Col. Chris Hadfield: “Safely home - back on Earth, happily readapting to the heavy pull of gravity. Wonderful to smell and feel Spring.”
Read about Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield’s return to Earth following historic five-month mission here: http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/media/news_releases/2013/0513.asp
Photo credits: Mikhail Metzel/AFP/Getty Images/Guardian/space-pics/NASA
(via scinerds)
A portion of the salt and pepper you see on an analog television actually comes from the radiation left over from the Big Bang. The radiation, known as the cosmic microwave background, permeates all of space and gives the universe an average temperature of 2.7 K (-455 degrees F), just slightly above absolute zero.
The first detection of the microwave background was made in 1964 at AT&T Bell labs where physicists initially thought that an accumulation of bird poop on their 20-foot antenna was the source of the unwanted noise signals. The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the accidental discovery which supported the now prevailing Big Bang Theory.
(via scinerds)
New Plasma Device Considered Holy Grail of Energy Generation
Scientists at the University of Missouri have devised a new way to create and control plasma that could transform American energy generation and storage.
Randy Curry, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri’s College of Engineering, and his team developed a device that launches a ring of plasma at distances of up to two feet. Although the plasma reaches a temperature hotter than the surface of the sun, it doesn’t emit radiation and is completely safe in proximity to humans.
While most of us are familiar with three states of matter – liquid, gas and solid – there is also a fourth state known as plasma, which includes things such as fire and lightning. Life on Earth depends on the energy emitted by plasma produced during fusion reactions within the sun.
The secret to Curry’s success was developing a way to make plasma form its own self-magnetic field, which holds it together as it travels through the air.
“Launching plasma in open air is the ‘Holy Grail’ in the field of physics,” said Curry.
“Creating plasma in a vacuum tube surrounded by powerful electromagnets is no big deal; dozens of labs can do that. Our innovation allows the plasma to hold itself together while it travels through regular air without any need for containment.”
The plasma device could also be enlarged to handle much larger amounts of energy, he said.
(Source: scinerds)
South Korea Makes Billion-Dollar Bet on Fusion Power
A fusion power demonstration reactor to be built in the 2030s in collaboration with the DoE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, represents a step toward commercial use
From Nature magazine
Image: The inside of KSTAR, one of the first research tokamaks in the world with fully superconducting magnets, after a recent upgrade that will allow the study of pulses of up to 300 seconds duration Copyright: Nation Fusion Research Institute PR team, Korea
South Korea has embarked on the development of a preliminary concept design for a fusion power demonstration reactor in collaboration with the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New Jersey.
The project is provisionally named K-DEMO (Korean Demonstration Fusion Power Plant), and its goal is to develop the design for a facility that could be completed in the 2030s in Daejeon, under the leadership of the country’s National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI).
South Korea is already developing the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (K-STAR) project and contributing to ITER, the €15-billion (US$20-billion) experimental reactor being built in Cadarache, France, under the auspices of an international collaboration. K-DEMO is intended to be the next step toward commercial reactors and would be the first plant to actually contribute power to an electric grid.
“It is a very smart strategy to take advantage of the experience gained in constructing ITER and to immediately proceed to construct a fusion power plant like K-DEMO,” says Stephen Dean, president of Fusion Power Associates, an advocacy group in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
K-DEMO will serve as prototype for the development of commercial fusion reactors. According to the PPPL, it will generate “some 1 billion watts of power for several weeks on end”, a much greater output than ITER’s goal of producing 500 million watts for 500 seconds by the late 2020s.
Building up know-how
In early 2012, the South Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced that developing technologies to build K-DEMO would be a priority for the next 10 years, establishing the know-how to permit the construction of a commercial fusion power plant between 2022 and 2036. The government also announced that it planned to invest about 1 trillion won (US$941 million) in the project. About 300 billion won of that spending has already been funded, according to a source within the ministry. The government expects the project to employ nearly 2,400 people in the first phase, which will last throughout 2016.
Robert Goldston, who was the director of the PPPL when it helped with the initial design of K-STAR, believes that the K-DEMO project is feasible, considering South Korea’s commitment to its previous project. “There was a financial crisis in Asia right in the middle of the K-STAR project, but the government and fusion scientists were steady and serious about getting the job done, despite lots of hardship,” he says. “My sense is that the Korean team, at all levels, is very dedicated to a steady pace even in adversity — and there is always adversity in big projects.”
Lee Gyung-Su, a research fellow at NFRI and a former chairman of the ITER Management Advisory Committee, says that Korea is desperately in need of the energy that fusion could provide. “Korea has a lack of energy resources,” he says. “The population density is high and the country consumes so much energy,” Lee adds, “we have a different perspective on fusion energy compared to the United States.”
ITER has experienced repeated delays and cost increases, prompting some critics to question whether the project will ever be completed. “It is already obvious that future commercial-size machines will be too large and costly, and too expensive to operate, to generate competitive energy,” says Thomas Cochran, a consultant for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington DC. He adds that he believes South Korea should spend its resources on technologies that have the potential to provide a nearer-term impact on carbon emissions and climate change.
Lee acknowledges the criticism, but says that most of ITER’s issues were of a management, rather than a technical nature. “The schedules are now mostly fixed and sorted out,” he says. “And risks always exist when it comes to a new finding in science, and the investment on the research and development has been made based on the estimation of such risks.”
Moreover, Lee adds, “we are willing to take risks, and need to innovate to survive”.
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on January 21, 2013.
Incredible Photographs of Fractals Found in the Natural World
Fractal is described or characterized as “self-similarity.” Self-similarity refers to the reiteration of a specific pattern where a fragment of the object, figure or illustration appears similar to the whole. This trait is observable in the fern leaf, rivers, galaxies, clouds, video feedback, crystal growth and financial markets.(1)
Here are some of the most stunning examples of these repeating patterns that look the same no matter how far you zoom in or out.
(via the-star-stuff)
NASA Probe Gets Close Views of Large Saturn Hurricane
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first close-up, visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling around Saturn’s north pole.
In high-resolution pictures and video, scientists see the hurricane’s eye is about 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide, 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Thin, bright clouds at the outer edge of the hurricane are traveling 330 mph(150 meters per second). The hurricane swirls inside a large, mysterious, six-sided weather pattern known as the hexagon.
“We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”
Scientists will be studying the hurricane to gain insight into hurricanes on Earth, which feed off warm ocean water. Although there is no body of water close to these clouds high in Saturn’s atmosphere, learning how these Saturnian storms use water vapor could tell scientists more about how terrestrial hurricanes are generated and sustained.
Both a terrestrial hurricane and Saturn’s north polar vortex have a central eye with no clouds or very low clouds. Other similar features include high clouds forming an eye wall, other high clouds spiraling around the eye, and a counter-clockwise spin in the northern hemisphere.
A major difference between the hurricanes is that the one on Saturn is much bigger than its counterparts on Earth and spins surprisingly fast. At Saturn, the wind in the eye wall blows more than four times faster than hurricane-force winds on Earth. Unlike terrestrial hurricanes, which tend to move, the Saturnian hurricane is locked onto the planet’s north pole. On Earth, hurricanes tend to drift northward because of the forces acting on the fast swirls of wind as the planet rotates. The one on Saturn does not drift and is already as far north as it can be.
“The polar hurricane has nowhere else to go, and that’s likely why it’s stuck at the pole,” said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Hampton, Va.
Scientists believe the massive storm has been churning for years. When Cassini arrived in the Saturn system in 2004, Saturn’s north pole was dark because the planet was in the middle of its north polar winter. During that time, the Cassini spacecraft’s composite infrared spectrometer and visual and infrared mapping spectrometer detected a great vortex, but a visible-light view had to wait for the passing of the equinox in August 2009. Only then did sunlight begin flooding Saturn’s northern hemisphere. The view required a change in the angle of Cassini’s orbits around Saturn so the spacecraft could see the poles.
“Such a stunning and mesmerizing view of the hurricane-like storm at the north pole is only possible because Cassini is on a sportier course, with orbits tilted to loop the spacecraft above and below Saturn’s equatorial plane,” said Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “You cannot see the polar regions very well from an equatorial orbit. Observing the planet from different vantage points reveals more about the cloud layers that cover the entirety of the planet.”
Cassini changes its orbital inclination for such an observing campaign only once every few years. Because the spacecraft uses flybys of Saturn’s moon Titan to change the angle of its orbit, the inclined trajectories require attentive oversight from navigators. The path requires careful planning years in advance and sticking very precisely to the planned itinerary to ensure enough propellant is available for the spacecraft to reach future planned orbits and encounters.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
(Source: spaceplasma, via infinity-imagined)
(Source: sticksstonesheartsbones, via scinerds)
Einstein’s Gravity Theory Passes Toughest Test Yet
An extreme pair of superdense stars orbiting each other has put Einstein’s general theory of relativity to its toughest test yet, and the crazy-haired physicist still comes out on top.
(via scinerds)
The crescent Moon with Earthshine passes near open cluster M45, The Pleiades.
Credit: Jerry Lodriguss
(via n-a-s-a)
Thanks to Stanford University’s aptly named Clarity, scientists are now able to scan the brain for unobstructed views of neurons and their connections. In this scan, aided by a green fluorescent protein, one is able to see the axonal and dendritic branches of neurons within the hippocampus.
