Asteroid Threat in 2040???

There is an asteroid called 2011 AG5, and if it follows the orbit scientists have plotted for it so far, there is a small, small chance that it could hit Earth in February 2040. Astronomers, who have been tracking the asteroid since January 2011, say it is in an elliptical orbit that could bring it somewhere near Earth in 2040. Earth is about 8,000 miles in diameter; the asteroid appears to be about 450 feet across.
The problem is that having watched it for only about half an orbit around the Sun, the scientists cannot say for certain where it will be 28 years from now. So, for the moment, NASA's Near Earth Object Program says the odds are about one in 625 that it could hit us in that still-distant future.
Scientists have discussed all sorts of far-out plans in case a future asteroid truly does turn out to be coming our way. If they have enough lead time, they might send a probe with thruster rockets, or even explosives, to nudge an asteroid into a slightly different orbit. A very small course change, years in advance, could make a big difference by 2040, they say. Even if the asteroid misses Earth by less than a hundred miles, its passing will be a non-event.

There are asteroids wandering around the inner solar system all the time -- one of them, called 2005 YU55, passed within 201,000 miles of Earth in November, closer than the moon is to us.
But about half a dozen times since the planet formed, there have been major for-real impacts with catastrophic results. The last, 65 million years ago, is believed to have killed off the last of the dinosaurs with the dust and ash that darkened the skies after it hit, though there have been scientists who disagree.
Scientists estimate that the asteroid from back then was about nine miles across at its widest, far larger than 2011 AG5. And they point out that they know very little about 2011 AG5; they cannot say whether it is a solid hunk of rock or a loose jumble of debris flying together in space. All they know is that it's in a long, elliptical orbit that takes it almost twice as far from the sun as we are.

All about Curveball

The curveball is a type of pitch in baseball thrown with a characteristic grip and hand movement that imparts forward spin to the ball causing it to dive in a downward path as it approaches the plate.

Generally the Magnus effect describes the laws of physics that make a curveball curve. A fastball travels through the air with backspin, which creates a higher pressure zone in the air ahead of and under the baseball. The baseball's raised seams augment the ball's ability to churn the air and create higher pressure zones. The effect of gravity is partially counteracted as the ball rides on and into energized air. Thus the fastball falls less than a ball thrown without spin (neglecting knuckleball effects) during the 60 feet 6 inches it travels to home plate.


The Magnus effect is the phenomenon whereby a spinning object flying in a fluid creates a whirlpool of fluid around itself, and experiences a force perpendicular to the line of motion. The overall behaviour is similar to that around an airfoil (see lift force) with a circulation which is generated by the mechanical rotation, rather than by aerofoil action.

In many ball sports, the Magnus effect is responsible for the curved motion of a spinning ball. The effect also affects spinning missiles, and is used in rotor ships and Flettner aeroplanes.

In order to watch this science experiment on the basball field go see St. Louis cardinals or the Los Angeles Angels this season. Here are links to buy your ticket through Ticketamerica.com

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Russia reaches Lake Vostok, about 3.8 kilometers (2.4 miles) beneath the Antarctica Surface

After more than two decades of drilling, Russian scientists have reached the surface of a gigantic freshwater lake in Antarctica that had been hidden under miles of ice for 20 million years, potentially holding life from the distant past and a clue to the search for life on other planets.


Reaching Lake Vostok is a major discovery avidly anticipated by scientists around the world hoping that it may allow a glimpse into microbial life forms that existed before the Ice Age. It may also provide precious material that would help look for life on ice-crust moons of Jupiter and Saturn or under Mars' polar ice caps where conditions could be similar.

The project, however, has drawn strong fears that 60 metric tons (66 tons) of lubricants and antifreeze used in the drilling may contaminate the pristine lake. The Russian researchers have insisted that the bore would only slightly touch the lake's surface and a surge in pressure will send the water rushing up the shaft where it will freeze, immediately sealing out the toxic chemicals.

Lukin said in a statement that about 1.5 cubic meters of kerosene and freon poured into tanks on the surface from the boreshaft, proof that the lake water streamed from beneath, froze, and blocked the hole.

The scientists will later remove the frozen sample for analysis in December when the next Antarctic summer comes.

Lake Vostok, about 3.8 kilometers (2.4 miles) beneath the surface, is the largest in a web of nearly 400 known subglacial lakes in Antarctica, and scientists in other nations hope to follow up with similar projects. The lake is 250 kilometers (160 miles) long and 50 kilometers (30 miles) across at its widest point, similar in area to Lake Ontario.

Scientists believe that microbial life may exist in the dark depths of the lake despite high pressure and constant cold — conditions similar to those expected to be found under ice crust on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's move Enceladus.

New Earth-like Planet: Kepler-22b

NASA's Kepler space telescope has found a new planet -- the most Earth-like yet -- circling a yellow star similar to Earth's sun and 600 light-years away, according to the space agency.


The most promising thing about this world, called Kepler-22b for now is that it's in the so-called Goldilocks zone around its host star. Its surface temperature is estimated at an average of 72 degrees, which means liquid water -- considered essential for life as we know it -- would be possible there.

But just how realistic are the prospects for life on that distant world? Even in their excitement, the researchers caution that they have found no proof that we are not alone.

The Kepler team has done a prodigious job of detection and mathematical calculation, but Kepler has not actually seen the planet or taken any chemical measurements. They know its host star is slightly smaller and cooler than the sun, and they found that its light dims ever so slightly once every 290 Earth days. That means the dot of the planet is passing in front of it. It's a little closer to its sun than we are to our sun.

From there, they can extrapolate. For the planet to be in a nice, nearly circular orbit, not too hot and not too cold, they figured out that it's probably 2.4 times the diameter of Earth.

That makes it among the smallest planets yet found orbiting other stars, but it's a smidgen larger than an ideal candidate for extraterrestrial life would be.

"That smidgen makes all the difference," said Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, who is one of the pioneers of planet-hunting outside Earth's solar system, and a member of the Kepler team.

Scientists know, from looking at Earth's solar system, that rocky worlds like the Earth's are a precious commodity. If a world is too small (think of Mercury or Earth's moon), any atmosphere will escape into space before life could possibly form. If a world is too large (think of Jupiter or Neptune) it's likely to be all atmosphere, a giant ball of gas or slush that thickens quickly as you plunge beneath its cloud tops, but probably has no solid surface where living things could thrive.

Kepler-22b might be the right temperature, but it is probably closer in mass to icy Neptune than to Earth. "I would bet my telescope that there is no hard, rocky surface to walk on," Marcy told the Associated Press.

Still, the discovery sets scientists' minds racing. "This discovery shows that we Homo sapiens are straining our reach into the universe to find planets that remind us of home," Marcy said. "We are almost there."
Thanks to Associated Press for using there new release.

Euphoria for "faster than light" particle didn't last much

An international team of scientists in Italy studying the same neutrino particles colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light rejected the startling finding this weekend, saying their tests had shown it must be wrong.


The September announcement of the finding, backed up last week after new studies, caused a furor in the scientific world as it seemed to suggest Albert Einstein's ideas on relativity, and much of modern physics, were based on a mistaken premise.

The first team, members of the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome, said they recorded neutrinos beamed to them from the CERN research center in Switzerland as arriving 60 nanoseconds before light would have done.

But ICARUS, another experiment at Gran Sasso -- which is deep under mountains and run by Italy's National Institute of National Physics -- now argues that their measurements of the neutrinos energy on arrival contradict that reading.

In a paper posted Saturday on the same website as the OPERA results, arxiv.org/abs/1110.3763v2, the ICARUS team says their findings "refute a superluminal (faster than light) interpretation of the OPERA result."

They argue, on the basis of recently published studies by two top U.S. physicists, that the neutrinos pumped down from CERN, near Geneva, should have lost most of their energy if they had travelled at even a tiny fraction faster than light.

But in fact, the ICARUS scientists say, the neutrino beam as tested in their equipment registered an energy spectrum fully corresponding with what it should be for particles traveling at the speed of light and no more.

Physicist Tomasso Dorigo, who works at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and the U.S. Fermilab near Chicago, said in a post on the website Scientific Blogging that the ICARUS paper was "very simple and definitive."

It says, he wrote, "that the difference between the speed of neutrinos and the speed of light cannot be as large as that seen by OPERA, and is certainly smaller than that by three orders of magnitude, and compatible with zero."

Under Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. That idea lies at the heart of all current science of the cosmos and of how the vast variety of particles that make it up behave.

There was widespread skepticism when the OPERA findings were first revealed, and even the leaders of the experiment insisted that they were not announcing a discovery but simply recording measurements they had made and carefully checked.

However, last Friday they said a new experiment with shorter neutrino beams from CERN and much larger gaps between them had produced the same result. Independent scientists said however this was not conclusive.

Other experiments are being prepared -- at Fermilab and at the KEK laboratory in Japan -- to try to replicate OPERA's findings. Only confirmation from one of these would open the way for a full scientific discovery to be declared.

Antimicrobial Sorption Materials-VitaVallis

Russian scientists have developed a drug-free method of healing wounds that may prove as revolutionary as the discovery of penicillin.


Antimicrobial sorption materials –VitaVallis is safe alternative to antibiotics and chemicals for healing wounds and wound infections, including antibiotic resistant ones. VitaVallis, created by researchers in Tomsk, Siberia, helps clean up wounds of all known types of toxic bacteria. It does not get stuck to the wound and heals burns, cuts and any septic and infected wounds two to three times faster than traditional methods do. The dressing stops bleeding, ends inflammation, eliminates swellings and stimulates skin regeneration. It also helps kill pain and remove foul wound odour.

The new method was developed at the junction of physics and medicine. It is based on the long-known fact that pathological bacteria typically carry a negative electric charge. Siberian researchers figured that positively charged material should be able to extract bacteria from wounds.

The secret of the VitaVallis antiseptic dressing is the positively charged nanosized alumina fibre which drags negatively charged microbes and lock them down in the absorbing layer.

Check out more at http://vitavallis.com/eng/main.html

Flip camcorders in sunset

Not too long ago, it was on the list of must-have gadgets of most tech enthusiasts. But Cisco has announced last week that it is shutting down production of the Flip Camcorder, a company that it acquired as recently as March 2009. The camcorder continues to be quite popular in the U.S. and in the few other markets that it has been present, its USP is its ease of use and “file transfer”. The third generation Flip camcorders that hit the stores last year were capable of shooting videos in HD, image stabilisation, and the advanced models even had options to plug in external microphones. Sadly the growth of Flip coincided with the growth and the growth of smart phones. With the camera functions of smart phones improving vastly, Cisco just did not see reason in continuing with a stand-alone camcorder.

Our Universe-Just huge chucks of emptiness

Our universe is full of massive empty spaces and if all emptiness in the universe were to be removed, the universe may become as big as our fist.
This is a fascinating excursion. You could say that an atom is more empty than the solar system. The universe is quite empty. The interstellar space contains only about one atom hydrogen per cubic centimeter. In the intergalactic space, this is one hundred thousand times smaller. Yet, it is enough to ensure that the universe is relatively stable and relatively flat.
Even our hydrogen atom is quite empty. The size of an atom is small but the size of the nucleus inside is a hundred thousand times smaller. A peculiar happening, but this is the only way it works.
The reason is that the so-called empty space is nothing; it carries the influence of every thing around. Also, whatever is not present physically has a potential existence that can transition to reality of the kind we can touch and feel through a quantum fluctuation.

Hunt to find the Neutrino the "small neutral one" in South Pole

The world’s largest detector for high-energy neutrinos was completed December 18 2010, when scientists lowered the last of 5,160 sensors more than a mile beneath the ice of the Antarctic plateau.


The electron neutrino (a lepton) was first postulated in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli to explain why the electrons in beta decay were not emitted with the full reaction energy of the nuclear transition. The apparent violation of conservation of energy and momentum was most easily avoided by postulating another particle. Enrico Fermi called the particle a neutrino and developed a theory of beta decay based on it, but it was not experimentally observed until 1956.

Wolfgang Pauli introduced the neutrino to the world of physics in 1930 with a famous letter to "Liebe Radioacktive Damen und Herren" (Dear radioactive ladies and gentlemen) at the Tubingen meeting of radioactivity researchers. Pauli's first public discussion of the neutrino was at the 7th Solvay Conference in Brussels in 1933.

The first experimental observation of the neutrino interacting with matter was made by Frederick Reines, Clyde Cowan, Jr, and collaborators in 1956 at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina. Their neutrino source was a nuclear reactor (it actually produced antineutrinos from beta decay).

Modern neutrino detectors at IMB in Ohio and Kamiokande in Japan detected neutrinos from Supernova 1987A. A new neutrino detector at Sudbury, Ontario began collecting data in October of 1999. Another Japanese neutrino detector called Super Kamiokande became operational in April 1996.

An early set of experiments with a facility called the solar neutrino telescope, measured the rate of neutrino emission from the sun at only one third of the expected flux. Often referred to as the Solar Neutrino Problem, this deficiency of neutrinos has been difficult to explain. Recent results from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory suggest that a fraction of the electron neutrinos produced by the sun are transformed into muon neutrinos on the way to the earth. The observations at Sudbury are consistent with the solar models of neutrino flux assuming that this "neutrino oscillation" is responsible for observation of neutrinos other than electron neutrinos.



The IceCube Neutrino Observatory will hunt for tiny particles that are common in the universe, but rarely interact with other matter. In fact, trillions of neutrinos pass through a person’s body each second. They rain down onto Earth as cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere. Neutrinos also shoot out of the violent insides of stellar explosions, churn regularly from the sun and may even arise from the ambient leftovers of the Big Bang.

IceCube is tuned to find high-energy neutrinos like the ones bursting from active galactic nuclei, which are bright sources that are likely the radiation from a black hole gobbling the mass around it, and gamma ray bursts, intense beams of light from a star collapsing into a black hole. The $279 million observatory is a full cubic kilometer in volume, or 1,000 times bigger than the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector in Japan. While IceCube is less sensitive than the Super-K, scientists will need the huge volume to see long streaks of muons, exotic leftovers from collisions between neutrinos and water nuclei.

IceCube’s sensors are designed to detect a flash of blue light when neutrinos collide with a water molecule. Ice at the South Pole is remarkably pure, so impinging neutrinos will almost certainly interact with water, not a different molecule. And because each new snowfall adds weight, packing down the ice below, there are a lot of molecules for a neutrino to hit.

Unlike most physics experiments, IceCube began taking data while under construction. Since 2005, it has already seen neutrinos with energies as high as 100 trillion electron-volts, seven times the maximum power that will be produced by collisions between protons at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.

Astrophysicists have a long list of scientific questions for IceCube to investigate during its planned 15-year life. For example, physicists believe that supernovas accelerate protons, but evidence is circumstantial. Seeing high-energy neutrinos, which should spew out of the bursting stars along with protons, would confirm theories of how stars explode.

“People have known for a long time it must be there, but to see it, and measure the right number, is an important thing to do,” says project spokesperson Tom Gaisser, a physicist at the University of Delaware in Newark.

Also on the wish list for scientists: finding neutrinos produced when hypothesized dark matter particles annihilate in the sun. Dark matter is thought to be much more abundant than ordinary matter in the universe, but has not yet been detected.