Gizmorama - November 5, 2012
Good Morning,This is interesting, apparently researchers say they've managed to assemble thousands of nano-machines capable of producing a coordinated movement like that of human muscle fibers. Amazing!
Learn about this great development and other interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.
Until Next Time,
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Visit and Enjoy: EVTV1.com****-- Sun emits powerful flare --*GREENBELT, Md. - A powerful solar flare released by the sun will likely be followed by others in the next days, U.S. astronomers say. Scientists working with NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a space telescope that constantly scans the sun, said the erupting flare reached peak brightness at 11:22 p.m. EDT Monday. Three strong flares had already erupted from the same sunspot before the rotation of the sun brought it into view from the Earth, they said. "This means more flares are probably in the offing, and they will become increasingly Earth-directed as the sunspot turns toward our planet in the days ahead," astronomer Tony Phillips wrote on Spaceweather.com. The Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the erupting flare in still images and video, SPACE.com reported. Astronomers classify the strength of solar flares in terms of energy release, with Monday's flare ranked as an X-class event, the most powerful level. Solar activity increased and decreases on an 11-year cycle, with a peak of magnetic activity expected in 2013.
*-- Sensors could monitor reactors in disaster --*KANSAS CITY, Mo. - U.S. researchers say they've created self-powered sensors that could monitor a nuclear reactor in a disaster even when electrical power to the reactor fails. The research was prompted by the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, when the electrical power supply to the nuclear reactor failed during a severe earthquake and subsequent tsunami and rendered backup electrical generators, coolant pumps and sensor systems useless. The loss of power meant the plant's operators were unable to monitor the fuel rods in the reactor and spent fuel in the storage ponds. Penn State researchers have teamed with the Idaho National Laboratory to create a self-powered sensor capable of harnessing heat from nuclear reactors' harsh operating environments to transmit data without electronic networks, a release from the American Institute of Physics reported Tuesday. The sensors use a technology called thermoacoustics to create energy from the heat with a nuclear reactor. "Thermoacoustics exploits the interaction between heat and sound waves," Randall A. Ali, a graduate student studying acoustics at Penn State, said. "Thermoacoustic sensors can operate without moving parts and don't require external power if a heat source, such as fuel in a nuclear reactor, is available." The researchers will present their findings at the Acoustical Society of America's meeting this week in Kansas City, Mo.
*-- Project to seek moon outside solar system --*CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - With the discovery of planets orbiting distant stars almost routine, a U.S. researcher say he wants to extend the search to a new target: distant moons. "It's the next big thing in the field," David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said. "We've found rocky planets as small as Mars. The big challenge now is trying to find a moon." Kipping is leading the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler project, a year-old effort that joins astronomers from several institutions in the search for moons outside our solar system, a Harvard University release said Tuesday. The project uses publicly available data from the Kepler Space Telescope, an orbital telescope dedicated to the search for exoplanets outside the solar system. Moons abound in our own our solar system, with 176 circling six of the eight planets, 67 of them around Jupiter. "You look at our system and say moons have to be common. But we don't know whether that's true empirically," Kipping says. "We have no prejudice about whether we'll find these things or not. Either way, we should be able to say something profound about the universe." Moons large enough to be detected by Kepler will also be large enough so their gravity will hold onto an atmosphere, Kipping said, and if one of those moons is orbiting a planet in their star's habitable "Goldilocks zone" -- not too hot and not too cold --it could be a place where life might arise.
*-- Nano-machines can mimic muscle movement --*STRASBOURG, France - French researchers say they've managed to assemble thousands of nano-machines capable of producing a coordinated movement like that of human muscle fibers. The researchers, led by Nicolas Giuseppone of the University of Strasbourg, said the experiment suggests a multitude of applications in robotics and in the medical field for the synthesis of artificial muscles or other materials. Human muscles are controlled by the coordinated movement of thousands of protein molecules -- biological "nano-machines" -- which only function individually over distances on the order of a nanometer. But when combined in their thousands, these molecules -- or the artificial nano-machines in the French experiment -- can amplify this linear movement until they reach human scale and do so in a perfectly coordinated manner, the researchers said. Giuseppone's team has reported synthesizing long polymer chains incorporating thousands of nano-machines each capable of producing linear telescopic motion of around one nanometer. Taken together, the whole polymer chain can contract or extend over about 10 micrometers, thereby amplifying the movement by a factor of 10,000, the researchers said.
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