Hey guys, you may remember a few days ago i posted about a story that researchers from Cornell were venturing into a new way of creating X-Rays called Energy Recovery Linac (ERL), which should result in much more powerful x-rays.

Well i was slightly skeptical to the claim that things being examined using the ERL, did not have to be in crystalline form, so i decided to talk to a professor at my school that teaches the x-ray physics course and he did indeed confirm that this could well be the case if they were able to focus a strong beam on a single structure (like a protein for example). This is something that will definitely please many in the field when/if the ERL comes, because today when you intend to look at the structure of a protein you must first make it into a crystalline material before it can be probed using the x-ray. That is to say you need to have a lot of proteins arranged in a static symmetric way, which can be quite a hassle.

Also something he pointed out to me as he read the article, that i hadn’t really noticed was that the projected cost of building an ERL is not that high compared to Synchrotrons (which is the source most commonly used to create high powered x-ray beams). The ERL is projected to cost around 300-400 million$, which seems to be about the same they are projecting the new Synchrotron MAX-IV is going to cost (source). However if you compare it to another exciting project that also aims at creating very high powered x-ray beams, the free electron x-ray laser (FEL), their cost is a projected one billion euro, or about 1.5 billion US dollars. Although, i do think that the free electron one will create much better x-rays (i couldn’t find any hard numbers for the ERL to compare to the FEL), the ERL does seem to perform much better then a normal synchrotron, at what appears to be practically the same price.

On a more personal note, i may not be able to write terribly frequently in the coming week, i have an exam coming up, my last one ever in fact, so i’ll have to study pretty hard to try and pass it. Quantum Information certainly is not easy stuff (Quantum computers/encryption/etc), but if i manage to get a decent handle on it and pass the exam, i might just write a short roundup about it, it’s quite fascinating really.

According to a press release from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Cornell researchers are working on completing a device called an Energy Recovery Linac, or ERL, that promises to provide a much brighter source of X-Rays then are known today.

Today, X-Rays in physics research are mainly created using so called Synchrotrons, where electrons are accelerated around in a circle, and eventually undulated left and right using strong bar-magnets to produce x-rays (accelerating electrons produce light). The beam size of these synchrotrons are however limited, and that is where the Cornell team comes in. As far as i cant tell, it is more or less the same principle, they will also send the electrons through a circle and undulate it with strong bar-magnets to produce the x-rays, but the big difference is that in synchrotrons the same electrons are accelerated through the chamber again and again, but the ERL will only send them around once before slowing them down again and sending out a new batch of electrons. This process is suppose to make it possible to make much smaller beams, all the way down to the micron regime.

Now to me, the most exciting thing about this press-release is that they say that using this new better x-ray source, there is the potential of looking at much smaller things, that do not have to be in a crystalline form. Basically, today, everything we want to determine the structure of (at such small levels) needs to be in a crystal, that is to say, the molecules are arranged in an organized repeating pattern, which obviously strongly limits what things we can look at. In addition to that, they also compare the data that the new source can get, to the difference between a photograph and a video (the photograph being current technology). I must admit that i am not entirely sure of the physics that are involved in these ultra bright x-rays, but seeing as how the NSF and Cornell are releasing this, I’ll take their word for it..

I can highly recommend actually reading their press-release, it’s not as dry and boring as press-releases tend to be, and they also discuss possible uses for it (although it all seems a bit sensational to me). Also, there is a video there (access it here) with an interview with one of the scientists involved in the project.

Not a whole lot to say about this video, it’s just incredibly cool. It shows in an animated/CGI way how magnetic field lines act (for example on the sun). It’s not your normal boring/dry NASA material, it’s incredibly cool and mesmerizing.

This youtube video is a quick 1.5 minute clip from the movie, check out the full movie (~5min) here. The movie was made by NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory, and they provide the commentary as well.

Thanks to Zac for tipping me and letting me know about this! Originally saw this at Gizmodo.

Aside from being the plotline in bad Val Kilmer movies, cold-fusion is the subject of heated debate in scientific circles. It was first in 1989 that two researchers announced at a press-conference that they had observed excess heat in a very simple experiment at room temperature (hence the “cold”, fusion is normally achieved at high temperatures). They proposed that this excess heat was because of nuclear fusion. This obviously turned the world upside down, because cold fusion would mean almost free and clean energy for all (again, much like the Val Kilmer movie). It didn’t really work out though, as you may have noticed when you fill up your car, the world is not full of free and clean energy, almost 20 years after it’s announcement.

There were several problems that lead to severe skepticism over cold fusion, like the failure of consistently reproducing the results (not for the lack of trying), the lack of nuclear products (you would expect this from a fusion process) and the fact that there is no theory today that could explain how cold fusion could occur (although it’s obviously possible that we just haven’t made that theory yet). You can check out the wikipedia article on cold fusion for more detail on both the history and the skepticism (and supposed findings).

Fast-forward to today, and there are yet again news reports circulating about researchers having achieved cold-fusion. This time it is from the University of Osaka, in Japan, a fairly reputable University, putting some weight behind the claims. Although there is no mention of measurements of nuclear products that were always missing in the past, they do claim to have a completely reproducible system, with scientists at the scene saying that the data they saw being produced live, was giving the same result as the data they had shown in their previously published article (J. High Temp. Soc. Jpn, Feb. and March issues, 2008).

Everyone of course is hoping for the best, cold-fusion would be a great thing of course, but given the dirty past it has, i’m afraid we’ll need a lot more then a flashy press-conference to lay off the skepticism.

This isn’t exactly breaking science news, but it is still a pretty cool demonstration of electrostatic force.

I saw this news over at Popular Mechanics, and according to them the inventors of this lovely device are a non-profit group called SRI. They will be unveiling this new design of a wall-climbing robot shortly, but until then you’ll have to watch the video from the original story.

What’s happening here is basically the same as when you rub a balloon against your hair and it sticks to the wall. There is a buildup of electric charge on the balloon as a result of rubbing it on your hair, and because of this it is able to stick to most wall surfaces. The vehicle does the same thing, creating an electric charge on a large surface of the car (probably on the belt it uses to move), causing a strong enough attraction to the wall to overcome gravity.

If i had to guess, I’d say that the car was built much like a Van der Graaf generator, which is basically a machine made for creating a huge amount of electrostatic charge (you might recognize it if you see one, it’s basically a pole with a big metal sphere on top, it’ll emit sparks if you get too close). Van der Graaf generators are fairly simple contraptions, consisting of a conveyor belt that literally transfers electrons from small needles at the bottom, to the sphere on top (check out HowStuffWorks.com’s guide to Van Der Graaf generators if you want to know more). My guess is that the belt that is moving the machine, works in much the same way, collecting electrons onto the belt and using them to “stick” to the wall. I’m sure there is more to it, and there’s a pretty good chance that i’m just talking out of my ass, but hey, it’s fun to guess. If you think you know how it works, leave comments! I’d love to hear your ideas.

Now i’m not one to love all things labeled “nano”, but being a HUGE soccer (football!) fan, i can’t resist this piece of news.

The national institute of standards and technology (NIST) is now giving the public a chance to watch the second annual nano-soccer cup, where competitors from various research institutes will compete with tiny robots to complete various tasks. The nano-bots will be controlled via remote-control and react to changes in magnetic field, or through electric signals sent through the microchip arena (which is about the size of a single rice). The robots will compete in events such as the two millimeter dash, the slalom (dodging between obstacles to make it to the goal), ball handling skills, which involves moving balls into a goal. Much hope is tied to nanobots being a big thing in the medical field in the future, performing microsurgery and such, plus of course, they will play an intricate part in the BORG plan to assimilate all races (as long as 7of9 is there, i welcome my borg overlords).

It should be said though, that it would appear that they have slapped the nano-label on these things as a way to cash in on the nano-hype, as the actualy bots are several micrometer long (one micrometer is 1.000 nano-meters). They claim that because the robots actually weigh nano-GRAMS they can rightfully call it a nanobot competition, but to me it just seems that people are eager to call anything nano as it’s a pop-thing these days. You can see a nano-bot with a micrometer scale next to it in our image above (courtesy of NIST)

Be that as it may! It’s still darn impressive and i can highly recommend checking out their website. There they actually have pictures of the soccer ball to be used, the actual field and even sweet pictures last years nanobots that competed for nano-soccer glory.

Well it’s Sunday and not a whole lot of institutions are pumping out press-releases right about now, so i’ll post a video i really like that illustrates the nature of waves quite well.

First i’d like to throw out a shameless plug to one of the first posts i wrote here, a short article on waves in general and their meaning in science, check it out first if you have the time, or just enjoy the youtube goodness if you don’t feel like it.

I won’t go into too much detail explaining this, if you just read the old article i linked to, and listen to the explenation given by our mythbuster friends, it should enough. But if you still have some questions about this, don’t hesitate to leave a comment and i’ll do my best to explain better.

Who doesn’t love lasers? You can be annoying at the movies with it, attach them to the heads of sharks and obtain fusion with it. Sadly it seems that the scientists over at Rochester University are only interested in the last prospect, but it’s still pretty neat.

According to a press-release from the University of Rochester, they now have a laser capable of focusing a petawatt of power, onto a target only a millimeter wide. Now the prefix Peta isn’t something we get to use often, as it’s a HUGE number, we’re not even close to measuring harddrives in that range yet, we’re barely up to terabytes there,, but Peta(bytes) comes right after that. So that’s 1.000.000.000.000.000 Watts of power output. In comparison, a normal red laser pointer typically has the power output on the order of milli-watts (0.001 Watts).

Now for me, just being able to throw those numbers around would be reason enough to build the laser, but it’s actually got practical use. It’s purpose is to try out a new concept known as fast-igntion fusion, that offers much more energy efficient way of obtaining fusion. Fusion has long been a holy-grail of sorts in the energy sector, as it would create no enviromently unfriendly gases, and much less radioactive waste compared to nuclear reactors (that work on using the concept of Fission (splitting atoms)). Although fusion has been done before, it has never been done in a way where you actually get more energy out then you put in (correct me if i’m wrong), and the fast-ignition scheme of achieving fusion is one suggestion to make it more economically viable.

Here’s a short article on fusion, explaining both the shortcomings of traditional fusion, and how the fast-ignition scheme might improve it.

Well it turns out that big announcement that NASA had today (if you haven’t been following it, there’s been a lot of speculation about it), was not aliens or admittance of fake moon landings, but the youngest supernova ever found in the milky way.

This may seem kind of dull, as there are plenty of supernovas out there to look at, but what makes this interesting is the fact that judging by the rate we see supernovas (outside our galaxy), we should be seeing more young supernovas around us. Based on calculations made, there should be around 10 supernovas in the milky way, that are younger then the (now previously) youngest supernova, Cassiopeia-A, which occured in 1680. This is exactly what they have now observed, a 140 year old supernova called G1.9+0.3 (catchy isn’t it?), observed with the cleverly named “Very Large Array” and the in-orbit x-ray telescope Chandra.

They actually observed the supernova originally over 20 years ago, and it was assumed to be 400-1000 years old. Recently though, they took a second look at it, and saw that it had expanded much more rapidly then they had expected. This lead to them to have a closer look and conclude that it was a lot younger. Check out the picture (courtesy of NASA) for a look at the actual supernova where you can see the remains of the sun expanding. The inner white ring that is superimposed on it, is to show how big it was when it was first observed.

Official NASA press release.

Scientists from the Department of Energy’s lab at Argonne, have devised a way to have a gas-cloud of molecules align itself in the same way (press release here). This is very significant as it allows scientists to decipher the structure of said molecules without having to crystallize them.

You see, the major way to figure out the structure of molecules and such, is by a technique called x-ray diffraction. It basically shoots in a very powerful x-ray beam (from a source called a synchrotron), and causes it to diffract off it, creating a pattern image. You can think of it kind of like shining light at an object and then looking at it’s shadow to figure out what it looks like (a simplification of course, but you get the idea). The problem with this though, is that each atom will diffract (cast a shadow) in a different way depending on how it is aligned, and unless they are all set in a periodic lattice (also called crystal), it is impossible to understand the diffraction picture and gain any information from it (for an example of a periodic lattice check out the picture for this article). So for example while you would be able to do x-ray diffraction on a crystal, you could not perform it on a gas-cloud, as the distance between atoms there is random and they do not align themselves in any periodic way.

Because of this, scientists have had to crystallize proteins and such that they wanted to investigate (in fact x-ray diffraction was heavily used to investigate DNA when it was found, that’s how they found out it was helical), but there is one major problem, many proteins, including many in drug interaction, can’t be crystallized, and that is where this new technique comes in. Using a laser, they claim to be able to align the molecules in a gas in a periodic way so that it can be used in x-ray diffraction. This would obviously be a huge thing as there are so many proteins (in the human body among other places) that have not yet been investigated.

It should be noted though, that they say they have achieved alignment and theoretically shown that it could be used for x-ray diffraction. They have only achieved the laser periodicity, not actually performed x-ray diffraction on it. On a slightly more personal note, i got to witness the x-ray diffraction of a crystallized molecule a few months ago, and frankly it seemed like a huge hassle, they had to keep it on liquid nitrogen, fish out a tiny sample and mount it in front of the beam. In the end, the sample we saw her (the scientist) image ended up having to be discarded because there was some water vapor that had set on the crystal (if i remember correctly), meaning she had to do it all over again. So I’m sure this is something that will be welcomed with open arms in that community.