caps'," saysDmitry Skryabin, a nanophotonics researcher at Bath University in the UK.

Light transmission through a tiny hole can also be controlled with dyes, as Ebbesen and his colleague James Hutchison, also at the University of Strasbourg, recently found.

Plasmon passing

Normally, when white light is shone onto a piece of gold foil pierced with tiny holes, only the wavelengths of green light pass through. But Ebbesen and Hutchison found that coating the foil with a thin layer of green dye allowed red light to pass through as well; indeed, more red than green started to come through.

This was a shock, as green dye should absorb all light except green. "One certainly doesn't expect a sample to become transparent at the wavelengths where the molecule absorbs," says Hutchison.

The researchers suspect that the dye molecules absorb the red light but then "pass" it to the plasmons underneath the dye, which are not of the right frequency to interact with red light directly.

Hutchison says that holes painted with various dyes could also be useful in optical computing components.

Journal references: Nano Letters, DOI: 10.1021/nl103408h; Angewandte Chemie, DOI: 10.1002/anie.201006019

Source:http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20116-light-through-a-blocked-hole-plasmonics-is-the-answer.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

"Big Bang" scientists map cautious plan for 2011

Scientists at the CERN research center seeking answers to key mysteries of the cosmos said on Wednesday they would be moving ahead cautiously this year to avoid any possible breakdown in their giant LHC machine.

But they indicated that in 2012, if all goes well, they would step up the energy of particle collisions that most feel is vital to bring them near to finding the almost mythical Higgs boson and evidence for the existence of dark matter.

"We are pushing the limits," physicist Marco Zanetti told a seminar for CERN staff attended by Reuters.

Simulations of what could happen if there was a simple leak in a joint in the hugely complex machine like the incident that set back the LHC project by a year in 2009 showed it could bring another 12-month delay, he said.

But Zanetti and other speakers at the seminar made clear they saw little chance of this happening now the LHC -- or Large Hadron Collider -- has been functioning without a glitch since March 31 last year.

After a two-month winter shutdown, it is starting up again later this month -- with the particle collisions that simulate the primeval explosion that created the universe 13,7 billion years ago at the top energy yet reached for around 135 days.

That energy is called 3.5 TeV, or tera electron-volts, giving a total of 7 TeV when the particles speeding around the LHC's 27-kilometre tunnel deep under the Swiss-French border on the edge of Geneva smash into each other.

CERN technology director Steve Myers told the seminar that the LHC team still hoped to double the energy impact in 2014, after a year-long shutdown in 2013 for intensive upgrading, but the next few months would show if that were viable.

At the higher collision energy of 14 TeV, CERN -- the 21-nation European Organization for Particle Research -- expects to produce results that could shed light on the possible existence of parallel worlds or multiple universes.

Originally the LHC had been due to shut down at the end of this year for 12 months but the CERN council decided last month to keep going through 2012 because the machine was running so smoothly, giving extra time for an early discovery.

The Higgs -- the particle whose existence was posited nearly 40 years ago by British scientist Peter Higgs as the mystery agent that turns mass into matter and makes the known universe work -- is the prime target at this phase.

Source:http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/top-news/science/57415710?count=20&client_source=feedzilla_widget&order=relevance&format=json&sb=1

Scientists make nanosheets with high-tech potential

A novel way of splitting materials into sheets just one atom thick could lead to new electronic and energy storage technologies, scientists said Thursday.

An international team of researchers said they had invented a versatile way to create one atom thick "nanosheets" from a range of layered materials, similar to the graphite used in pencils, using ultrasonic pulses and common solvents.

The new method is simple, cheap, fast, and could be scaled up to work on an industrial scale, the scientists said in a report of their work published in the journal Science.

The research adds to previous studies by two Russian-born scientists, who last year won the Nobel Prize for physics for their work on graphene, a form of carbon that is just one atom thick and yet 100 times stronger than steel.

"Because of its extraordinary electronic properties graphene has been getting all the attention...as physicists hope that it might one day compete with silicon in electronics," said Valeria Nicolosi, of Britain's Oxford University, who led the study with Jonathan Coleman of Ireland's Trinity College Dublin.

"But in fact there are hundreds of other layered materials that could enable us to create powerful new technologies."

Coleman said the new materials this team had created -- which include Boron Nitride, Molybdenum disulfide, and Bismuth telluride -- have chemical and electronic properties which make them suitable for use in new electronic devices, super-strong composite materials and energy generation and storage.

"Of the many possible applications of these new nanosheets, perhaps the most important are as thermoelectric materials," he said in a statement about the findings.

He said the materials could for example be made into devices that generate electricity from waste heat lost from places like gas, oil or coal-fired power plants, which lose between 50 and 70 percent of the energy they produce in waste heat.

"The development of efficient thermoelectric devices would allow some of this waste heat to be recycled cheaply and easily," Coleman said.

Scientists have been trying for decades to create nanosheets of these kind of materials, because arranging them in atom-thick layers enables their unusual electronic and thermoelectric properties to be unlocked, the researchers explained.

But all previous methods were very time consuming and laborious, and the resulting materials were fragile and not suitable for most applications.

"Our new method offers low-costs, a very high yield and a very large throughput -- within a couple of hours, and with just 1 milligram of material, billions and billions of one-atom-thick graphene-like nanosheets can be made at the same time from a wide variety of exotic layered materials," said Nicolosi.

These new materials could also be used in next generation batteries known as "supercapacitors," which can deliver energy thousands of times faster than standard batteries and could vastly improve technologies such as electric cars.

Source:http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/03/us-science-nanosheets-idUSTRE7127EB20110203?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+reuters/scienceNews+(News+/+US+/+Science)

Laser blasts sunlight protein into view

(Image: Thomas White/DESY)

Meet photosystem I, a plant protein that converts sunlight into energy during photosynthesis, in all its crystalline glory.

To create this image, researchers led by Henry Chapman of the Centre for Free-Electron Laser Science at the German national laboratory DESY sprayed 15,000 nanocrystals of the protein into the path of the Linac Coherent Light Source, an X-ray laser at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California.

Powerful laser pulses vaporised the nanocrystals almost instantly, but not before the crystals had scattered X-rays, producing diffraction patterns that could be combined to render the crystal's detailed structure in three dimensions.

The ability to glean structural data from such tiny crystals could allow many more proteins to be understood. Other methods of elucidating structure require larger crystals, which, for some proteins, can be difficult or impossible to prepare.

Journal reference: Nature, DOI:10.1038/nature09750

Caffeinated Gene Therapy

Many people in society simply cannot function without a daily dose of caffeine. It is so prevalent in many diets. From coffee, to tea, to soft drinks, it has become a staple on par with corn or wheat, or even water. Of course caffeine is not necessary to survive, but it is sure good at keeping our eyes open. However, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Texas, caffeine does more than just keep us awake. It also energizes cells into producing more viruses used for gene therapy.

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Caffeine is the world's most widely consumed psychoactive substances, and amazingly, is completely legal and unregulated. It is found naturally in many plant species such as coffee, tea, and cocoa beans. Plants generate it because it paralyzes and kills certain insects which feed upon them. Therefore, it is the only stimulate we consume that is also a pesticide.

However, the amazing new property discovered by researchers can have lasting impacts on gene therapy research. Gene therapy is the manipulation of genes within the body's tissue cells with the goal of treating disease. It can correct defective genes which are responsible for disease development.

The problem is how to manipulate the genes. For a long time, scientists have known that viruses reproduce by binding to their hosts and introducing their unique genetic material into the cell. This genetic material gives instructions to the cell to produce copies of itself, hijacking the cell’s natural production. For gene therapists, viruses can be used to manipulate cells with "good" genetic material. This is known as the viral vector.

The new study recently published in the journal Human Gene Therapy claims that caffeinated cells used to produce viruses for gene therapy can generate up to 8 times more than non-caffeinated cells. According to the researchers, using caffeine should decrease the cost of producing lentiviruses for research and clinical uses. Lentiviruses are a common type of virus used in gene therapy.

"It is ironic that the ingredient in beverages like colas and coffees that helps keep us awake and alert is also useful in jazzing up cells to produce more gene therapy vectors. An increase in vector production of 5-fold may prove critical in establishing the commercial viability of lentiviral based products," says James M. Wilson, MD, PhD, and Director of the Gene Therapy Program.

The researchers emphasize that the timing of introducing caffeine into cells is critical for increased virus production. Also the concentration of caffeine cannot be too high because it can be toxic to the cells, and would not cause them to increase virus production.

Researchers involved with the study from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas include Brian Ellis, Patrick Ryan Potts, and Matthew Porteus. Their work can be found in the journal Human Gene Therapy which is published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.

Link to published article: http://www.liebertpub.com/contentframe.aspx?code=MDoqsls2tWBQ0c%2bZWT0nPtZ1zyJ60HXWr8kmqZBHbUfkxIBDwf3RDtPbRDToWe2xigdyewz

source:http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/42297