Astronomy and Physics News around the World Dec. 02, 2012
Reported News for this Week:
1. Flash x-ray laser technique yield 1st protein structure at atomic resolution
2. A new breed of micro fuel cells
3. In an Isolated, Ice-Covered Antarctic Lake Far Below Freezing, Life is Found
4. The future looks bright: ONR, marines eye solar energy 5. Funding cut for SuperB collider kills project
6. Gigantic Plasma Jets Pour From the Heart of Hercules A
7. Breakthrough in thermoacoustic imaging may make medical clinic appearance soon
8. Brown Dwarfs Might Host Planets Too 9. The precise engineering of 3D brain tissues 10. Predicting material fatigue
Flash x-ray laser technique yield 1st protein structure at atomic resolution
Science Magazine - For the first time, so-called 'serial femto-second crystallography' (SFX) has revealed the atomic-level structure of a protein of paramount research interest. The SFX technique depends on ultra- intense, ultra-short, x-ray bursts from a free-electron laser to take snapshots of a continuous steam of tiny protein crystals before the radiation has time to destroy the material. Most protein structures have been found using synchrotron x-ray sources and necessarily large crystals. Getting a protein crystal to grow to sufficient size and that diffracts well at reasonable temperatures is a major hurdle in protein
crystallography, and many proteins refuse to yield such crystals. One such protein is the cysteine protease, cathepsin B, from Trypanosoma brucei (TbCatB), a promising drug target for the treatment of sleeping sickness, a fatal infectious disease that is fairly common in Africa. Using SFX scientists were able to obtain a three-dimensional native protein structure at 2.1 Å resolution. Besides the physical structure, the result allows physical chemists to understand a plausible chemical mechanism for inhibiting the enzyme. This new result, reported in Science, is an exciting milestone in molecular biophysics, human and animal health.
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A new breed of micro fuel cells
Engineers at Yale University have developed a new breed of micro fuel cell that could serve as a long- lasting, low-cost, and eco-friendly power source for portable electronics. Major components of the new device are made of bulk metallic glasses, which can be finely shaped and molded using a comparatively efficient and inexpensive fabrication process akin to processes used in shaping plastics. Read/Comment
In an Isolated, Ice-Covered Antarctic Lake Far Below Freezing, Life is Found
Lake Vida lies within one of Antarctica’s cold, arid McMurdo Dry Valleys (Photo: Desert Research Institute)
Even inside an almost completely frozen lake within Antarctica’s inland dry valleys, in dark, salt-laden and sub-freezing water full of nitrous oxide, life thrives… offering a clue at what might one day be found in similar environments elsewhere in the Solar System.
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The future looks bright: ONR, marines eye solar energy
The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is looking to the sun for energy in an effort to help Marines do away with diesel-guzzling generators now used in combat outposts. The Renewable Sustainable Expeditionary Power (RSEP) program seeks to create a transportable renewable hybrid system that can provide Marines with electricity for a 15-day mission without relying on fuel resupply convoys that often become targets for adversaries. Read/Comment
Funding cut for SuperB collider kills project
Path not taken: the planned route of SuperB
Physics World - The Italian government has withdrawn its $325 million support for the SuperB collider.
The loss of the Italian funding, which had been foreshadowed for at least a year, will likely kill the $1.3 billion project. Using the SuperB physicists would have collided electrons and positrons at 6.7 GeV where they would have decayed to B mesons. Physicists would have been able to study the subtle differences in how particles and their antiparticles decay and could help shed light on the mystery of why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe. This problem is actually being pursued by the LHCb collaboration at CERN; although while LHC collisions may result in greater B meson production, hadron collisions also produce more constituents and processes that make for greater challenges in precise
isolation of B meson decay signals. B meson decay is also being pursued at Japan's SuperKEKB project and several other lepton colliders. Studying neutrino-less tau lepton decay, or "charged lepton flavor violation", was also a key scientific mission for the facility. MORE
Gigantic Plasma Jets Pour From the Heart of Hercules A
Combined Hubble (optical) and VLA (radio) images show enormous radio jets shooting out from the galaxy Hercules A
Talk about pouring your heart out! Astronomers using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and the recently- upgraded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico have identified gigantic jets of plasma, subatomic particles and magnetic fields blasting out of the center of Hercules A, a massive galaxy 2 billion light-years away.
The image above is a combination of optical images from Hubble and radio data gathered by the multi-dish VLA. If our eyes could see in the high-energy spectrum of radio, this is what Hercules A — the otherwise ordinary-looking elliptical galaxy in the center — would really look like.
(Of course, if we could see in radio our entire sky would be a very optically busy place!) (...)
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Breakthrough in thermoacoustic imaging may make medical clinic appearance soon
Short pulses sharpen up thermoacoustic images
Physics World - A technique that shoots microwaves into tissue and monitors the resulting acoustic waves may soon be common in clinical settings. Thermoacoustic imaging using microwaves can have higher contrast and is more penetrative than conceptually similar photoacoustic imaging, but the microwave method is too dangerous to use on humans. The breakthrough made by physicists in China and reported in Physical Review Letters comes from using short nanosecond pulses of microwaves. The nanosecond pulses reduce the wavelengths of the acoustic waves, and importantly they reduce the tissue's exposure to harmful microwaves. The technical challenge over the years has been to find ways to achieve short-pulsed microwave sources. With this new advance the researchers were able to achieve micron-level resolution and microwave exposure dosages 100 times lower than American safety standards. This result could make microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography, which has the potential to image human bodies without using harmful X-rays or other ionizing radiation achievable within five years. MORE
Brown Dwarfs Might Host Planets Too
This image shows the brown dwarf ISO-Oph 102, or Rho-Oph 102, in the Rho Ophiuchi star-forming region.
Its position is marked by the crosshairs. This visible-light view was created from images forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin
Brown dwarfs inhabit a kind of fuzzy line between stars and planets: their mass is seemingly too small for them to be full-fledged stars and yet they are too large to be planets. These dim stars were only discovered in 1995 but current estimates say that brown dwarfs could be as numerous as normal stars in our galaxy.
Now, astronomers have found a brown dwarf that has a dusty disc encircling it, just like the discs encircling regular, young stars. It contains millimeter-sized solid grains, and around other newborn stars, these discs of cosmic dust are where planets form. Astronomers say this surprising find challenges theories of how rocky, Earth-scale planets form, and suggests that rocky planets may be even more common in the Universe than expected.
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The precise engineering of 3D brain tissues
MIT engineers have devised a way to stack neurons to form 3D brain tissue. Image: Marcia Williams Medical Illustrations
Borrowing from microfabrication techniques used in the semiconductor industry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University engineers have developed a simple and inexpensive way to create 3D brain tissues in a laboratory dish. The new technique yields tissue constructs that closely mimic the cellular composition of those in the living brain, allowing scientists to study how neurons form connections and to predict how cells from individual patients might respond to different drugs. Read/Comment
Predicting material fatigue
The experimental setup shows how the composite material was stretched and exposed to light. At the same time, the reflecting light was measured. Credit: Wiley
Detection of material failure is a difficult task for engineers, because cracks inside a material block can't readily be identified from the outside. Researchers in Germany have now developed so-called self- reporting composite materials that can communicate their internal condition. The concept utilizes zinc oxide tetrapod crystals as a filler material for composites which at the same time reveals material failure by a visual signal under UV light. Read/Comment
