2011 November 9 - Asteroid 2005 YU55 Passes the Earth. Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2011 November 9 Asteroid 2005 YU55 Passes the Earth Image Credit: Deep Space Network, JPL, NASA Explanation: Asteroid 2005 YU55 passed by the Earth yesterday, posing no danger. The space rock, estimated to be about 400 meters across, coasted by just inside the orbit of Earth's Moon. Although the passing of smaller rocks near the Earth is not very unusual -- in fact small rocks from space strike Earth daily -- a rock this large hasn't passed this close since 1976. Tomorrow's picture: 62 Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply.NASA Web Privacy Policy and Important NoticesA service of:ASD at NASA / GSFC& Michigan Tech.
Local recharge technology in $70m US deal - Business. Auckland boffins are in the money with an electrifying deal worth about $70 million for technology which allows electric cars to be charged without cables. A joint-venture firm established by Auckland University has been bought by US firm Qualcomm after inventing the "Inductive Power Technology" device. Cars simply drive over a pad, which transfers electricity to the vehicle. In video demonstrations, the device sends the owner a message when the charging is complete. And the technology is advertised as completely safe - the video shows a cat walking under a car as electricity is transferred, with no ill effects.
University vice-chancellor Stuart McCutcheon said the technology would be turned into a "world gold standard" for the industry and could end up "powering pretty much every electric vehicle in the world". "We have created an opportunity to have this New Zealand technology become a standard for the world. " - NZ Herald. High-voltage engineers create nearly 200-foot-long electrical arcs using less energy than before (Update) Photos taken by the researchers show plasma arcs up to 60 meters long casting an eerie blue glow over buildings and trees at the High Voltage Laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.
A team of engineers at Canterbury University in New Zealand has developed a method to create nearly 200-foot-long electrical arcs -- visible currents of electricity traveling through air that has been broken down into electrically charged particles. Others have created longer arcs, but the traditional technique requires large amounts of energy in order to break down the air. The new technique requires much less energy. In it, an arc travels along the path of a thin copper wire. At 0.2 mm, the wire is a little larger than the diameter of an average human hair. The wire explodes when a voltage is applied, creating a burst of light that lasts for about as long as an average camera flash, less than one thousandth of a second, and a plasma, a gas of charged particles. The 10 college majors with the lowest unemployment rates | The Lookout. Job fair in Minneapolis (AP) College students, take note: There are at least six fields of study whose graduates are virtually 100 percent employed right now.
That's right--certain majors, such as pharmacology, produce graduates who face a zero percent unemployment rate. That's not bad considering last month's joblessness rate for people with a college degree or higher was 4.4 percent. The Wall Street Journal created an interactive tool where users can search for the average employment rate and median income of people who studied each major.
The data comes from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, which released a similar ranking of majors in May that we wrote about here. The Center's previous study found that graduates with engineering and science majors tend to earn significantly more many than graduates with other college majors. But narrowing the results down to only the employment rate yields a wider range of fields that provide excellent job security. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
GPS, relativity, and nuclear detection. Microfluidic Wheatstone bridge for rapid sample analysis. Microfluidic approaches for gene delivery and gene therapy. Replacing a Battery by a Nanogenerator with 20 V Output - Hu - 2011 - Advanced Materials. Airships Offer Alternative Stairway to Space. In the 2009 Pixar animated cartoon “Up” a widower affixes hundreds of balloons to his house and floats high above the clouds and between continents. An idea that may sound equally preposterous is to float a very large ballooned vehicle right up to the edge of space — and then give it a boost into orbit. SCIENCE CHANNEL: Shocking Balloon Ride On Oct. 22, the altitude record for lighter-than-air craft was broken when an airship launched from Nevada’s Black Rock desert ascended to 95,085 feet. After one of two tandem balloons affixed to a 30-foot long carbon airframe burst, a command was sent to release the other balloon and the vehicle parachuted back home.
It’s designers, the California-based company JP Aerospace that builds military balloons, say this is just the beginning of a plan to loft a manned station to 200,000 ft. It would serve as a gateway to low Earth orbit. Talk about up, up and away, as the rock group The Fifth Dimension crooned in 1967. Images courtesy JP Aerospace.