The colourful Rho Ophiuchi star formation region, about 400 light-years from Earth, contains very cold (around -250 degrees Celsius), dense clouds of cosmic gas and dust, in which new stars are being born. The clouds are mostly made of hydrogen, but contain traces of other chemicals, and are prime targets for astronomers hunting for molecules in space. Astronomers using the APEX telescope to observe this region discovered hydrogen peroxide molecules in interstellar space for the first time, in the area marked with the red circle. This is also a rich region for amateur observations. Rho Ophiuchi itself is the bright star near the top of the image. The bright yellowish star in the bottom left is Antares, one of the brightest stars in the sky. Below and to Antares’ right is the globular cluster Messier 4. This image of the region was obtained from the Paranal Observatory by observing with a 10-cm Takahashi FSQ106Ed f/3.6 telescope and a SBIG STL CCD camera, using a NJP160 mount. Images were collected through three different filters (B, V and R) and then stitched together. It was originally created as part of ESO’s Gigagalaxy Zoom project. Credit: ESO/S. Guisard
Molecules of hydrogen peroxide have been found for the first time in interstellar space. The discovery gives clues about the chemical link between two molecules critical for life: water and oxygen. On Earth, hydrogen peroxide plays a key role in the chemistry of water and ozone in our planet’s atmosphere, and is familiar for its use as a disinfectant or to bleach hair blonde. Now it has been detected in space by astronomers using the ESO-operated APEX telescope in Chile.
A new study by Katy Prentice, done as part of her undergraduate degree (MSci in Palaeontology and Evolution) at the University of Bristol, shows that the pterosaurs evolved in a most unusual way, becoming more and more specialised through their 160 million years on Earth. The work is published today in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have developed a technique that delivers gene therapy into human brain cancer cells using nanoparticles that can be freeze-dried and stored for up to three months prior to use. The shelf-stable particles may obviate the need for virus-mediated gene therapy, which has been associated with safety concerns. The report appears in the August issue of Biomaterials.
By applying a coating to individual silicon nanowires, researchers at Harvard and Berkeley have significantly improved the materials' efficiency and sensitivity.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In the future, nano-sized computers implanted in the human body could autonomously scan for disease indicators, diagnose diseases, and control the release of the appropriate drugs. Although this scenario is still several decades away, researchers have been making significant progress in developing early types of biomolecular computers.
It's like a Brownie camera for the digital age: The microscopic device fits on the head of a pin, contains no lenses or moving parts, costs pennies to make – and this Cornell-developed camera could revolutionize an array of science from surgery to robotics.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In what might at first seem obvious, but isn't after further thinking, a group of physicists from the United States and Canada have demonstrated, for the first time, that images generated by light, can be rotated via a rotating medium. In a paper published in Science, physicists Sonja Franke-Arnold, Graham Gibson, Robert W. Boyd and Miles J. Padgett describe how they were able to replicate the effects of light shifting via a moving medium, in a spinning medium, opening the door to a possible new way of encoding transmitted images.
Scientists have long known that healthy cells looked and behaved differently from cancer cells. For instance, the nuclei of healthy cells -- the inner part of the cells where the chromosomes are stored -- tend to have a rounder surface than the nuclei in cancerous cells.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Physicists and chemists use different techniques to study essentially the same thing — the nature and behavior of matter. Usually the particular path is of little consequence, because they all lead ultimately to the same truths at the end of the experimental journey. Sometimes, however, choosing one path over another can offer unique and interesting insights along the way, such as when a traveler takes the scenic route instead of a more direct path.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A high-temperature superconductor can now be switched on and off within a trillionth of a second – 100 years after the discovery of superconductivity and 25 years after the first high-temperature superconductor was. A team including physicists from the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Research Group for Structural Dynamics at the University of Hamburg has realised an ultrafast superconducting switch by using intense terahertz pulses. This experiment opens up the possibility to discover more about the still unsettled cause of this type of superconductivity, and also hints at possible applications for ultrafast electronics in the future.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the University of Glasgow have, for the first time, been able to drag light by slowing it down to the speed of sound and sending it through a rotating crystal.
Showcasing new tools for widespread development of quantum circuits made of mechanical parts, scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology have demonstrated a flexible, broadly usable technique for steadily calming the vibrations of an engineered mechanical object down to the quantum "ground state," the lowest possible energy level.
Russia will submit a claim to the United Nations to expand its Arctic borders, a top official said Wednesday, as scientists embarked on a new expedition to prove its ownership of energy-rich territory.
The Cassini spacecraft observed three of Saturn's moons set against the darkened night side of the planet in this image from April 2011.
After 16 years spent gathering a wealth of data that has revolutionized our understanding of Earth, ESA's veteran ERS-2 satellite is being retired. This pioneering mission has not only advanced science, but also forged the technologies we now rely on for monitoring our planet.
Scientists have released a digital map that shows in unprecedented detail the mosaic of vegetation and land-cover types that makes up the British landscape.
After 2 to 6 inches of rain fell on most of central South Dakota - and more in isolated areas - in the last couple weeks; South Dakota State University Extension Soil Specialist, Ron Gelderman, says some fields may experience nitrogen loss.
Once broken, a compact fluorescent light bulb continuously releases mercury vapor into the air for weeks to months, and the total amount can exceed safe human exposure levels in a poorly ventilated room, according to study results reported in Environmental Engineering Science, a peer-reviewed online only journal published monthly by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
The largest digital camera ever built for a space mission has been painstakingly mosaicked together from 106 separate electronic detectors. The resulting "billion-pixel array" will serve as the super-sensitive 'eye' of ESA's Galaxy-mapping Gaia mission.
Geo-engineering schemes aimed at tackling global warming through artificial iron fertilisation of the oceans would significantly affect deep-sea ecosystems, according to research involving scientists from the United Kingdom's National Oceanography Centre (NOC) as well as former Ocean and Earth Science research students of the University of Southampton, which is based at the Centre.
(AP) -- The weather isn't cutting NASA any breaks, not even for the last space shuttle launch.
(AP) -- Scientists are monitoring unusual underground activity that could signal an eruption at the Hekla volcano in southern Iceland.
NASA's Juno spacecraft is 30 days before its first launch window opens.
(AP) -- A somewhat generational battle over NASA's future is escalating even as NASA is about to close the book on the space shuttle era.
A "serious hardware incident" has shut down the Subaru Telescope indefinitely. A leak allowed orange-colored coolant to spill over the primary mirror and into the main camera, as well as into other instruments and the structure of the telescope. The damage is still be assessed. During the clean-up and recovery of equipment, nighttime observations have been suspended, as well as daytime summit tours of the telescope.
Landsat 5 captured an image of flooding occurring along the Iowa/Nebraska border on June 30, 2011. Flooding is still occurring on July 6, and Flood Warnings are still in effect from the National Weather Service.
NASA needs new technology breakthroughs to revitalize its mission to explore the universe, President Barack Obama said Wednesday as the shuttle Atlantis was preparing for its final mission.
(PhysOrg.com) -- On the Earth, dust particles are everywhere - under beds, on bookshelves, even floating in the air. We take dust for granted. Dust is also common in space, and it is found for example in the cold, dark molecular clouds where stars are born. Dust is a critical ingredient of the cosmos for several reasons. It is a repository for many chemical elements (carbon and silicon, for example). It also acts as a catalyst for the chemical reactions that produce the many complex molecules observed in space, molecules which in turn play a key role in the heating and cooling of the clouds that leads to the formation of the next generation of stars (and their planets).
(PhysOrg.com) -- The first two weeks of June 2010 were a blur for six scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). As the world focused on the ongoing crisis in the Gulf of Mexico after the blowout of BP's Deepwater Horizon Macondo well, the scientists dropped everything to estimate how much oil was flowing from the mangled wellhead.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Molecules of hydrogen peroxide have been found for the first time in interstellar space. The discovery gives clues about the chemical link between two molecules critical for life: water and oxygen. On Earth, hydrogen peroxide plays a key role in the chemistry of water and ozone in our planet’s atmosphere, and is familiar for its use as a disinfectant or to bleach hair blonde. Now it has been detected in space by astronomers using the ESO-operated APEX telescope in Chile.
Bringing fresh insight into long-standing debates about how powerful geological forces shape the planet, from earthquake ruptures to mountain formations, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have identified a new mechanism driving Earth's massive tectonic plates.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists analyzing data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft now have the first-ever, up-close details of a Saturn storm that is eight times the surface area of Earth.
Japanese scientists report on a unique ‘ubiquitous element strategy’ to overcome the ‘rare-element crisis’ that was triggered by increasing demand for such elements as lithium, used in batteries, and dysprosium for Ne-Fe-B permanent magnets.
Pioneering research by the University of Reading has developed a new way to test the adhesive qualities of drugs under laboratory development which could replace the current practice of using animal tissue.
Researchers from the RUB-Department of Biophysics of Prof. Dr. Klaus Gerwert have succeeded in providing evidence that a protein is capable of creating a water molecule chain for a few milliseconds for the directed proton transfer. The combination of vibrational spectroscopy and biomolecular simulations enabled the elucidation of the proton pump mechanism of a cell-membrane protein in atomic detail. The researchers demonstrated that protein-bound water molecules play a decisive role in the function. Their results were selected for the Early Edition of PNAS.
An automatic and portable detector that takes just fifteen minutes to analyze a sample suspected of contamination with anthrax is being developed by US researchers. The technology amplifies any anthrax DNA present in the sample and can reveal the presence of just 40 microscopic cells of the deadly bacteria Bacillus anthracis.
(PhysOrg.com) -- An enzyme called Pin1 regulates the protein that initiates cell division by changing the shape of a peptide bond. Researchers at Notre Dame and Virginia Tech have discovered how Pin1 communicates through an internal conduit between its two domains to decide whether it will open or shut the gate to cell division.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have designed a multiple-compartment gel capsule that could be used to simultaneously deliver drugs of different types. The researchers used a simple "one-pot" method to prepare the hydrogel capsules, which measure less than one micron.
By pairing an award-winning remote-detection version of NMR/MRI technology with a unique version of chromatography specifically designed for microfluidic chips, researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have opened the door to a portable system for highly sensitive multi-dimensional chemical analysis that would be impractical if not impossible with conventional technologies.
