January 9, 2012

Good Morning,

A new species of animals has been discovered by British researchers in an environment that looks to be "from another planet." Check out the first articles for all the exciting details on this find.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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New species found in deep antarctic waters

OXFORD, England - British researchers say they've discovered extraordinary new species of animals living near hydrothermal vents below the frigid waters of the Southern Ocean. Oxford researchers say they've found an environment unlike anything
found around other hydrothermal vents in other oceans, populated by previously unknown species of anemones, predatory sea stars and piles of hairy-chested yeti crabs, The Christian Science Monitor reported Wednesday. It was "almost like a sight from another planet," Oxford zoology Professor Alex Rogers said. While weird life forms have been observed at deep-sea vents the world over, hydrothermal vents had never been found in Antarctica before, Jon Copley, a professor at the University of Southampton who also participated in the research, said. Research in the harsh conditions of the Southern Ocean is more difficult than in temperate environments, he said. "It's only quite recently that we've been able to be bold enough, really, to head to the poles," Copley said. Researchers lowered cameras to two areas, 8,530 feet
and 7,874 feet deep to capture the first records of antarctic hydrothermal vents and their strange inhabitants.


Lizard tails inspire more agile robots

BERKELEY, Calif. - Researchers in robotics say they're looking at leaping lizards and dinosaurs as sources of inspiration in designing robots with "tails" that are more agile. University of California, Berkeley, researchers studied how lizards manage to leap successfully even when they slip and stumble, swinging their tail upward to prevent a forward pitch that could send them head-over-heels into a tree. Agile therapod dinosaurs like the velociraptor may have used their tails as stabilizers to prevent forward pitch researchers said. The scientists added a tail to a robotic car they named Tailbot and discovered both robots and lizards have to adjust the angle of their tail just right to counteract the effect of the stumble. Given an actively controlled tail, even robots can make a leap and remain upright, the found. "We showed for the first time that lizards swing their tail up or down to counteract the rotation of their body, keeping them stable," research leader Robert J. Full said in a UC Berkeley release Wednesday. "Inspiration from lizard tails will likely lead to far more agile search-and-rescue robots, as well as ones having greater capability to more rapidly detect chemical, biological or nuclear hazards."


Mars rover to settle in for long winter

PASADENA, Calif. - NASA says its Opportunity Mars rover will spend its fifth martian winter working at a location informally named "Greeley Haven." The site is named as a tribute to planetary geologist Ronald Greeley, a member of the science team for the Mars rovers who died in October, a NASA release said Thursday. The site features a sun-facing slope that will help the rover maintain adequate solar power during its fifth martian winter. Opportunity's solar panels have accumulated a thick coating of dust, so although it did not need to stay on sun-facing slopes during previous martian winters, researchers say they want to give the rover as much help in the coming winter as they can. While at Greeley Haven Opportunity will inspect mineral compositions and textures on the outcrop and record a full-circle, color panorama of the area. The winter site is located on the rim of the 14-mile-wide Endeavour Crater, where Opportunity arrived five months ago after three years of driving from the smaller Victoria Crater, which it studied for two years.


Wire four atoms wide conducts electricity

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Australian and U.S. researchers say they've created wires in silicon 4 atoms wide and 1 atom tall that carry electrical current as well as copper wires do. A team of scientists from the University of New South Wales, Melbourne University and Purdue University are engaged in research to develop future quantum computers in which single atoms are used for computation. "We are on the threshold of making transistors out of individual atoms," says Michelle Simmons at the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales. "But to build a practical quantum computer we have recognized that the interconnecting wiring and circuitry also needs to shrink to the atomic scale." The researchers made their atomic wire by inserting a string of phosphorus atoms into a silicon crystal, a Purdue release Thursday. The innovation was to build the circuits up atom by atom, instead of by the current method of building microprocessors, in which material is stripped away. "Typically we chip or etch material away, which can be very expensive, difficult and inaccurate," Gerhard Klimeck, a Purdue professor of electrical and computer engineering, said. "Once you get to 20 atoms wide you have atomic fluctuations that make scaling difficult. "But this experimental group built devices by placing atomically thin layers of phosphorus in silicon and found that with densely doped phosphorus wires just four atoms wide it acts like a wire that conducts just as well as metal," he said.

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