Gizmorama - July 27, 2015

Good Morning,

Need a prescription refilled, but you're unable to pick it up? Well, don't worry! A pharmaceutical drone delivery service may be in your future. Really? In my opinion, that's a 'looks good on paper' idea.

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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* NASA assists in pharmaceutical drone delivery *
WASHINGTON (UPI) - An outdoor free clinic in Virginia was the first to receive an unmanned aerial delivery of pharmaceuticals Friday.

NASA partnered with Flirtey Inc., -- a drone startup company -- to successfully deliver medicines and other medical supplies to an annual free clinic in Wise County, Va., which serves at least 1,500 people.

During the experimental exercise, a full-sized aircraft from NASA's Langley Research Center escorted a remotely operated hexacopter from Flirtey to the fairgrounds where the clinic is located. Authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the operation became the first drone-delivery to transport such supplies.

The flight was part of an event called Let's Fly Wisely.

"This first unmanned aerial delivery gave us the chance to do some critical research and mission exploration with our Cirrus SR22," deputy director of NASA's Langley Research Services, Frank Jones, said of the fixed-wing Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) that carried 10 pounds of provisions during the demonstration.

"We flew the aircraft remotely beyond [a] visual line of sight for the first time from a portable ground station," Jones said. "We had remotely piloted it a number of times at NASA Langley using our permanent ground station, but this allowed us to demonstrate a new capability that we can use to test unmanned mission concepts and aircraft technologies in a remote location."

The entire operation took about two hours as Flirtey separated the medical supplies into 24 small packages which can be easily transported by the drone. The pharmaceuticals were lowered to the ground via tether and health care professionals at the scene received them.

"These flights highlight the humanitarian possibilities of this technology, Virginia Sen. (D-VA) Mark R. Warner said Friday.


* Massless particle discovered 85 years after it was theorized *
PRINCETON, N.J. (UPI) - Researchers have discovered a massless particle, which was first theorized 85 years ago and thought to be a possible building block for other subatomic particles.

The discovery of the Weyl fermion, conceived of by mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl in 1929, could be a boon for electronics, researchers said. It could allow electricity to flow more freely and efficiently providing greater power, most notably for computers.

"The physics of the Weyl fermion are so strange, there could be many things that arise from this particle that we're just not capable of imagining now," M. Zahid Hasan, a professor of physics at Princeton University, said in a press release.

Based on Weyl's work, and their own intuition, the researchers theorized the fermions could exist inside a synthetic tantalum arsenide crystal they designed. The crystals were then inserted into a scanning tunneling spectromicroscope, which is cooled to near absolute zero and suspended from the ceiling to prevent even atom-sized vibrations. Based on the spectromicroscope, the crystals matched all of Weyl's theoretical specifications for the presence of the particle.

Once the specifications had been confirmed, researchers tested the crystals for the presence of the particle using high-energy, accelerator-based photon beams. The beams' shape, size and direction shifted when fired through the crystal, indicating the Weyl fermion was present in the crystal.

"After more than 80 years, we found that this fermion was already there, waiting. It is the most basic building block of all electrons," Hasan said. "It is exciting that we could finally make it come out following Weyl's 1929 theoretical recipe."

The researchers also found the particles can be used to create massless electrons that move quickly without being lost when they meet with an obstruction. The loss, called backscattering, hinders efficiency and generates heat in electronics. Because this doesn't happen with electrons created using Weyl fermions, the potential for their application in electronics and computers is large.

"It's like they have their own GPS and steer themselves without scattering," Hasan said. "They will move and move only in one direction since they are either right-handed or left-handed and never come to an end because they just tunnel through. These are very fast electrons that behave like unidirectional light beams and can be used for new types of quantum computing."

The study is published in Nature Communications.

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