Self Decontaminating Surface

So your battalion is in the Middle East pushing the enemy back when all-of-a-sudden some asshole decides to use a deadly chemical agent to bomb the crap out of you and your men. Not only is this attack ruining your allotted tan time, but now all your men are contaminated with hazardous “stuff”.

Good thing the friendly private contractors of DARPA have nearly perfected Self Decontaminating Surfaces. From infrastructure like tents, brick and mortar, and sand bag bunkers to random objects like your gun, electronics, and clothing, all your inanimate objects will clean themselves!

Nano-technology is really cool and scary all at the same time. At least now you can tan in peace knowing that any fallout will be magically scrubbed away by your little US funded nano-buddies (just cover your skin up when you tan, okay?).

Structural Amorphous Metals

Aluminum alloy? So 1990′s.  Titanium alloy? Pul-lease!  Adamantium? Fictitiously obsolete.  If you’re not an amorphous metal, you’re just another one of those “ium” metal-alloys of the old-school.

Welcome to the future, where traditional alloys have been left in the past for amorphous alloys; a super light, super strong, corrosion resistant alloy that will revolutionize many of the products we use today AND will use in the future. Even crazier, this new method of forging allows amorphous metals to retain its original shape, even when forcible bent.  (Ever see the video of the crazy shape retaining foil from the Roswell, New Mexico crash?  THIS IS THE SAME SHIT! )

What is Amorphous Metals?

Wiki explains:

“An amorphous metal is a metallic material with a disordered atomic-scale structure. In contrast to most metals, which are crystalline and therefore have a highly ordered arrangement of atoms, amorphous alloys are non-crystalline. Materials in which such a disordered structure is produced directly from the liquid state during cooling are called “glasses”, and so amorphous metals are commonly referred to as “metallic glasses” or “glassy metals“.

” An amorphous metal is an alloy combining elements of differing atomic diameters.  The differing atomic diameters and unusual composition prevents the atoms from arranging in a regular crystalline structure (like normal metal alloys). The atoms have no easy way to slip by each other under deformation, resulting in a very hard material. “

This is exciting stuff because it’s already here, and MANY labs are experimenting with it everyday.  It won’t be long before we will see this technology make it to main-stream consumer goods. DARPA explains some of the many uses for this tech:

“…..achieve combinations of mechanical properties that provide revolutionary improvements compared to those of comparable conventional alloys. Amorphous-composite hybrid materials that have the stiffness of beryllium and twice the strength will be demonstrated in space applications. Bulk amorphous alloys that have strength, fatigue, and corrosion properties better than titanium will be demonstrated in turbine applications.”

Power Swim

SAS, Navy Seals, and CAN-TF2 have all got BIG upgrades from this technology already. What’s interesting about it is its lack of pushy buttons and electric gizmos.  This human powered unit helps underwater covert soldiers reach their destination using only a fraction of the previously required energy.

DARPA says:

” When used properly, the device allows swimmers to cover a given distance up to 150 percent faster than with fins, while using the same amount of energy. Much of that boost in metabolic efficiency is due to the muscle groups used. The swimmer is essentially relaxing into a slightly bent position, instead of forcing or pushing the foils through the water. This takes the emphasis off the small muscle groups used to kick, and allows larger muscle groups, such as the glutes and quads, to take over. During tests, it typically took around 2 hours for Navy SEALs to fight the urge (and years of training) to move forcefully and learn the PowerSwim’s unique motion. “

Like I said, this bad boy is already in use today!

Molecular Electronics

In the future that DARPA sees, we’ll all have nano-computers inside our bodies. It will regulate everything from medicine, surgery, and bodily functions to harvesting electricity, knocking out rogue genes, and having awesome Iron Man augmented reality.

Moore’s Law dictated the inevitability of the penultimate size of a CPU. And right when it seemed like we were reaching that point, molecular electronics blows this theory out of the water. For the time being.  It’s all really quite insane.

“Innovations in drug delivery through nanoparticles, select gene knockout, and portable sensing and testing devices… Research in harvesting excess vibration energy from nanowires, and converting this energy into electricity. “

Let your imagination run wild, because this opens to door to literally a plethora of sci-fi style technologies!

Real World Reasoning

I would love to see how this technology evolves into the future, as this is a pretty crazy computer rendering programme. Imagine you’re a general and you wanted to run simulations on possible methods of attack in any area of the world. This DARPA lead initiative would call on the use of a highly sophisticated software engine designed to use real-world data (satellite, photo, textual..etc) and intuitively reproduce a replica of the battlefield in question. Not only will this reproduction be visual (presumably with sweet 3D glasses), but the programme goes a step further to include interior layouts, and how physical objects would interact with the surroundings / simulations.

From DARPA’s proposal:

“Create 100 km(squared) per hour of highly realistic immersive 3-D representations of the air/land/sea mission space from ISR data for any tactical environment, generate one city block of geo-specific building interiors and exteriors , and realistically model the interaction of physical objects.”

Stay tuned for the 3rd and 4th edition next week and the week after. Furthermore, by now you must love me… so you should really use the RSS thingy below and get on the ChromeDome subscription-wagon.

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Neutrinos are a fundamental particle with no electric charge, and previously thought to have no mass. The CUORE experiment (Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events) is determined to find the mass of neutrinos starting next year. The catch is that the CUORE experiment couldn’t have come to fruition without Roman lead ingots that were mined over 2,000 years ago…

Ahhrrrr – A booty full of….lead.

In 1988 a diver discovered a shipwreck a few kilometers from Oristano, which is close to the Sardinian coast (Italy).  The ship that sunk was the Navis Oneraria Magna, a Roman cargo ship that shipped resources across the empire. Upon its sinking more than 2,000 years ago, it had more than 1,000 lead ingots aboard. Each weighs about 33 kilograms. The Romans would use these ingots to produce coins, pipes, ammunition, weapons, and jewelry. Interestingly enough, researchers believe the ship was sunk by its captain on purpose to keep it from enemy forces. It was anchored and close enough to shore such that the crew could swim to safety.

What’s the BFD?

The CUORE experiment is tricky;  scientists will wait for “neutrinoless double-beta decay” to happen in a 750-kilogram cube of tellurium dioxide placed under 1,400 metres of rock at the Gran Sasso laboratory. But to successfully observe this rare event, they will need to shield their experiment from external radioactivity.

Enter the Roman shipwreck and its lead booty. As you may know, standard everyday lead is a great shield against radiation (like that cool vest you wear when you get an x-ray). But freshly mined lead is slightly radioactive itself because of an unstable isotope (lead-210). The CUORE experiment requires zero background (or external) radioactivity, and these Roman lead ingots have lost almost all of their radioactivity after 2,000 years on the bottom of the ocean. Scientists claim that lead-210 decays into more stable isotopes, halving its radioactivity every 22-years.

A Scientific Love for Roman Lead

Over 20 years ago, Fiorini (CUORE scientist) heard of the discovery and knew these ingots would prove useful for the then planned CUORE experiment. Even better news came when Fiorini learned that the governments heritage  department in charge of retrieving the ingots didn’t have enough funds to retrieve all of them. With a few calls, the INFN (the governing body of CUORE) was convinced to front the rest of the money with the condition that a portion of the ingots go towards the CUORE experiment (and other ready-to-go experiments they had lined up in the 90′s).

Now what?!

The ingots will be melted down into 3 centimeter thick lead lining sheets that will surround the cubic CUORE detector while the museum curator who gave them the ingots cries a little.

Bonus info

I went to the CUORE website and stopped reading after the first paragraph. Wrap your head around this:

” Where should the field of DBD go from the present situation? Neutrino oscillation experiments gives clear evidence that neutrinos oscillate. A number of recent theoretical interpretations of these experiments data imply that the effective Majorana mass of the electron neutrino (as measured in neutrinoless DBD) could be in the range 0.01 eV to the present bounds. Considering this range, could a next generation 0nDBD experiment detect it? If so, what technique would be the best for a possible discovery experiment? CUORE, a proposed array of about 1000, 750 g TeO₂¹³⁰Te experiment where for the first time a large array of bolometers was used to search for 0nDBD . The good results obtained so far prove that the bolometric technique, although novel is competitive and alternative to the traditional calorimetric Ge technique. ”

[Sources: CUORE Homepage, and Nature News]

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Physicists hypothesize that the Higgs-Boson is responsible for imbuing particles with mass, but have never been able to prove it.  They hope that the LHC has the power necessary to produce a Higgs-Boson particle.  State-of-the-art detectors are also in place in order to detect the particles and gather as much information as possible about them.  One of these detectors, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), is about 21 metres in length and 16 metres in diameter, weighing as much as 2,500 African elephants.  The detector must be very precise and accurate, since it needs to gather data from more than 100,000 collisions per second.  The detector can be likened to a camera, which would be rated as a 100 Mega-Pixel camera able to take 40 million photos per second.  Over a years time, this would produce more than 15 million gigabytes of data.  To sort and analyze all of that data will require massive computing power.  This is why they need 100,000 of the world’s fastest computers.  All of this work is in hope of furthering our understanding of the forces of nature that govern our lives.

Simulation of detection of the Higgs-Boson

Source: [PhysOrg.com]

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Mount Katla hasn’t had a major eruption since 1918, and apparently we’re overdue for a burp or two.  Apparently the Eyjafjallajökull volcano (which hasn’t erupted in over 200 years) doesn’t blow without getting Mount Katla in on the fun.   All three recorded events from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano has spurred a reaction from Mount Katla: in 920, 1612, and a disturbance stretching from 1821 to 1823.  If Mount Katla blows, scientists warn that its affects could become a menace World wide. A near-by Icelandic volcano blew in 1783 and caused thick fog across Europe and North America for 8-months! . . . I might suggest to hold off booking that trip to the Mediterranean in the near future.

On with the pictures. . .  Please visit my friends at Big Picture, they take amazing shots of leading news stories from around the World. I also sourced some gorgeous photos from Flickr:  Iriya and *ice.
To navigate the images properly, just hover your mouse over the images and use your mouse-wheel. . . Click on one for high-resolution.

[UPDATED: National Geographic just released these absolutely stunning images, take a look here. (Thanks Seth)]

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Lorentzian Wormhole

In a recent paper written by Theoretical Physicist Nikodem Poplawski from Indiana University, the Physicist suggests that the universe within which we reside may actually itself be contained within a wormhole which is part of a black hole that lies in another, bigger universe.  Confused yet?  Good.  In his paper, Physics Letters B, Poplawski takes advantage of the Euclidean-based coordinate system, referred to as isotropic coordinates, to describe the gravitational field of a black hole.  This also helped him model the radial geodesic motion of a massive particle into the black hole.

Poplawski explains that only experiment or observation can reveal the actual motion of a particle falling into the black hole.  He also notes that since an observer can only see the outside of the black hole, the interior cannot be observed unless you are within the black hole.  This condition would be satisfied if our universe was the interior of a black hole existing within a larger universe.  Poplawski explains that since Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity does not choose a time of orientation, it is possible to traverse time in either direction.  That is to say, if a black hole can form from the gravitational collapse of matter through an event horizon in the future, then the opposite is true for the past.  Such a process would describe an exploding white hole; matter emerging from an event horizon in the past, like the expanding universe.

A white hole is connected to a black hole via an Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormhole) and is hypothetically the time reversal of a black hole.  Poplawski’s paper also suggests that all astrophysical black holes may have Einstein-Rosen bridges, each with a new universe inside that formed simultaneously with the black hole.  Poplawski states that our universe could have itself formed from inside a black hole existing in another universe.

Much more work is to be done before anything like this is proven, but for now it provides a new way to explain the origins of our universe.  Unlike the big bang theory, this theory does not seem to contain any big contradictions.  It would also help explain the information that we assumed was lost when something entered the event horizon of a black hole.  This method would not violate the laws of quantum physics, which states that matter cannot be created or destroyed, but must always be preserved.  This model, in isotropic coordinates, of the universe as a black hole could explain the origin of cosmic inflation.

Source: [Science Daily]

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A team of Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, led by Younan Xia, have been working on methods to rid people of cancerous cells.  Cancer is a notorious disease for which treatment is very nonspecific.  The team of Scientists have made great progress in terms of eliminating cancerous cells, and they are using gold to do so.  A very specific gold nanocage is used in their process, which accumulates selectively within tumors.  Instead of actively targeting tumors with large doses, they can be passively targeted with smaller doses.  This is due to the fact that the golden nanocages are excellent at absorbing light energy and converting it into heat.  The heat produced by the nanocages is more than enough to eliminate the malignant cells, without heating up surrounding tissue or causing any excess damage.

The gold nanocages themselves are quite harmless and actually inert.  Gold has been used within medicine for over a century, mostly for treating arthritis.  Finding materials that can be both beneficial in medicine but not detrimental to the human body is often very difficult.  This is what makes gold a very attractive material.  The gold nanocages can be modified in many ways to absorb different frequencies of light.  This is important because specific frequencies of light can penetrate through several inches of a body.  If the light does not penetrate far enough into the body, it may not reach the gold nanocages which need the light in order to convert it into heat.  The image below shows the gold nanocages in action.  They first absorb the light and convert it into heat, which is plainly visible in the thermal image.  The affected area will heat up to about 55°C, which is more than enough to eliminate the tumorous cells.

Gold Nanocage Thermal Image

Scientists have been testing these nanocages, along with other methods, on mice.  One set of mice were injected with the gold nanocages while others were injected with a buffer solution.  Each mice had two tumors, one on their left side and another on their right.  After several days, the right side of each mouse was exposed to a diode laser for 10 minutes.  Thermal images were taken of the procedure and revealed that the gold nanocages were able to reach temperatures of 54°C while the buffer solution only reached about 37°C.  Cells will begin to die at temperatures around 42°C.  A radioactive tracer was injected into the mice to monitor what effects these tests had on the tumors.  The mice with gold nanocages showed that their tumors were significantly fainter than those of the mice with the buffer solution, indicating that the test was successful.

These are amazing results that show great promise for the future of battling cancerous cells.  Not only are the cancerous cells being eliminated, but since pass targeting is being used as opposed to active targeting, patients will not experience the drastic side effects which have plagued cancer patients in the past. The team of scientists have received a 5-year $2,129,873 grant from the National Cancer Institute to continue their work in hopes of making it even more efficient and productive.

Source: [Science Daily]

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Fear is one of many innate human emotions.  It is an emotional response to a perceived threat, or to put it in other words, a basic survival mechanism which is stimulated by things like pain or being threatened in any way.  It is a natural response in most developed lifeforms which ensues survival.  But since the human mind has developed so greatly, we don’t see much necessity for this emotion.  Humans have the ability to think and assess situations, but our basic emotions still play a great part in our thought process.  As it stands, fear is supposed to be instinctive, telling us whether something may be bad for us or harm us in some way.  At the same time though, it can cloud our actual judgement and bring about nervous and rash decisions.

There are different types of fears as well.  Many people fear things that can actually do harm to them, but there are also irrational fears of seemingly harmless things.  There are many people that are afraid of things that cannot in any way hurt them.  Many common fears like this include fear of spiders (harmless, non-poisonous ones), cats, and even public-speaking.  Though none of those things are physically threatening, some people are still petrified of them.  This irrational fear can be very detrimental in specific cases, which is why it would be nice if we could simply forget our fears.

Forgetful Fish

A research paper published in BioMed Central‘s open access journal Behavioral and Brain Functions reveals that it may one day be possible to eliminate our fears.  Researchers at the University of Hiroshima in Japan studied the cerebellum’s of gold fish.  The cerebellum is an area of the brain which is thought to be involved with the development of our fears.  The researchers used classical conditioning to instill a sense of fear into the fish.  They flashed a light in their eyes while simultaneously sending a small electrical shock through them, which enabled the fish to correlate being flashed with a light to being shocked as well.  After a while, the electrical shock was not necessary, since the fish became used to experiencing pain when a light was flashed in their eyes.  When the light was flashed, the heart-rates of the fish slowed down, which is typically how fish react to fear.

Researchers found that fish which had lidocaine injected into their cerebellum seemed to forget all about their fears.  Shining a light on them did not change their heart rate, and they genuinely seemed unaffected.  After the anesthetic had worn off, the fish once again would be afraid if a light was shone on them.  Being able to forget about our fears, even if just for a moment, is a great step in our effort to understand how the brain actually functions.  Scientists are trying to understand exactly how our biological and chemical processes work, and this is a great start.  Much more testing and research will be needed to see whether there are any side effects, or even if we can control its effects for our own purposes.  Either way, it shows great promise for the future of understanding our complex minds.

Source: [Science Daily]

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A group of astronomers claim that they have confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and that the universes’ expansion is actually accelerating.  The group of astronomers are led by Tim Schrabback of the Leiden Observatory.  The team conducted an intensive study which covered over 446,000 galaxies.  The result is the largest survey ever conducted using the Hubble Telescope, which has been dubbed as the COSMOS survey.  Hubble photographed 575 slightly overlapping views of the same part of the Universe using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).  The overall time it took for this task neared 1000 hours.  Aside from the data Hubble provided, researchers used redshift data from ground-based telescopes to assign distances to almost 200,000 galaxies.  The number of galaxies included in this survey is immense, but more importantly than that is the sheer amount of data uncovered about invisible structures.

Using complex algorithms, the team led by Schrabback has improved the standard method and obtained galaxy shape measurements to an unprecedented precision.  The results of the study will be published in an upcoming issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics.  The meticulousness and scale of this study enables an independent confirmation that the expansion of the universe is accelerated by something referred to as Dark Energy.  Dark Energy is almost the opposite of Gravity.  While Gravity pulls things together, Dark Energy pulls things apart.  When Dark Energy is present, it slows down the growth of galaxy clusters, and secondly, it changes the way the Universe expands.  This study also adds confirmation to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which predicts how the lensing signal depends on red-shift.

Previous studies that tried to map parts of the universe used 2-d methods, like taking a chest x-ray, but this new study is more similar to a 3-d reconstruction.  This allows for much more data to be present, like distances between galaxies, the distance from Earth to any other galaxy, and also ultimately the distribution of matter in space.  Astronomers plan to apply these techniques to greater ranges of space, once it is possible.

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