Topics: Existentialism, Politics, Science, Research
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A survey of more than 1,000 UK-based university staff suggests that the country’s vote to leave the European Union could drive an academic exodus.
Forty-two per cent of lecturers and professors surveyed say they are more likely to consider leaving the UK higher-education sector as a result of the referendum outcome. The proportion was even greater (76%) among the non-UK EU citizens in the survey, commissioned by the University and College Union, which represents tens of thousands of academics and is based in London.
Many individual foreign researchers have said they feel less welcome in Britain after the Brexit vote, or that they now see better opportunities abroad. But the latest poll is one of the clearest indications of the widespread nature of this feeling in UK academia.
(Left) An artist’s conception of the Lucy spacecraft flying by the Trojan Eurybates – one of the six diverse and scientifically important Trojans to be studied. Trojans are fossils of planet formation and so will supply important clues to the earliest history of the solar system. (Right) Psyche, the first mission to the metal world 16 Psyche will map features, structure, composition, and magnetic field, and examine a landscape unlike anything explored before. Psyche will teach us about the hidden cores of the Earth, Mars, Mercury and Venus.
(Photo: SwRI and SSL/Peter Rubin)
Topics: Asteroids, NASA, Planetary Science, Space Exploration
NASA will embark on two missions it says could unlock secrets to how our solar system was formed.
The Lucy and Psyche missions — both robotic, unmanned endeavors controlled from Earth — will take us back to the time 10 million years after the sun was born.
Lucy will visit the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter when it launches in October 2021. Scientists suspect the asteroids, currently caught in the largest planet's 12-year orbit around the sun, may have existed in the beginnings of the solar system and before Jupiter's orbit.
Lucy's principal investigator Harold F. Levison claims the mission will yield other-worldly insight into our universe.
"Because the Trojans are remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets, they hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system," he explained. "Lucy, like the human fossil for which it is named, will revolutionize the understanding of our origins."
But don't wait up, Lucy's first stop won't come until 2025 when it arrives at a main belt asteroid. It will examine the Trojans from 2027 to 2033.
Image Source: Madame Noire
Taraji P. Henson (Katherine Johnson), Janelle Monae (Mary Jackson) and Octavia Spencer (Dorothy Vaughn)
Topics: Diversity, Diversity in Science, NASA, STEM, Women in Science
Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson are members of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. The Iota Alpha Omega chapter have rented out the Poughkeepsie Galleria as a fundraiser for the sorority and general positive exposure to the public for the organization in general and African Americans in STEM in particular. I was proud to do an electronics STEM fair at the Children's Home of Poughkeepsie in 2014. I will proudly without as much effort support this tonight. 😊
When you think of NASA and Black women, Mae Jemison no doubt comes to mind. But long before Jemison became the first African American woman to travel in space in 1992, there were three women of color already making history at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and now their story will finally be told in the upcoming theatrical release, Hidden Figures.
The movie, which stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae, tells the story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson —”brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation’s confidence, turned around the Space Race, and galvanized the world,” a press release relayed.
Dark center. In these scanning tunneling microscope images of current flow through a single atom on a silicon surface, the dimming of the center shows current decreasing as the voltage increases (from right to left). The halo shows that current flowing around the atom behaves normally. [Credit: M. Rashidi et al./Univ. of Alberta]
Negative differential resistance (NDR) refers to current decreasing as voltage increases, contrary to a normal resistor. The phenomenon is useful in electronics, and now a research team has demonstrated a reliable form of single-atom NDR and has explained in detail how it works. To verify their model, the team used a scanning tunneling microscope in a new way—they measured the time it takes for electrons to hop onto a single atom and showed that this time is critical for the NDR effect. The work opens the door to integration of NDR into microelectronic devices.
NDR was first observed in the tunnel diode 50 years ago [1]. Tunnel diodes are used in switching devices, oscillators, and other applications. However, it has proven difficult to incorporate them into integrated circuits, limiting their wider use in microelectronics. Researchers have found cases of nanoscale NDR, but they have been either unreliable or hard to control.
Robert Wolkow of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues created a robust, single-atom NDR device by baking a silicon wafer to remove surface-attached oxygen and then immersing it briefly in atomic hydrogen at very low pressure. Hydrogen atoms bonded to almost every surface silicon atom, leaving only a few atoms exposed. These atoms provided so-called dangling bonds, each of which hosted two electrons, one with higher energy than the other.
Figure 1: Castro-Alvaredo et al. [1] and Bertini et al. [2] used a hydrodynamics approach to describe interacting quantum particles in 1D (bottom). The approach takes a zoomed-out picture of the particles (middle), viewing it on a length scale ll that is much longer than the average distance dd between particles. In this way, the particles appear as a continuous medium, like a fluid. A description of the system on a very long length scale LL can then be calculated, such as how its mass density varies in space (top) and how this quantity evolves in time.
Whether attempting to crack the mystery of high-temperature superconductors or describe a cloud of ultracold atoms, theorists face a similar question: What is the best way to model the behavior of many interacting quantum particles? Most models for such systems are extremely hard to solve analytically, or even simulate on a classical computer. In this context, models for one-dimensional (1D) systems are special because they have mathematical properties that often permit an exact mathematical solution. But even these solvable models aren’t ideal for describing real experiments, particularly those involving many out-of-thermal-equilibrium particles, like a cloud of atoms being released from a trap. A way to realize this description for a large class of widely used 1D models has now been reported in two independent papers, one by Olalla Castro-Alvaredo from the University of London, UK [1], and colleagues and the other by Bruno Bertini from the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and colleagues [2].
A beautiful method of realizing quantum particles in a 1D setting is to confine ultracold atoms in an elongated (cigar-shaped) trap [3]. If the atoms are bosons, this system can be described by the 1D “delta Bose gas.” In this paradigmatic model, particles move solely along a line. They also mutually repel each other, but only when they are at exactly the same position, hence the “delta” in the model’s name. In the absence of an external trapping potential, this model is exactly solvable in the sense that the particles’ energy spectrum can be calculated [4].
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida April 8, 2016 in this handout photo provided by SpaceX. REUTERS/SpaceX/Handout via Reuters
Topics: Mars, NASA, Science Fiction, Space Exploration, Spaceflight
I invite you to watch the Mars series on National Geographic (trailer below). It appeals to me because all science fiction is speculative, but the series does a superb job of juxtaposition between what is being planned and discussed now and projecting how it might be carried out in the future. Part of our journey to other worlds as a space faring species will be in stuttered, baby steps until the profoundly difficult becomes routine.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to resume flying rockets next week following an investigation into why one of them burst into flames on a launch pad four months ago, the company said on Monday.
In a statement, SpaceX said it expected to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base on Jan. 8 to put 10 satellites into orbit for Iridium Communications Inc.
SpaceX had suspended flights after the same model rocket went up in a blaze on Sept. 1 as it was being fueled for a routine pre-launch test in Florida.
The explosion at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida destroyed the $62 million rocket and a $200 million communications satellite.
Space X, owned and operated by Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Officer Musk, has a backlog of more than 70 missions for NASA and commercial customers, worth more than $10 billion.
The company statement said that accident investigators concluded that a canister of helium inside the rocket’s upper-stage oxygen tank had exploded.
In the short term, SpaceX plans to revamp its fueling procedures so that the super-cold liquid oxygen will not build up between the helium tank’s liner and its outer covering, it added.
SpaceX said accumulation of oxygen in a void or buckle in the liner most likely led to the explosion.
Phenol-urea-formaldehyde (PUF) organic foam were used as precusors for the new monolithic nitrogen-containing microporous cellular activated carbons production. Carbonization and CO2 activation were used to prepare this novel monolithic nitrogen-containing activated carbon foam with both interconnected macroporous and micro/meso- porosity structures from the developed PUF organic foam. The macroporosity corresponded to the connected network of cells with diameters ranging from 100 to 600 µm, and the pinholes in the cell walls had diameters ranging from 1 to 2 µm. The micro/mesoporosity is located at the inner surface of the cells. They can be used just like the classic activated carbon as an adsorbent, catalyst support, energy storage and biological material in various industries, but higher adsorption kinetics. Credit: World Scientific Publishing
Topics: Biology, Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Research
Researchers have developed monolithic, nitrogen-containing, microporous, cellular-activated carbon from phenol-urea-formaldehyde (PUF) organic foam for CO2 and H2 adsorption. The macroporosity corresponded to the connected network of cells with diameters ranging from 100 to 600 μm, and the pinholes in the cell walls had diameters ranging from 1 to 2 μm. The micro/mesoporosity is located at the inner surface of the cells.
More information: Weigang Zhao et al, Preparation and Characterization of Nitrogen-Containing Cellular Activated Carbon for CO and H Adsorption, Nano (2016). DOI: 10.1142/S1793292017500072
