Saturn’s aurora borealis, unlike auroras on other planets, is driven by a powerful weather system. The winds drag Saturn’s magnetic field lines.
Printable electronics
Posted in electronics
Circa 2016
Digital stickers are on the horizon with a new MIT stamping technique that prints tiny, intricate circuits with electronically conductive ink.
Get ready for a giant update.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, is expected to provide an update on the current status of the company’s Starship project, the giant ship designed to send humans to Mars and beyond.
The ESA is investigating hibernation technology that could allow astronauts to remain healthy during long-duration missions to Mars and beyond.
A renewed era of space exploration is upon us, and many exciting missions will be headed to space in the coming years. These include crewed missions to the Moon and the creation of permanent bases there. Beyond the Earth-Moon system, there are multiple proposals for crewed missions to Mars and beyond. This presents significant challenges since a one-way transit to Mars can take six to nine months. Even with new propulsion technologies like nuclear rockets, it could still take more than three months to get to Mars.
In addition to the physical and mental stresses imposed on the astronauts by the duration and long-term exposure to microgravity and radiation, there are also the logistical challenges these types of missions will impose (i.e., massive spacecraft, lots of supplies, and significant expense). Looking for alternatives, the European Space Agency (ESA) is investigating hibernation technology that would allow their astronauts to sleep for much of the voyage and arrive at Mars ready to explore.
This researcher was the subject of a recent study led by Alexander Choukér, a professor of Medicine at the Hospital of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU), and Thu Jennifer Ngo-Anh – a payload coordinator with the ESA’s Directorate of Human and Robotic Exploration Programs. The paper that describes their findings was recently published in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.
Thermal span in a layered compound promises applications in next-generation electrical switches and nonvolatile memory.
When temperature changes, many materials undergo a phase transition, such as liquid water to ice, or a metal to a superconductor. Sometimes, a so-called hysteresis loop accompanies such a phase change, so that the transition temperatures are different depending on whether the material is cooled down or warmed up.
In a new paper in Physical Review Letters, a global research team led by MIT physics professor Nuh Gedik discovered an unusual hysteretic transition in a layered compound called EuTe4, where the hysteresis covers a giant temperature range of over 400 kelvins. This large thermal span not only breaks the record among crystalline solids, but also promises to introduce a new type of transition in materials that possess a layered structure. These findings would create a new platform for fundamental research on hysteretic behavior in solids over extreme temperature ranges. In addition, the many metastable states residing inside the giant hysteresis loop offer ample opportunities for scientists to exquisitely control the electrical property of the material, which can find application in next-generation electrical switches or nonvolatile memory, a type of computer memory that retains data when powered off.
A team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile have found evidence of another planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Solar System. This candidate planet is the third detected in the system and the lightest yet discovered orbiting this star. At just a quarter of Earth’s mass, the planet is also one of the lightest exoplanets ever found.
“The discovery shows that our closest stellar neighbour seems to be packed with interesting new worlds, within reach of further study and future exploration,” said João Faria, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, Portugal, lead author of a study published today in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Proxima Centauri is a small, M-class star, lying just 4.2 light years away.
The newly discovered planet, named Proxima d, orbits Proxima Centauri at a distance of about four million kilometres, less than a tenth of Mercury’s distance from the Sun. It lies between the star and the habitable zone – the band where liquid water can exist at the surface of a planet – and takes just five days to complete one orbit around its star.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian flu in an Indiana turkey flock on Wednesday, the nation’s first case in a commercial poultry operation since 2020.
European scientists say they have made a major breakthrough in their quest to develop practical nuclear fusion — the energy process that powers the stars.
The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen.
If nuclear fusion can be successfully recreated on Earth it holds out the potential of virtually unlimited supplies of low-carbon, low-radiation energy.
The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds, more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997.
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