Lifeboat Foundation

A warm-hued material prized by jewelry makers, amber takes more than 40,000 years to form. See pictures of some of the finest specimens.

To take a picture, the best digital cameras on the market open their shutter for around around one four thousandths of a second.

To snapshot atomic activity, you’d need a shutter that clicks a lot faster.

Now scientists have come up with a way of achieving a shutter speed that’s a mere trillionth of a second, or 250 million times faster than those digital cameras. That makes it capable of capturing something very important in materials science: dynamic disorder.

Two atom-thick layers of the same crystalline material can be stacked on top of each other in ways that yield ferroelectricity.

There’s enough trouble on this planet already that we don’t need new problems coming here from the sun. Unfortunately, we can’t yet destroy this pitiless star, so we are at its mercy. But NASA at least may soon be able to let us know when one of its murderous flares is going to send our terrestrial systems into disarray.

Understanding and predicting space weather is a big part of NASA’s job. There’s no air up there, so no one can hear you scream, “Wow, how about this radiation!” Consequently, we rely on a set of satellites to detect and relay this important data to us.

One such measurement is of solar wind, “an unrelenting stream of material from the sun.” Even NASA can’t find anything nice to say about it! Normally this stream is absorbed or dissipated by our magnetosphere, but if there’s a solar storm, it may be intense enough that it overwhelms the local defenses.

This novel technology looks like a sci-fi device. But it’s real.

It seems like something from a science fiction movie: a specialized, electronic headband and using your mind to control a robot.

Oonal/iStock.

Continue reading “Mind control: 3D-patterned sensors allow robots to be controlled by thought” »

A paper in Nature reports the discovery of a superconductor that operates at room temperatures and near-room pressures. The claim has divided the research community.

The behavior of a collection of squeezed elastic beams is determined by geometry, not by complex forces.

When a collection of thin elastic beams—such as toothbrush bristles or grass—is compressed vertically, the individual elements will buckle and bump into one another, forming patterns. Experiments and numerical simulations now show that basic geometry controls how order emerges in these patterns [1]. The results could be useful for designing flexible materials and for understanding interactions among flexible structures in nature, such as DNA strands in cells.

Studies of bending and buckling have often focused on the behavior of a single membrane, such as a thin disc of polystyrene fabric, a sheet of crumpled paper, or even a bell pepper. But few models have tackled the dynamics of a group of many elastic objects.

2.7 billion light years away, in a galaxy cluster known as Abell 1,201, an ultramassive black hole lurks, measuring upwards of 32.7 billion times the mass of our Sun. This new measurement exceeds astronomers’ previous estimates by at least 7 billion solar masses. It’s one of the biggest black holes astronomers have ever detected and cuts close to how large we believe they can be.

Our universe is filled with black holes, including the supermassive black holes found in the center of galaxies throughout all the regions of space around us. Many of these are inactive, not excreting material that causes them to light up, making them easier to detect. Others are rogue black holes, roaming through space however they please. Others still are ultramassive black holes.

These black holes are much bigger than supermassive black holes like those found at the center of galaxies. And, because they’re so massive – and contain so much mass – they should theoretically be easier to find. However, as I noted above, it all depends on how active the black hole is and how much heat it emits. That’s because, by default, ultramassive black holes (and black holes overall) don’t emit light.

Life comes in all shapes in sizes, but some sizes are more popular than others, new research from the University of British Columbia (UBC) has found.

In the first study of its kind published today (March 29) in PLOS ONE, Dr. Eden Tekwa, who conducted the study as a postdoctoral fellow at UBC’s department of zoology, surveyed the body sizes of all Earth’s living organisms, and uncovered an unexpected pattern. Contrary to what current theories can explain, our planet’s biomass—the material that makes up all living organisms—is concentrated in organisms at either end of the size spectrum.

“The smallest and largest organisms significantly outweigh all other organisms,” said Dr. Tekwa, lead author of “The size of life,” and now a research associate with McGill University’s department of biology. “This seems like a new and emerging pattern that needs to be explained, and we don’t have theories for how to explain it right now. Current theories predict that biomass would be spread evenly across all body sizes.”