Obama: Turn Off Fox News. When worlds really do collide! When I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was "When Worlds Collide", about a rogue planet that collides with Earth, killing everyone (except for a few who escape on rockets).
Science fiction, right? Right? Yeah, maybe not so much. It turns out, worlds really do collide. And we can see the shrapnel. Binary stars are stars that physically orbit each other. Not only that, but there’s a further subgroup of these binaries called RCVn (short for R Canes Venatici, the star that serves as the prototype). Astronomers used the Spitzer Space Telescope to observe 10 such close-knit pairs. What could cause that? Typically, when we see a star with too much IR, it means it has lots of dust around it.
Yeah. As the two stars orbit each other, they shed mass through a stellar wind, like the Sun’s solar wind. The energy in such a collision would dwarf the sweatiest nightmares of any Hollywood writer — or religiously-motivated apocalyptic preacher, for that matter. Not that it matters, really. Milky Way Down Under. Desert mystery. There’s a mystery in the Syrian desert shielded by the conflict tearing apart the Middle Eastern nation.
In 2009, archaeologist Robert Mason of the Royal Ontario Museum was at work at an ancient monastery when, walking nearby, he came across a series of rock formations: lines of stone, stone circles, and what appeared to be tombs. Mason, who talked about the finds and about archaeology at the monastery on Wednesday at Harvard’s Semitic Museum, said that much more detailed examinations are needed to understand the structures, but that he isn’t sure when he will be able to return to Syria, if ever.
Analysis of fragments of stone tools found in the area suggests the rock formations are much older than the monastery, perhaps dating to the Neolithic Period or early Bronze Age, 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Mason also saw corral-like stone formations called “desert kites,” which would have been used to trap gazelles and other animals. Mason also talked about the monastery, Deir Mar Musa. SpaceX Test Fires Advanced New Engine. Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has successfully test fired SuperDraco, a powerful new engine that will play a critical role in the company's efforts to change the future of human spaceflight.
"SuperDraco engines represent the best of cutting edge technology," said Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO and Chief Technology Officer. "These engines will power a revolutionary launch escape system that will make Dragon the safest spacecraft in history and enable it to land propulsively on Earth or another planet with pinpoint accuracy. " The SuperDraco is an advanced version of the Draco engines currently used by SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft to maneuver on orbit and during reentry. As part of SpaceX's state-of-the-art launch escape system, eight SuperDraco engines built into the side walls of the Dragon spacecraft will produce up to 120,000 pounds of axial thrust to carry astronauts to safety should an emergency occur during launch.
Higgs Boson Info. Could plasma light extend Moore’s law? The lab equipment includes a small system that measures plasma for electronics applications, attached to a larger tank containing plasma for energy research (credit: University of Washington) A University of Washington lab says it can produce light with enough power to be used in manufacturing microchips.
The lab has been working for more than a decade on fusion energy, harnessing the energy-generating mechanism of the sun. But in one of the twists of scientific discovery, on the way the researchers found a potential solution to a looming problem in the electronics industry. “To get smaller feature sizes on silicon, the industry has to go to shorter wavelength light,” said Uri Shumlak, a UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics. The UW beam lasts up to 1,000 times longer than competing technologies and provides more control over the million-degree plasma that produces the light. The electronics industry is trying to produce this extreme ultraviolet light in various ways. Israeli Company Unveils 1st of its Kind Medical Smartphone. DNA Transforms into Dark Matter Detector. Underground experiments costing millions of dollars have still failed to find definite proof of the dark matter that supposedly makes up 90 percent of our Milky Way galaxy.
But a much cheaper detector made of DNA could finally come up with the "smoking gun" for dark matter's existence. The smoking gun would come from finding both daily and annual changes in the detection of suspected dark matter particles called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) — pattern changes that would fit leading theories about dark matter. Scientists have figured out how thousands of DNA strands can show the direction of incoming WIMPs for the first time, so that they can detect the proposed pattern changes. Dark matter is part of the gravitational glue that theoretically holds the Milky Way galaxy and universe together, because visible matter alone can't explain the gravitational hold that prevents galaxies from flying apart.