Scientists record first ever image of molecule

Scientists have recorded the first ever image of a molecule's "anatomy" with unprecedented clarity, using a complex technique known as non-contact atomic force microscopy.

The results could greatly impact the field of nanotechnology, which seeks to understand and control some of the tiniest known objects.

"If you think about how a doctor uses an X-ray to image bones and organs inside the human body, we are using the atomic force microscope (AFM) to image the atomic structures that are the backbones of individual molecules," said IBM researcher Gerhard Meyer.

"Scanning probe techniques offer amazing potential for prototyping complex functional structures and for tailoring and studying their electronic and chemical properties on the atomic scale," he added.

The team's current study follows on the heels of another experiment published in the June 12 issue of Science, where IBM scientists measured the charged states of atoms using an AFM.



These breakthroughs will open new possibilities for investigating how charge transmits through molecules or molecular networks.

Understanding the charge distribution at the atomic scale is essential for building smaller, faster and more energy-efficient computing components than today's processors and memory devices, said an IBM release.

These findings were reported in the Friday issue of Science.

IANS

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Delicate Arch - Natural Wonder

Delicate Arch is a 52 ft (16 m) tall freestanding natural arch located in Arches National Park near Moab, Utah. It is the most widely-recognized landmark in Arches National Park and is depicted on both Utah license plates and a postage stamp commemorating Utah's centennial anniversary of statehood in 1996. The Olympic torch relay for the 2002 Winter Olympics passed through the arch.

Photo by: Dr. Doc

Because of its distinctive shape, the arch was known as "the Chaps" and "the Schoolmarm's Bloomers" by local cowboys. It was given its current name by Frank Beckwith, leader of the Arches National Monument Scientific Expedition, who explored the area in the winter of 1933–1934.

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The arch played no part in the original designation of the area as a U.S. National Monument in 1929, and was not included within the original boundaries; it was added when the monument was enlarged in 1938.

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In the 1950s, the National Park Service investigated the possibility of applying a clear plastic coating to the arch to protect it from further erosion and eventual destruction. The idea was ultimately abandoned as impractical and contrary to NPS principles.

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Delicate Arch is formed of Entrada Sandstone. The original sandstone fin was gradually worn away by weathering and erosion, eventually leaving the arch. Other arches in the park were formed the same way but due to placement and less dramatic shape are not as famous.

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Lake Pontchartrain

Lake Pontchartrain is a brackish lake located in southeastern Louisiana. It is the second-largest saltwater lake in the United States, after the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and the largest lake in Louisiana. It covers an area of 630 square miles (1630 square km) with an average depth of 12 to 14 feet (about 4 meters). Some shipping channels are kept deeper through dredging. It is roughly oval in shape, about 40 miles (64 km) wide and 24 miles (39 km) from south to north.

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The south shore forms the northern boundary of the city of New Orleans, and its two largest suburbs Metairie and Kenner. On the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain is an area called the North Shore or Northshore or the Northlake area. It is composed of cities such as Mandeville, Covington, Madisonville, Slidell; in Saint Tammany Parish; Ponchatoula, Hammond, and Amite in Tangipahoa Parish; and Franklinton and Bogalusa in Washington Parish. These Northshore parishes form the eastern Florida Parishes.

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Lake Pontchartrain is named for Louis Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain, the French Minister of the Marine, chancellor of France and minister of finance during the reign of France's "Sun King," Louis XIV, for whom Louisiana is named.

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The lake was created 2,600 to 4,000 years ago as the evolving Mississippi River Delta formed its southern and eastern shorelines with alluvial deposits. Its Native American name was Okwata ("Wide Water"). In 1699, French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville renamed it Pontchartrain after Louis Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain.

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Human habitation of the region began at least 3,500 years ago, but increased rapidly with the arrival of Europeans about 300 years ago. The current population is over 1.5 million. The United States Geological Survey is monitoring the environmental effects of shoreline erosion, loss of wetlands, pollution from urban areas and agriculture, saltwater intrusion from artificial waterways, dredging, basin subsidence and faulting, storms and sea-level rise, and freshwater diversion from the Mississippi and other rivers.

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Monkeys born from eggs that got DNA transplant

An experimental procedure that someday may enable women to avoid passing certain genetic diseases on to their children has gained an early success, with the birth of four healthy monkeys, scientists report.

The technique still faces safety questions and perhaps ethical hurdles, but an expert called the work exciting.

The experiment, which involved transferring DNA between eggs from rhesus macaques, was described Wednesday on the Web site of the journal Nature by researchers from the Oregon Health and Science University.

Someday, the technique may be used against diseases caused by inherited defects in the "power plants" of cells, called mitochondria. These conditions are uncommon and unfamiliar to most people, such as Leber hereditary optic neuropathy. Roughly one person in every 4,000 or 5,000 either has one of these mitochondrial diseases or is at risk for one.

Symptoms of these potentially fatal illnesses include muscle weakness, dementia, movement disorders, blindness, hearing loss, and problems of the heart, muscle and kidney.

An egg contains the vast majority of its DNA in the nucleus, but mitochondria contain DNA elsewhere in the egg. So if a woman has a disease caused by defects in the mitochondrial DNA, the new technique might someday make it possible for her to pass on her normal DNA from the nucleus but not the flawed DNA from the mitochondria.

To allow for that, doctors may transplant nucleus DNA from the eggs of such women into donor eggs that have healthy mitochondria. The donor eggs would have had their own nucleus DNA removed. After test-tube fertilization, this egg would in theory produce a baby without mitochondrial defects. (Fathers do not pass along their mitochondria.)

Researcher Shoukhrat Mitalipov said more safety studies must be done in monkeys. He noted that the technique would face regulatory hurdles for human studies because it would change the DNA inherited by future generations, an idea that has long provoked ethical concerns.

Douglas Wallace of the University of California, Irvine, an authority on mitochondria who wasn't involved in the federally funded experiment, said the results were exciting and the technique is "potentially very interesting."

But "there are safety issues that are going to need to be addressed before one could think about it in humans," Wallace said.

Bureau Report

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Soon, solar cells will be printed on rooftops!

If scientists have their way, solar cells could soon be produced more cheaply using nanoparticle “inks” that allow them to be printed like newspaper or painted onto the sides of buildings or rooftops to absorb electricity-producing sunlight.

For the past two years, Brian Korgel, a University of Texas at Austin chemical engineer and his team have been working on this low-cost, nanomaterials solution to photovoltaics – or solar cell – manufacturing.

Korgel uses the light-absorbing nanomaterials, which are 10,000 times thinner than a strand of hair, because their microscopic size allows for new physical properties that can help enable higher-efficiency devices.

The inks could be printed on a roll-to-roll printing process on a plastic substrate or stainless steel. And the prospect of being able to paint the “inks” onto a rooftop or building is not far-fetched.

“You’d have to paint the light-absorbing material and a few other layers as well,” Korgel said. “This is one step in the direction towards paintable solar cells,” he added.

For the development of the solar cells, Korgel and his team are using copper indium gallium selenide or CIGS, which is both cheaper and benign in terms of environmental impact.

“CIGS has some potential advantages over silicon,” Korgel said. “It’s a direct band gap semiconductor, which means that you need much less material to make a solar cell, and that’s one of the biggest potential advantages,” he added.

His team has developed solar-cell prototypes with efficiencies at one percent; however, they need to be about 10 percent.

“If we get to 10 percent, then there’s real potential for commercialization. If it works, I think you could see it being used in three to five years,” Korgel said.

He also said that the inks, which are semi-transparent, could help realize the prospect of having windows that double as solar cells.

ANI

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Okanagan Valley

Located in southern British Columbia, Canada - the Okanagan Valley is one of the warmest regions in all of Canada. The Okanagan is comprised of the major centres of Kelowna, Penticton, Vernon and Osoyoos. During the summer months, visitors are offered countless sandy beaches, hot sun, and a variety of outdoor and water activities. Okanagan Lake provides the valley not only with excellent swimming but is also a spectacular backdrop to the golf courses and wineries and popular ski resorts located in the rolling hills of the valley. The Okanagan is considered a premiere wine valley and a tour of the local wineries is a must for anyone visiting the region.

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As defined for census purposes by StatsCan, the region has a total area of 20,829 km² (8,042 mi²) which is roughly two-thirds the size of Belgium. As of 2001, the region's population is approximately 297,601.

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The Okanagan Valley is home to the Okanagan Nation, an Interior Salish people who live in the valley from the head of Okanagan Lake downstream to near the river's confluence with the Columbia River in present-day Washington, as well as in the neighbouring Similkameen Valley, though the traditional territory encompasses the entire Columbia River watershed. They were hunter-gatherers, living off wild game and berries and roots for the most part but travelling north or south to fish salmon runs or to trade with other nations.Today the member bands of the Okanagan Nation Alliance are sovereign nations, with vibrant natural resource and tourism based economies. The annual August gathering near Vernon is a celebration of the continuance of Okanagan life and culture.

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Fruit production is a hallmark of the Okanagan Valley today, but the industry began with difficulty. Commercial orcharding of apples was first tried there in 1892, but a series of setbacks prevented the major success of commercial fruit crops until the 1920s. But until the 1930s, the demand for shipping fruit and other goods did drive a need for the sternwheeler steamboats that serviced Okanagan Lake: the S.S. Aberdeen from 1886 and then the S.S. Sicamous and S.S. Naramata from 1914. The Sicamous and Naramata survive as a tourist attraction in Penticton.

Photo Matt Dennison

While the last half-century has grown several resource-based enterprises in the region, for instance forestry in Princeton, the fastest-growing industries in the Okanagan today are real estate, tourism and retirement accommodation as well as the ripping up of orchards and their replacement by wineries and vinyards. Favoured by its sunny climate, lakes, and winery attractions, the valley has become a hot destination for vacationers and retirees. The area is a seasonal magnet for itinerant fruit-picking labourers, primarily from Quebec and Mexico who are housed in migrant-worker camps.

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New algorithm explores future changes in plant populations

In a new research, a team of scientists has developed an algorithm that may be used to predict the future changes in plant populations.

The algorithm has been developed by scientists Sean Hammond and Karl Niklas.

It is called spatially explicit, reiterative algorithm, or SERA—that explores whether changes occurring in plant communities, such as self-thinning and the competitive displacement of one species by another, can be attributed to the characteristics of the individual plants that comprise the community.

“Our model predicts how a plant population or community will behave when plant-plant interactions are predicated exclusively on the constraints imposed by a few physical principles and by competition for physical space and light,” stated Dr. Niklas.

Recent empirical studies have shown that a variety of plant communities in different environments exhibit some of the same size-dependent and age-dependent trends.

One example is the relationship between the mass of tree canopies and the diameter of the tree trunks.

In the simulations of plant growth within a community performed by SERA, various trends emerged as a result of competition for light and space among the individual plants, and these trends are in agreement with the trends found empirically in plant populations.

Other results of SERA simulations were also found to be in agreement with empirical data.

Although a few million years late, SERA predicted that angiosperms would outcompete gymnosperms as the dominant land plants, and it was able to accurately predict the age at which a variety of plant species would reach reproductive maturity.

“Remarkably, our model predicts the behavior of real plant populations, and thus suggests to us that many ‘complex’ ecological interactions emerge as a result of a few very ‘simple’ processes,” commented Dr. Niklas.

SERA may be very useful in predicting changes in community development and composition as environmental and climatic variability increases.

ANI

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Largest lake on Saturn’s moon Titan as smooth as a mirror

A new study has shown that the largest lake on Saturn’s moon Titan is as smooth as a mirror, varying in height by less than 3 millimeters, and good enough for skipping rocks on it.

The find, based on new radar observations, adds to a deluge of evidence that the moon’s lakes are indeed filled with liquid, rather than dried mud.

“Unless you actually poured concrete and spread it really, really smoothly, you’d never see something like that on Earth,” said team member Howard Zebker of Stanford University.

Astronomers have waffled on whether Saturn’s largest moon is dry or wet, but the bulk of the evidence points to liquid lakes.

The radar on the Cassini spacecraft, which arrived at Saturn in 2004, turned up dark splotches at Titan’s poles.

The darkness in radar indicates those regions are very smooth, like the signal expected from the surface of a liquid lake.

Spectral data also showed that the apparent lakes seem to be filled with methane and ethane, which would be liquid on Titan’s frigid surface, and “geomorphologically, they just look like lakes,” Zebker said.

But, previous radar observations viewed the apparent lakes at an angle, and therefore did not see bright radar glints reflected back from their surface, leaving open the possibility that the features were dry lake beds or patches of soot.

Now, researchers report seeing just that signal.

In December last year, Cassini pointed its radar straight down over Titan’s largest lake, Ontario Lacus, which spans 235 kilometres at the moon’s south pole.

The reflected signal was so strong, it maxed out the probe’s receiver.

The radar echoes revealed a surface covering thousands of square metres whose height varies by less than 3 millimetres – 10 times as flat as previous measurements were able to reveal.

“It’s very hard to imagine a solid surface that is smooth on the order of millimeters,” lead author Lauren Wye of Stanford told New Scientist.

This provides strong evidence that the lake is currently liquid, not dried mud.

“If you’ve ever walked outside and seen an area on the ground where there’s mud and the water dries up, even that is pretty flat – but you get cracks in the mud and pieces that curl up,” Zebker said. “You never see anything as smooth as what we’re inferring for Titan’s surface,” he added.

Confirming the presence of liquid on Titan adds to the long list of similarities between Titan and Earth.

ANI

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Aliens in no mood to response to SETI right now

The SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) telescope has produced its first scientific results, but unfortunately it's still waiting for a response from the aliens.

The project, called the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) after benefactor and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, went live in 2007.

It was designed to scan for broadcasts from alien civilizations with more consistency and a wider field of view than any previous effort.

Run jointly by the SETI Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, from a site in northern California, the ATA is ultimately intended to comprise 350 dishes.

But, even with its current complement of 42, it has an impressively wide field of view. It uses relatively small, 6-metre dishes that together can take in five square degrees of sky at a time - a box as wide as 10 full moons.

"At any one moment, you look into a very large piece of the sky," said Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute. "At 350 (telescopes), the ATA just blows any other survey telescope out of the water. Even at 42, it's interesting," she told New Scientist.

According to Joeri van Leeuwen, an ATA team member who presented the project's first results at a conference in the Netherlands in June, "You can see entire galaxies within one shot."

One question the ATA aims to answer is a mystery of missing gas.

Star-forming regions don't seem to have enough molecular gas to keep up the star-formation rates we observe.

Some researchers think atomic hydrogen might make up the difference.

ATA team members have searched for it in four groups of galaxies so far, but have not yet found any new intergalactic gas, deepening the mystery.

"This paper was our first science paper, so we've answered some questions, but we're finding new questions again. This paper really shows that our setup is working, we have all the algorithms working, and we could easily upgrade to a more powerful system still," van Leeuwen said.

Such surveys do not distract from the search for aliens, which - if they exist and are attempting to communicate - may send out broadcasts at wavelengths not commonly emitted by astrophysical objects.

ANI

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The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes

The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes is a valley within Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska which is filled with ash flow from the eruption of Novarupta on June 6—June 8, 1912. Following the eruption, thousands of fumaroles vented steam from the ash. Robert F. Griggs, who explored the volcano's aftermath for the National Geographic Society in 1916, gave the valley its name, saying that "the whole valley as far as the eye could reach was full of hundreds, no thousands—literally, tens of thousands—of smokes curling up from its fissured floor."

Photo by: amol2005

The 1912 eruption was the largest eruption by volume in the 20th century, erupting about 13 cubic kilometers (3.1 cu mi) of material. Novarupta generated as many as 14 major earthquakes with magnitudes between M6 and M7, a level of energy release virtually unprecedented during volcanic eruptions in modern memory, and over 100 earthquakes greater than M5. Following the eruption, the summit of Mount Katmai subsided (collapsed) about 1,200 meters (3,900 ft), forming the central caldera.

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Photo by: Francesco L

Katmai is a stratovolcano, formed from alternating layers of lava flows and pyroclastic rocks. The presence of pyroclastic materials indicates that some Katmai eruptions have been explosive. The subsidence of the summit to form the central caldera and the extraordinarily energetic earthquakes accompanying the 1912 eruption are evidence of this.

Photo by: Sean Risse

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The ash-filled valley covers a 40-square-mile (100 km2) area and is up to 700 feet (210 m) deep. In places deep canyons have been cut by the River Lethe, allowing observers to see the ash flow strata. Since the ash has cooled, most of the fumaroles are now extinct and despite its name the valley is no longer filled with smoke. The signs of volcanic activity are still visible on nearby hills. Katmai's most recent eruption was in 1927, but there have been non-eruptive events as recent as 2003. The Alaska Volcano Observatory still monitors Katmai's activity as part of the Katmai Cluster, where there are 5 active stratovolcanos within 15 kilometers (9 mi) of Katmai.

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World’s smallest laser unveiled

The world’s smallest laser, contained in a silica sphere just 44 nanometres across, and about 10 times smaller than the wavelength of light, has been unveiled.

According to a report in Nature News, the laser has been named as the ‘spaser’.

Whereas a laser amplifies light, using a mirrored cavity to intensify it, a spaser amplifies surface plasmons — tiny oscillations in the density of free electrons on the surface of metals, which, in turn, produce light waves.

The spaser could be used as a light source for scanning near-field optical microscopes, which can resolve details beyond the reach of standard light microscopy, and in nanolithography, to etch patterns much smaller than the width of a human hair.

The device also opens the door to nanoscale circuits that could process information thousands of times faster than the microelectronic chips inside today’s computers.

“This work has utmost significance,” said Mark Stockman of Georgia State University in Atlanta, who with David Bergman of Tel Aviv University in Israel proposed the spaser concept in 2003.

“The spaser is the smallest possible quantum amplifier and generator of optical fields on the nanoscale — without it, nanoplasmonics is like microelectronics would have been without a transistor,” he added.

According to Nikolay Zheludev, a physicist at the Optoelectronics Research Centre at Southampton University, UK, “I can think of applications in tagging large biochemical assays and in security marking, where the spaser’s narrow spectral output gives better tagging capacity than existing semiconductor quantum dot emitters.”

Such applications are not far off, according to the US team.

But, Noginov thinks that the spaser’s ability to generate coherent surface plasmons may be even more important than its uses as a nanolaser, and could herald a new generation of ultrafast nanoelectronics.

So far, researchers have made plasmonic circuit elements that serve as wires, resistors and capacitors, but the spaser should enable the development of amplifiers and generators.

For the spaser to have realistic applications in computing, however, researchers need to find a way to make it work electrically using a semiconductor, rather than using light to pump an organic dye.

That would allow the spaser to be integrated with photonic nanocircuitry. According to Stockman, such devices are about a year away.

“There is already a nanolaser with electrical pumping, and its extension to the spaser is very realistic,” he said.

ANI

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Spectacular Moon-Venus conjunction at break of dawn

A celestial show greeted skygazers at the break of dawn on Monday with Venus and Moon coming together in the eastern sky for a conjunction.

The phenomenon was seen in the early morning sky during which the thin waning crescent Moon poised directly above Venus, popularly known as Goddess of Love, Director of Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) C B Devgun said.

Conjunction is a term used in astronomy for the relative positions of celestial bodies. In the Moon-Venus conjunction, two celestial bodies will appear close in the sky.

Some astro-enthusiasts saw the celestial treat with naked eyes but some used a pair of binoculars for its exact positioning in the northeastern horizon at around 4:00 AM when Venus rises, he said.

The crescent Moon was right on the meridian, high in the south, and the planet Venus was only 4 degrees away from it, to the lower left.

The event was visible from all parts of the world, even from light-polluted cities.

Venus, the undisputed Queen of the morning sky, will appear in the eastern sky before sunrise everyday till October, and then begin to disappear once again into the glare of the Sun.

Bureau Report

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Pandas could be extinct in 2-3 generations

China's giant panda could be extinct in just two to three generations as rapid economic development is infringing on its way of life, state media said on Monday, citing an expert at conservation group WWF.

The problem is that the pandas' habitat is being split up into ever smaller patches, preventing the animals from roaming freely for mating partners and in turn endangering their gene pool.

"If the panda cannot mate with those from other habitats, it may face extinction within two to three generations," said Fan Zhiyong, Beijing-based species programme director for WWF. "We have to act now."

The risk of inbreeding is increasing, threatening to reduce the panda's resistance to diseases and lowering its ability to reproduce, the paper said.

Fan said that highways pose major restrictions on the panda's free movement.

"We may have to give up building some infrastructure," Fan said. "I don't know the solution to this problem."

There are about 1,590 pandas living in the wild around China, mostly in southwestern Sichuan, northern Shaanxi and northwestern Gansu provinces. A total of 180 have been bred in captivity, according to earlier reports.

In addition to environmental constraints, the animals' notoriously low libidos have frustrated efforts to boost their numbers.

Breeders have resorted to tactics such as showing them "panda porn" videos of other pandas mating, and putting males through "sexercises" aimed at training up their pelvic and leg muscles for the rigours of copulation.

Bureau Report

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