Sticky tape generates X-rays

Christmas could bring with it a new hazard as you wrap your gifts – X-ray-emitting sticky tape.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have shown that simply peeling ordinary sticky tape in a vacuum can generate enough X-rays to take an image — of one of the scientists’ own fingers (see videos).

“At some point we were a little bit scared,” says Juan Escobar, a member of the research team. But he and his co-workers soon realized that the X-rays were only emitted when the kit was used in a vacuum. “We don’t want to scare people from using Scotch tape in everyday life,” Escobar adds.

This kind of energy release — known as triboluminescence and seen in the form of light — occurs whenever a solid (often a crystal) is crushed, rubbed or scratched. It is a long-known, if somewhat mysterious, phenomenon, seen by Francis Bacon in 1605. He noticed that scratching a lump of sugar caused it to give off light.

The leading explanation posits that when a crystal is crushed or split, the process separates opposite charges. When these charges are neutralized, they release a burst of energy in the form of light.

As long ago as 1953, a team of scientists based in Russia suggested that peeling sticky tape produced X-rays. But “we were very sceptical about the old results,” says Escobar. His team decided to look into the phenomenon anyway, and found that X-rays were indeed given off, in high-energy pulses.

When the researchers placed a small plastic window in their vacuum chamber, they were even able to take an X-ray image of a finger, using a dental X-ray detector. Their results are published in Nature¹

Mechanoluminescent mystery

“Of the total electron discharges, only one in ten thousand makes X-rays,” says Escobar. The energies of the individual X-ray pulses, typically a few nanoseconds long, are about 15 kiloelectron volts.

The energy of the X-rays is directly related to the amount of charge that builds up at the surface of the tape as it is peeled. The scientists calculate that this charge was ten times greater in their study than typically seen in similar experiments. “We are not exactly sure why the tape is so heavily charged,” Escobar says.

The sticky-tape X-ray machine is also baffling others in the field. “You wouldn’t have thought that so much of the mechanical energy would come out as X-rays,” says Ken Suslick, an expert in mechanoluminescence at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “The adhesive on the tape is an amorphous liquid, not crystalline. What’s causing the transfer of charge, of electrons or protons, what the accepting and donor groups are — these things are much less clear.”

The researchers suggest that the high charge density generated by peeling the tape could be great enough to trigger nuclear fusion. Michael Loughlin, a nuclear analyst at the international nuclear fusion experiment, ITER, in Cadarache, France, is sceptical. But he adds that if he is proved wrong, a system that could provide fusion reactions at the flick of a switch would be very useful. … – nature

Bird-Like Dinosaur Sported Bizarre Tail Feathers

A pigeon-sized dinosaur that lived more than 100 million years ago sported four ribbon-like tail feathers that likely helped the creature balance on tree branches.

That picture comes from a fossil of a nearly complete skeleton and the well-preserved feathers of Epidexipteryx hui, discovered in Inner Mongolia, China. The finding, detailed in the Oct. 23 issue of the journal Nature, fills in gaps about the transition from non-avian dinosaurs to birds.

Although scientists are not positive about the dates for the sediments that the skeleton was found in, researchers suspect the dinosaur lived some time around 152 million to 168 million years ago during the Middle to Late Jurassic Period. That makes the remains slightly older than Archaeopteryx, long considered the oldest bird, which lived about 150 million years ago.

“Although this dinosaur cannot be the direct ancestor for birds, it is one of the dinosaurs that have the closest phylogenetic relationship to birds,” said researcher Zhonghe Zhou of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “Therefore, it could provide a lot of information about the transition process from dinos to birds,” including changes in the tail and feathers.

He added, “This find confirms the link between dinosaurs and birds, and indicates that we are getting closer and closer to the details of the transition from dinos to birds.” – yahoo

Ancient jewels found in uni desk

Tiny gold studs thought to be almost 4,000 years old which had been unearthed close to Stonehenge have been found in a desk at Cardiff university.

The gold studs once decorated the handle of a Bronze Age dagger buried in the grave of a warrior at Bush Barrow, Wiltshire, between 1900 and 1700 BC.

They were dug up 200 years ago and loaned to the university in the 1960s.

A senior lecturer at Cardiff recently found the gold studs and they will now be displayed at a museum in Devizes.

According to experts from the Wiltshire Heritage Museum, the dagger was made in Brittany and the handle was ornamented with thousands of the tiny gold studs, each one of which is almost small enough to fit through the eye of a needle.

The studs ornamented the handle in a herringbone pattern and had been fixed into the wooden handle using a bronze tool to make a hole in the wood, and were fixed in place using resin or animal glue.

The burial containing the dagger was excavated 200 years ago at Bush Barrow but thousands of the studs became scattered across the site by archaeologists who did not know what they were.

In the 1960s, some of the studs were loaned to Prof Richard Atkinson of Cardiff university, who was well-known for his excavations at Silbury Hill and Stonehenge.

They were placed in an old film canister, simply labelled “Bush Barrow”, and were later found by Prof John G. Evans, who put them in his desk.

Prof Evans died in 2005 and the gold studs were recovered from his old desk by Niall Sharples, a senior lecturer at the university. … – bbc

Mysterious ‘dead water’ effect caught on film

In 1893, Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen and his ship Fram were victims of a strange phenomenon as he sailed past the Nordenskiöld Archipelago, north of Siberia.

Nansen wrote afterwards: “Fram appeared to be held back, as if by some mysterious force, and she did not always answer the helm … We made loops in our course, turned sometimes right around, tried all sorts of antics to get clear of it, but to very little purpose.”

Nansen called the effect “dead water”, reporting that it slowed Fram to a quarter of her normal speed.

Research has already shown that dead water occurs when an area of water consists of two or more layers of water with different salinity, and hence density – for example, when fresh water from a melting glacier forms a relatively thin layer on top of denser seawater. Waves that form in the hidden layer can slow the boat with no visible trace.

Now French scientists recreating that scenario in a lab tank have revealed new detail of the phenomenon and even captured the effect on video. The work will help scientists to better understand dead water and the behaviour of stratified sea patches. – newsci

Teens convicted of virtual theftual

A Dutch court has convicted two youths of theft for stealing virtual items in a computer game and sentenced them to community service. Only a handful of such cases have been heard in the world, and they have reached varying conclusions about the legal status of “virtual goods”. The Leeuwarden District Court says the culprits, 15 and 14 years old, coerced a 13-year-old boy into transferring a “virtual amulet and a virtual mask” from the online adventure game RuneScape to their game accounts. “These virtual goods are goods (under Dutch law), so this is theft,” the court said on Tuesday in a summary of its ruling. Identities of the minors were not released. The 15-year-old was sentenced to 200 hours service, and the 14-year-old to 160 hours. – news24

Oh no.  If they get community service for taking only an amulet and a mask, I’m in serious trouble. I broke into a house, stole a lantern and a sword, found a trap door under a rug, murdered a troll, took a gold coffin, a jewel encrusted egg, a platinum bar … bar … bar.. and numerous other valuable items from the Great Underground Empire. I did leave them all in a trophy case, however. So technically, I just moved them around.

How did these teens get the amulet and the mask out of the game and into the real world? I was never able to work that out. Everything I took in Zork always ended up right back where it started each time I played the game again. Zork obviously has a way better virtual security system than RuneScape.

Physicists Find New State Of Matter In ‘Transistor’: Huge Implications For New Electronic Devices

McGill University researchers have discovered a new state of matter, a quasi-three- dimensional electron crystal, in a material very much like those used in the fabrication of modern transistors. This discovery could have momentous implications for the development of new electronic devices.

Currently, the number of transistors that can be inexpensively crammed onto a single computer chip increases exponentially, doubling approximately every two years, a trend known as Moore’s Law. But there are limits, experts say. As chips get smaller and smaller, scientists expect that the bizarre laws and behaviours of quantum physics will take over, making ever-smaller chips impossible.

This discovery, and other similar efforts, could help the electronics industry once traditional manufacturing techniques approach these quantum limits over the next decade or so, the researchers said. Working with one of the purest semiconductor materials ever made, they discovered the quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal in a device cooled at ultra-low temperatures roughly 100 times colder than intergalactic space. The material was then exposed to the most powerful continuous magnetic fields generated on Earth. Their results were published in the October issue of the journal Nature Physics.

Two-dimensional electron crystals were discovered in the laboratory in the 1990s, and were predicted as far back as 1934 by renowned Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner.

“Picture a sandwich, and the ham in the middle is your electrons,” explained Dr. Guillaume Gervais, director of McGill’s Ultra-Low Temperature Condensed Matter Experiment Lab. “In a 2D electron crystal, the electrons are squeezed between two materials and they’re very two dimensional. They can move on a plane, like billiard balls on a pool table, but there’s no up and down motion. There’s a thickness, but they’re stuck.” …

“It’s actually not quite 3-D, it’s an in-between state, a totally new phenomenon,” he said. “This is the kind of thing the theoreticians love. Now they’re scratching their heads and trying to fine-tune their models.”

The importance of this discovery to micro-electronics and computing could be profound. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, Moore’s Law has powered the ever-accelerating home electronics, personal computer and Internet revolutions which have changed the world. But, Gervais explained, Moore’s Law is not an irresistible force, and some time in the next decade, it will inevitably collide with the immovable object of the laws of physics.

“In a standard transistor, you have a gate and the electron flow is controlled by it like a a faucet would control a gas flow,” he said. “You can understand the particles as independent units, which lets us treat them as ones and zeroes or on and off switches in digital computing.

“However, once you get down to the nano scale, quantum forces kick in and the electrons may condense into a collective state and lose their individual nature. Then all sorts of bizarre phenomena pop up. In some cases, the electrons may even split. Concepts of ‘on’ and ‘off’ lose all meaning under these conditions.”

“This issue is academic, but it’s not just academic. The same semiconductor materials we’re working with are currently used in cellphones and other electronic devices. We need to understand quantum effects so we can use them to our own advantage and perhaps reinvent the transistor altogether. That way, progress in electronics will keep happening .” – sciencedaily

Scientists Erase Specific Memories in Mice

It sounds like science fiction, by scientists say it might one day be possible to erase undesirable memories from the brain, selectively and safely. Using a complex genetic approach, U.S. and Chinese researchers believe they have done just that in mice, but the feat is far from being tested on humans.

Study co-author Joe Z. Tsien, co-director of the Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, says the “work reveals a molecular mechanism of how [memory deletion] can be done quickly and without doing damage to brain cells.”

The finding is published in the Oct. 23 issue of Neuron.

Humans plagued by painful memories have long wished for a way to eject them from the brain. The concept was the premise of the popular 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which two former lovers pay a “memory-erasure” service to expunge the unhappy affair from their minds.

To explore the possibility of safely carving away bits of memory, the study authors first focused on the activity of a common protein found only in the brain, called CaMKII. In both mice and people, this enzyme is often referred to as the “memory molecule” because of its key role in facilitating brain cell communication — especially people’s ability to learn and retain information.

To hone in on the specific workings of CaMKII, Tsien and his team first developed a “chemical-genetic method” that enabled them to instantly turn the protein “on” or “off” among mice intentionally bred to overproduce the molecule. After exposing the mice to emotionally powerful stimulations, such as a mild shock to their paws, the scientists then observed how well or poorly the animals subsequently recalled the particular trauma as their brain’s expression of CaMKII was manipulated up and down.

When the brain was made to overproduce CaMKII at the exact moment the mouse was prodded to retrieve the traumatic memory, the memory wasn’t just blocked, it appeared to be fully erased. This occurred without impacting the animal’s ability to recall any other memories, the scientists say.

A similar observation was made in experiments involving the mice’s recognition of specific objects. In those cases, overexpression of CaMKII appeared to eliminate all memory of toys with which the mice had previously been exposed. According to Tsien, the animal study illustrates how the targeted erasure of specific memories might be genetically triggered in a controlled and harmless manner. …  – yahoo

Traumatizing the mice would not be necessary if they used more imagination in their experimental design.

Video: History of brainwashing and mind control

You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough- In this episode, the history of brainwashing and mind control was examined. The angle pursued by Curtis was the way in which psychiatry pursued tabula rasa theories of the mind, initially in order to set people free from traumatic memories and then later as a potential instrument of social control. The work of Ewen Cameron was surveyed, with particular reference to Cold War theories of communist brainwashing and the search for hypnoprogammed assassins…