New ‘frozen smoke’ material: 1 ounce could carpet three football fields

Michael Bernstein -

Scientists are reporting the development of a new, ultra-light form of “frozen smoke” — renowned as the world’s lightest solid material — with amazing strength and an incredibly large surface area. The new so-called “multiwalled carbon nanotube (MCNT) aerogel” could be used in sensors to detect pollutants and toxic substances, chemical reactors, and electronics components. A report about the material appears in ACS Nano, a monthly journal.

Lei Zhai and colleagues explain that aerogels made from silicon dioxide (the main ingredient in sand) and other material already are used as thermal insulation in windows and buildings, tennis rackets, sponges to clean up oil spills, and other products. Aerogels are solid but so light that they have been compared to frozen smoke. However, only a few scientists have succeeded in making aerogels from carbon nanotubes, wisps of carbon so small that almost 50,000 would fit across the width of a human hair.

The report describes a process for making MCNT aerogels and tests to determine their properties. MCNT aerogels infused with a plastic material are flexible, for instance, like a spring that can be stretched thousands of times. If the nanotubes in a one-ounce cube were unraveled and placed side-to-side and end-to-end, they would carpet three football fields. The MCNT aerogels also are excellent conductors of electricity, making them ideal for sensing applications, such as sensing as little as 0.003527 ounce of a material resting in the palm of one hand, the report indicates.

via New ‘frozen smoke’ material: 1 ounce could carpet three football fields.

Sun’s Gravity Could Be Tapped to Call E.T.

Adam Hadhazy – Our own sun might represent the best communications device around, if only we could harness its power, scientists say.

If the sun’s gravity could be used to create a giant telescope, people could send and receive intensely magnified signals that could allow us to call an alien civilization, some researchers propose.

According to Einstein’s general relativity, the sun’s behemoth mass warps space-time around it, which actually bends light rays passing by like a giant lens. If a detector was placed at the right focal distance to collect the light, the resulting image would be extremely magnified.

The only catch is, the nearest focal point is about 550 times the distance between the Earth and the sun.

Nonetheless, eventually harnessing this power might enable Earth to view distant objects, communicate with interstellar probes, and even contact aliens, scientists say. The technique could be applied to optical light, or longer-wavelength light in the radio spectrum, for example.

Plus, an even stronger network could be created by placing relay spacecraft near other stars to form “radio bridges” across the great voids between stars that weaken and distort cosmic communiques.

“If we use the sun as a gravitational lens, then we can keep in touch with our own probes even at considerable interstellar distances,” said Claudio Maccone, technical director of the Paris-based International Academy of Astronautics, and author of a new study on the mechanics of the proposed technique.

“This is key to exploring the neighborhood of our galaxy in the centuries to come,” he said. …

via Sun’s Gravity Could Be Tapped to Call E.T. – Yahoo! News.

Rocky exoplanet milestone in hunt for Earth-like worlds

image: An artist’s conception shows how the star-facing side of Kepler 10b may look

Astronomers have discovered the smallest planet outside our Solar System, and the first that is undoubtedly rocky like Earth.

Measurements of unprecedented precision have shown that the planet, Kepler 10b, has a diameter 1.4 times that of Earth, and a mass 4.6 times higher.

However, because it orbits its host star so closely, the planet could not harbour life.

The discovery has been hailed as “among the most profound in human history”.

The result was announced at the 217th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, US, by Nasa’s Kepler team.

The Kepler space telescope, designed to look for the signs of far-flung planets, first spotted the planet 560 light years away, alongside hundreds of other candidate planets.

Kepler relies on the “transiting” technique, which looks for planets that pass between their host star and Earth.

A tiny fraction of the star’s light is blocked periodically, giving a hint that the star has a planet orbiting it.

The radius of the planet correlates to exactly how much light is blocked when it passes.

Follow-up measurements by a telescope at the Keck observatory in Hawaii confirmed the find of Kepler 10b by measuring how the planet pulls to and fro on its parent star as it orbits.

These measurements also bore out the fact that the parent star was about eight billion years old – a grandfather among stars of its type.

Crucially, this meant that the star was free of the optical and magnetic activity that have introduced some uncertainty into the measurements of previous candidates for rocky exoplanets, such as Corot-7b, announced in early 2009. …

via BBC News – Rocky exoplanet milestone in hunt for Earth-like worlds.

More than 100 dead birds found off Calif. highway

RANDI ROSSMANN – While scientists and specialists are investigating why massive numbers of birds have dropped dead from the sky elsewhere in the country, Sonoma County now has its own bird deaths mystery to solve, reported the CHP.

More than 100 birds were found dead Saturday afternoon clustered on the ground off of Highway 101, south of Geyserville, Officer Jon Sloat reported Monday.

Officers responded to Independence Lane at about 2:30 p.m. Saturday and found dozens of birds dead on and around the roadway.

The California Department of Fish and Game was notified and a local warden responded. He took several of the birds away to be identified and tested by a biologist, Sloat said.

The birds all appeared to be the same type, small with feathers in brown and black, according to photos taken by officers.

The birds hadn’t been shot and most were intact, officers reported.

What caused the deaths wasn’t clear Saturday.

Immediate attempts to reach Fish and Game were not successful.

One theory was that the birds were hit by a semi truck, but that was just speculation and perhaps unlikely given the large number of birds, officers reported.

Much larger cases of birds dying at the same time have occurred recently in Arkansas and Louisiana.

On New Year’s Eve as many as 5,000 red-winged blackbirds fell from the sky in Central Arkansas.

More recently, about 500 birds were found in Pointe Coupee Parish in Louisiana, about 300 miles from the Arkansas bird deaths.

Scientists and wildlife officials are attempting to determine what happened.

via SF Gate | More than 100 dead birds found off Calif. highway.

Oxygen depletion? Running into large invisible ships that are flying around undetected?

Study: If We’re Not Alone, We Should Fear the Aliens

When considering the prospect of alien life, humankind should prepare for the worst, according to a new study: Either we’re alone, or any aliens out there are acquisitive and resource-hungry, just like us.

These two unpalatable options are pretty much the only possibilities, according to the new study. That’s because evolution is predictable, and alien biospheres should thus produce intelligent creatures much like us, with technological prowess and an ever-increasing need for resources.

But the fact that we haven’t run across E.T. yet argues strongly for the latter possibility — that we are alone in the universe’s howling void, the study suggests.

“At present, as many have observed, it is very quiet out there,” study author Simon Conway Morris, of the University of Cambridge, told SPACE.com in an e-mail interview. “And given many planetary systems are billions of years older than ours, I’d expect us to be best grilled on toast back in the Cambrian.” …

Writing in the same issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, psychologist Albert Harrison predicts that the discovery of alien life — should it happen anytime soon — would be more likely to inspire delight than incite pandemonium here on Earth.

That’s partly because E.T. would probably seem pretty non-threatening, and fairly abstract, when we first discover it. The first evidence of alien life would likely be a microbe from Mars or other solar system body, or an electromagnetic signal snagged out of the air, according to Harrison.

“This is how we’re looking systematically for extraterrestrial life,” Harrison, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, told SPACE.com. “Because this is where we’re looking, this is where we’re likely to find it.”

Either way, such a discovery would be a far cry from “War of the Worlds”-style invading spaceships. There may be some ambiguity and uncertainty involved, especially with an electromagnetic signal, which could be tough to interpret. But that shouldn’t be a major problem, according to Harrison.

“There will be varied responses, but I think that on the whole we’ll take it well,” he said. “You have to remember, there are adaptive mechanisms that swing into play.”

And finding E.T. might not be a single, drama-packed event, he added. Rather, it could occur as most science does, with a lot of back-and-forth discussions and appraisals of the evidence.

“What I think could very well happen is that slowly, over time, different people start concluding that we’re not alone,” Harrison said. “Some people have already concluded it. It won’t necessarily have to be a big flashpoint, or like a bomb going off. It’ll be more and more people saying, ‘Gee, the evidence does show that they’re out there.’”

Preparing for 50 years

Another reason people would likely take the discovery of E.T. well, according to Harrison, is what has happened in the last 50 years. Advances in technology, spaceflight, space science and our understanding of the cosmos have prepared us for the possibility that we are not alone. [Top Spaceflight Stories of 2010]

“This creates the sense that anything could be possible,” Harrison said. “And it creates the perceptions, I think, that E.T. may be out there, and that we’ll eventually have the technological means to detect him.”

For his part, Harrison is more sanguine than Conway Morris about the possibility of E.T.’s existence. Aliens may well be hard to find in such a vast universe, especially since we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for.

“It’s that needle in a cosmic haystack,” Harrison said. “Maybe they’re just too far away, and we’ll never run into them. There are a lot of unknowns.”

And, though he doesn’t advocate letting our guard down, Harrison is not quite as worried about aliens’ possible malignant intentions as Conway Morris is. It’s not necessarily inevitable that alien civilizations advance to stages of interstellar imperialism, cruising the cosmos for resources, Harrison said.

Despite the atrocities leading the news every night, societies here on Earth seem to be trending more toward peaceful coexistence, Harrison said. And even if an alien civilization got greedy and imperialistic, there’s no guarantee it would be able to run roughshod over its neighbors.

“It’s possible to have very acquisitive civilizations out there,” Harrison said. “Maybe they get to a certain point, but they may collapse or be beaten back. No one civilization is necessarily going to take over, because there will be coalitions of other civilizations that will keep them in check.”

People around the world seem to share Harrison’s more positive outlook. In the new study, he cites one poll that found that 86 percent of Americans believe that aliens are more likely to be friendly than hostile.

Maybe most of us have a bead on aliens. Or maybe we’re just optimists — or suckers.

via Study: If We’re Not Alone, We Should Fear the Aliens | Space.com.

Swiss Village: Pay Up or We’ll Kill Your Dog

A Swiss village has found a drastic way to compel dog holders to pay their pet’s annual tax: cough up, or the dog gets it.

Reconvilier – population 2,245 humans, 280 dogs – plans to put Fido on notice if its owner doesn’t pay the annual $50 tax.

Local official Pierre-Alain Nemitz says the move is part of an effort to reclaim hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes.

He says a law from 1904 allows the village to kill dogs if its owner does not pay the canine charge.

Nemitz told the AP on Monday that authorities have received death threats since news of the plan got out.

“This isn’t about a mass execution of dogs,” Nemitz said. “It’s meant to put pressure on people who don’t cooperate.”

via Swiss Village: Pay Up or We’ll Kill Your Dog – CBS News.

Mind Games

… the people connecting on the call are self-described victims of mind control — people who believe they have been targeted by a secret government program that tracks them around the clock, using technology to probe and control their minds.

The callers frequently refer to themselves as TIs, which is short for Targeted Individuals, and talk about V2K — the official military abbreviation stands for “voice to skull” and denotes weapons that beam voices or sounds into the head. In their esoteric lexicon, “gang stalking” refers to the belief that they are being followed and harassed: by neighbors, strangers or colleagues who are agents for the government. …

Until recently, people who believe the government is beaming voices into their heads would have added social isolation to their catalogue of woes. But now, many have discovered hundreds, possibly thousands, of others just like them all over the world. Web sites dedicated to electronic harassment and gang stalking have popped up in India, China, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Russia and elsewhere. Victims have begun to host support meetings in major cities, including Washington. Favorite topics at the meetings include lessons on how to build shields (the proverbial tinfoil hats), media and PR training, and possible legal strategies for outlawing mind control.

The biggest hurdle for TIs is getting people to take their concerns seriously. A proposal made in 2001 by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) to ban “psychotronic weapons” (another common term for mind-control technology) was hailed by TIs as a great step forward. But the bill was widely derided by bloggers and columnists and quickly dropped.

… there are hints of ongoing research: An academic paper written for the Air Force in the mid-1990s mentions the idea of a weapon that would use sound waves to send words into a person’s head. “The signal can be a ‘message from God’ that can warn the enemy of impending doom, or encourage the enemy to surrender,” the author concluded.

In 2002, the Air Force Research Laboratory patented precisely such a technology: using microwaves to send words into someone’s head. That work is frequently cited on mind-control Web sites. Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the research laboratory’s directed energy directorate, declined to discuss that patent or current or related research in the field, citing the lab’s policy not to comment on its microwave work. …

The official U.S. Air Force position is that there are no non-thermal effects of microwaves. Yet Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, tagged microwave attacks against the human brain as part of future warfare in a 2001 presentation to the National Defense Industrial Association about “Future Strategic Issues.”

“That work is exceedingly sensitive” and unlikely to be reported in any unclassified documents, he says.

Meanwhile, the military’s use of weapons that employ electromagnetic radiation to create pain is well-known, as are some of the limitations of such weapons. In 2001, the Pentagon declassified one element of this research: the Active Denial System, a weapon that uses electromagnetic radiation to heat skin and create an intense burning sensation. So, yes, there is technology designed to beam painful invisible rays at humans, but the weapon seems to fall far short of what could account for many of the TIs’ symptoms. While its exact range is classified, Doug Beason, an expert in directed-energy weapons, puts it at about 700 meters, and the beam cannot penetrate a number of materials, such as aluminum. …

via Mind Games – washingtonpost.com.

New glass stronger and tougher than steel

Glass stronger and tougher than steel? A new type of damage-tolerant metallic glass, demonstrating a strength and toughness beyond that of any known material, has been developed and tested by a collaboration of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)and the California Institute of Technology. What’s more, even better versions of this new glass may be on the way.

“These results mark the first use of a new strategy for metallic glass fabrication and we believe we can use it to make glass that will be even stronger and more tough,” says Robert Ritchie, a materials scientist who led the Berkeley contribution to the research.

The new metallic glass is a microalloy featuring palladium, a metal with a high “bulk-to-shear” stiffness ratio that counteracts the intrinsic brittleness of glassy materials.

“Because of the high bulk-to-shear modulus ratio of palladium-containing material, the energy needed to form shear bands is much lower than the energy required to turn these shear bands into cracks,” Ritchie says. “The result is that glass undergoes extensive plasticity in response to stress, allowing it to bend rather than crack.”

Ritchie, who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and the University of California (UC) Berkeley’s Materials Science and Engineering Department, is one of the co-authors of a paper describing this research published in the journal Nature Materials. Co-authoring the Nature Materials paper were Marios Demetriou (who actually made the new glass), Maximilien Launey, Glenn Garrett, Joseph Schramm, Douglas Hofmann and William Johnson of Cal Tech, one of the pioneers in the field of metallic glass fabrication. …

via ScienceDaily | New glass stronger and tougher than steel.

Planck telescope observes cosmic giants

The Planck space telescope has identified some of the largest structures ever seen in the Universe.

These are clusters of galaxies that are gravitationally bound to each other and which measure tens of millions of light-years across.

Astronomers say the Planck observatory has made more than 20 detections that are brand new to science.

The European Space Agency telescope has also confirmed the existence of a further 169 galaxy clusters.

Follow-up studies have hinted at the great scale of these structures.

“The clusters contain up to a hundred galaxies, and each galaxy has a billion stars,” said Dr Nabila Aghanim of the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France.

The clusters, sighted in all directions, range out to about four billion light-years from Earth.

Astronomers are interested in such observations because they say something about the way the Universe is built on the grandest scales – how matter is organised into vast filaments and sheets and separated by great voids. …

via BBC News – Planck telescope observes cosmic giants.