Monday 30 January 2012

Molecule in earth's atmosphere could "cool the planet"

Scientists have shown that a newly discovered molecule in Earth's atmosphere has the potential to play a significant role in off-setting global warming by cooling the planet.

In a breakthrough paper published in Science, researchers from The University of Manchester, The University of Bristol and Sandia National Laboratories report the potentially revolutionary effects of Criegee biradicals.

These invisible chemical intermediates are powerful oxidisers of pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, produced by combustion, and can naturally clean up the atmosphere.

Although these chemical intermediates were hypothesised in the 1950s, it is only now that they have been detected. Scientists now believe that, with further research, these species could play a major role in off-setting climate change.

The detection of the Criegee biradical and measurement of how fast it reacts was made possible by a unique apparatus, designed by Sandia researchers, that uses light from a third-generation synchrotron facility, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source.

The intense, tunable light from the synchrotron allowed researchers to discern the formation and removal of different isomeric species -- molecules that contain the same atoms but arranged in different combinations.

The researchers found that the Criegee biradicals react more rapidly than first thought and will accelerate the formation of sulphate and nitrate in the atmosphere. These compounds will lead to aerosol formation and ultimately to cloud formation with the potential to cool the planet.

The formation of Criegee biradicals was first postulated by Rudolf Criegee in the 1950s. However, despite their importance, it has not been possible to directly study these important species in the laboratory.

In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about 0.8 °C with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades.

Most countries have agreed that drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are required, and that future global warming should be limited to below 2.0 °C (3.6 °F).

Dr Carl Percival, Reader in Atmospheric Chemistry at The University of Manchester and one of the authors of the paper, believes there could be significant research possibilities arising from the discovery of the Criegee biradicals.

He said: "Criegee radicals have been impossible to measure until this work carried out at the Advanced Light Source. We have been able to quantify how fast Criegee radicals react for the first time.

"Our results will have a significant impact on our understanding of the oxidising capacity of the atmosphere and have wide ranging implications for pollution and climate change.

"The main source of these Criegee biradicals does not depend on sunlight and so these processes take place throughout the day and night."

Professor Dudley Shallcross, Professor in Atmospheric Chemistry at The University of Bristol, added: "A significant ingredient required for the production of these Criegee biradicals comes from chemicals released quite naturally by plants, so natural ecosystems could be playing a significant role in off-setting warming."


Saturday 28 January 2012

Electron's negativity cut in half by supercomputer

Simulations Slice Electron in Half -- A Physical Process That Cannot Be Done in Nature.

While physicists at the Large Hadron Collider smash together thousands of protons and other particles to see what matter is made of, they're never going to hurl electrons at each other. No matter how high the energy, the little negative particles won't break apart. But that doesn't mean they are indestructible.

Using several massive supercomputers, a team of physicists has split a simulated electron perfectly in half. The results, which were published in the Jan. 13 issue of Science, are another example of how tabletop experiments on ultra-cold atoms and other condensed-matter materials can provide clues about the behavior of fundamental particles.

In the simulations, Duke University physicist Matthew Hastings and his colleagues, Sergei Isakov of the University of Zurich and Roger Melko of the University of Waterloo in Canada, developed a virtual crystal. Under extremely low temperatures in the computer model, the crystal turned into a quantum fluid, an exotic state of matter where electrons begin to condense.

Many different types of materials, from superconductors to superfluids, can form as electrons condense and are chilled close to absolute zero, about -459 degrees Fahrenheit. That's approximately the temperature at which particles simply stop moving. It's also the temperature region where individual particles, such as electrons, can overcome their repulsion for each other and cooperate.

The cooperating particles' behavior eventually becomes indistinguishable from the actions of an individual. Hastings says the phenomenon is a lot like what happens with sound. A sound is made of sound waves. Each sound wave seems to be indivisible and to act a lot like a fundamental particle. But a sound wave is actually the collective motion of many atoms, he says.

Under ultra-cold conditions, electrons take on the same type of appearance. Their collective motion is just like the movement of an individual particle. But, unlike sound waves, cooperating electrons and other particles, called collective excitations or quasiparticles, can "do things that you wouldn't think possible," Hastings says.

The quasiparticles formed in this simulation show what happens if a fundamental particle were busted up, so an electron can't be physically smashed into anything smaller, but it can be broken up metaphorically, Hastings says.

He and his colleagues divided one up by placing a virtual particle with the fundamental charge of an electron into their simulated quantum fluid. Under the conditions, the particle fractured into two pieces, each of which took on one-half of the original's negative charge.

As the physicists continued to observe the new sub-particles and change the constraints of the simulated environment, they were also able to measure several universal numbers that characterize the motions of the electron fragments. The results provide scientists with information to look for signatures of electron pieces in other simulations, experiments and theoretical studies.

Successfully simulating an electron split also suggests that physicists don't necessarily have to smash matter open to see what's inside; instead, there could be other ways to coax a particle to reveal itself.

Thursday 26 January 2012

Mystery of source of supernova in nerby galaxy solved

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have solved a longstanding mystery of the type of star, or so-called progenitor, which caused a supernova seen in a nearby galaxy. The finding yields new observational data for pinpointing one of several scenarios that trigger such outbursts.

Based on previous observations from ground-based telescopes, astronomers knew that a kind of supernova called a Type Ia supernova created a remnant named SNR 0509-67.5, which lies 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy.

The type of system that leads to this kind of supernova explosion has long been a high importance problem with various proposed solutions but no decisive answer. All these solutions involve a white dwarf star that somehow increases in mass to the highest limit.

Astronomers failed to find any companion star near the center of the remnant, and this rules out all but one solution, so the only remaining possibility is that this one Type Ia supernova came from a pair of white dwarfs in close orbit.

"We know that Hubble has the sensitivity necessary to detect the faintest white dwarf remnants that could have caused such explosions," said lead investigator Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. "The logic here is the same as the famous quote from Sherlock Holmes: 'when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'"

The cause of SNR 0509-67.5 can be explained best by two tightly orbiting white dwarf stars spiraling closer and closer until they collided and exploded.

The results are being reported January 11 at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas. A paper on the results will be published in the Jan. 12 issue of the journal Nature.

For four decades, the search for Type Ia supernovae progenitors has been a key question in astrophysics. The problem has taken on special importance over the last decade with Type Ia supernovae being the premier tools for measuring the accelerating universe.

Type Ia supernovae are tremendous explosions of energy in which the light produced is often brighter than a whole galaxy of stars. The problem has been to identify the type of star system that pushes the white dwarf's mass over the edge and triggers this type of explosion. Many possibilities have been suggested, but most require that a companion star near the exploding white dwarf be left behind after the explosion.

Therefore, a possible way to distinguish between the various progenitor models has been to look deep in the center of an old supernova remnant to search for the ex-companion star.

In 2010, Schaefer and Ashley Pagnotta of LSU were preparing a proposal to look for any faint ex-companion stars in the center of four supernova remnants in the Large Magellanic Cloud when they discovered that the Hubble Space Telescope had already taken the desired image of one of their target remnants, SNR 0509-67.5, for the Hubble Heritage program, which collects images of especially photogenic astronomical targets.

In analyzing the central region, they found it to be completely empty of stars down to the limit of the faintest objects that Hubble can detect in the photos. Schaefer reports that the best explanation left is the so-called "double degenerate model" in which two white dwarfs collide.

There are no recorded observations of the star exploding. However, researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., have identified light from the supernova that was reflected off of interstellar dust, delaying its arrival at Earth by 400 years. This delay, called a light echo of the supernova explosion also allowed the astronomers to measure the spectral signature of the light from the explosion. By virtue of the color signature, astronomers were able to prove it was a Type Ia supernova.

Because the remnant appears as a nice symmetric shell or bubble, the geometric center can be accurately determined. These properties make SNR 0509-67.5 an ideal target to search for ex-companions. The young age also means that any surviving stars have not moved far from the site of the explosion.

The team plans to look at other supernova remnants in the Large Magellenic Cloud to further test their observations.

Monday 23 January 2012

30-story building built in 15 days



What can you accomplish in 360 hours?

The Chinese sustainable building company, Broad Group, has yet attempted another impossible feat, building a 30-story tall hotel prototype in 360 hours, after building a 15-story building in a week earlier in 2011.

You may ask why in a hurry, and is it safe? The statistics in the video can put you in good faith. Prefabricated modular buildings has many advantages over conventional buildings.

Higher precision in fabrication (+/- 0.2mm).
More coordinated on-site construction management.
Shorter construction time span.
Lower construction waste.
Also many other health and energy features are included in Broad Sustainable Buildings (BSB)

The building was built over last Christmas time and finished before New Years Eve of 2012.


An Introduction to BROAD SUSTAINABLE BUILDING CO., LTD Jan.11, 2012
Established in March, 2009, BROAD SUSTAINABLE BUILDING CO., LTD is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BROAD Group, solely operates the magnitude-9 earthquake resistant, 5x more energy efficient, 20x purer air, 90% factory-built, and 1% construction waste Broad Sustainable Buildings (BSB).

BSB headquarter and its R&D Center are situated in the Xiangyin County of Hunan Province in Southern China, with 80,000sqm workshops, 900 employees in 2011. In 2012 with 220,000sqm workshops, 12,000 employees, and in 2013 with 360,000sqm workshops and 19,000 employees, reaching an annual production and installation capacity of 10 million sqms. BSB's central goal is:

1. Improving R&D of BSB technologies, setting up supply chains
2. Sell BSBs in compliance with local regulations in the Hunan building market.
3. Transfer BSB technology to 100 partnership enterprise, every Chinese province and distributed evenly in each nation worldwide.

By December, 2011, BSB technology reached finalization, altogether with 12 BSBs built in Changsha, Xiangyin, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Mexico and developed 2 franchise partners in Ningxia and Fujian with identical factory sizes to the Xiangyin BSB Factory. Another 10 Chinese & international potential partners are in negotiation.

BROAD envisions in the near future, there will be one BSB among three buildings worldwide, allowing all men and women to share BSB's solace. Proving that by responsible use of technology, earth's environment and human living can be elevated simultaneously.

Saturday 21 January 2012

In a squeeze

Elements under pressure reveal secrets of extreme chemistry.

Bruce Banner isn’t the only scientist who could crush you with one mighty squeeze. These days, the Hulk’s superhuman strength is matched by researchers who squish all kinds of stuff in superscience experiments.

The goal isn’t to save the world from baddies, but to explore new frontiers in the nature of matter. After all, most material in the universe exists at bone-crushing pressures. Think massive stars and planetary cores — realms no comic book fan or other Earth dweller has ever seen.

Deep within the planet, rock experiences pressures more than 1 million times as great as the “1 atmosphere” that ordinary humans live under at sea level. Pressures at the centers of ultradense neutron stars are some trillion quadrillion times greater. Under such extreme conditions, atoms themselves begin to buckle.

To mimic these hellish realms, scientists are ramping up pressure in the lab, like the Hulk getting ever stronger as he gets madder. In the process, they’re squeezing out some surprising insights.

One team has found a new kind of iron oxide, a compound that somehow had never been seen before, even though it contains two of the most common elements in Earth’s crust. Another group argues that hydrogen’s odd behavior at high pressures means that the cores of giant gas planets, such as Jupiter, are eroding in a slow hydrogen drip. Meanwhile scientists at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, Calif., have squeezed diamond to record pressures, uncovering unexpected and exotic behaviors.

Chemistry, it seems, is a different beast under high pressure. “We’re developing a whole new paradigm for understanding the nature of matter,” says Russell Hemley, a chemist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

Hydrogen crush

The idea of squeezing materials to see what happens dates back at least to the 17th century, when British chemist Robert Boyle discovered that doubling the pressure on an ideal gas halved its volume. Around the same time, researchers at the Accademia del Cimento, a scientific society in Florence, Italy, were exploring whether liquids, too, could be compressed. The scientists filled a metal sphere with water and banged it with a hammer. Perhaps not surprisingly, the sphere leaked. But that experiment, Hemley says, set the stage for far more technologically adept investigations.

By the 20th century scientists knew that ordinary matter — be it solid, liquid or gas — behaves according to chemical rules laid out by its electrons, those negatively charged particles that buzz around atomic nuclei in well-defined regions known as orbitals. It turns out that squishing matter doesn’t just compress its atoms so that they stack closer together, like a pile of well-arranged oranges at a farmers market. Compression also radically alters electron orbitals, in different ways depending on their original shapes.

Suddenly electrons can zip around in places they haven’t been before, and the rules typically governing the periodic table of the elements go out the window.

Perhaps the poster child for odd behavior at high pressures is hydrogen, the most common element in the universe. As the simplest element, with just one proton in its nucleus and one orbiting electron, hydrogen seems like it should behave in a straightforward way. But recent experiments have shown that, like Bruce Banner, it suffers from multiple personalities.

Most intriguing, scientists say, is the fact that if you squeeze hydrogen hard enough, this flighty gas transforms into a dense fluid whose electrons move in an ill-defined sea, allowing it to conduct electricity and behave as a metal. Understanding how two atoms linked as a gaseous H2 molecule split and form single atoms flowing as a liquid could illuminate what happens to more complicated molecules under pressure, says physicist Alexander Goncharov of Carnegie. “Once we understand that simple system, others may become simpler,” he says.

Goncharov, Hemley and many other scientists probe hydrogen and other materials by crushing them between two small diamonds in a machine known as a diamond anvil cell. The pointy ends of the cut diamonds narrow to a tiny tip where, when squeezed together, the pressure soars. In a small dent where the diamonds meet, an injected sample can be compressed to unfathomably high pressures.

Using such a device, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, announced in Nature Materials in November that they had created metallic hydrogen at room temperature and pressures around 2.6 million times Earth’s atmosphere (SN: 12/17/11, p. 9). If confirmed, the discovery would fulfill a long-sought goal; scientists first predicted the existence of metallic hydrogen in 1935.

But some experts are withholding judgment on the new work. It’s one thing to squeeze materials at high pressures and see something unusual; it’s another to establish conclusively what that unusual observation means. Several researchers say they have data that contradict the metallic hydrogen claim, but they do not want to discuss their work in detail until it appears in peer-reviewed journals.

The Max Planck group, led by Mikhail Eremets, is involved in another high-pressure disagreement. In a paper appearing in Science in 2008, Eremets’ team, along with colleagues from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, reported that a mix of silicon and hydrogen became superconducting at high pressures. This compound, known as silane, is made of one silicon atom bonded with four hydrogen atoms. As an industrial compound, silane is used as a coating agent, a water repellent and in other applications. But mash it in a diamond anvil cell, and at around 960,000 atmospheres it starts allowing electrons to flow freely, the researchers reported.

Not so fast, other scientists said. One challenge with studying hydrogen is that at high enough pressures and temperatures, it starts reacting with just about everything around it — even elements that are usually chemically inert. Theorists led by Duck Young Kim, now at Carnegie, have reported that hydrogen may hook up with famously unreactive platinum at pressures around 210,000 atmospheres. At higher pressures, 700,000 atmospheres or above, this newborn platinum hydride may even start to superconduct, shuttling electrons without resistance, the scientists wrote in September in Physical Review Letters.

Such a mix of platinum and hydrogen could explain the superconductivity reported in silane, an international team argued in August in Physical Review B. The team’s calculations suggest that platinum hydride could form as the silane breaks apart into silicon and hydrogen — and that hydrogen reacts with platinum electrodes used in the experiment. One particular crystal form of platinum hydride, the scientists say, could explain the superconductivity supposedly observed.

Eremets’ team stands by its work, but the experience underscores how complicated high-pressure science can be.

Core compression

Despite the difficulties involved in working under extreme conditions in the lab, it is still the only way to figure out what’s happening in many places in the universe, including the ground under people’s feet. For geologists, high-pressure experimentation is about as close as they will ever get to a journey to the center of the Earth. And the latest high-pressure studies show how many surprises still lurk there.

Iron, for instance, is the fourth most abundant element in the Earth’s crust and makes up nearly all of the planet’s core. Yet researchers have only now discovered an entirely new iron compound; it contains four atoms of iron and five of oxygen and exists only at high pressure.

Barbara Lavina of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and colleagues synthesized this compound in a diamond anvil cell by smooshing a different compound made of iron, carbon and oxygen. The compound began to break apart, and at about 100,000 atmospheres and 1,800 kelvins (1,500˚ Celsius) a new type of crystal appeared.

Other iron oxides are common in nature, but this was the first time this particular chemical combination had been seen. “It was thrilling for me just to write the formula Fe4O5,” says Lavina, whose report appeared October 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Understanding the details of how iron and oxygen atoms bond with one another may also reveal key properties of the Earth’s innards, such as how heat flows within the planet. One mineral crucial to revealing these details is wüstite, or FeO. Independent teams at the University of Chicago and Osaka University in Japan recently squeezed wüstite and found that it conducts electricity at pressures and temperatures similar to those found in the planet’s outer core and lower mantle, the layer just above the core.

Pockets rich in wüstite may exist at the core-mantle boundary, where the mineral may transfer heat from the core into more shallow depths, says Chicago’s Rebecca Fischer. Metallic FeO could also help explain why oxygen dissolves in metal more readily at high pressures, such as in the planet’s core, Fischer’s team reports in an upcoming Geophysical Research Letters.

The world of high-pressure discovery also extends well beyond Earth — to other planets in the solar system, and on to other planetary systems. In particular, the cores of gas giant planets are “the least accessible but in many ways the most important objects in the solar system,” says Hugh Wilson, a planetary chemist at the University of California, Berkeley. The very existence of the cores allowed Jupiter and Saturn to coalesce around them; the gravitational pull of the completed gas giants then helped dictate how the rest of the solar system grew.

Yet scientists don’t know much about how the giant planet cores formed. In principle, they were born as bits of rock and ice swirling around the newborn sun began to glom together, becoming big enough to start attracting hydrogen and helium gas to make up the rest of the planet. Today researchers don’t agree on how big the cores are, much less the conditions that exist inside them.

One new idea, born from some high-pressure theoretical calculations involving hydrogen, even suggests that giant planet cores are slowly dissolving away. Over time, watery ice in Jupiter’s core dissolves in the hydrogen-rich material swirling above so that the core shrinks, Wilson and Burkhard Militzer, also of Berkeley, write in an upcoming Astrophysical Journal. “What’s going on inside Jupiter is more complicated and less homogeneous than had been taken into account in previous models,” Wilson says.

The work may even shed light on planets in other solar systems, which astronomers have glimpsed only indirectly so far. Many known exoplanets are more massive than Jupiter, and so they are also hotter inside. Cores of these exoplanets would have started eroding away even faster than Jupiter’s, Wilson says. As a result, elements may have leached from the core and become well-mixed in the gassy atmosphere. One day, if astronomers on Earth can get a detailed picture of an exoplanet’s atmosphere from afar, they may need to account for such internal chemical mixing in order to properly understand what they’re seeing.

The squeeze machine

In perhaps the ultimate test of high-pressure science, researchers are gearing up to squeeze things at the world’s most powerful laser machine. The three-football-field-long National Ignition Facility will focus 192 laser beams on a single tiny target. The eventual goal is to fuse the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, thus harnessing in the lab what the sun and billions of other stars do daily.

But for now, as NIF ramps up toward full power, other scientists are taking advantage of early, prefusion tests to see what happens to materials put in the path of the beams. “NIF is uniquely capable of trying to explore this realm of compression science,” says Jon Eggert, a material scientist at the lab.

This spring, NIF scientists squished diamond in the facility’s laser beams to pressures up to a crushing 50 million atmospheres — more than double the previous record set using a different compression technique by the OMEGA laser at the University of Rochester. So far, Eggert and his colleagues have seen stress patterns appear in diamond crystals that no one has seen before. The researchers have also put tantalum into the machine and spotted what may be a new transition between crystal forms at around 3.4 million atmospheres.

Later this year, the NIF team plans to squeeze materials at 100 million atmospheres. In theory, NIF could approach or exceed the pressure required to seriously disrupt the shell structure of atoms, called the atomic unit of pressure. That would come at around 300 million atmospheres, Eggert says, and would bring with it breakthrough insights into how matter behaves under such conditions. But it’s still not clear, he says, whether the geometry of how the laser beams come together will allow the team to achieve the atomic unit of pressure.

No matter how high the NIF manages to go, Hemley says, it and the other experiments will continue to uncover new surprises. “Exploring these simple planetary materials under extreme conditions is really deepening our understanding of chemistry,” he says. “A lot of what we thought we knew is wrong.”

Thursday 19 January 2012

Researchers create a wire four atoms wide, one atom tall

The smallest wires ever developed in silicon -- just one atom tall and four atoms wide -- have been shown by a team of researchers from the University of New South Wales, Melbourne University and Purdue University to have the same current-carrying capability as copper wires.

Experiments and atom-by-atom supercomputer models of the wires have found that the wires maintain a low capacity for resistance despite being more than 20 times thinner than conventional copper wires in microprocessors.

The discovery, which was published in this week's journal Science, has several implications, including:

For engineers it could provide a roadmap to future nanoscale computational devices where atomic sizes are at the end of Moore's law. The theory shows that a single dense row of phosphorus atoms embedded in silicon will be the ultimate limit of downscaling.
For computer scientists, it places donor-atom based silicon quantum computing closer to realization.
And for physicists, the results show that Ohm's Law, which demonstrates the relationship between electrical current, resistance and voltage, continues to apply all the way down to an atomic-scale wire.

Bent Weber, the paper's lead author and a graduate student in the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales, was thrilled with the finding.

"It's extraordinary to show that Ohm's Law, such a basic law, still holds even when constructing a wire from the fundamental building blocks of nature -- atoms," he says.

The innovation of the Australian group was to build the circuits up atom by atom, instead of the current method of building microprocessors, in which material is stripped away, says Gerhard Klimeck, a Purdue professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology.

"Typically we chip or etch material away, which can be very expensive, difficult and inaccurate," Klimeck says. "Once you get to 20 atoms wide you have atomic flucuations that make scaling difficult. But this experimental group built devices by placing atomically thin layers of phosphorus in silicon and found that with densely doped phosphorus wires just four atoms wide it acts like a wire that conducts just as well as metal."

The goal of the research is to develop future quantum computers in which single atoms are used for the computation, says Michelle Simmons, director of the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales and the project's principal investigator.

"We are on the threshold of making transistors out of individual atoms," Simmons says. "But to build a practical quantum computer we have recognized that the interconnecting wiring and circuitry also needs to shrink to the atomic scale."

Hoon Ryu, a Purdue graduate who is now a senior researcher with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology's Supercomputing Center, said the practicality of the research is exciting.

"The metallic wire is in principle quite difficult to be scaled into one- to two-nanometer pitch, but in both experimental and modeling views, the research result is quite remarkable," Ryu says. "For the first time, this demonstrates the possibility that densely doping wire is a viable alternative for the next-gerenation, ultra-scale metallic interconnect in silicon chips."

To assist the Australian researchers, Klimeck's research team ran hundreds of simulations to study the variability of these nanoscale structures.

"Having the throughput capability for a highly scalable code is important for doing that, and we have that capability here at Purdue with http://nanoHUB.org/
 
," Klimeck says. "We ran hundreds of cases to understand the potential landscape of these devices, so this was computationally intensive work."

Klimeck says that in addition to the project's scientific and engineering implications, he found the collaboration the most rewarding aspect.

"It is an exciting collaboration," he says. "We were doing simulations of experimental work, which was based on a theoretical model. So we were bringing the three legs of modern science together in one project. Plus, our graduate students are able to stay in contact and work with each other despite working in various locations around the world. It's hard to think of a better example of how science is done today."

Tuesday 17 January 2012

Now you see it, now you don't: researchers cloak a moment in time

Think Harry Potter movie magic: Cornell researchers have demonstrated a "temporal cloak" -- albeit on a very small scale -- in the transport of information by a beam of light.

The trick is to create a gap in the beam of light, have the hidden event occur as the gap goes by and then stitch the beam back together. Alexander Gaeta, Cornell professor of applied and engineering physics, and colleagues report their work entitled "Demonstration of temporal cloaking," in the journal Nature (Jan. 5, 2012.)

The researchers created what they call a time lens, which can manipulate and focus signals in time, analogous to the way a glass lens focuses light in space. They use a technique called four-wave mixing, in which two beams of light, a "signal" and a "pump," are sent together through an optical fiber. The two beams interact and change the wavelength of the signal. To begin creating a time gap, the researchers first bump the wavelength of the signal up, then by flipping the wavelength of the pump beam, bump it down.

The beam then passes through another, very long, stretch of optical fiber. Light passing through a transparent material is slowed down just a bit, and how much it is slowed varies with the wavelength. So the lower wavelength pulls ahead of the higher, leaving a gap, like the hare pulling ahead of the tortoise. During the gap the experimenters introduced a brief flash of light at a still higher wavelength that would cause a glitch in the beam coming out the other end.

Then the split beam passes through more optical fiber with a different composition, engineered to slow lower wavelengths more than higher. The higher wavelength signal now catches up with the lower, closing the gap. The hare is plodding through mud, but the tortoise is good at that and catches up. Finally, another four-wave mixer brings both parts back to the original wavelength, and the beam emerges with no trace that there ever was a gap, and no evidence of the intruding signal.

None of this will let you steal the crown jewels without anyone noticing. The gap created in the experiment was 15 picoseconds long, and might be increased up to 10 nanoseconds, Gaeta said. But the technique could have applications in fiber-optic data transmission and data processing, he added. For example, it might allow inserting an emergency signal without interrupting the main data stream, or multitasking operations in a photonic computer, where light beams on a chip replace wires.

The experiment was inspired by a theoretical proposal for a space-time cloak or "history editor" published by Martin McCall, professor of physics at Imperial College in London, in the Journal of Optics in November 2010. "But his method required an optical response from a material that does not exist. Now we've done it in one spatial dimension. Extending it to two [that is, hiding a moment in an entire scene] is not out of the realm of possibility. All advances have to start from somewhere," Gaeta says.

Sunday 15 January 2012

Hybrid silkworms spin stronger spider silk

Research was published this week showing that silk produced by transgenically engineered silkworms in the laboratory of Malcolm Fraser Jr., professor of biological sciences at University of Notre Dame, exhibits the highly sought-after strength and elasticity of spider silk. This stronger silk could possibly be used to make sutures, artificial limbs and parachutes.

The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and highlighted for their breakthrough in the long search for silk with such mechanical properties. The manuscript was published after an in-depth peer review process, and was deemed by the publishers as a newsworthy article of the issue in which it appears, further indicating its relative importance to science and technology.

"It's something nobody has done before," Fraser says. The project, which used Fraser's piggyBac vectors to create transgenic silkworms with both silkworm and spider silk proteins, was a collaboration of his laboratory with Donald Jarvis and Randolph Lewis at the University of Wyoming. Jarvis' lab made the transgene plasmids, while Fraser's lab made the transgenic silkworms and Lewis' lab analyzed the fiber from the silkworms. Results showed that the fibers were tougher than typical silkworm silk and as tough as dragline silk fibers produced by spiders, demonstrating that silkworms can be engineered to produce such improved fibers.

Commercial production of spider silk from spiders is impractical because spiders are too cannibalistic and territorial for farming. Researchers have experimented with producing the stronger material in other organisms, including bacteria, insects, mammals and plants, but those proteins require mechanical spinning -- a task the silkworms perform naturally. The stronger fiber could find application in sutures, where some natural silkworm silk is used, as well as wound dressings, artificial ligaments, tendons, tissue scaffolds, microcapsules, cosmetics and textiles.

This work is the culmination of a research effort begun more than 10 years ago with an internal award from Notre Dame to Fraser to develop silkworm transgenics capabilities; a two-year NIH R21 grant awarded to Jarvis, Lewis and Fraser; and several years of supplemental funding from Kraig BioCraft Laboratories. The success of this research would have been impossible without the ability to carry out silkworm transgenesis, mastered by Bong-hee Sohn and Young-soo Kim in the Fraser lab at Notre Dame.

Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc., with Fraser, Lewis and Jarvis on its scientific board, is currently evaluating several business opportunities for this first generation fiber for both textile and non-textile use. The researchers ultimately expect to improve on the first-generation product to make even stronger fibers.

Friday 13 January 2012

Clearest picture yet of dark matter points the way to better understanding of dark energy

Two teams of physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have independently made the largest direct measurements of the invisible scaffolding of the universe, building maps of dark matter using new methods that, in turn, will remove key hurdles for understanding dark energy with ground-based telescopes.

The teams' measurements look for tiny distortions in the images of distant galaxies, called "cosmic shear," caused by the gravitational influence of massive, invisible dark matter structures in the foreground. Accurately mapping out these dark-matter structures and their evolution over time is likely to be the most sensitive of the few tools available to physicists in their ongoing effort to understand the mysterious space-stretching effects of dark energy.

Both teams depended upon extensive databases of cosmic images collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which were compiled in large part with the help of Berkeley Lab and Fermilab.

"These results are very encouraging for future large sky surveys. The images produced lead to a picture that sees many more galaxies in the universe and sees those that are six time fainter, or further back in time, than is available from single images," says Huan Lin, a Fermilab physicist and member of the SDSS and the Dark Energy Survey (DES) .

Melanie Simet, a member of the SDSS collaboration from the University of Chicago, will outline the new techniques for improving maps of cosmic shear and explain how these techniques can expand the reach of upcoming international sky survey experiments during a talk at 2 p.m. CST on January 9, at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) conference in Austin, Texas. In her talk she will demonstrate a unique way to analyze dark matter's distortion of galaxies to get a better picture of the universe's past.

Eric Huff, an SDSS member from Berkeley Lab and the University of California at Berkeley, will present a poster describing the full cosmic shear measurement, including the new constraints on dark energy on January 12 at the AAS conference.

Several large astronomical surveys, such as the Dark Energy Survey, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, and the HyperSuprimeCam survey, will try to measure cosmic shear in the coming years. Weak lensing distortions are so subtle, however, that the same atmospheric effects that cause stars to twinkle at night pose a formidable challenge for cosmic shear measurements. Until now, no ground-based cosmic-shear measurement has been able to completely and provably separate weak lensing effects from the atmospheric distortions.

"The community has been building towards cosmic shear measurements for a number of years now," says Huff, an astronomer at Berkeley Lab, "but there's also been some skepticism as to whether they can be done accurately enough to constrain dark energy. Showing that we can achieve the required accuracy with these pathfinding studies is important for the next generation of large surveys."

To construct dark matter maps, the Berkeley Lab and Fermilab teams used images of galaxies collected between 2000 and 2009 by SDSS surveys I and II, using the Sloan Telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Berkeley Lab also used updated calibrations from SDSS III, which continues today. The galaxies lie within a continuous ribbon of sky known as SDSS Stripe 82, lying along the celestial equator and encompassing 275 square degrees. The galaxy images were captured in multiple passes over many years.

The two teams layered snapshots of a given area taken at different times, a process called coaddition, to remove errors caused by the atmospheric effects and to enhance very faint signals coming from distant parts of the universe. The teams used different techniques to model and control for the atmospheric variations and to measure the lensing signal, and have performed an exhaustive series of tests to prove that these models work.

Gravity tends to pull matter together into dense concentrations, but dark energy acts as a repulsive force that slows down the collapse. Thus the clumpiness of the dark matter maps provides a measurement of the amount of dark energy in the universe.

When they compared their final results before the AAS meeting, both teams found somewhat less structure than would have been expected from other measurements such as the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), but, says Berkeley Lab's Huff, "the results are not yet different enough from previous experiments to ring any alarm bells."

Meanwhile, says Fermilab's Lin, "Our image-correction processes should prove a valuable tool for the next generation of weak-lensing surveys."

Wednesday 11 January 2012

The art of molecular carpet-weaving

Stable two-dimensional networks of organic molecules are important components in various nanotechnology processes. However, producing these networks, which are only one atom thick, in high quality and with the greatest possible stability currently still poses a great challenge. Scientists from the Excellence Cluster Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM) have now successfully created just such networks made of boron acid molecules. The current issue of the scientific journal ACSnano reports on their results.

Even the costliest oriental carpets have small mistakes. It is said that pious carpet-weavers deliberately include tiny mistakes in their fine carpets, because only God has the right to be immaculate. Molecular carpets, as the nanotechnology industry would like to have them are as yet in no danger of offending the gods. A team of physicists headed by Dr. Markus Lackinger from the Technische Universität München (TUM) und Professor Thomas Bein from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Univers
ität München (LMU) has now developed a process by which they can build up high-quality polymer networks using boron acid components.

The "carpets" that the physicists are working on in their laboratory in the Deutsches Museum München consist of ordered two-dimensional structures created by self-organized boron acid molecules on a graphite surface. By eliminating water, the molecules bond together in a one-atom thick network held together solely by chemical bonds -- a fact that makes this network very stable. The regular honey-comb-like arrangement of the molecules results in a nano-structured surface whose pores can be used, for instance, as stable forms for the production of metal nano-particles.

The molecular carpets also come in nearly perfect models; however, these are not very stable, unfortunately. In these models the bonds between the molecules are very weak -- for instance hydrogen bridge bonds or van der Waals forces. The advantage of this variant is that faults in the regular structure are repaired during the self-organization process -- bad bonds are dissolved so that proper bonds can form.

However, many applications call for molecular networks that are mechanically, thermally and/or chemically stable. Linking the molecules by means of strong chemical bonds can create such durable molecule carpets. The down side is that the unavoidable weaving mistakes can no longer be corrected due to the great bonding strength.

Markus Lackinger and his colleagues have now found a way to create a molecular carpet with stable covalent bonds without significant weaving mistakes. The method is based on a bonding reaction that creates a molecular carpet out of individual boron acid molecules. It is a condensation reaction in which water molecules are released. If bonding takes place at temperatures of a little over 100°C with only a small amount of water present, mistakes can be corrected during weaving. The result is the sought after magic carpet: molecules in a stable and well-ordered

Monday 9 January 2012

New particle at large hadron collider discovered by atlas experiment

Researchers from the University of Birmingham and Lancaster University, analysing data taken by the ATLAS experiment, have been at the centre of what is believed to be the first clear observation of a new particle at the Large Hadron Collider.

The particle, the chi b(3P), is a new way of combining a beauty quark and its antiquark so that they bind together. Like the more famous Higgs particle, the chi b(3P) is a boson. However, whereas the Higgs is not made up of smaller particles, the chi b(3P) combines two very heavy objects via the same 'strong force' which holds the atomic nucleus together.

Andy Chisholm, a PhD student from the University of Birmingham who worked on the analysis said: 'Analysing the billions of particle collisions at the LHC is fascinating. There are potentially all kinds of interesting things buried in the data, and we were lucky to look in the right place at the right time.'

'The chi b(3P) is a particle that was predicted by many theorists, but was not observed at previous experiments, such as in my previous work on the D-Zero experiment in Chicago,' continued Dr James Walder, a Lancaster research associate who worked on the analysis.

Dr Miriam Watson, a research fellow working in the Birmingham group observed: 'The lighter partners of the chi b(3P) were observed around twenty five years ago. Our new measurements are a great way to test theoretical calculations of the forces that act on fundamental particles, and will move us a step closer to understanding how the universe is held together.'

Professor Roger Jones, Head of the Lancaster ATLAS group said: 'While people are rightly interested in the Higgs boson, which we believe gives particles their mass and may have started to reveal itself, a lot of the mass of everyday objects comes from the strong interaction we are investigating using the chi b.'

Saturday 7 January 2012

First ever direct measurement of earth's rotation

A group with researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) are the first to plot changes in Earth's axis through laboratory measurements. To do this, they constructed the world's most stable ring laser in an underground lab and used it to determine changes in Earth's rotation. Previously, scientists were only able to track shifts in the polar axis indirectly by monitoring fixed objects in space. Capturing the tilt of Earth's axis and its rotational velocity is crucial for precise positional information on Earth -- and thus for the accurate functioning of modern navigation systems, for instance.

The scientists' work has been recognized an Exceptional Research Spotlight by the American Physical Society.

Planet Earth wobbles. Like a spinning top touched in mid-spin, its rotational axis fluctuates in relation to space. This is partly caused by gravitation from the sun and the moon. At the same time, Earth's rotational axis constantly changes relative to Earth's surface. On the one hand, this is caused by variation in atmospheric pressure, ocean loading and wind. These elements combine in an effect known as the Chandler wobble to create polar motion. Named after the scientist who discovered it, this phenomenon has a period of around 435 days. On the other hand, an event known as the "annual wobble" causes the rotational axis to move over a period of a year. This is due to Earth's elliptical orbit around the sun. These two effects cause Earth's axis to migrate irregularly along a circular path with a radius of up to six meters.

Capturing these movements is crucial to create a reliable coordinate system that can feed navigation systems or project trajectory paths in space travel. "Locating a point to the exact centimeter for global positioning is an extremely dynamic process -- after all, at our latitude, we are moving at around 350 meters to the east per second," explains Prof. Karl Ulrich Schreiber who directed the project in TUM's Research Section Satellite Geodesy. The orientation of Earth's axis relative to space and its rotational velocity are currently established in a complicated process that involves 30 radio telescopes around the globe. Every Monday and Thursday, eight to twelve of these telescopes alternately measure the direction between Earth and specific quasars. Scientists assume that these galaxy nuclei never change their position and can therefore be used as reference points. The geodetic observatory Wettzell, which is run by TUM and Germany's Federal Agency for Cartography (BKG), is also part of this process.

In the mid-1990s, scientists of TUM and BKG joined forces with researchers at New Zealand's University of Canterbury to develop a simpler method that would be capable of continuously tracking the Chandler wobble and annual wobble. "We also wanted to develop an alternative that would enable us to eliminate any systematic errors," continues Schreiber. "After all, there was always a possibility that the reference points in space were not actually stationary." The scientists had the idea of building a ring laser similar to ones used in aircraft guidance systems -- only millions of times more exact. "At the time, we were almost laughed off. Hardly anyone thought that our project was feasible," says Schreiber.

Yet at the end of the 1990s, work on the world's most stable ring laser got underway at the Wettzell observatory. The installation comprises two counter-rotating laser beams that travel around a square path with mirrors in the corners, which form a closed beam path (hence the name ring laser). When the assembly rotates, the co-rotating light has farther to travel than the counter-rotating light. The beams adjust their wavelengths, causing the optical frequency to change. The scientists can use this difference to calculate the rotational velocity the instrumentation experiences. In Wettzell, it is Earth that rotates, not the ring laser. To ensure that only Earth's rotation influences the laser beams, the four-by-four-meter assembly is anchored in a solid concrete pillar, which extends six meters down into the solid rock of Earth's crust.

Earth's rotation affects light in different ways, depending on the laser's location. "If we were at one of the poles, the Earth and the laser's rotational axes would be in complete synch and their rotational velocity would map 1:1," details Schreiber. "At the equator, however, the light beam wouldn't even notice that the Earth is turning." The scientists therefore have to factor in the position of the Wettzell laser at the 49th degree of latitude. Any change in Earth's rotational axis is reflected in the indicators for rotational velocity. The light's behavior therefore reveals shifts in Earth's axis.

"The principle is simple," adds Schreiber. "The biggest challenge was ensuring that the laser remains stable enough for us to measure the weak geophysical signal without interference -- especially over a period of several months." In other words, the scientists had to eliminate any changes in frequency that do not come from Earth's rotation. These include environmental factors such as atmospheric pressure and temperature. They relied predominantly on a ceramic glass plate and a pressurized cabin to achieve this. The researchers mounted the ring laser on a nine-ton Zerodur base plate, also using Zerodur for the supporting beams. They chose Zerodur as it is extremely resistant to changes in temperature. The installation is housed in a pressurized cabin, which registers changes in atmospheric pressure and temperature (12 degrees) and automatically compensates for these. The scientists sunk the lab five meters below ground level to keep these kinds of ambient influences to a minimum. It is insulated from above with layers of Styrodur and clay, and topped by a four-meter high mound of Earth. Scientists have to pass through a twenty-meter tunnel with five cold storage doors and a lock to get to the laser.

Under these conditions, the researchers have succeeded in corroborating the Chandler and annual wobble measurements based on the data captured by radio telescopes. They now aim to make the apparatus more accurate, enabling them to determine changes in Earth's rotational axis over a single day. The scientists also plan to make the ring laser capable of continuous operation so that it can run for a period of years without any deviations. "In simple terms," concludes Schreiber, "in future, we want to be able to just pop down into the basement and find out how fast the Earth is accurately turning right now."

Thursday 5 January 2012

Ten epochal inventions in 2011

Drugs that prevent HIV transmission are highest scientific progress in 2011, according to a list of the famous magazine "Science". Each year the magazine makes "top ten" list, and all scientists aspire to be on it.

1. PROTECTION AGAINST HIV

The first place is actually the work of an international study conducted on 1763 respondents, showed that, using new therapies in the early stages, almost completely prevents the transmission of virus from seropositive to their healthy partners.

This study, initiated 30 years after the AIDS epidemic emerged in the world, described as the biggest breakthrough so far in preventing this disease. Because antiretroviral drugs work almost like a condom - prevent the healthy heterosexual partners of infection in 96 percent of cases.

The study, called HPTN 052 was started in 2007. years among couples where one partner is infected. The participants were people from Botswana, Brazil, India, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Thailand, USA and Zimbabwe. In "Sajensovom" commentary says that the tests have "a profound impact on the future response to the AIDS epidemic." For the HIV infection per year worldwide 33 million people, and since it was only in 2009. year 1.8 million people died. Assessed and the results of the HPTN 052 study increases the hope that the AIDS epidemic to be stopped at least in the States, if not worldwide.

In addition to the antiviral therapy, the list of the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued "Sajens" there were nine other scientific discoveries that are, in their court, marked the 2011th year.

 2. EPIC MISSION

JAPANESE spacecraft "Hayabusa" managed to return to Earth after a three-year mission, with many ups and downs. On the way back to burn over Australia, but somehow managed to land the. This is the first mission is to bring an asteroid material for analysis. It is the asteroid Itokava, from which the dust particles flown. The results showed that asteroids change color of the solar wind.

 3. AFRICAN ANCESTORS

Among the ten most important discoveries have been included DNA analysis of distant human ancestors. After studying from 2010. year, which showed that Europeans and Asians are inherited from two to six percent of Neanderthal DNA, a new analysis confirms that the development of the cave man's influence on the immune system of people nowadays. Discovery remains of Australopithecus sedibe in South Africa opened the question of whether he was perhaps the ancestor of our "homo" species.

 4.  PLANT ENERGY

Japanese researchers have discovered two photosynthetic protein fotosistem using plants to split water into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. It is precisely this could lead to major progress in the use of clean energy.

5. BIG BANG

Astronomers have discovered an ancient form of hydrogen that existed in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. U.S. astronomers have found two hydrogen clouds that are over two billion years to preserve its original composition from the period just after the Big Bang.

Another team of astronomers found the star, which in itself contains almost no metal, as were the earliest stars of the universe. This suggests that parts of the universe still survive despite the "cosmic violence."

6. BACTERIA CHOOSE

Scientists have managed to discover the unusual features of microbes that "live" in the human stomach. Some of them prefer high protein diet, while others feels good vegetarian food.

7. DRUG AGAINST MALARIA 

Its place on the list of the most significant discoveries found in the world's first malaria vaccine RTS, S, which is still under investigation. First results of clinical studies show that this vaccine managed to almost halve the risk of illness in African children.

 8. SPACE WANDERS

Are also pointed out an unusual discovery in the depths of space, including a system of six large planets orbiting stars called Kepler 11, 2000 light years away from Earth. On that list was the discovery of the giant gaseous bodies that are moving in the opposite direction from the stars of "parents". One of the unusual discovery was the existence of ten planets which move in orbits around stars nonexistent. And there is one planet that makes circles around the two stars.

9. NEW ZEOLITES

INDUSTRIAL chemists have created several new types of artificial zeolite, which can save a lot of money and offers new possibilities in the Gas and oil industry. Valuable material for the purification of air and water, as in the process of cleaning detergents for washing clothes.

10. AGING CELL

Removing old cells that could help improving the quality of life, according to research conducted by scientists in lab mice. They discovered that if you eliminate old cells from the body, we can postpone the creation of cataracts, and muscle weakness.

Tuesday 3 January 2012

Why does the universe exist?

"Our present theory can be closer to the beginning of the so-called Planck time (10-43 or 10 to the minus 43 seconds). If it developed that will enable a breakthrough in this interval, it will bring us closer to answering the question - why is there a universe?

A likely and will allow us to look inside the "black hole".Will the universe end up in the "great frost" or "great survavanju"

Why is the universe, in general, there?
The question that people have always asked and which is still in the domain of religion and philosophy is whether the existence of the universe needs a coincidence or purpose. The great English philosopher Karl Popper concluded that something may be considered if there is a scientific way to prove that this is not true, it is not the case here. If you would from a scientifically based theory emerged necessity of the universe or the irrelevance of the need for it, this problem would be a completely different significance.
Our present theory can be closer to the beginning of the so-called Planck time (10 to minus 43 seconds). If it developed that will enable a breakthrough in this interval, it will bring us closer to answering the question - why is there a universe? A likely and will allow us to look inside the "black hole".


What is known for, and what is still beyond the reach of our knowledge?
Einstein's theory of relativity has enabled a completely new approach to cosmology and the universe as a whole has been the subject of science. On the basis of Einstein's equations, Alexander Friedmann in 1922. showed that the universe must be expanding and that, depending on the medium weight in it, this expansion to continue indefinitely, or will he begin to summarize to the start. Edwin Hubble in 1929, observing distant galaxies, confirmed that in the midst of a huge explosion and that the galaxies which are still rapidly moving away from us. Many did not accept that the universe is expanding. Sneering speaking of such a model, the great astronomer Fred Hoyle was asked: Is all this became like a "big bang", which is accepted as the origins of the name.
In the forties of last century was George Gamow, analyzing the model, concluded that the chemical composition of the universe, which contains about 90 percent hydrogen, can not provide current thermonuclear processes in stellar interior and this is confirmation that the temperature and density of the universe at the time of creation chemical elements during the so-called primordial nucleosynthesis, were such that the speed and number of photons in heavier nuclei broke faster than it created, and when that period ended on hydrogen remains the dominant chemical element.
Gamow was also predicted that the hydrogen in the universe cools, when the temperature drops to the point of neutralization, should go from neutral to ionized state. At this point, changing the conditions of light and the universe was opaque becomes transparent. Since this is happening amidst a tremendous release of energy, the son of the first traces of light which should exist today. He concluded that if the theory of "Big Bang" is correct, from all directions should come background radiation temperature which is estimated at a few Kelvin. This is George Gamow, in poperovskom sense, given the opportunity to prove that the theory is false, if this radiation does not exist. It was discovered by Arno and Robert Wilson Penzijas 1965th year, for which they received the Nobel Prize 1974th
Despite the enormous progress of astronomy, there are mysteries of the universe outside the scope of scientific knowledge. Apart from the reasons for its existence, for now the red line represents the so-called Planck time from the beginning of time is expressed with up to 10 ^ -43 seconds, in which science taps into the darkness.Tell us, briefly, what it looks like: what is, what it consists of, how far reaching?
When we talk about scale, it should be noted that this is the one observable. The largest telescopes allow astronomers to see galaxies that are 10 to 13 billion light years distant. But since the 13.7 billion years of its existence, the universe expanded, the diameter of opservabilnog is 2x13, 7 than about 46 billion years. Astronomers call this boundary particle horizon. Behind it cosmic inflation could happen in many places, creating a new universe inaccessible to us.
Alan Gut and Andrei Linde in 1981. this mechanism worked out a scenario that most cosmologists now considered most likely. According to him, our very small and dense universe is 10-35 seconds after the beginning entered a phase of exponential inflation, when the tiny fraction of a second razduvao to scale much larger than the observable universe. So she became completely flat and, despite all the powerful tools, not a sign of its curvature is still observed.
We now know only four percent of matter in the universe, the one visible, consisting of about 90 percent hydrogen, 10 percent helium and about one percent of other chemical elements. The rest is 73 per cent of the mysterious dark energy and 23 percent of the mysterious dark matter.


Does not sound that almost metaphysical created almost from nothing (ex nihilo)? May one such interpretation be considered credible?
What was once considered the "nothing" for a complete blank space - a vacuum, now has a completely different meaning. It has its own internal energy, which can be "family" particle and antiparticle, and during his childhood was far greater. In addition, some cosmological theories predict the existence of multiverse universe in which constantly come and go. For example, string theory proposes that moving the Dirichlet brane (the membrane) devetodimenzionalnom different dimensions in space, and one of them is our three-dimensional universe.


If a rapidly expanding, you can predict his ultimate destiny? Why the laws of physics finally exclude any condition?
If our universe look like a car, then it expands under the action of two causes. The force of gravity is the brake trying to slow him down and stop, and the dark energy of the gas pedal which tends to accelerate it. What will be its ultimate fate depends on, for now, unknown nature of dark energy. If she acts like a cosmological constant envisioned by Einstein - does not change with time, the fate of his nothingness. He will be influenced by razduvavati until ice and endless emptiness. Such a scenario astronomers call the "big freeze" or "heat death of the universe."
On the other hand, if the properties of dark energy changes over time, and is expanding its power is diluted and weak, the force of gravity will eventually determine the final fate of the universe. If she prevails, there will be a "big survavanja", a kind of inverted "Big Bang".


What it is "wicked forces" to all the slaughters? Will, after all, be dissolved in the tiniest bits of the component?
So it would come if the dark energy, as an internal vacuum energy, to be able to be received with the expansion of the universe, since it will zoom in and I vacuum. Then it would indeed become the "devil's power". How to be armed, seemed to slaughters galaxies, planets and, ultimately, atoms. For twenty billion years the universe would turn into a tremendously rare "soup of elementary particles."


Why do some cosmologists and astrophysicists invoke Einstein's constant, although he denied it quickly?
At a time when Albert Einstein worked on the theory of relativity, it was thought that the universe is infinite and uniformly filled with stars, that has always existed and that over eons of past and future did not change or will change. It seemed common sense, and he felt that its expansion or contraction, which follows from the equation, a gap that needs to be removed, and introduced the cosmological constant to balance. When Hubble discovered that galaxies are moving away, Einstein said that it was his biggest mistake.
However, 1998. the Sol Perlmutter, Brian Smith and Adam Rice discovered that our universe is not only begun, under the influence of gravity to slow the spread, but the five billion years ago and began to accelerate, for which the 2011th won the Nobel Prize. To describe the dark energy that accelerates the universe, which is analogous to a member of the cosmological constant was back in the equation, but with another meaning. For Einstein, it played a role in some types of energy inherent in space, which has spread to his razređivala. It was constant, and gave her name. Now add the member depends on the nature of dark energy: that it be increased with the expansion of the universe, diluted or remains constant.


For the mysterious particles that scientists reach out to clarify the origin of mass, if - as the senses - the search for Higsovim awry boson?
It is generally considered that the mass properties belonging essential nature of particles, but rather the theory suggests that it is a secondary property that arises from their interaction with the vacuum. He is not completely empty but contains Higsovo field that they, like the viscous environment, slow motion, and apparently gives them mass. But this theoretical assumption requires the existence of new particles holder of this field, Higsovog boson, which has yet to receive experimental confirmation. This is the missing piece fundamental theory of matter "standard model". Large Collider will certainly offer us something new. Or Higgs boson or other new exotic particles, may be carriers of previously unknown interactions and new physical phenomena.As explained by the "heart of darkness" of the entire cosmos - elusive dark matter and dark energy unfathomable?
Dark matter may be composed of a series of unknown particles, which may interact with new powers and a whole new universe are intertwined with ours. Among the major candidates are the hypothetical heavy particles VIMP, which is an abbreviation of the English title "weak interreagujuće massive particles." Are invisible and have virtually no impact on the ordinary particles. There are other candidate - neutralino, stable particles whose mass is several hundred times larger than protons or light particles, called axioms.
And for dark energy, except for vacuum energy, there are other exotic candidates. Among them, the particles in the form of string theory, which predicts this theory.


For reasons which are avoided, even condemned in advance, any attempt to thinking of events that preceded the "big bang"?
Sentences can only apply to non-scientific approaches. "Big Bang" is just the beginning stages of expanding our universe, and not the creation time. Cosmologists today are trying to peek in the time before the "Big Bang" and trying to come up where they might find its traces. Famous mathematicians Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadjan published in 2010. article which claimed that the data on background radiation from satellite vmap find concentric circles that are interpreted as a consequence of gravitational waves from the period before the "Big Bang", produced by fusion of giant "black holes". The work is subjected to criticism and doubts, but he attracted attention. And if it turns out that their conclusions are wrong, point out the way in how to look for irregularities background radiation scars of past eons.
Race to "peeped" behind the "Big Bang" began. It is therefore eagerly await the considered data from a European satellite Planck, launched the 2009th cosmic and new missions, which were obtained by increasing data accuracy and, perhaps, can provide a view behind the "Big Bang".Some people, from time to time, dared to study Einstein brought under suspicion.  


Do you believe that it is possible to speed exceeds the speed of light?
Dario Autijero associates caught in flagranti 23rd September 2011. neutrino that are moving faster than the speed of light permitted, the excess is impossible to ever accurately proveravanoj Einstein's theory of relativity. It is likely that sooner or later find it was a mistake. Especially as one of the fathers of neutrino astronomy, Košiba, grabbed neutrino simultaneously with photons, which are reported occurrence of Supernova 1987A, which means that they walked at a speed that allowed Einstein.  


What if the result is correct?
Neutrinos, which have exceeded the speed of the much higher energy. This may be a window to a new breakthrough in high energy physics, one step closer to a single theory of everything. Those who deal with strings believe that this result, if true, may be evidence of the existence of multiple dimensions. Namely, assume that there is a fourth type of neutrino can pass into another dimension and gets a short cut, it would appear that we exceeded the speed of light.
Dario Autijero suggested that the astronomers confirm or disprove this result. Most energetic explosions in the universe are gamma bursts, which in our group for astrophysical spectroscopy involved Port Č. Popovic and Sasa Simic. This energy is much larger than the neutrino-offenders and if they move even slightly higher speed of light from distant galaxies to thousands of years before arriving gamma glare. If you are detected simultaneously in Autijerovom experiment there is a serious problem.
So, the scientists greater than light speed is not a question of belief, but the experiment, theoretical considerations and modeling. Remember tahiona, hypothetical particles faster than light.


With what a picture of reality will face when the man looked to be in the remaining dimensions?
Other dimensions of string theory predicts, according to which there are nine spatial and one temporal dimension, and to eliminate some problems and added the eleventh. According to this theory, subatomic particles such as electrons and protons are open strings so I can not leave our universe. Just a hypothetical particle can. For example graviton, the owner or agent of the force of gravity. For instruments that we use, made of particles that are related to our three dimensions, others are invisible. For now we can only imagine if one day they will be achieved through the use graviton instruments or other exotic particles and allow us a whole new picture of reality.


Is the universe began with four or more dimensions?
Of course it depends on the theory, what we take to start and I think that the multiverse, the observable universe and our dam in string theory. An additional problem is that our theory only to reach the Planck time, and how many dimensions it has in it beyond our means.
It is interesting that there are assumptions that are in the beginning were only two spatial dimensions. But the best is that the two scientists proposed a method on how to test and that one of them, Dejan Stojkovic, from the University of Buffalo, and other Jonas Murejka from Los Angeles. They showed that, if the earliest start of only two spatial dimensions, appeared primordial gravitational waves before they disappeared, but left no traces. Is the universe at an early age had three, four, or eleven dimensions, according to string theory, for now an open question.


How far is thought by coming into the cosmic future?
The best opportunities for contemplative journey into the future cosmic further provides a model in which the universe is infinitely expanding. Fred Adams, who has ancestors among the Serbs, and Gregory Laflin, developed in 1997. The future of this fantastic universe to 10,100 years ago and described in his book. L. Kraus and R. Scherer in 2007. and 2008. went further: they presented what will take place in the universe, depending on whether protons decay, or remain stable. In the first case went up to 10,793 years ago when going to fall apart last pozitronijumi and remain a tremendously rare photons. If protons are stable, the evolution of the universe to both write "the end of cosmology and the return of a static universe," will last until 1056 years. Then the universe will be empty except for a few stray particles of iron dust, indestructible rest of the world that we knew.


Is there the slightest hope for survival of life in the final comprehensive wasteland cosmic "dark ages"?
Hope should never give up. Desolation "dark age" provides opportunities that are not in the script "survavanja large" or "large laceration." See how mankind has progressed during the cosmic scale is negligible. Before the eons reason to prepare for such conditions. If successful in the boundless desert to create yourself a little paradise, the danger of sudden destruction, such as gamma flashes or explosion of a nearby supernova, it will disappear.


Why is the universe, exactly, these qualities that led to the emergence of life?


Indeed, many of the constants in our universe seems to have been set by us, if only differed slightly, there would be. More George Gamow has shown that if the speed of light was higher, the faster the stars spent their energies and shorter lived. Taking into account that our sun should almost five billion years to develop the system in his mind, it is clear that the stars far short of our lives would not be. If, however, the speed of light was smaller, all processes in the order they proceeded slowly, so it would explode as a supernova, and new and so rasejavale through space life-giving chemical elements formed in the thermonuclear reactions in their bosom, such as calcium, phosphorus and carbon in our bodies - and we also would not be.
Other basic physical constants and the relative strength of the four fundamental forces are so finely tuned that even quite small changes have a major impact on the structure and chemistry of the universe and opportunities for the emergence and survival. Some wonder whether this is accidental. They find that all tricksy that we created, and it called anthropic principle.
But we exist because the universe as it is, otherwise there would be or other, or he would be no life. If we want to avoid such conclusions are that God created the universe for us and realized that the incredibly unlikely, it is reasonable to assume that the dice thrown several times.Is our universe just a little island in the multiverse gigantic, infinitely vast and varied?
The question on many worlds, raised more than Anaksimandera, now sets the new Copernican scientific manner and style of our relative position and role in the multiverse, reducing our entire universe to a trivial bubble in an infinite cosmic foam, which, unlike the others, It just came from a myriad of combinations of conditions that allowed our origins.


Will we one day civilization advanced enough to be able to make a new universe?
Legend of Soviet astronomy Kardašov Nikolai, now director of the Institute for Radio Astronomy in America, in his famous paper presented at a scientific congress of alien civilizations, divided them into three types. Type 1 controls the energy planet, Type 2 exploits the power of its sun, explore the planetary system and establishing colonies on planets around neighboring stars. Type 3 control the entire galaxy of space-time continuum and managed. Will there be a need to introduce civilization and type 4, which controls the universe and is able to create new, for now the thing of science fiction.