Friday 26 December 2014

Elon Musk's Hyperloop Could Be Just 10 Years Away

Ilona Mask vision about revolutionary, low-cost and very fast way of travel called "Hipetlup" could become a reality for ten years.

Ilon Mask "Hipelup" presented to the public in August 2013, but even then he said he was too busy to implementing the project of transport of people using the system of tubes and capsules that traveled through them at high speeds.

- If this was on top of my priority list, I probably would have finished it a year or two - said then Mask, adding that the project provides insight so others can improve it and build on their ideas.


Startup company "Hyperloop Transportation Technologies" (HTT) aims to make that, which published a document of 76 pages about their plans. HTT plans to pipe networks through which ranged hypervelocity capsules with passengers making around the world, and the technology that would allow the time for which the car takes six hours shortened to just 35 minutes.

Currently working on the project "more than a hundred great people who work without pay in exchange for shares in the company." As stated, many of them have their own jobs and businesses, but HTT-to devote dozens of hours a week.

- There are people from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Dartmouth, UCLA, and many have experience in top collectives such as Boeing, Airbus, NASA, SpaceX, Yahoo, Cisco ... - writes the documentation.
 


First would be working network in the US, which should be linked to all major US cities, and then make the project moved to Europe, Africa and Asia. HTT has announced that for the project need between seven and 19 billion dollars, and CEO Dirk Alborn said that it is so broad assessment required due to unforeseen material prices and costs for a period of ten years.

HTT operates under the company's fundraising JumpStartFund, whose Alborn president, and apparently there are already many donors and investors who want to invest money. Alborn acknowledged that the ten-year plan may be ambitious, because they did not take into account the regulation of the legal framework and the "political problems".

- We want to be transparent. For us, the first goal is to build "Hiperlup", we want to see in the United States, and if it made more sense to do it in another territory, it will be so. The goal is to build it. The second goal is to make it cost effective. We have an idea that there are luxury capsules, but the economy class travel cost 20-30 US dollars. Ideally, the ordinary fare would be free, and paid to the commercials - says Alborn.


Mask said that it was necessary for the system between six and eight billion dollars and four years of work for the model for demonstration. According maskov project, "Hiperlup" to passengers transported in capsules of aluminum, which would be "fired" through wind tunnel using a magnet and large fan.

Capsules should floated nearly supersonic speeds from point A to point B on the airbag, which would eliminate friction - like turn on the table for air hockey. The capsules would be maintained pressure, and under this project, the travelers during the trip would feel slightly stronger force, as during take-off or landing, or ride in an amusement park.

- While not invent the right beam, which would really be cool, the only way for super-fast journey is through a pipe in which there were special conditions - said then Mask.
 
 

Wednesday 3 December 2014

Fractional Distillation Of Air

Did you know that the air we breathe isn’t just oxygen, infact it’s made up of a number of different gases such as nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon, neon and many others. Each of these gases carry useful properties so separating them from the air around us is extremely beneficial.

The process is called fractional distillation and consists of two steps, the first relies on cooling the air to a very low temperature (i.e. converting it into a liquid), the second involves heating it up thus allowing each gas within the mixture to evaporate at its own boiling point. The key to success here is that every element within air has its own unique boiling temperature. As long as we know these boiling temperatures we know when to collect each gas.

So what are the real world benefits of separating and extracting these gases? Well liquid oxygen is used to power rockets, oxygen gas is used in breathing apparatus, nitrogen is used to make fertilizers, the nitric acid component of nitrogen is used in explosives.

The other gases all have their own uses too, for example argon is used to fill up the empty space in most light bulbs (thanks to its unreactive nature). Carbon dioxide is used in fire extinguishers and is great for putting out fires in burning liquids and electrical fires. There really are too many uses to list but suffice it to say that fractional distillation is an extremely useful process for humans the world over.

Monday 1 December 2014

History Made as 90,000 Earthlings Send Messages to Mars


There’s really a more productive way to spend Black Friday instead of going berserk and storming the stores. A really huge crowd of 90,000 people capable of invading every bigger mall during the yesterday’s run-and-buy frenzy, has made history sending greetings to our reddish neighboring planet. “Today uwingu.com sent almost 90,000 messages to Mars—first time people’s names & messages sent to Mars by radio!” the Uwingu company which crowd funds space projects, said on Twitter. It was a global shout-out event to mark the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Mariner 4 - the first mission to Mars.

Sunday 23 November 2014

Astronomers Observe a Spooky Alignment of Quasars


New observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have revealed alignments over the largest structures ever discovered in the Universe. A European research team has found that the rotation axes of the central supermassive black holes in a sample of quasars are parallel to each other over distances of billions of light-years. The team has also found that the rotation axes of these quasars tend to be aligned with the vast structures in the cosmic web in which they reside. A team led by Damien Hutsemékers from the University of Liège in Belgium used the FORS instrument on the VLT to study 93 quasars that were known to form huge groupings spread over billions of light-years, seen at a time when the Universe was about one third of its current age. "Alignments between galaxy axes and large-scale structures are expected in theories of structures and galaxy formation. The alignments between quasar axes and large-scale structures are found on much larger scales so that it is a bit mysterious and a challenge for the theory," Hutsemékers told astrowatch.net. The research was presented in a paper entitled “Alignment of quasar polarizations with large-scale structures“, by Damien Hutsemékers et al., to appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on 19 November 2014.

Thursday 6 November 2014

New theory says that death does not exist!

does not exist
Many of us fear death. We believe in it because we were told that we will die.

People associated with the bodies, and as we know, the body dies. However, new scientific theory holds that death is not the final event, says Robert Lanza, an expert in advanced cell technology on his blog.

One well-known aspect of quantum physics is that certain observations can not be predicted absolutely. Instead, there are a number of possible observations, each with a different probability.

One frequent explanation, interpretation of the "many worlds", argues that each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (multiverse).

A new scientific theory called biocentrism bit cleared these ideas. There are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen, it happens in them. Death does not exist in the real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in them.

Although our bodies are destined to be destroyed, the sense of life - "Who am I?" Is actually a fountain of energy of 20 watts, which controls the brain. However, this energy does not disappear after death. One of the most reliable axioms of science is that energy never dies - it can neither be created nor destroyed.


Whether this energy is transferred from one world to another?

Judging by biocentrism, space and time are not the hard objects the way you think. If you wave your hand through the air - if you remove everything, what's left? It's nothing.

The same thing can be applied to time. We can not see anything through the bone that surrounds your brain. Everything we see and feel is currently the vortex of information that is going on in our head. Space and time are only tools used to make everything connect.

Death does not exist in a timeless and spaceless world.

At the very end, even Albert Einstein admitted, "My old friend has left this strange world in front of me. It does not mean anything. People like us know that the distinction between past, present and future only stubbornly persistent illusion. "

Immortality does not mean continuous existence in time without end, it is situated outside of time.

Sunday 2 November 2014

Astronomers Find Planet-forming Lifeline in a Young, Low-mass Binary Star System


Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered a streamer of gas flowing from a massive outer disc toward the inner reaches of a young, low-mass binary star system GG Tau-A. The never-before-seen feature may be responsible for sustaining a second, smaller disc of planet-forming material that otherwise would have disappeared long ago. “We have demonstrated that the inner disks can be replenished with fresh material and are thereby potential sites of planet formation,” Emmanuel Di Folco, co-author of the study from the Laboratory of Astrophysics of Bordeaux, France told astrowatch.net. Our finding with ALMA is that there is a large amount of cold material that flows into the cavity (from the outer ring) towards the inner disk(s) and stars. The infalling material can nurture the inner disk(s) and extend their lifetime on timescales long enough to sustain planet formation therein.” The researchers detailed their findings in a paper to be published in the journal Nature on Oct. 30, 2014.

Sunday 26 October 2014

Astronomers Find Two Families of Comets Around Beta Pictoris


A French team of astronomers has discovered that two families of exocomets orbit the nearby star Beta Pictoris. The researchers used the HARPS instrument at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile to make the most complete census of comets around another star ever created. "The expansive statistics of the comets that we observed with HARPS and the high quality of the instrument allowed us to distinguish two groups of detections," Flavien Kiefer of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, lead author of the new study told astrowatch.net. "We found that these two groups were physically different and thus composed distinct families." The research was presented in a paper entitled "Two families of exocomets in the Beta Pictoris system" which is published in the journal Nature on Oct. 23.

Sunday 19 October 2014

Hidden Star Formation Found in a Protocluster


Astronomers have used the APEX telescope to probe a huge galaxy cluster that is forming in the early Universe and revealed that much of the star formation taking place is not only hidden by dust, but also occurring in unexpected places. The Spiderweb Galaxy (formally known as MRC 1138-262) and its surroundings have been studied for twenty years, using ESO and other telescopes, and is thought to be one of the best examples of a protocluster in the process of assembly, more than ten billion years ago. This is the first time that a full census of the star formation in such an object has been possible. "To obtain a full census requires a lot of observing time at a broad range of telescopes using different techniques. As the observing time is very expensive and hard to obtain, this can only be done in a few very carefully selected regions, such as the proto-cluster surrounding the Spiderweb Galaxy," Carlos De Breuck, APEX project scientist at ESO, and a co-author of the new study told astrowatch.net.

Sunday 12 October 2014

Dark Matter Half What We Thought, Scientists Say


A new measurement of dark matter in the Milky Way has revealed there is half as much of the mysterious substance as previously thought. Australian astronomers used a method developed almost 100 years ago to discover that the weight of dark matter in our own galaxy is 800 billion times the mass of the Sun. They probed the edge of the Milky Way, looking closely, for the first time, at the fringes of the galaxy about 5 million trillion kilometres from Earth. Astrophysicist Dr Prajwal Kafle, from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said we have known for a while that most of the Universe is hidden. “Stars, dust, you and me, all the things that we see, only make up about 4 per cent of the entire Universe,” he said. “About 25 per cent is dark matter and the rest is dark energy.”

Sunday 5 October 2014

Polish Astronomers Discover Young Stellar Bridge in the Magellanic Clouds


Polish astronomers from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) have discovered a young stellar bridge, that forms a continuous connection between the Magellanic Clouds. This finding is based on number density maps for stellar populations found in data gathered by OGLE. This is the most extensive optical survey of this region up to date. “We find that the young population is present mainly in the western half of the Magellanic Bridge area (MBR), which, together with the newly discovered young population in the eastern Bridge, form a continuous stream of stars connecting both galaxies along,” the researchers write in a paper published on Oct. 1. “The young population distribution is clumped, with one of the major densities close to the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and the other, fairly isolated and located approximately midway between the Clouds, which we call the OGLE island.” The Magellanic Clouds comprise of two galaxies: the Large (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud and are the closest to the Milky Way pair of interacting galaxies. The Clouds have always been of special interest to astronomers and they continue to play a significant role in our understanding of the Universe.

Sunday 28 September 2014

The Legacy of Science


Since the dawn of time, man has interacted with the environment. Observation without interaction is and always was a logical impossibility. Questions ensue; answers have not always been forthcoming, although they do emerge through incremental shifts and the occasional bout of sudden inspiration. Scientists and researchers look for answers every day. It is the very pervading core and definition of our vocation; much like that of a Philosopher. We pursue an almost primal need to understand the universe and thereby make people’s lives easier.

Friday 26 September 2014

Put away the rattle of weapons in outer space!

NASA wants to be independent from the Russian Soyuz rocket. It is to be expected, says Judith Hartl. Political conflict in Ukraine, just accelerate the adoption of such a decision.

The announcement did not come suddenly. It was clear that the American space agency NASA has to announced a new space flights. Because it is obvious that there is gap since Shuttle flights are suspended 2011. As time went on, the astronauts to get to space station ISS, there are still only a Russian Soyuz rocket.

Dependable powerful device, which almost never failed. Technical difficulties, unlike the vulnerable and changing American shuttles, almost none. While it may be narrow and uncomfortable, the Soyuz is valid for the safest taxi in space. However, for each flight, NASA astronaut on had to set aside $ 50 million.

It was therefore a matter of days will appear more modern and more spacious alternative. In the middle of 2012, the head of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Jan Verner said he could not imagine that the private rocket company SpaceX and Boeing - which until now exclusively used for the transport of food to the ISS - rearrange the spacecraft.


Strained relationship

The political relationship between the United States and Russia in 2012 was harmonious cooperation in space was narrow, collegial and friendly. If that were so, and more, Americans would no doubt give themself more time, until they start making spacecraft.

But times have changed dramatically. Because of the crisis in Ukraine, the tone between the United States and Russia became rougher. Unfortunately, in the universe. Therefore, the announcement of the American NASA, again wants to fly with their rockets, should be seen in a political context.
 


Already in April, NASA was almost entirely cut off cooperation with Russia, in addition to the international space station. Now that private companies should help to get NASA out of the impasse. Technically they can do it, there is no doubt. SpaceX and Boeing have already been successfully transported to space things. In the meantime, many NASA engineers working for the two companies. But I happen to have some things that attract the attention of:

In late August, in Texas during testing exploded a rocket. After the accident, the CEO of SpaceX wrote on Twitter that the rockets are too complicated. And they are. To drive people into space, they have to be very, very safe. This takes time and NASA must provide it to companies. Testing must be continued without haste. For the life of astronauts should not be questioned because of the current political strife and vanity.


Responsible would have to ask themselves how far they want to go with the escalation of the conflict and the rattle of weapons. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, advised the United States to send astronauts to ISS with trampoline. On the other hand, the head of NASA believes that the world's leading nation in space exploration should not be dependent on any other country. But now it is. As well as Russia. One nation in the future will not be able to explore the universe itself. The best proof of this was the great work together Europeans, Russians and Americans on the international space station ISS. And to Mars can only join forces to arrive. And with all due respect: the best astronauts are also cosmonauts.  

Sunday 7 September 2014

Researcher Advances a New Model for Dark Matter

Orange waves and blue rays represent the effect of quantum evaporation. Credit: University of Kansas / KU News Service
Astrophysicists believe that about 80 percent of the substance of our universe is made up of mysterious “dark matter” that can’t be perceived by human senses or scientific instruments. “Dark matter has not yet been detected in a lab. We infer about it from astronomical observations,” said Mikhail Medvedev, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, who has just published breakthrough research on dark matter that merited the cover of Physical Review Letters, the world’s most prestigious journal of physics research. Medvedev proposes a novel model of dark matter, dubbed “flavor-mixed multicomponent dark matter.” “Dark matter is some unknown matter, most likely a new elementary particle or particles beyond the Standard Model,” Medvedev said. “It has never been observed directly, but it reveals itself via gravity it produces in the universe. There are numerous experiments around the world aimed at finding it directly.”

Friday 5 September 2014

You spend 40 minutes every day blind

It's not that your eyes aren't working. Your mind is actually blocking images all the time, and refusing to process them. Whenever your eyes move, your brain doesn't process what would normally be very dizzying blurry images coming from the retina. To fill in the gaps of time, your brain creates an illusion for a fraction of a second to keep us from noticing. This is called "Saccadic masking" and it keeps us from experiencing motion blur.

Your brain replaces the blurry images with static images of your next object of focus. Whatever you look at after moving your eyes appears to stay still for a long period of time, because it is actually the same image stretched for a longer period of time to cover up the blur. This is called the "stopped-clock illusion", when the first second on a clock after you turn to look at it appears to take longer than all the other seconds.

Sunday 31 August 2014

Do We Live in a 2-D Hologram? New Fermilab Experiment Will Test the Nature of the Universe

Fermilab scientist Aaron Chou, left, project manager for the Holometer experiment, and Vanderbilt University graduate student Brittany Kamai peer into the device that will test whether the universe is a 2-D hologram. Credit: Fermilab.

A unique experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory called the Holometer has started collecting data that will answer some mind-bending questions about our universe – including whether we live in a hologram. Much like characters on a television show would not know that their seemingly 3-D world exists only on a 2-D screen, we could be clueless that our 3-D space is just an illusion. The information about everything in our universe could actually be encoded in tiny packets in two dimensions. Get close enough to your TV screen and you’ll see pixels, small points of data that make a seamless image if you stand back. Scientists think that the universe’s information may be contained in the same way and that the natural “pixel size” of space is roughly 10 trillion trillion times smaller than an atom, a distance that physicists refer to as the Planck scale.

Tuesday 26 August 2014

China is progressing: Closer to supersonic submarine

China has made a step closer to making supersonic submarines that from Shanghai to San Francisco could arrive in less than two hours, reports portal Saut Tea Morning Post.

The new technology developed by a team of scientists from the Laboratory for complex flow and heat transfer from the Institute of Technology in Harbin, made ​​it easier for submarines and torpedoes to move under water extremely high speeds, according to the portal.

Lifang Chen, professor of mechanics and engineering fluid, said the innovative approach of this team, caused that they can now create complicated air "bubble" necessary to move quickly under water.

"We are very excited about the potential that it brings" he said, adding that there are still many unknowns to be solved.

Water causes more friction and resistance to movement than air, which means that ordinary submarines can not move as fast as an airplane, according to the portal.

Recalls that during the Cold War, the Soviet military developed a technology called
super-cavitation, which included a "package" submarine inside air bubbles to avoid problems caused by water resistance. 

supersonic submarine
Scheme supersonic submarines: From Shanghai to San Francisco in less than two hours

The Soviet super-cavitation torpedo called Šakval able to reach the speed of 370 km / h or more, which was much faster than any ordinary torpedo.

In theory, the super-cavitational vessel could, under the water reaches the speed of sound, or about 5,800 km / h, which, according to the report of California Institute of Technology in 2001, could lead to reduced travel time from one to the other shore of the Atlantic Ocean to less than hour, while traveling from one to the other shore of the Pacific ocean took about a hundred minutes.

This is for now only in theory, scientists are skeptical of the practice.

In addition to Russia, the development of vessels and weapons based on
super-cavitation technology deal with countries like Germany, Iran and the United States, according to the portal. 

Sunday 24 August 2014

Sending Humans to Mars a Principle of Space Exploration, Says Former NASA Director


Let’s say it straight. Mars is, without any doubt our next step in space exploration, sparking our imagination for many years in spaceflight history. After sending tons of scientific rovers, it’s about time to send human pioneers to start colonizing the Red Planet. The only question is when will we reach that highly anticipated milestone? “Sending humans to Mars around 2033 should be the single organizing principle of future space exploration,” Professor G. Scott Hubbard of Stanford University and former NASA Ames Research Center director told astrowatch.net. He will give a speech on Sept. 6 about Mars exploration at the European Mars Conference (EMC) 2014 that will take place in Podzamcze, Poland.

Friday 22 August 2014

If you collapse an underwater bubble with a soundwave, light is produced, and nobody knows why

It’s a phenomenon called sonoluminescence. Sonoluminescence is a physical occurrence by which sound turns into light. Scientists have been trying for 70 years to explain it, but have had no success. No one has managed to explain how a bubble of air in water can focus sound to cause light, but it happens.

Some minor revelations have surfaced, however. At first, physicists thought friction was to blame, but in the late 1980s, they discovered that a sound wave’s path expanded bubbles and heated the gas inside them to temperatures hotter than the sun’s surface. That collapse with the heat, they thought, created a glowing plasma. Thirty years later, that is still the going theory.

However, researchers have suggested that different physical mechanisms must be at work and that there must be multiple kinds of sonoluminescence. What’s been concretely determined so far, though, is that it has to do with the size of the bubble as well as the OH emission from the bubble when it bursts.

If the science goes much further, it could be possible that some day sound and gas could be used to light underwater areas, exceeding the limitations of conventional lights.

Sunday 17 August 2014

Vision for Mars Rovers


Seeing is believing. Our great visions of space exploration require also a trustable vision system. Curiosity rover snapping dozens of pictures every day is capable to see the Red Planet in different way than the human eye. Needless to say, human vision is highly adapted to the specific conditions here on Earth. “The exploration of Mars will require radically different qualities of the vision system because of both the Mars atmospheric properties and the range of things that this vision system will need to be able to see.” Yosef Akhtman of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) told astrowatch.net. “In particular using an RGB camera, which was developed to mimic human vision on Earth is a bit naive and far from optimum.” Akhtman will give a speech on Sept. 7 regarding adaptive vision system for extraterrestrial exploration at the European Mars Conference (EMC) that will take place in Podzamcze, Poland.

Tuesday 12 August 2014

If you bend a piece of paper 103 times, you get the thickness of the universe

The myth is that you can not bend the paper more than eight times. The reality is that you can bend to infinity, if you have a large enough paper, and enough energy. However, there is one small problem. If you bend it 103 times, you get the thickness of the entire universe.

How something thin like paper can get the thickness of the universe?

The answer lies in mathematics. It is a simple exponential function. Every time you bend the paper in half, you double its thickness. At the third bend, you get the thickness of the nail. On the seventh fold, you get thickness like pad.


On the tenth, the width of the hand.

At 23, bending, your paper is already one kilometer thick.

In the thirtieth folding, but you got to the universe. It is 100 kilometers high.

42nd bending, you have reached the moon. At 51, you scalded the sun. Now you've reached the 81 bends, and your paper is already 127 786 light-years wide, almost as thick as Andromeda galaxy.
 


You bend the paper 90 times. It is now 130.8 million light years wide. On the surface is about 100 galaxies.

And finally, we have reached 103 fold. Now you've reached the edge of the universe, 93 billion light years in diameter.

Here are some examples that will help you understand how you can folding paper to get to the edge of space!
 

Sunday 10 August 2014

Violent Solar System History Uncovered by a Meteorite


Curtin University planetary scientists have shed some light on the bombardment history of our solar system by studying a unique volcanic meteorite recovered in Western Australia (WA). Captured on camera seven years ago falling on the WA side of the Nullarbor Plain, the Bunburra Rockhole Meterorite has unique characteristics that suggest it came from a large asteroid that has never before been identified. Associate Professor Fred Jourdan, along with colleagues Professor Phil Bland and Dr Gretchen Benedix from Curtin’s Department of Applied Geology, believe the meteorite is evidence that a series of collisions of asteroids occurred more than 3.4 billion years ago. “This meteorite is definitely one-of-a-kind,” Dr Jourdan said. “Nearly all meteorites we locate come from Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the solar system. But after studying the meteorite’s composition and orbit, it appears it derived from a large, unidentified asteroid that was split apart during the collisions.”

Friday 8 August 2014

Catatumbo, the everlasting storm

There's a Lightning storm in Venezuela that's been going on since at least the 16th century!

Relámpago del Catatumbo (Catatumbo Lightning) is an atmospheric phenomenon that occurs where the Catatumbo River meets the Lake Maracaibo, in Venezuela.

How do they happen? The winds blowing accross the Maracaibo lake and other swampy plains around the area meet with the Andes mountain ridges. These winds carry a lot of heat and moisture, which are perfect for creating electric charges. The result? Lightning for 280 times an hour, 10 hours a day for 160 nights a year!

It is believed that the phenomenon has been going around since at least the 16th century (and most likely, even more than that). The first time this storm was reported in writing was an epic poem called "la Dragontea," by Lope de Vega in 1597, which told of the defeat of Sir Francis Drake at this site. Drake tried to attack the city of Maracaibo, but the lightning gave away his position and the city was able to respond in time.

All the electric activity makes the Catatumbo Lightning the largest single generator of Ozone in the planet. The lightning is visible up to 400 km away! Because of this, it's also called as the Maracaibo Beacon.

Friday 1 August 2014

NASA plans to start a garden on the Moon next year!

It's a great time to be alive when all of the cliches seen in sci-fi movies time and time again are starting to become a reality.

Men landing on the moon, versatile rovers roam Mars and now we're just a couple years away from starting plant life on our neighboring celestial bodies.

Arabidopsis is a small flowering plant that is closely related to mustard or cabbage, both useful when trying to colonize another planet ecologically. More importantly, it contains one of the model organism that is key for studying plant biology, especially since it's the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced.

NASA, the American space agency, set its sights on Arabidopsis to be part of the first garden on the Moon and Mars. Ambitiously, NASA plans to have it planted on the Moon by 2015, as in next year. Mars isn't that far behind with a target date of 2021.

This very well could be the first step of plans to one day send men and women to live on distant worlds, hopefully with food and water already set up for them.

Saturday 26 July 2014

Astronomers Find Unexpected Lack of Water Vapour on Hot Jupiters


A team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have gone looking for water vapour in the atmospheres of three planets orbiting stars similar to the Sun – and have come up nearly dry. The three planets, HD 189733b, HD 209458b, and WASP-12b, are between 60 and 900 light-years away, and are all gas giants known as ‘hot Jupiters.’ These worlds are so hot, with temperatures between 900 to 2200 degrees Celsius, that they are ideal candidates for detecting water vapour in their atmospheres. However, the three planets have only one-tenth to one-thousandth the amount of water predicted by standard planet formation theories. The best water measurement, for the planet HD 209458b, was between 4 and 24 parts per million. The results raise new questions about how exoplanets form and highlight the challenges in searching for water on Earth-like exoplanets in the future. The findings were published Thursday (24 July) in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Tuesday 22 July 2014

We transform matter into energy all the time, but never energy into matter...but that could change!

We all know the famous equation thought up by Albert Einstein, "E=mc2." It means that matter and energy are the same thing and can be converted back and forth. We see this all the time, from gasoline to atom bombs. But we only see one side of the equation: turning matter into energy. Now there is a plan to make energy into matter.

It hasn't happened yet, but Oliver Pike, the scientist who proposed the experiment, hopes that it will happen by 2015.

Although it's never been done in the lab before, the process is thought to be fairly straightforward. Scientists are going to smash together photons much like they do with particles in machines such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

The only hard part about this should be finding the right place to do it. The experiment requires two powerful lasers and vacuum conditions, but Pike says several scientists are interested in trying it out, so it shouldn't take too long to find a place.

The experiment design relies on a hohlraum, a small metal cylinder that holds hydrogen fuel in laser fusion experiments. Heating a hohlraum with a laser produces a dense field of X-ray photons inside. Pike's team estimates that passing a jet of high-energy gamma-ray photons through the laser-excited hohlraum would make enough photons collide to produce up to 100,000 pairs of electrons and positrons.

Friday 18 July 2014

Russian physicists make teleportation reality

Russian scientists from the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute, in collaboration with colleagues from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, have found a way to preserve the quantum entanglement of the particle as it passes through the accelerator or when transferring large distances, published in the prestigious scientific journal Physical Review A.
 
Quantum feedback allows to realize quantum teleportation.

The laws of quantum mechanics do not allow for teleportation of objects and people, but it is already possible to quantum teleport single photons and atoms.


Teleportation - is not fiction, say scientists from Moscow Physical-Technical Institute (MFTI). In the future we will be able to travel long distances without the use of physical force and simultaneously placed in two places, for example: Beijing and Moscow and in Siberia and the islands of New Zealand.

Not excluded teleportation conquest of cosmic space. It's all about the physical effects, so-called "Quantum entanglement." It is the ability of the quantum structures that are located at a distance from one another, remaining inseparable.

In classical physics, there is no such effect. Russian scientists have found a way to preserve the "quantum entanglement" in transmitting information at a considerable distance. It is, in fact, teleportation, explained one of the paper's authors, MFTI researcher Sergey Filipov:

- When we are in a ball
strings are ruffle, that discourage us. A physicists when they work with a complex situation are very happy, because in these conditions there is a correlation - what happens at one end of the thread tuft, is associated with what is happening on the other. These correlations can be forwarded anywhere. People displaced in such a manner to a certain distance, it will also be a correlation. Their behavior would be independent of one another. 


Initially, research physicists were related to the study of signal transmission over optical networks. That is, according to scientists, the so-called. "Secret quantum communications." In MFTI have found such an algorithm that allows the connection becomes even more secret. As for teleportation, it has become a "side" effect design. A scientist explains how with the help of the found effect can move things and people:

- Let's say you want to teleport humans. To do this, you do not distribute all of its atoms. You say, I have a 20 kg oxygen 10 kg carbon, a certain amount of hydrogen and takes the same amount at the other end. Next, you send information about their compounds and composition written in atoms. At the other end of the end of your materials make the same person.


In a sense, this "collection" is reminiscent of holography - image reconstruction of three-dimensional objects using a laser. The difference is that this is not just a special type of photography, but the creation of man, so to speak, of "flesh and blood", with all the characteristics and capabilities. Science has not yet reached such heights. Scientists have, for now, learn to teleport a photon. OPRAVI they are usually carriers of information sent. At the other end of the thread, experts have learned to create the same state micro object, which was located at the opposite end. Now we must learn to apply this principle in more complex systems. It's difficult because as the system grows, it dramatically increases the complexity of teleportation, says Sergey Filipov.

- Teloportovati two atoms, twice is harder than one, and three - eight times harder. If You would like to evaluate the degree of complexity of human teleportation, we should take into account that one of the ten to 24 atoms.