Listening for Gravity Waves, Silence Becomes Meaningful

Photo: ARMED FOR DISCOVERY: At the LIGO site in Louisiana, a pair of four-kilometer-long arms [one of which stretches toward the top of this photograph] awaits the telltale elongation or compression of a passing gravity wave. A similar observatory in Washington State is also on the case. LIGO Scientific Collaboration

From Scientific American:

The ripples in spacetime predicted by general relativity remain one of the most sought-after prizes in physics, and new research narrows estimates of their prevalence.

Gravity waves spread through space and time like ripples on a pond, warping the fabric of the universe as they pass. The largest waves emanate from the most cataclysmic events in the universe: stellar explosions, mergers of black holes, and the violent first moments of cosmological history. Or so the venerable theory of general relativity goes—although many predictions of Albert Einstein's theory of gravity have been proved, only indirect evidence for gravity waves has been found.

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Why Teams In Red Win More

Competitors who wear red win more than those that are dressed in any other colour, according to a study in Germany. Photo: GETTY IMAGES

From The Telegraph:

Competitors who wear red win more than those that are dressed in any other colour, according to a study in Germany.

Researchers found that those who wear red tops, jackets or clothing score 10 per cent more in any competition than if they were in another colour.

Experts believe that red could make individuals and teams feel more confident as well as being perceived by others as more aggressive and dominant.

The findings could explain why Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal, have been so successful,. On the other hand, the results could suggest that the success of those teams has given those that wear the red colour more confidence.

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Google Book Search: Protecting Privacy As Rhe Library Moves Online

Google's ambition to create an uber-library on the Internet raises some concerns for privacy experts. (ABC News Photo Illustration)

From ABC News:

Google's Plan to Digitize Millions of Books Is Not Without Controversy.

Imagine having online access to virtually any book, at anytime, including millions of books no longer in print. Imagine being able to browse through this extraordinary collection of much of the world's knowledge, search for quotes and key passages, annotate pages with your own thoughts, and share the marked-up page with friends and colleagues.

Now imagine that this uber-library never closes; that it's always just one mouse-click away.

This isn't fiction, it is the ambitious vision of Google Book Search, an online service that stands to revolutionize the way people access and interact with books.

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US National Parks Face 'Greatest Threat', Senate Told

Views like this could be lost forever (Image: KPA/Zuma/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

US national parks could be changed so significantly by global warming that they will be lost forever, senators were warned this week.

"If we continue adding heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere in the way we now are, we could, for the first time, lose entire national parks," Stephen Saunders, president of the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, National Parks Subcommittee.

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Behind the Scenes With the World's Most Ambitious Rocket Makers

SpaceX propulsion chief Tom Mueller examines a spacecraft control thruster.

From Popular Mechanics:

An improbable partnership between an Internet mogul and an engineer could revolutionize the way NASA conducts missions—and, if these iconoclasts are successful, send paying customers into space

In late 2001, Tom Mueller was sacrificing his nights and weekends to build a liquid-fuel rocket engine in his garage.

Mueller, a propulsion engineer at Redondo Beach, Calif.–based aerospace firm TRW, felt like an “unwanted necessity” at his day job. His prolific ideas about engine design were lost at such a large, diverse company. To satisfy his creative impulses, he built his own engines, attached them to airframes and launched them in the Mojave Desert with fellow enthusiasts in the Reaction Research Society, America’s oldest amateur rocketry club. RRS members, many of them employees at aerospace firms, meet regularly in the Los Angeles area to build and launch the biggest and highest flying rockets they can—just as the group has done since it was founded in the early 1940s.

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Test for Nasa's New Rocket Motor

The motor will burn for a full two minutes.

From The BBC:

The first-stage rocket motor that US space agency (Nasa) hopes will launch astronauts in future undergoes its first full-scale test on Thursday.

The static firing will take place at a facility owned by manufacturer Alliant Techsystems Inc (ATK) in Utah.

The five-segment booster is intended to power the early flight phase of Nasa's Ares 1 rocket, the vehicle designed to loft its new Orion crew carrier.

The two-minute burn will give engineers valuable performance data.

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The Equilibrium Concept: A Car That Acts Like A Person

The Equilibrium Concept Car: Automotive designer Bob Romkes's vision for the Equilibrium concept is a car that uses artifical intelligence and other technologies to adapt to a driver's needs, and mimics the responses of a living being. Bob Romkes

From Popular Science:

You love your car, but would you want it to be more human? One designer thinks so.

Ask anyone who's ever talked back to their GPS navigation system: Product developers are pretty good at using technology to humanize inanimate objects. But how would you like it if your car responded to your presence -- lighting up with delight or panting like a pet dog? What if, more helpfully, it recognized your touch on the steering wheel, and queued up your favorite MP3s and set your seating position just the way you liked it? Creepy or no? Either way, that's the future envisioned in the Equilibrium (EQ), a concept car by Dutch designer Bob Romkes that uses artificial intelligence to simulate life and the personality of an individual. Imagine rows of faceless sedans parked at the mall suddenly springing to virtual life, each becoming a sort of Tamagotchi with a purpose.

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Rewriting General Relativity? Putting A New Model Of Quantum Gravity Under The Microscope

Scientists are trying to figure out to what extent a new theory of quantum gravity will reproduce general relativity -- the theory that currently explains, to very high accuracy, how masses curve spacetime and create the influence of gravity. (Credit: Image copyright American Physical Society / Illustration: Carin Cain)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2009) — Does an exciting but controversial new model of quantum gravity reproduce Einstein's theory of general relativity?

Scientists at Texas A&M University in the US explore this question in a paper appearing in Physical Review Letters and highlighted with a Viewpoint in the August 24th issue of Physics.

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Death Calculator Predicts Your Odds Of Kicking The Bucket

From Live Science:

A new web site claims to give the odds on you dying next year, or for whatever period you select, based on a few simple questions.

The site, DeathRiskRankings.com, is the brainchild of researchers and students at Carnegie Mellon University. It provides answers based on publicly available data from the United States and Europe, comparing mortality risks by gender, age, cause of death and geographic region. Put your info in, and it produces the probable causes of your demise and provides insight on the timing of that unfortunate event.

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GM Monkeys With DNA Of THREE Parents Raises Hope Of Eradicating Incurable Diseases

From The Daily Mail:

Scientists have produced four baby monkeys who each have three biological parents.

They used an IVF procedure designed to stop the spread of incurable inherited diseases.

Scientists believe the breakthrough could lead to the first genetically engineered children within a few years.

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Video: UAV In A Firefight Of A Different Kind

From Autopia:

Unmanned aerial aircraft see a lot of action on the battle front, but not all the battles are in Iraq or Afghanistan. Some firefights are waged on the home front.

Earlier this month in Alaska, a 40-pound Insitu Scan Eagle saw duty fighting wildfires after dense haze grounded conventional aircraft. The UAV is operated by the University of Alaska, which according to university officials is the first entity other than NASA or the Department of Homeland Security allowed to fly an unmanned aircraft beyond the line of sight in civil airspace.

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As Farmland Grows, The Trees Fight Back

A ripening barley field in Bourton on the Water in Gloucestershire, Britain
Tim Graham / Getty

From Time Magazine:

Farms vs. forests — that's the usual dynamic in tropical countries, where the growth of agriculture often comes at the expense of trees. In nations like Brazil and Indonesia — where deforestation is behind the vast majority of carbon emissions — rain forests are not just cut down for logging but also burned to make room for new farms and pastureland. As more people need more food — and biofuels as well — there's a risk that we could see many of our remaining virgin rain forests wiped out completely.

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Dying Languages Archived For Future Generations

Cambridge University

From The Telegraph:

A Cambridge University project to safeguard the world's 6,000 spoken languages has been launched after it emerged half could die out within a generation.

The World Oral Literature Project aims to help cultures under threat from globalisation create lasting records of their native languages.

Still in its inaugural year, the project led by Cambridge University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, has already handed out around 10 grants to tribes from Mongolia to Nigeria - and the researchers admitted traditional British languages such as Cornish and Gaelic are also at risk.

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SKorea Satellite Lost After Launch: Officials

The Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1 blasted off into space on Tuesday. Korea Aerospace Research Institute, via European Pressphoto Agency

From Breitbart/AFP:

A satellite launched by South Korea's first space rocket is thought to have burnt up in the Earth's atmosphere after missing its designated orbit, officials said Wednesday.

Seoul vowed to press on with its drive to become a space technology leader despite Tuesday's setback, caused by the defective operation of a fairing covering the satellite.

The science and technology ministry said one of the two aerodynamic fairings covering the rocket's tip failed to fall away, after opening in preparation for the satellite's release.

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Where Did You Get Those Lovely Spirals?

Mystery no more. Astronomers think they've figured out how spiral galaxies,
like the Milky Way, form. Credit: NASA/JPL

From Science Now:

Look at an image of the Milky Way galaxy, and you can't help but notice its exquisite spiral arms. For nearly 100 years, astronomers have tried to understand how the Milky Way and other spiral galaxies formed these dramatic patterns--and now they think they finally have the answer.

Current thinking about how spiral galaxies form traces back to an idea nearly 2 millennia old, to 2nd-century Egyptian mathematician Ptolemy. Trying to describe how the five planets in the night sky followed seemingly irregular paths, Ptolemy hit upon an idea he called epicycles.

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Lower-cost Solar Cells To Be Printed Like Newspaper, Painted On Rooftops

Researchers apply the nanoparticle “inks” as a spray on the solar cells.
(Credit: Image courtesy of University of Texas at Austin)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2009) — Solar cells could soon be produced more cheaply using nanoparticle “inks” that allow them to be printed like newspaper or painted onto the sides of buildings or rooftops to absorb electricity-producing sunlight.

Brian Korgel, a University of Texas at Austin chemical engineer, is hoping to cut costs to one-tenth of their current price by replacing the standard manufacturing process for solar cells – gas-phase deposition in a vacuum chamber, which requires high temperatures and is relatively expensive.

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Robotic Fish Could Patrol Waterways

Mechanical engineers Kamal Youcef-Toumi and Pablo Valdivia have designed the sleek robotic fish to more easily maneuver into areas where traditional underwater autonomous vehicles can’t go. Credit: Patrick Gillooly/MIT

From Live Science:

Schools of newly-designed robotic fish could one day patrol waterways, swimming around as fluidly as the real fish they're based on, looking for environmental pollutants and inspecting submerged structures, such as boats and oil pipelines.

Mechanical engineers Kamal Youcef-Toumi and Pablo Valdivia Y Alvarado designed the sleek robotic fish to more easily maneuver into areas where traditional underwater autonomous vehicles can't go.

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Islay To Be Entirely Powered By tides

Philip Maxwell, chairman of the Islay Energy Trust, by the Sound of Islay where the ScottishPower turbines will be sited. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Murdo MacLeod

From The Guardian:

Exclusive: ScottishPower is to build turbines in the Sound of Islay that will generate enough electricity for the island's 3,500 inhabitants – and its famous distilleries.

ScottishPower is planning a tidal energy project that will supply all the electricity for one of Scotland's most famous islands, the Guardian can reveal.

The company is close to signing a supply contract with Diageo, the drinks group, to provide electricity from the project to eight distilleries and maltings on Islay – including the makers of the renowned Laphroaig and Lagavulin whiskies.

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Fill Her Up! The World's Highest Garage Attendant Prepares Space Shuttle Discovery For Launch

Perched 153ft above the ground a Nasa technician prepares the liquid oxygen tank on the US space shuttle Discovery. Today's launch was scrubbed after a faulty fuel valve was detected

From The Daily Mail:

Next time you find yourself tapping your foot impatiently as you fill up your car with petrol spare a thought for Nasa engineers.

They have the task of filling the space shuttle Discovery's external fuel tank with nearly two million litres of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. The process takes the best part of a day and leaves Nasa with a hefty energy bill.

The liquid oxygen is stored in the top of the nose cone while the liquid hydrogen makes up the bottom half of the tank. They are fed through to the three main engines at an impressive speed, with oxygen pumping through at 80,000 litres a minute and hydrogen at 215,000litres a minute.

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Climate Tipping Point Defined For US Crop Yields

From The New Scientist:

While news reports and disaster movies remind us about tipping points for Arctic melt and sea level rise, some things closer to home get less attention. Take food supply: new modelling studies show that there are climate tipping points here too, beyond which crop yields will collapse.

Wolfram Schlenker at Columbia University, New York, and Michael Roberts at North Carolina State University in Raleigh used a high-resolution dataset of weather patterns from 1950 to 2005 to discover how yields of three key US crops would respond to increasing temperatures.

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