Science News Thread

[jack]

I was all excited about the moon bombing... My wife and I talked about it and I told her about the Apollo mission, the one that something went wrong and they had to abort the mission. think it was apollo 11... On that mission they were suppose to detonate a bomb on the surface of the moon... So I told her that the ET's would stop the bombing and look... I don't know for sure but d**n there was suppose to be a 6mile high ploom and I saw nothing... I think they covered it up... Ive also done some personal analysis on the pics as the tailing craft before impact.... Looks like lots of structures right around where the bomb was suppose to hit... Hummmmm Any thoughts on this guys... Have a great day all... we live in exciting times... jack

[papat]

Jack
Can't help but wonder if the recent moon incident had any thing to do with "ARTEMIS", LG data on viewed timelines ect.

[jack]

Oct 18, 2009 23:43:01 GMT 4 @papat said:

Jack
Can't help but wonder if the recent moon incident had any thing to do with "ARTEMIS", LG data on viewed timelines ect.

good question

[ninathedog]

edit>>
A more in-depth report is available via NPR.org, here:
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113947912

..........

Space Scientist Is Held as Spy

FBI Arrests U.S. Government Physicist in Sting Operation Involving Nuclear Secrets

By EVAN PEREZ
The Wall Street Journal
October 20, 2009

WASHINGTON -- A top U.S. space researcher was arrested in a Federal Bureau of Investigation sting Monday and charged with attempting to spy for Israel.

Stewart Nozette, 52 years old, of Chevy Chase, Md., is a former government physicist who worked for agencies ranging from the Defense Department to the White House.


Stewart Nozette, center, was present at a Pentagon news briefing in December 1996, when he and Paul Spudis, left, both of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, discuss the discovery of water on the moon.


In exchange for thousands of dollars in cash and an Israeli passport, Mr. Nozette allegedly attempted to pass on U.S. top-secret nuclear and space secrets to an FBI agent who was posing as an Israeli intelligence operative, according to an FBI affidavit filed with the criminal complaint in the case.

An attorney for Mr. Nozette didn't immediately respond to a call seeking comment. Mr. Nozette is expected to make his first appearance Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington. If convicted, Mr. Nozette faces up to life in prison.

Other alleged spy cases in recent years involving Israel include one that collapsed in May against two former lobbyists for a pro-Israel group. U.S. officials said the Nozette case doesn't include allegations that Israel or its agents were involved.

The FBI affidavit doesn't explain how Mr. Nozette came to the attention of U.S. investigators. However, the affidavit describes Mr. Nozette's work over the past decade for an Israeli aerospace company that is wholly owned by the Israeli government. During a security search as he departed on a foreign trip in January, a security officer noted he was traveling with two small portable hard drives, which another government officer couldn't locate in a subsequent search as Mr. Nozette re-entered the U.S.

A spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington didn't respond to a request for comment.

"Those who would put our nation's defense secrets up for sale can expect to be vigorously prosecuted," said Channing D. Phillips, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

FBI wiretaps cited in the government affidavit quote Mr. Nozette telling the undercover federal agent that his former top-secret security clearances allowed him access to sensitive nuclear and intelligence secrets.

"I don't get recruited by Mossad every day. I knew this day would come," Mr. Nozette allegedly is heard on wiretaps telling the FBI agent, according to the affidavit.

The FBI agent arranged for Mr. Nozette to use a location previously set up -- a "dead-drop" -- at a post-office box in Washington, provided him a cellphone to send text messages, and set up an alias for use in his new Israeli identification documents, according to the affidavit. In a post-office box dead-drop last month, Mr. Nozette left a sealed manila envelope containing an encrypted portable hard drive, the affidavit says. The drive contained classified information on satellite programs supporting U.S. military and intelligence operations.

While the affidavit indicates that Mr. Nozette at first appeared suspicious about the espionage arrangements, it also relates how the undercover agent gained Mr. Nozette's trust and he is heard on a wiretap saying of the post-office drops: "that seems kind of Mossad-like." The FBI affidavit quotes Mr. Nozette offering to provide additional classified information on nuclear and other weapons systems, as well as military spacecraft or satellites. He explained that he would earn his keep, according to affidavit, because some of the information would have to be from memory, since he no longer has the necessary security clearances. "These are among the most sensitive subjects and it will have to be recreated from memory over some time," the FBI affidavit quotes him as saying.

Mr. Nozette, a Chicago native, was prominent in his field. He helped develop a radar experiment, now displayed at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, that is said to have detected water on the moon's south pole.

.......


Write to Evan Perez at [e-mail]
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A4

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

online.wsj.com/article/SB125600137727795549.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

[nodstar]

UCLA Study: The Internet Is Altering Our Brains[/size]

Fox News
www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,568576,00.html?test=latestnews
2009-10-20



Adults with little Internet experience show changes in their brain activity after just one week online, a new study finds.

The results suggest Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults.

As the brain ages, a number of structural and functional changes occur, including atrophy, or decay, reductions in cell activity and increases in complex things like deposits of amyloid plaques and tau tangles, which can impact cognitive function.

Research has shown that mental stimulation similar to the stimulation that occurs in individuals who frequently use the Internet may affect the efficiency of cognitive processing and alter the way the brain encodes new information.

"We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function," Dr. Gary Small, study author and professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, said in a statement.

The UCLA team worked with 24 neurologically normal volunteers between the ages of 55 and 78. Prior to the study, half the participants used the Internet daily, while the other half had very little experience. Age, educational level and gender were similar between the two groups.

The participants performed Web searches while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, which recorded the subtle brain-circuitry changes experienced during this activity. This type of scan tracks brain activity by measuring the level of blood flow in the brain during cognitive tasks. While the study involves a small number of people and more research on this topic is needed, small study sizes are typical of fMRI-based research.

After the initial brain scan, subjects went home and conducted Internet searches for one hour a day for a total of seven days over a two-week period. These practice searches involved using the web to answer questions about various topics by exploring different websites and reading information. Participants then received a second brain scan using the same Internet simulation task, but with different topics.

The first scan of participants with little Internet experience showed brain activity in the regions controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities. The second brain scan of these participants, conducted after the home practice searches, demonstrated activation of these same regions, but there was also activity in the middle frontal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus – areas of the brain known to be important in working memory and decision-making.

Thus, after Internet training at home, participants with minimal online experience displayed brain activation patterns very similar to those seen in the group of savvy Internet users.

"The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults," Teena D. Moody, the study's first author and UCLA researcher, said in a statement.

When performing an online search, the ability to hold important information in working memory and to take away the important points from competing graphics and words is essential, Moody noted.

Previous research by the UCLA team found that searching online resulted in a more than twofold increase in brain activation in older adults with prior experience, compared with those with little Internet experience. The new findings suggest that it may take only days for those with minimal experience to match the activity levels of those with years of experience, said Small.

Additional studies will be needed to address the impact of the Internet on younger individuals and help identify aspects of online searching that generate the greatest levels of brain activation.

The findings were presented Oct. 19 at the meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, Illinois.

[nodstar]

Life's Chemistry Set" Found in Remote Reaches of Universe[/size]

Daily Galaxy
www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/10/more-of-lifes-chemistry-set-found-in-remote-reaches-of-universe.html

2009-10-16



While some have been scanning our nearest neighbors for signs of life, excited by the existence of ice and methane plumes on Mars, others have been looking farther afield. Much farther afield. Twenty-five thousand light years afield, in fact, which is a bit more afield than the human brain can actually picture without popping, and in the far flung locale of HMC G31.41+0.31 one of the basic components of life has been found.


Such long-range searches are very different to our close range surveys. You can't quite make out structures in another quadrant of the galaxy (even inferring the existence of a planet is considered a major success), but for all that we still depend on the "look at the incoming light" tactic the ancients used to detect Venus and Jupiter. But we're no longer limited to the visual spectrum, and can see more than just "Big spots that reflect light."

A lot more. The advances of quantum mechanics allow us to identify materials clear across the Milky Way just from the light we receive - every chemical in creation has a unique light signature, caused by photons jumping between the different electron energy levels in its atoms. In this case, a European team of scientists have identified the simple sugar glycolaldehyde from its infra-red emissions.

Glycolaldehyde (CH2OHCHO) might not sound terribly vital to you, but it's kind of important. Put together with propenal it can make ribose, which is used to make ribonucleic acid, which is used to make deoxyribonucleic acid, which is used to make you. It's one of the fundamental chemical building blocks that's more biological than mineral and its existence spread through space is a big deal. It's been observed as far back as 2000 in hot galactic core regions, but this is the first observation in a location where life as we know it could conceivable occur.

Recent results indicating that there are far more planets out there than we previously suspected, and combined with these suggestions that the "life chemistry set" is pretty widespread this raises the chances of extraterrestrial life. Because no matter what the odds of a successful combination of components, there is a far larger number of planets shaking the chemical cocktail shaker for a "Life Special With Extra Carbon."

[nodstar]

Sun's heliosphere has a different shape than theorists had expected.[/size]

MIT News

web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/ibex-findings.html

2009-10-17

Bursting the sun's bubble
New observations indicate the heliosphere — the sun's sphere of influence — has a different shape than theorists had expected.
David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

The sun's environment in interstellar space — the heliosphere — is essentially a bubble that encompasses the entire solar system and has a diameter about 100 times the distance from the Earth to the sun. This region, in which the solar wind dominates before it smashes into the surrounding galactic gas and dust, was supposed to look something like the shape of a comet: a region pushed inward on one side and streaming outward on the other. But a new NASA orbiting observatory designed to study this vast zone found something completely different.

Our sun's sphere of influence, according to a series of papers published in Science on Oct. 16 detailing the initial results from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite, seems instead to be a bubble that is cinched at the waist by a vast ribbon as seen by energetic neutral atoms — atoms that are not electrically charged, but are moving very fast through space — that are glowing 10 times more brightly than anyone had expected from anything in this region called the heliosphere. The textbook descriptions of the heliosphere, according to Science's accompanying news story, will have to be entirely rewritten.

IBEX is a project run by the Southwest Research Institute that involves dozens of researchers from several institutions around the country, including three from MIT who are co-authors of the group of Science papers: Peter Ford, a principal research scientist at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, and Kavli research scientists Roland Vanderspek and Geoffrey Crew.

IBEX, launched a year ago into a high elliptical orbit that takes it out almost as far as the moon, has completed its first six months of observations — enough to give a first view of the entire sky. It captures energetic particles coming from the boundary between the sun's region of influence and the interstellar space beyond. Previously, the only direct evidence about this giant bubble came from the two Voyager spacecraft, which reached the inner edge of this boundary zone about two years ago and provided in-situ glimpses of two particular points on that shell.

IBEX provides "the first all-sky view of this region, and no one was expecting what we've seen," Crew says. Oddly enough, the energetic ribbon that circles the whole sky doesn't seem to follow the ecliptic (the plane in which all of the planets orbit). Nor does it follow the plane of the galaxy we inhabit, the Milky Way. "Who ordered this?" Crew exclaims. "It doesn't line up with anything!"

What does the discrepancy mean? It will take theorists some time to figure that out, since the observations were so different from anything predicted by existing theories or models. "Theories are flying," Crew says. One suggestion is that the ribbon of energetic neutral atoms may have to do with the effect of the local galactic magnetic field pushing against the heliosphere. These observations suggest that the ribbon is perpendicular to that magnetic field, he says.

IBEX is expected to remain in operation for at least two more years, and it could potentially keep going for a decade or more if funding is provided, which would be helpful in order to see whether the heliosphere varies over the course of the 11-year solar cycle. "There's a lot to look at in the future to try to understand this," Crew says. "There will be a wealth of new information to constrain the models."

Email Article

[nodstar]

If We Live in a Multiverse, How Many Are There?[/size]

Universe Today
www.universetoday.com/2009/10/15/if-we-live-in-a-multiverse-how-many-are-there/

2009-10-17



Theoretical physics has brought us the notion that our single universe is not necessarily the only game in town. Satellite data from WMAP, along with string theory and its 11- dimensional hyperspace idea has produced the concept of the multiverse, where the Big Bang could have produced many different universes instead of a single uniform universe. The idea has gained popularity recently, so it was only a matter of time until someone asked the question of how many multiverses could possibly exist. The number, according to two physicists, could be "humongous."

Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin at Stanford University in California, did a few back-of- the- envelope calculations, starting with the idea that the Big Bang was essentially a quantum process which generated quantum fluctuations in the state of the early universe. The universe then underwent a period of rapid growth called inflation during which these perturbations were "frozen," creating different initial classical conditions in different parts of the cosmos. Since each of these regions would have a different set of laws of low energy physics, they can be thought of as different universes.

Linde and Vanchurin then estimated how many different universes could have appeared as a result of this effect. Their answer is that this number must be proportional to the effect that caused the perturbations in the first place, a process called slow roll inflation, — the solution Linde came up with previously to answer the problem of the bubbles of universes colliding in the early inflation period. In this model, inflation occurred from a scalar field rolling down a potential energy hill. When the field rolls very slowly compared to the expansion of the universe, inflation occurs and collisions end up being rare.

Using all of this (and more – see their paper here) Linde and Vanchurin calculate that the number of universes in the multiverse and could be at least 10^10^10^7, a number which is definitely "humungous," as they described it.

The next question, then, is how many universes could we actually see? Linde and Vanchurin say they had to invoke the Bekenstein limit, where the properties of the observer become an important factor because of a limit to the amount of information that can be contained within any given volume of space, and by the limits of the human brain.

The total amount of information that can be absorbed by one individual during a lifetime is about 10^16 bits. So a typical human brain can have 10^10^16 configurations and so could never distinguish more than that number of different universes.

"So, the total number of possibilities accessible to any given observer is limited not only by the entropy of perturbations of metric produced by inflation and by the size of the cosmological horizon, but also by the number of degrees of freedom of an observer," the physicists write.

"We have found that the strongest limit on the number of different locally distinguishable geometries is determined mostly by our abilities to distinguish between different universes and to remember our results," wrote Linde and Vanchurin. "Potentially it may become very important that when we analyze the probability of existencse of a universe of a given type, we should be talking about a consistent pair: the universe and an observer who makes the rest of the universe "alive" and the wave function of the rest of the universe time-dependant."

So their conclusion is that the limit does not depend on the properties of the multiverse itself, but on the properties of the observer.

They hope to further study this concept to see if this probability if proportional to the observable entropy of inflation.

[nodstar]

Jupiter's Moon Europa Has Enough Oxygen For Life[/SIZE]

PhysOrg.com
www.physorg.com/news174918239.html#top

2009-10-19



New research suggests that there is plenty of oxygen available in the subsurface ocean of Europa to support oxygen-based metabolic processes for life similar to that on Earth. In fact, there may be enough oxygen to support complex, animal-like organisms with greater oxygen demands than microorganisms.

The global ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa contains about twice the liquid water of all the Earth’s oceans combined. New research suggests that there may be plenty of oxygen available in that ocean to support life, a hundred times more oxygen than previously estimated.

The chances for life there have been uncertain, because Europa’s ocean lies beneath several miles of ice, which separates it from the production of oxygen at the surface by energetic charged particles (similar to cosmic rays). Without oxygen, life could conceivably exist at hot springs in the ocean floor using exotic metabolic chemistries, based on sulfur or the production of methane. However, it is not certain whether the ocean floor actually would provide the conditions for such life.

Therefore a key question has been whether enough oxygen reaches the ocean to support the oxygen-based metabolic process that is most familiar to us. An answer comes from considering the young age of Europa’s surface. Its geology and the paucity of impact craters suggests that the top of the ice is continually reformed such that the current surface is only about 50 million years old, roughly 1% of the age of the solar system.

Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona has considered three generic resurfacing processes: gradually laying fresh material on the surface; opening cracks which fill with fresh ice from below; and disrupting patches of surface in place and replacing them with fresh material. Using estimates for the production of oxidizers at the surface, he finds that the delivery rate into the ocean is so fast that the oxygen concentration could exceed that of the Earth’s oceans in only a few million years. Greenberg presented his findings at the 41st meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences now under way in Fajardo, Puerto Rico.

Greenberg says that the concentrations of oxygen would be great enough to support not only microorganisms, but also “macrofauna”, that is, more complex animal-like organisms which have greater oxygen demands. The continual supply of oxygen could support roughly 3 billion kilograms of macrofauna, assuming similar oxygen demands to terrestrial fish.

The good news for the question of the origin of life is that there would be a delay of a couple of billion years before the first surface oxygen reached the ocean. Without that delay, the first pre-biotic chemistry and the first primitive organic structures would be disrupted by oxidation. Oxidation is a hazard unless organisms have evolved protection from its damaging effects. A similar delay in the production of oxygen on Earth was probably essential for allowing life to get started here.

Richard Greenberg is the author of the recent book “Unmasking Europa: The Search for Life on Jupiter’s Ocean Moon”, which offers a comprehensive picture of Europa for the general reader.

Source: American Astronomical Society, via Astrobio.

[nodstar]

Scientists announce planet bounty - 32 exoplanets[/SIZE]

BBC
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8314581.stm
2009-10-20



Astronomers have announced a haul of planets found beyond our Solar System.

The 32 "exoplanets" ranged in size from five times the mass of Earth to 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter, the researchers said.

They were found using a very sensitive instrument on a 3.6m telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile.

The discovery is exciting because it suggests that low-mass planets could be numerous in our galaxy.

"From [our] results, we know now that at least 40% of solar-type stars have low-mass planets. This is really important because it means that low-mass planets are everywhere, basically," explained Stephane Udry from Geneva University, Switzerland.

"What's very interesting is that models are predicting them, and we are finding them; and furthermore the models are predicting even more lower-mass planets like the Earth."

Size selection

The discovery now takes the number of known exoplanets - planets outside our Solar System - to more than 400.

These have been identified using a range of astronomical techniques and telescopes, but this latest group was spotted as a result of observations made with the Harps spectrometer at La Silla.

The High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher instrument employs what is sometimes called the "wobble technique".

This is an indirect method of detection that infers the existence of orbiting planets from the way their gravity makes a parent star appear to twitch in its motion across the sky.

Astronomy is working right at the limits of the current technology capable of detecting exoplanets and most of those found so far are Jupiter-scale and bigger.

Harps, however, has focussed its efforts on small, relatively cool stars - so-called M-class stars - in the hope of finding low-mass planets, ones most likely to resemble the rocky planets in our own Solar System.

Of the 28 planets known with masses below 20 Earth-masses, Harps has now identified 24 of them - and six of those are in the newly announced group.

"We have two candidates at five Earth-masses and two at six Earth-masses," Professor Udry told BBC News.

Combined approach

Harps has previously identified an object which is only twice as massive as the Earth (announced in April).

Scientists are confident this planet harbours no life, though, because it orbits so close to its parent star that surface temperatures would be scorching.

In revealing the new collection of planets on Monday, the Harps team-members said they expected to confirm the existence of another batch, similar in number, during the coming six months.

The ultimate goal is to find a rocky planet in a star's "habitable zone", an orbit where temperatures are in a range that would support the presence of liquid water.

Scientists believe the introduction of newer, more sensitive technologies will allow them to identify such an object within just a few years from now.

The US space agency (Nasa) recently launched its Kepler telescope.

This hopes to find Earth-size planets by looking for the tiny dip in light coming from a star as an object crosses its face as viewed from Earth.

To properly characterise a planet, different observing techniques are required. The Kepler "transit" method reveals the diameter of an object, but a Harps-like measurement is needed to resolve the mass.

[fr33ksh0w2012]

Chinese Scientists Build Working Black Hole

Sunday, October 18, 2009

An artist's illustration shows a close-up view of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy's center
Researchers theorized how to design a table-top black hole earlier this year. Now two ambitious Chinese scientists have actually built one—using the same materials that made invisibility cloaks possible.



The theoretical model for the black hole aped the properties of a cosmological black hole, whose intense gravity bends the surrounding space-time, causing any nearby matter or radiation to follow the warped space-time and spiral inwards.

The working Chinese model consists of a cylinder, made up of strips of a special material that increasingly affects electric fields. As rays of light approach the device, they curve inward towards its center, where the permittivity (a characteristic that describes how the material affects an electric field) is such that the light cannot escape. The device then converts the light into heat energy.

To affect light in such a way, the black hole uses so-called meta-materials that "bend light" to mimic the properties of a cosmological black hole. Meta-materials can deflect microwaves around a three-dimensional object, essentially making it invisible to the waves. Researchers themselves made waves by proposing that such materials may lead to the creation of an invisibility cloak.

For more on this innnovation, visit New Scientist.

www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,566322,00.html?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a4:g4:r4:c0.000000:b0:z5

[ninathedog]

'Freezer plan' bid to save coral

By Matt McGrath
BBC News, Copenhagen

It's the last ditch effort to save biodiversity from the reefs which are extremely diverse systems
— Simon Harding
Zoological Society of London


Corals in Honda Bay in Palawan island, western Philippines
Coral reefs are a key source of food, income and coastal protection

The prospects of saving the world's coral reefs now appear so bleak that plans are being made to freeze samples to preserve them for the future.

A meeting in Denmark took evidence from researchers that most coral reefs will not survive even if tough regulations on greenhouse gases are put in place.

Scientists proposed storing samples of coral species in liquid nitrogen.

That will allow them to be reintroduced to the seas in the future if global temperatures can be stabilised.

Legislators from 16 major economies have been meeting in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, to try to agree the way forward on climate change.

The meeting has been organised by the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment (Globe).

Losing the fight

Key coral reefs 'could disappear'

One of the issues they have been considering is what to do with coral reefs, which make up less than a quarter of 1% of the ocean's floor.

Yet the reefs are a key source of food, income and coastal protection for around 500 million people worldwide.

At this meeting, politicians and scientists acknowledged that global emissions of carbon dioxide are rising so fast that we are losing the fight to save coral and the world must develop an alternative plan.

Freezing samples for the future may be a necessary option.

''Well it's the last ditch effort to save biodiversity from the reefs which are extremely diverse systems," said Simon Harding from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

"It would take other work to try and reconstruct the reef so that you can start the process of building up a reef again," he said.

"That is something that needs to be looked at in detail, but we can definitely store the species and save them in that way."

According to recent research, one of the world's most important concentrations of coral — the so-called Coral Triangle in South East Asia — could be destroyed by climate change before the end of this century with significant impacts on food security and livelihoods.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8324954.stm

[nodstar]

Scientists first to trap light and sound vibrations together in nanocrystal[/size]

PhysOrg.com
www.physorg.com/news175766229.html

2009-10-27

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have created a nanoscale crystal device that, for the first time, allows scientists to confine both light and sound vibrations in the same tiny space.

"This is a whole new concept," notes Oskar Painter, associate professor of applied physics at Caltech. Painter is the principal investigator on the paper describing the work, which was published this week in the online edition of the journal Nature. "People have known how to manipulate light, and they've known how to manipulate sound. But they hadn't realized that we can manipulate both at the same time, and that the waves will interact very strongly within this single structure."

Indeed, Painter points out, the interactions between sound and light in this device—dubbed an optomechanical crystal—can result in mechanical vibrations with frequencies as high as tens of gigahertz, or 10 billion cycles per second. Being able to achieve such frequencies, he explains, gives these devices the ability to send large amounts of information, and opens up a wide array of potential applications—everything from lightwave communication systems to biosensors capable of detecting (or weighing) a single macromolecule. It could also, Painter says, be used as a research tool by scientists studying nanomechanics. "These structures would give a mass sensitivity that would rival conventional nanoelectromechanical systems because light in these structures is more sensitive to motion than a conventional electrical system is."

"And all of this," he adds, "can be done on a silicon microchip."

Optomechanical crystals focus on the most basic units—or quanta—of light and sound. (These are called photons and phonons, respectively.) As Painter notes, there has been a rich history of research into both photonic and phononic crystals, which use tiny energy traps called bandgaps to capture quanta of light or sound within their structures.

What hadn't been done before was to put those two types of crystals together and see what they are capable of doing. That is what the Caltech team has done.

"We now have the ability to manipulate sound and light in the same nanoplatform, and are able to interconvert energy between the two systems," says Painter. "And we can engineer these in nearly limitless ways."

The volume in which the light and sound are simultaneously confined is more than 100,000 times smaller than that of a human cell, notes Caltech graduate student Matt Eichenfield, the paper's first author. "This does two things," he says. "First, the interactions of the light and sound get stronger as the volume to which they are confined decreases. Second, the amount of mass that has to move to create the sound wave gets smaller as the volume decreases. We made the volume in which the light and sound live so small that the mass that vibrates to make the sound is about ten times less than a trillionth of a gram."

Eichenfield points out that, in addition to measuring high-frequency sound waves, the team demonstrated that it's actually possible to produce these waves using only light. "We can now convert light waves into microwave-frequency sound waves on the surface of a silicon microchip," he says.

These sound waves, he adds, are analogous to the light waves of a laser. "The way we have designed the system makes it possible to use these sound waves by routing them around on the chip, and making them interact with other on-chip systems. And, of course, we can then detect all these interactions again by using the light. Essentially, optomechanical crystals provide a whole new on-chip architecture in which light can generate, interact with, and detect high-frequency sound waves."

These optomechanical crystals were created as an offshoot of previous work done by Painter and colleagues on a nanoscale "zipper cavity," in which the mechanical properties of light and its interactions with motion were strengthened and enhanced.

Like the zipper cavity, optomechanical crystals trap light; the difference is that the crystals trap—and intensify—sound waves, as well. Similarly, while the zipper cavities worked by funneling the light into the gap between two nanobeams—allowing the researchers to detect the beams' motion relative to one another—optomechanical crystals work on an even tinier scale, trapping both light and sound within a single nanobeam.

"Here we can actually see very small vibrations of sound trapped well inside a single 'string,' using the light trapped inside that string," says Eichenfield. "Importantly, although the method of sensing the motion is very different, we didn't lose the exquisite sensitivity to motion that the zipper had. We were able to keep the sensitivity to motion high while making another huge leap down in mass."

"As a technology, optomechanical crystals provide a platform on which to create planar circuits of sound and light," says Kerry Vahala, the Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and professor of applied physics, and coauthor on the Nature paper. "These circuits can include an array of functions for generation, detection, and control. Moreover," he says, "optomechanical crystal structures are fabricated using materials and tools that are similar to those found in the semiconductor and photonics industries. Collectively, this means that phonons have joined photons and electrons as possible ways to manipulate and process information on a chip."

And these information-processing possibilities are well within reach, notes Painter. "It's not one plus one equals two, but one plus one equals ten in terms of what you can do with these things. All of these applications are much closer than they were before."

"This novel approach to bringing both light and sound together and letting them play off of each other exemplifies the forward-thinking work being done by the Engineering and Applied Science (EAS) division," says Ares Rosakis, chair of EAS and Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering at Caltech.

More information: "Optomechanical crystals," Nature.

[nodstar]

Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint?[/size]

New Scientist
www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427314.400-rethinking-relativity-is-time-out-of-joint.html

2009-10-26

EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein's theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory's foundation?

Everything from the concept of the black hole to GPS timing owes a debt to the theory of general relativity, which describes how gravity arises from the geometry of space and time. The sun's gravitational field, for instance, bends starlight passing nearby because its mass is warping the surrounding space-time. This theory has held up to precision tests in the solar system and beyond, and has explained everything from the odd orbit of Mercury to the way pairs of neutron stars perform their pas de deux.

Yet it is still not clear how well general relativity holds up over cosmic scales, at distances much larger than the span of single galaxies. Now the first, tentative hint of a deviation from general relativity has been found. While the evidence is far from watertight, if confirmed by bigger surveys, it may indicate either that Einstein's theory is incomplete, or else that dark energy, the stuff thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, is much weirder than we thought (see "Not dark energy, dark fluid").

The analysis of starlight data by cosmologist Rachel Bean of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has generated quite a stir. Shortly after the paper was published on the pre-print physics archive, prominent physicist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena praised Bean's research. "This is serious work by a respected cosmologist," he wrote on his blog Cosmic Variance. "Either the result is wrong, and we should be working hard to find out why, or it's right, and we're on the cusp of a revolution."
If it is wrong, we should be working hard to find out why, but if it's right, we are on the cusp of a revolution

"It has caused quite a furore in astronomy circles," says Richard Massey of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh in the UK. "This paper has generated a lot of interest."

Bean found her evidence lurking in existing data collected by the Cosmic Evolution Survey, a multi-telescope imaging project that includes the longest survey yet by the Hubble Space Telescope. COSMOS, which detected more than 2 million galaxies over a small patch of sky, takes advantage of gravity's ability to bend light. Massive objects like galaxy clusters bend the light of more distant objects so that it is directed towards or away from Earth. This effect, called gravitational lensing, is at its most dramatic when it creates kaleidoscopic effects like luminous rings or the appearance of multiple copies of a galaxy.

The sky is also dominated by the distorting effects of "weak lensing", in which intervening matter bends light to subtly alter the shapes and orientations of more distant galaxies, creating an effect similar to that of looking through old window glass. Since galaxies come in all shapes and sizes, it is difficult to know whether the light from an individual galaxy has been distorted, because there is nothing to compare it with. But by looking for common factors in the distortion of many galaxies, it is possible to build up a map of both the visible and even unseen matterMovie Camera that bend their light.

The weak lensing technique can also be used to measure two different effects of gravity. General relativity calls for gravity's curvature of space to be equivalent to its curvature of time. Light should be influenced in equal amounts by both.

When the COSMOS data was released in 2007, the team - led by Massey - assumed these two factors were equivalent. Their analysis revealed that gravitational tugs on light were stronger than anticipated, but they put this down to a slightly higher concentration of ordinary and dark matter in the survey's patch of sky than had been predicted.

To look for potential deviations from general relativity, Bean reanalysed the data and dropped the requirement that these two components of gravity had to be equal. Instead the ratio of the two was allowed to change in value. She found that between 8 and 11 billion years ago gravity's distortion of time appeared to be three times as strong as its ability to curve space. An observer around at the time wouldn't have noticed the effect because it only applies over large distances. Nonetheless, "there is a preference for a significant deviation from general relativity", says Bean (www.arxiv.org/abs/0909.3853).
Gravity's distortion of time appeared to be three times as strong as its ability to curve space

At this stage, it's hard to say what would happen if the deviation from general relativity was confirmed. Cosmologists have already considered some modifications to general relativity that could explain the universe's acceleration (see "Not dark energy, dark fluid").

Yet finding a deviation when the universe was less than half its current age is odd - if general relativity had broken down at some level, the signs should be most dramatic more recently, long after the repulsive effect of dark energy overwhelmed the attractive powers of gravity some 6 billion years ago.

Most astronomers, including Bean, are cautious about the results. "Nobody is yet betting money that the effect is real," says cosmologist Dragan Huterer of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Various other explanations, like a bias in the technique used to estimate the distances to galaxies, now need to be ruled out.

Although COSMOS photographed a deep patch of sky, it was fairly small by the standards of modern surveys. This opens up the possibility that this region might be anomalous, notes Asantha Cooray, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Irvine. "You could have a massive galaxy cluster that could boost your weak lensing signal up. Or by random chance you could have more dark matter," says Cooray, part of a team that analysed other survey data taken with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii and found no hint of a departure from general relativity. "The only way to take that into account is to look at data in a larger field."

Future projects will scan the sky over much wider areas and collect images of many more lensed galaxies. For example, the Dark Energy Survey is poised to start surveying the sky from 2011 and will build up an even more precise picture of how light has been bent over the course of the universe's history.

Whether these surveys find the effect or not, Bean hopes that her paper will generate more interest in the idea of using weak lensing to test general relativity. "I'm not putting my flag out there and saying this is a real thing," Bean says. "We need to look at more data sets. This is really just the first stage for trying to test gravity in this way."

Massey agrees: "At the moment we're in the mode of just trying to hack into general relativity to find the chinks in its armour, to find any places where it might not be working." n
Not dark energy, dark fluid

Dark energy could be weirder than we thought. Evidence that over large distances gravity exerts a greater pull on time than on space (see main story) might not necessarily suggest that the theory of general relativity is wrong. It could instead be a sign that the universe's acceleration may require a more exotic explanation.

The simplest way of explaining the universe's acceleration is to invoke a cosmological constant, originally proposed by Einstein to allow the universe to remain the same size in the presence of matter. This describes a universe filled with uniform, outward-pushing energy. But there are other possible explanations for acceleration.

One idea is that the entire universe exists on a membrane, or brane, floating inside an extra dimension. While matter will be confined to three dimensions, gravity could be leaking into this extra dimension. When the universe becomes large enough, this gravity could interact with matter in the brane, to produce acceleration on large scales.

A deviation could also be a sign that dark energy is a more complex "fluid" that exerts varying pressures in different directions. The snag is that telling the difference between a more exotic form of dark energy and a modification to our understanding of gravity could be tricky.

"If we were to detect a departure," says cosmologist Alessandra Silvestri of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we might not be able to tell whether there is a flaw in general relativity or just evidence that dark energy is "some sort of fancy fluid".

[fr33ksh0w2012]

WHAT DID I TRY TO TELL EVERYONE WHEN I WAS 13 AND EVERYONE LAUGHED AT ME

The Prophet of Garbage
2007-03-00, Popular Science - March 2007 Issue
www.popsci.com/popsci/science/873aae7bf86c0110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd...

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