Well, exams are over (and passed), so now i won’t have to take an exam or be at a lecture again … ever. As promised the rate of articles will pick up somewhat now, so here goes.

It seems like every other story we do somehow involves MIT doing something revolutionary, those guys are really at the forefront of science/engineering. This time around they claim to have made the worlds most power-efficient solar power solution.

The contraption is basically a cleverly designed mirror that focuses the sunlight it reflects onto a small area that absorbs the heat from the light quite efficiently into copper wires, that then transfer the heat to water surrounding them. The water then heats up and eventually produces steam, that could be used to power turbines, creating electricity. I could babble on here about the design and such, but MIT’s news service is actually quite good, and they have a video with the lead-designer explaining everything quite well, and he even demonstrates how the light beam is powrful enough to quickly make a plank of wood go up in flames. So check out this video here. I can also recommend reading their press-release on the matter.

Sorry for the infrequent posts here guys, my last exam is tomorrow so hopefully the frequency of posts will start going up again then.

In the meantime, i just wanted to draw your attention to a press-release from NASA where they are announcing that they have given out a deal to a contractor to develop a new space-suit by 2015. This is set to coincide with the return to the moon, so the spacesuit is required to be able to function both for space-walks at the international space station, as well as being suited for multiple moonwalks without needing much maintenance. Now the really cool thing about this, is that i had no idea they were actually planning a 6 month trip to the moon! I knew they were set to return, but not for such an extended period of time. To quote the article:

The suit will need to cope with a large number of moonwalks with minimal maintenance during the planned six-month lunar outpost expeditions.

Well this probably isn’t mind-blowing to many of you, as I’m positive this is very old news (it’s after all been a while since they announced they’d return to the moon), but somehow it completely escaped me. I can highly recommend reading the press-release, it’s quite well written and informative.

OK, let’s take this from the beginning…

In august 2006 the International Astronomical Union decided that Pluto was not worthy of it’s title as a planet because of the discovery of several Pluto-like objects outside the orbit of Pluto, and the fright that we would soon be teaching our kids a list of 50 planets. So they decided that Pluto should henceforth be known as a dwarf planet.

Alright… it may take some getting used to, but we’ll accept it.

But just as we’d all gotten used to the new definition, what could be a better idea then renaming the whole class again? Surely the IAU has nothing better to do? I guess not. Last week the IAU decided that Pluto and Pluto-like objects should now be called “plutoids”, giving Pluto back a lot of seemingly lost credit. I mean who wouldn’t want a whole class of objects named after them? So the official definition of a plutoid is:

“Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the sun at a distance greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighborhood around their orbit.”

Alright, this is all getting a bit confusing to be honest, i mean it’s all semantics after all, there is no real meaning behind these things, it’s just us humans that like to label things. So fair enough, dwarf planets will now be named after the biggest dwarf planet known, Pluto. But hey, what happens then if we discover another large plutoid? As an astronomer in the above linked article points out:

“The only fly in the ointment that I can envision is if a plutoid larger, than, say, Mars is detected,” Laughlin points out. “In that case, I think we’d see a big flare-up of the what-is-a-planet debate.”

So here we are, just waiting for the next big thing in solar system object renaming (exciting, isn’t it?). Meantime a Japanese team of astronomers propose a theory that there may exist exactly such a large object anywhere from 100 to 200 AU from the Sun (one AU is the distance from the sun to earth). This would explain some of the odd things we see in the Kupier Belt, a large belt of icy objects (like plutoids) outside the orbit of Neptune. Seriously, I can’t wait for them to find this. Not only will the discussion be fun to watch, but a whole lot of actually interesting astronomy could be learned from such an object. Like if it has a hot core, there’s the possibility of an under-surface ocean, making it possible for life as we know it to evolve. Especially if the building blocks of life are floating around in space.

As i’m sure you all know by now the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is about to arrive in all it’s glory (and if you don’t, i refer you to an excellent video-explanation of it mentioned in a previous post). Set to kick off in July, the scientists are in full crunch mode to get all bells and whistles ready for the demolition of the world as we know it by creating a black-hole.

One of the major experiments in the LHC, is the so called ALICE experiment (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), which will, as the name suggests, study the collision of large ions, such as two lead ions colliding head on. In order to get data from these massively energetic collisions, they need some kind of measurement device to see how the particles coming out of it are flying around, and the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) is the main particle tracking device in ALICE.

The chamber is filled with a gas that gets ionized (loses an electron) when the particles pass through it, leaving a trail behind that the detectors can measure. These detectors however, need to be very finely calibrated to get the best measurements possible, and that is what the scientists are working on now. Using a finely tuned laser to ionize the gas and shining it on mirrors very carefully placed throughout the chamber, they effectively simulate a particle trail, allowing for the first measurements on the finished system to be made. The results from these measurements are then used to finely calibrate the equipment, to have it all in tip-top shape for the big day. To quote Børge Svane Nielsen, the leader of the Danish research group from the Niels Bohr Institute:

We were very happy, when we managed to measure the first traces. It’s an important step and it shows that the detector system is working.

Original article here (sorry, only in Danish), courtesy of the Niels Bohr Institute (University of Copenhagen).

In between all those games to watch at the Euro 2008, I just wanted to give a quick post on some cool astronomy news that has been popping up all over the place the last few days.

There is no reason for me to try to explain something that is explained perfectly well in the ESO press release, but as the title suggests, ESO astronomers have detected 3 super-Earths (planets with masses from 1-14 Earth masses) in a nearby solar system. Now don’t get your hopes to high, as these planets are all too close to their star to be a nice place for life as we know it, but as they also point out in the article, this is a really good indication that there are a lot of rocky planets out there, and with every new telescope or detector, we get one step closer to being able to detect even smaller planets in even better orbits.

But once again, go read the announcement.
Among more mainstream news sites, the Bad Astronomer has of course also covered this.

Citizens of a small solar system in the Ursa Major constellation are being spammed grossly by inferior earthlings representing a particular earthy food company called Doritos, trying to increase sales of their flag ship product, the tortilla chips. In a 6 hour broadcast from an array of high power subspace radars on the Norwegian island of Svalbard on Earth, an MPEG file containing the ad piece was repeated over and over again, to make sure the Ursa Majorians would identify the message as intelligent.

The event has later been deemed pretty unintelligent as the inhabitants of the only habitable planet in the aforementioned solar system looks exactly like giant tortilla chips. They took the ad piece as a declaration of war, and have announced a soonish preemptive strike on Earth, probably causing the demise of the human race. As a fine example of same human race would have put it: “Doh!”

Milky Way Times is monitoring the situation and we’ll of course bring you any update as fast as possible. And don’t forget to vote on the top 5 human things you won’t miss.

*Snapping out of what seems to be an unending stream of science fiction thoughts induced by this news piece over at New Scientist.*

Now back to work on that subspace device… and maybe that runaway thoughts controller too.

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.

With the news hitting that Sergei Brin, supreme overlord of Google, will be hitting space with the worlds first private spaceflight to ISS, we can’t help but say: It’s good to be rich.

With a down payment of 5million dollars, space is one of the most exclusive (and least luxurious, see the broken space toilet story) destinations available to us puny humans. The company, called Space Adventures, has made a deal with the Russian space agency to get two seats on a specifically manufactured Soyuz flight starting 2011, that will take the millionaires to the international space station.

Now this is obviously great news, being a staunch capitalist myself (unlike my hippie co-writer Brink), i am very happy to see more competitors in the field of private spaceflight. I’m sure we all remember the famous SpaceShipOne, the first commercial space endevour that won the coveted X-Prize (a prize given to the first privately funded team to reach space). What you may not know, is that Richard Branson actually invested in the idea and is planning to launch Virgin Galactic very soon. The production of their vehicle (SpaceShipTwo) is finished, and they expect to start test-flights (of which there will be 50-100) this month. Now, taking a flight with Virgin Galactic will obviously not be as fun as actually going to ISS and living in zero-G. SpaceShipTwo “only” flies up to 110km (slightly more then SpaceShipOne) and then goes back to earth, giving only a short period of weightlessness and outer-spacy-ness, BUT it will be MUCH cheaper. The first (100) customers put in a deposit of 200.000$, from there it will slowly decline in cost over the years, and will eventually cost 20.000$ per person. Now that’s still a lot of moolah, but at least it’s something within the reach of ordinary people, and if you look at this video, i think you’ll agree that the view is worth it.

You don’t believe me? Well I almost don’t believe me myself, but this new architectural concept is simply AMAZING. While it’s normally not the main area of focus here on ReducedMass, hang on for a while and see how we might be living in the future.

This new concept is called Dynamic Architecture and boasts a number of new innovative ideas that separates it from the crowd. I’m mainly going to tell you what you can see in the promotion video and read on the website, so head over there if you want to see for yourself.

First of all, what makes the building look so cool is that each floor rotates independently around the central cylinder, making it possible to follow the Sun or whatever suits the people living there. Everybody wants to rotate the amount that is just right for them, and the building will never look the same again. With this particular feature I really hope there are only one apartment per floor, as there could be some serious fights going on around sunrise, dinnertime and sunset, making it fun for less fortunate people to come watch the building at these times. Also, I wonder if there would be some times where people were encouraged to rotate back to the original setting, resetting the looks of the building once in an while. Is this rotation business a toy that you will outgrow in a couple of weeks? Could be, but let’s see when they build the first one.

Well enough with the fun, this building has more useful ideas hidden. Between each floor are wind turbines rotating in the horizontal plane and each creating around 0.3 megawatt of electricity. With around 50 of these in a skyscraper, the building would be able to be totally self-sustainable and even release a lot of green electricity to the neighborhood. I don’t know if this would actually work, with the wings being hidden in between the floors and all, but I must assume they’ve run some simulations or similar to get the 0.3 megawatt result. Once again, we’ll figure it out if they put the thing up.

As mentioned, this building looks interesting enough to start constructing, and as far as I can tell from the site, they are already planning the first one to be raised in Dubai. In the video they are also showing how the building is constructed from modules of green material, claiming that it will only take a day to assemble a finished floor. All in all if this building can deliver everything it claims, me might have a small revolution at hand.

I know, shocking isn’t it? But i figured i’d ruin this neat little youtube video for you. If you’re an internet addict like me, you’ve most likely seen it already, if not here it is:

Neat? Yes. Real? No.

I was suspicious as soon as i saw it, remembering one of my professors describing ages ago how bags of popcorn actually get popped in the microwave, and this just seemed extremely unlikely. I’m happy to report that i wasn’t the only one, and one of the blog columnist over at Wired.com contacted a physicist and officially debunked it. Long story short, microwaves do not actually heat up the corn kernels to make them pop, they heat up a filament inside the bag, like aluminum, that absorbs the microwaves and turns them into heat (which then in turn heats the kernels creating the popcorn). Aside from that, mobile phones just don’t produce that strong microwaves, just think how easy it is to boil water in a microwave and then imagine what would happen if you were holding a strong microwave source, probably wouldn’t be pleasant (in fact the US Army is now working on microwave weapons). Anyway, check out the article, they even hint to that it might be cellphone companies going for viral advertisement that made this video, although i don’t know why you’d want people to associate your phone with strong microwave radiation.

Yay for skepticism!