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“You need to go back hundreds of million years to understand the full picture of life,” he said. “Fossils are the database for deep-time studies.”

Paleontology may be a look back into the deep past, but it also plays a role in our future.

“Paleontology, and dinosaurs in particular, is a fantastic gateway into science, because all kids are interested in dinosaurs,” Storrs said. “It’s great if they go on to become scientists, but at the very least, they can be part of an informed citizenry that has a basic knowledge of the world and how science operates, because there’s always going to be questions about vaccines for example, or evolution, or climate change. Science plays a huge role in our world today.”

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By 2020, the number of smartphone users in the world is expected to reach almost 2.9 billion — nearly doubling in six years from about 1.6 billion in 2014. Technology companies and researchers have been directly and indirectly imbuing smartphones with additional capabilities, including spectroscopy for biological and medical applications, among other uses (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Changhong H2 is the first consumer device with an integrated imaging spectrometer. Courtesy of Consumer Physics.

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Physicists in Darmstadt are investigating aging processes in materials. For the first time, they have measured the ticking of an internal clock in glass. When evaluating the data, they discovered a surprising phenomenon.

We experience time as having only one direction. Who has ever seen a cup smash on the floor, only to then spontaneously reassemble itself? To , this is not immediately self-evident because the formulae that describe movements apply irrespective of the direction of time.

A video of a pendulum swinging unimpeded, for instance, would look just the same if it ran backwards. The everyday irreversibility we experience only comes into play through a further law of nature, the second law of thermodynamics. This states that the disorder in a system grows constantly. If the smashed cup were to reassemble itself, however, the disorder would decrease.

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So cool and fascinating!!

If it were ever possible to take a flight through the extreme conditions of Neptune’s atmosphere, we might experience the fascinating phenomenon of diamond rain tapping at our window.

According to a new study by an international team of researchers, such a blizzard of bling could be relatively common throughout the Universe.

Carbon can link into a crystal on giant, icy gas planets like Neptune and Uranus because of the ultra-high temperatures and pressures deep down in the atmosphere. These conditions break up hydrocarbons like methane, allowing the carbon atoms within to connect with four others and make particles of solid diamond.

Continue reading “Diamonds Could Be Raining From The Sky on Far More Planets Than We Realized” | >

Quantum physicist Mickael Perrin uses graphene ribbons to build nanoscale power plants that turn waste heat from electrical equipment into electricity.

When Mickael Perrin started out on his scientific career 12 years ago, he had no way of knowing he was conducting research in an area that would be attracting wide public interest only a few years later: quantum electronics.

“At the time, physicists were just starting to talk about the potential of quantum technologies and quantum computers,” he recalls. “Today there are dozens of start-ups in this area, and governments and companies are investing billions in developing the technology further. We are now seeing the first applications in computer science, cryptography, communications, and sensors.”

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Scientists have been aware of a specific organelle in plant cells for more than a hundred years. However, UC Riverside scientists have only now discovered the organelle’s key role in aging.

The researchers initially set out to understand more generally which parts of plant cells control plant responses to stress from things like infections, too much salt, or too little light. Serendipitously, they found this organelle, and a protein responsible for maintaining the organelle, control whether plants survive being left too often in the dark.

Because they had not expected this discovery, which is described in a Nature Plants journal article, the research team was thrilled.

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