Voyager first spacecraft to reach edge of Solar System

NASA has announced that the Yoyager 1 spacecraft, launched originally in 1977 to survey Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, has observed evidence that it is on the verge of the heliopause at the edge of the solar system. Currently the spacecraft is 17.4 billion kilometers from Earth, is travelling at approximately 17 km per second and is sending signals that require 14 hours to reach Earth.

See BBC Website and NASA/JPL

Cold fusion, this time for real?

Twenty years to the day that two electrochemists ignited controversy by announcing signs of cold fusion at an infamous press conference in Utah, a separate team has made a similar claim in the same US state. But this time, the evidence is being taken more seriously.

See newscientist.

Nobel Laureate Weinberg to give public lecture

Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg will give a public lecture on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009, 3:00 pm at Theatre A, Science Lecture Block, UCD on ‘The Craft of Science and the Craft of Art’.

'Time Eater' clock reveals fascinating mechanism

A £1m clock called the "time eater" has been unveiled at Cambridge University by Professor Stephen Hawking. The clock has been designed by John Tayor - horologist and inventor whose thermostatic switch is incorporated in millions of electric appliance worldwide - the clock features a novel twist on the grasshopper escapement pioneered by John Harrison. Harrison invented the grasshopper escapement in the early 18th Century, which resulted in extremely accurate mechanical time keeping and was instrumental in solving the 'Longitude Problem.'

"I also wanted to depict that time is a destroyer - once a minute is gone you can't get it back. That's why my grasshopper is not a Disney character. He is a ferocious beast that over the seconds has his tongue lolling out, his jaws opening, then on the 59th second he gulps down time," said Taylor.

First beam in large hadron collider (LHC) at CERN

Geneva, 10 September 2008.
The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 CET this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery.

See CERN LHC.

Science 2.0 - a new way of doing research?

Web 2.0 as a platform has begun to transform the web and already divides users into first generation and second generation internet users. Certainly in the online travel arena, which I know well, for many younger people, there is increasing evidence that email and static web content is no longer being used, with dynamic content, interactive websites, chat forums and instant messaging the norm for this second generation - in particular social networking is becoming the dominant form of web traffic through the popularity of review sites for travel and purchasing like Tripadvisor, social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo and social contribution sites like wikipedia.

There is now a move online to take science research into the social networking category also, with research publications being released into the wild for instant review in the form of online commentary from the science community rather than peer review prior to publication as happens most often now. Science 2.0 could bring information on stream much more quickly, but of course does so with a caveat that the work has yet to be tested. A project that began in MIT is set to go more mainstream - OpenNetWare in the biological sciences. The approach is likely to proliferate among younger scientists in the coming years. Scientific American discusses whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing for science.

See Scientific American.

Unforeseen problems with prospective moon dwellers

NASA research on the Earth's magnetic field has uncovered a bit of a problem for future moon dwellers. It turns out that during the full moon, the moon is strongly whipped by the Earth's magnetotail, causing violent dust storms and electromagnetic activity which could have serious consequences for any surface dwellers or at best will require careful planning and a lot more cost to deal with than has been considered up to now.



At full moon, the moon passes through an oscillating "plasma sheet" — hot ionised gas particles trapped in the tail. Being hot, the electrons are fast moving with high kinetic energy and these electrons impact all over the moon's surface giving the moon a net negative charge. On the moon's dayside this effect is mitigated by the photoelectric effect due to sunlight, where photons release electrons from the surface, reducing the negative charge. But on the night side, the electronic charge stays built up and can accumulate to a relative potential of thousands of volts.

You may ask how did NASA not know this?
Well it had been seen before but it seems none of the Apollo missions never landed at full moon so there's been no direct experience of the effect to date. The effect was first noticed in 1968, when the Surveyor 7 lander photographed a strange glow on the horizon after dark, but nobody knew what it was.

See Space.com.

Father of Chaos theory dies at 90

Chaos theory revolutionised scientific thought across many fields in a way that is rarely seen in science. The father of the field, Edward Lorentz, has died aged 90, in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the USA. He was a professor at MIT in Cambridge.

In the early 60s, Lorentz worked originally with weather systems and noticed how small changes in initial conditions in his models led to large divergence in outcome. His important paper in the early 70s, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?", popularised the so called butterfly effect. His work also uncovered the "Lorentz attractor" familiar to anyone with some knowledge of chaos theory. From MIT, "Lorenz, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975, won numerous awards, honors and honorary degrees. In 1983, he and former MIT Professor Henry M. Stommel were jointly awarded the $50,000 Crafoord Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, a prize established to recognize fields not eligible for Nobel Prizes."

See MIT.

Upside to H-Bomb tests?

You might remember (if old enough) or at least remember hearing about the Bikini Atoll H-Bomb tests in the 1950s, where three islands were vapourised by the Bravo hydrogen bomb as part of a whole battery of tests occurring during the early years of the cold war. (More recently, French nuclear tests continued in the South Pacific's Moruroa atoll, albeit underground if I recall.)

New Scientist is carrying an article that shows something interesting, that the coral reef in the area seems to have recovered extremely well and is doing quite nicely thank you. From the article, "Richards and colleagues report a thriving ecosystem of 183 species of coral, some of which were 8 metres high. They estimate that the diversity of species represents about 65% of what was present before the atomic test". The main reason put forward for the recovery is the fact that the radiation has kept us humans away from the place, a far more destructive force on the environment than a mere H-Bomb. They do note that the surface ecology hasn't fared so well, but certainly the recovery observed seems at variance with what was expected against the backdrop of radiation levels measured there.

If you're interested, see New Scientist.

Scifest at DIT

SciFest is a one-day festival of science, in DIT on May 1st, which includes a competition and exhibition of projects from second-level schools. The day will include a session with the judges in the morning, lunch for the competitors and teachers, a selection of science talks and a prize-giving ceremony. The exhibitors will also be given information on the science programmes that are available at the Institute.

See scifest @ dit.

Massive black hole found by Finnish Astronomers

Astronomers from Finland have "weighed" a monster celestial object 18 billion times more massive than the Sun - six times larger than the previous record.

The black hole, known as OJ287, is orbited by a smaller black hole, which allowed its mass to be measured by analysing the orbit. The finding also enabled the researchers to test Einstein's theory of General Relativity for the first time in a strong gravitational field.

See BBC News.

Top 10 Scientific Discoveries 2007

Time Magazine is running its annual Top 10 Scientific Discoveries for 2007. Well worth a browse.

See Time Top 10.

LHC Cools Down

As the Large Hadron Collider at CERN nears operational status, the cooling process of detection equipment begins. Hamish Johnston of Physics World desribes the monumental task and cost that this involves.

See Physics World.

New carbon nanotube fibre outperforms Kevlar

A new type of continuous carbon fibre, developed a group at the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at Cambridge, could be woven into super-strong fabric, with potential uses for body armour for the military and law enforcement.

Made from carbon nanotubes, the researchers say their material is already several times stronger, tougher and stiffer than Kevlar fibres currently used to make protective armour.


See BBC News.

Don't shoot the messenger

Alan Casey brought to my attention this article about science broadcasting written by Robyn Williams called “Don't shoot science messengers, they're an endangered species” - Williams works for ABC in Australia hosting a science show. As a counterbalance to a previous post criticising science journalism, it highlights the resources required and the potential issues in reporting science properly.

See eurekastreet.

The calculator is 40 years old

The handheld calculator is 40 years old this year - and models are now part of the IT collection at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. The museum in fact has the "original 1967 prototype from Texas Instruments, which weighed 3 pounds, was encased in aluminum and ran on batteries. At the time the calculator was developed, existing models were heavy desktop devices -- not handhelds."

The development team included TI engineer Jack Kilby who died in 2005. Kilby invented the integrated circuit at TI in 1958 and later won the Nobel Prize for his work.

See Computerworld.

IoP report on Physics in the Irish Economy

The Institute of Physics has recently commissioned a report examining the importance of Physics in the economic life of Ireland. As an example of the findings, 85,000 jobs are in physics based sectors in Ireland (5.3% of all jobs in the economy). This compares with 82,000 jobs in the banking, finance and insurance sector.

See IoP in Ireland - Report.

Bad Science

There's a regular and excellent column in The Guardian by Ben Goldacre called Bad Science, which shows how poor mainstream media is at reporting science, how they simplify results to the point of idiocy for the sake of a headline. Mind you some of the science referred to is questionable too! Goldacre recently pointed out the flaws in the reporting of research that indicated the evolutionary basis of why blue is associated with boys, pink with girls.

Well worth a regular read.

See The Guardian Unlimited.