Iowa State University engineers have developed a new flexible, stretchable and tunable “meta-skin” that uses rows of small, liquid-metal devices to cloak an object from the sharp eyes of radar.
The meta-skin takes its name from metamaterials, which are composites that have properties not found in nature and that can manipulate electromagnetic waves. By stretching and flexing the polymer meta-skin, it can be tuned to reduce the reflection of a wide range of radar frequencies.
This flexible, stretchable and tunable “meta-skin” can trap radar waves and cloak objects from
detection.
Photo courtesy of Liang Dong
The journal Scientific Reports recently reported the discovery online. Lead authors from Iowa State’s department of electrical and computer engineering are Liang Dong, associate professor; and Jiming Song, professor. Co-authors are Iowa State graduate students Siming Yang, Peng Liu and Qiugu Wang; and former Iowa State undergraduate Mingda Yang. The National Science Foundation and the China Scholarship Council have partially supported the project.
“It is believed that the present meta-skin technology will find many applications in electromagnetic frequency tuning, shielding and scattering suppression,” the engineers wrote in their paper.
Dong has a background in fabricating micro and nanoscale devices and working with liquids and polymers; Song has expertise in looking for new applications of electromagnetic waves.
Working together, they were hoping to prove an idea: that electromagnetic waves – perhaps even the shorter wavelengths of visible light – can be suppressed with flexible, tunable liquid-metal technologies.
What they came up with are rows of split ring resonators embedded inside layers of silicone sheets. The electric resonators are filled with galinstan, a metal alloy that’s liquid at room temperature and less toxic than other liquid metals such as mercury.
Those resonators are small rings with an outer radius of 2.5 millimeters and a thickness of half a millimeter. They have a 1 millimeter gap, essentially creating a small, curved segment of liquid wire.
The rings create electric inductors and the gaps create electric capacitors. Together they create a resonator that can trap and suppress radar waves at a certain frequency. Stretching the meta-skin changes the size of the liquid metal rings inside and changes the frequency the devices suppress.
Tests showed radar suppression was about 75 percent in the frequency range of 8 to 10 gigahertz, according to the paper. When objects are wrapped in the meta-skin, the radar waves are suppressed in all incident directions and observation angles.
Liang Dong and Jiming Song, left to right, hold their meta-skin inside the experiment they used to measure the effectiveness of their radar-trapping device.
Photo courtesy of Liang Dong
“Therefore, this meta-skin technology is different from traditional stealth technologies that often only reduce the backscattering, i.e., the power reflected back to a probing radar,” the engineers wrote in their paper.
As he discussed the technology, Song took a tablet computer and called up a picture of the B-2 stealth bomber. One day, he said, the meta-skin could coat the surface of the next generation of stealth aircraft.
But the researchers are hoping for even more – a cloak of invisibility.
“The long-term goal is to shrink the size of these devices,” Dong said. “Then hopefully we can do this with higher-frequency electromagnetic waves such as visible or infrared light. While that would require advanced nanomanufacturing technologies and appropriate structural modifications, we think this study proves the concept of frequency tuning and broadening, and multidirectional wave suppression with skin-type metamaterials.”
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Pop quiz! Name the first five dinosaurs that come to mind. Chances are good that one you named was Tyrannosaurs rex, a popular favorite perhaps best known for its large size, fearsomeness and starring role in the “Jurassic Park” movies.
Life reconstruction of the new tyrannosaur “Timurlengia euotica” in its environment 90 million years ago. It is accompanied by two flying reptiles, “Azhdarcho longicollis”.
What you may not know about the tyrannosaurs is that they weren’t always the giant predators they are depicted as today. In fact, when tyrannosaurs first appeared during the Jurassic (170 million years ago), they were small, reaching about 10 feet in length, and lightly built. It wasn’t until the end of the Cretaceous—nearly 100 million years later—that tyrannosaurs achieved the massive size and weight of a T. rex.
Little was known about how this transition happened. Until now.
Reconstructed skeleton of “Timurlengia euotica” with discovered fossilized bones, highlighted in red, and other bones remaining to be discovered inferred from other related species of tyrannosaurs in white. Individual scale bars for the pictured fossilized bones each equal 2 cm.
According to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the fossilized remains of a newly discovered horse-sized dinosaur reveal how T. rex and its close relatives evolved into the top predators of their time.
As you might already know, the T. rex was a ferocious predator. Called the “king of lizards,” it had powerful jaws and a massive body. Though there have been a number of large dinosaurs discovered over the years, the T. rex remains to be one of the largest still. It was a carnivorous dinosaur, and it’s said that its jaws and teeth were so strong that it could easily crush a car.
The T. rex had a muscular body that stretched up to 40 feet long—about the size of a school bus. It also had a mighty tail and two strong legs, and it weighed up to eight tons. As mentioned earlier, it was a meat eater, so it would prey on scavenged carcasses and living animals. There have even been findings that T. rex would sometimes eat their own kind.
Did this dinosaur have any weaknesses? Some might say that its short arms could be considered one. Scientists believe their arms were left over from evolution, similar to the pelvic bones of snakes. They weren’t entirely useless, however. Their arms served non-predatory purposes, such as allowing them to grip a mate. In addition, they were used for slashing. With four-inch claws, they were capable of inflicting considerably deep wounds. They roamed North America’s forested river valleys during the Cretaceous period, which was about 68 million years ago.
The new species, Timurlengia euotica, lived about 90 million years ago and fills-in a 20 million-year gap in the fossil record of tyrannosaurs during the early Cretaceous. A nimble pursuit hunter with slender, blade-like teeth suitable for slicing through meat, this new tyrannosaur was not an ancestor of T. rex.
Hans Sues, Chair, Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution holding a cast (right hand) of a “Tyrannosaurus rex” tooth for comparison with an actual tooth of the new tyrannosaur “Timurlengia euotica,” catalog number 538157, from the Late Cretaceous found in the Kyzylkum Desert, Uzbekistan.
According to Hans Sues, chair of the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and one of the paper’s co-authors, this new fossil helps answer the question of how tyrannosaurs evolved so rapidly at the end of the nearly 70 million-year period they lived on Earth.
“This fossil shows that tyrannosaurs developed their advanced head first,” Sues says. “Timurlengia’s skull, though much smaller than that of T. rex, shows a sophisticated brain that would have led to keen eyesight, smell and hearing.”
Top row: Partial braincase of “Timurlengia euotica” in tree views (L to R: from the back, from below, and from the right side). Bottom row: Composite images of the brain case from CT scanning. Reconstructed brain in dark blue, inner ear in pink, nerves in yellow, and blood vessel in red.
At the same time tyrannosaurs were developing their acute senses and cognitive abilities, other large meat-eating dinosaurs were becoming extinct, opening up an opportunity for tyrannosaurs to become apex predators.
The fossils used in the study were collected by Sues and his colleague Alexander Averianov from the Russian Academy of Sciences over a 10-year period during expeditions to the Kyzylkum Desert in Uzbekistan. Many familiar groups of Cretaceous dinosaurs have their roots in Central Asia and some of these would go on to flourish in North America.
Hans Sues, a scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, excavating a dinosaur fossil at Dzharakuduk in the Kyzylkum Desert of Uzbekistan, September 2006.
T. euotica’s remains were later analyzed by Sues and a team of paleontologists led by Stephen Brusatte at the University of Edinburgh and determined to be a new species. Using CT scans of Timurlengia’s brain case, the team was later able to reconstruct its brain and learn more about its senses.
“Timurlengia answers the question of how later tyrannosaurs gain the advantages of size and acute senses,” Sues says. “This new fossil shows a complex inner ear and nerves that fit with what we know about T. rex.”
“New discoveries like this show that there is still so much to be discovered about the history of dinosaurs,” Sues continues. “It’s not every day that you find a new tyrannosaur.”
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How did Madagascar once slot next to India? Where was Australia a billion years ago?
Cloud-based virtual globes developed by a team led by University of Sydney geologists mean anyone with a smartphone, laptop or computer can now visualise, with unprecedented speed and ease of use, how the Earth evolved geologically.
This is a reconstruction of the supercontinent Pangea 180 million years ago. The colors correspond to fluctuations in the continental gravity field, which reflect the deep continental structure such as roots of ancient mountain chains, basins and fold belts. These features are used to solve the puzzle of re-arranging all continents from today¹s positions to their ancient placement in Pangea.
Credit: Professor Dietmar Müller.
Reported today in PLOS ONE, the globes have been gradually made available since September 2014. Some show Earth as it is today while others allow reconstructions through ‘geological time’, harking back to the planet’s origins.Uniquely, the portal allows an interactive exploration of supercontinents. It shows the breakup and dispersal of Pangea over the last 200 million years. It also offers a visualisation of the supercontinent Rodinia, which existed 1.1 billion years ago. Rodinia gradually fragmented, with some continents colliding again more than 500 million years later to form Gondwanaland.
“Concepts like continental drift, first hypothesised by Alfred Wegener more than a century ago, are now easily accessible to students and researchers around the world,” said University of Sydney Professor of Geophysics Dietmar Müller.
“The portal is being used in high schools to visualise features of the Earth and explain how it has evolved through time.”
The virtual globes includes visual depictions of a high-resolution global digital elevation model, the global gravity and magnetic field as well as seabed geology, making the amazing tapestry of deep ocean basins readily accessible.
The portal also portrays the dynamic nature of Earth’s surface topography through time. It visualises the effect of surface tectonic plates acting like giant wobble boards as they interact with slow convection processes in the hot, toffee-like mantle beneath Earth’s crust.
“When continents move over hot, buoyant swells of the mantle they bob up occasionally causing mountains,” said Professor Müller. “Conversely the Earth’s surface gets drawn down when approaching sinking huge masses of old, cold tectonic slabs sinking in the mantle, creating lowlands and depressions in the earth’s crust.”
Since its inception the portal has been visited more than 300,000 times from more than 200 countries and territories. Individual globes have featured in numerous media articles around the world. The seafloor geology globe is the most popular, viewed on average 500 times per day. The globe allows the viewer to explore how different types of deep-sea sediments vary between ocean basins, and at different latitudes and depths.
“These cloud-based globes offer many future opportunities for providing on-the-fly big data analytics, transforming the way big data can be visualised and analysed by end users,” said Professor Müller.
The interactive globes can be viewed on any browser at: portal.gplates.org
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Scientists have long been puzzled about what makes Mercury’s surface so dark. The innermost planet reflects much less sunlight than the Moon, a body on which surface darkness is controlled by the abundance of iron-rich minerals. These are known to be rare at Mercury’s surface, so what is the “darkening agent” there?
About a year ago, scientists proposed that Mercury’s darkness was due to carbon that gradually accumulated from the impact of comets that traveled into the inner Solar System. Now scientists, led by Patrick Peplowski of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, have used data from the MESSENGER mission* to confirm that a high abundance of carbon is present at Mercury’s surface.
This oblique image of Basho shows the distinctive dark halo that encircles the crater. The halo is composed of so-called Low Reflectance Material (LRM), which was excavated from depth when the crater was formed. Basho is also renowned for its bright ray craters, which render the crater easily visible even from very far away.
Credit: Courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
However, they also have also found that, rather than being delivered by comets, the carbon most likely originated deep below the surface, in the form of a now-disrupted and buried ancient graphite-rich crust, some of which was later brought to the surface by impact processes after most of Mercury’s current crust had formed. The results are published in the March 7, 2016, Advanced Online Publication of Nature Geoscience.
Co-author and Deputy Principal Investigator of the MESSENGER mission, Carnegie’s Larry Nittler, explained: “The previous proposal of comets delivering carbon to Mercury was based on modelling and simulation. Although we had prior suggestions that carbon may be the darkening agent, we had no direct evidence. We used MESSENGER’s Neutron Spectrometer to spatially resolve the distribution of carbon and found that it is correlated with the darkest material on Mercury, and this material most likely originated deep in the crust. Moreover, we used both neutrons and X-rays to confirm that the dark material is not enriched in iron, in contrast to the Moon where iron-rich minerals darken the surface.”
MESSENGER obtained its statistically robust data via many orbits on which the spacecraft passed lower than 60 miles (100 km) above the surface of the planet during its last year of operation. The data used to identify carbon included measurements taken just days before MESSENGER impacted Mercury in April 2015. Repeated Neutron Spectrometer measurements showed higher amounts of low-energy neutrons, a signature consistent with the presence of elevated carbon, coming from the surface when the spacecraft passed over concentrations of the darkest material.
Estimating the amount of carbon present required combining the neutron measurements with other MESSENGER datasets, including X-ray measurements and reflectance spectra. Together, the data indicate that Mercury’s surface rocks are made up of as much as a few weight percent graphitic carbon, much higher than on other planets. Graphite has the best fit to the reflectance spectra, at visible wavelengths, and the likely conditions that produced the material.
When Mercury was very young, much of the planet was likely so hot that there was a global “ocean” of molten magma. From laboratory experiments and modeling, scientists have suggested that as this magma ocean cooled, most minerals that solidified would sink. A notable exception is graphite, which would have been buoyant and floated to form the original crust of Mercury.
“The finding of abundant carbon on the surface suggests that we may be seeing remnants of Mercury’s original ancient crust mixed into the volcanic rocks and impact ejecta that form the surface we see today. This result is a testament to the phenomenal success of the MESSENGER mission and adds to a long list of ways the innermost planet differs from its planetary neighbors and provides additional clues to the origin and early evolution of the inner Solar System,” concluded Nittler.
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Global warming will increase rainfall in some of the world’s driest areas over land, with not only the wet getting wetter but the dry getting wetter as well.
New research published today in Nature Climate Change has revealed that in the Earth’s dry regions, global warming will bring an overall increase in rainfall and in extreme precipitation events that could lead to flash flooding becoming a more regular event.
“We found a strong relationship between global warming and an increase in rainfall, particularly in areas outside of the tropics,” said lead author Dr Markus Donat from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.
“Within the tropics we saw an increase in rainfall responding to global warming but the actual rate of this increase was less clear.”
Unfortunately for societies, businesses and agricultural activities that exist in arid regions, the expected increase in rainfall over dry areas does not necessarily mean that more water will become available according to the researchers. The additional heat caused by global warming will likely lead to increased evaporation. This means that while there may be more extreme flooding events it may have little impact on overall water storage rates.
“The concern with an increased frequency and in particular intensity of extreme precipitation events in areas that are normally dry is that there may not be infrastructure in place to cope with extreme flooding events,” said Dr Donat.
“Importantly, this research suggests we will see these extreme rainfall events increase at regional levels in dry areas, not just as an average across the globe.”
The researchers were able to reach this conclusion because they looked at regions with similar characteristics rather than trying to compare complex climate variations found when comparing one country or continent with another.
This meant that dry regions in Australia were compared with similarly dry regions in Asia, Africa and many other countries. At the same time, wetter regions across different countries were also compared. This allowed the researchers to directly compare like with like.
Importantly, the findings remained consistent across observations and models.
“With precipitation climate models and observations don’t always tell the same story regarding regional changes, but we were very surprised to find that our results turned out to be highly robust across both,” said Dr Donat.
“It appears the uncertainties in climate models were greatest where the observational uncertainties were greatest. This suggests that improved observations will be vital for those planning for climate change if they are to reasonably determine how future precipitation will change in every corner of the world with global warming.”
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Astronomers for the first time have detected repeating short bursts of radio waves from an enigmatic source that is likely located well beyond the edge of our Milky Way galaxy. The findings indicate that these “fast radio bursts” come from an extremely powerful object which occasionally produces multiple bursts in under a minute.
Prior to this discovery, reported in Nature, all previously detected fast radio bursts (FRBs) have appeared to be one-off events. Because of that, most theories about the origin of these mysterious pulses have involved cataclysmic incidents that destroy their source – a star exploding in a supernova, for example, or a neutron star collapsing into a black hole. The new finding, however, shows that at least some FRBs have other origins.
The 305-m Arecibo telescope and its suspended support platform of radio receivers is shown amid a starry night. From space, a sequence of millisecond-duration radio flashes are racing towards the dish, where they will be reflected and detected by the radio receivers. Such radio signals are called fast radio bursts, and Arecibo is the first telescope to see repeat bursts from the same source.
Credit: Danielle Futselaar
FRBs, which last just a few thousandths of a second, have puzzled scientists since they were first reported nearly a decade ago. Despite extensive follow-up efforts, astronomers until now have searched in vain for repeat bursts.
That changed last November 5th, when McGill University PhD student Paul Scholz was sifting through results from observations performed with the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico – the world’s largest radio telescope. The new data, gathered in May and June and run through a supercomputer at the McGill High Performance Computing Centre, showed several bursts with properties consistent with those of an FRB detected in 2012.
The repeat signals were surprising – and “very exciting,” Scholz says. “I knew immediately that the discovery would be extremely important in the study of FRBs.” As his office mates gathered around his computer screen, Scholz pored over the remaining output from specialized software used to search for pulsars and radio bursts. He found that there were a total of 10 new bursts.
The finding suggests that these bursts must have come from a very exotic object, such as a rotating neutron star having unprecedented power that enables the emission of extremely bright pulses, the researchers say. It is also possible that the finding represents the first discovery of a sub-class of the cosmic fast-radio-burst population.
“Not only did these bursts repeat, but their brightness and spectra also differ from those of other FRBs,” notes Laura Spitler, first author of the new paper and a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.
Scientists believe that these and other radio bursts originate from distant galaxies, based on the measurement of an effect known as plasma dispersion. Pulses that travel through the cosmos are distinguished from man-made interference by the influence of interstellar electrons, which cause radio waves to travel more slowly at lower radio frequencies. The 10 newly discovered bursts, like the one detected in 2012, have three times the maximum dispersion measure that would be expected from a source within the Milky Way.
Intriguingly, the most likely implication of the new Arecibo finding – that the repeating FRB originates from a very young extragalactic neutron star – is at odds with the results of a study published last week in Nature by another research team. That paper suggested FRBs are related to cataclysmic events, such as short gamma-ray bursts, which can not generate repeat events. “However, the apparent conflict between the studies could be resolved, if it turns out that there are at least two kinds of FRB sources,” notes McGill physics professor Victoria Kaspi, a senior member of the international team that conducted the Arecibo study.
In future research, the team hopes to identify the galaxy where the radio bursts originated. To do so, they will need to detect bursts using radio telescopes with far more resolving power than Arecibo, a National Science Foundation-sponsored facility with a dish that spans 305 metres and covers about 20 acres. Using a technique called interferometry, performed with radio telescope arrays spread over large geographical distances, the astronomers may be able to achieve the needed resolution.
“Once we have precisely localized the repeater’s position on the sky, we will be able to compare observations from optical and X-ray telescopes and see if there is a galaxy there,” says Jason Hessels, associate professor at the University of Amsterdam and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy as well as corresponding author of the Nature paper. “Finding the host galaxy of this source is critical to understanding its properties”, he adds.
Canada’s CHIME telescope could help unravel the puzzle, adds Kaspi, who is Director of the McGill Space Institute. Thanks to the novel design of the soon-to-be completed apparatus, it is expected to be able to detect dozens of fast radio bursts per day, she says. “CHIME will further our quest to understand the origin of this mysterious phenomenon, which has the potential to provide a valuable new probe of the Universe.”
The McGill researchers were supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Canada Research Chairs program, the Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics & Cosmology and the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies.
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Analyzing the data collected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope Maxim Pshirkov (The Sternberg Astronomical Institute, MSU) discovered a new source that confirmed the fact that binary systems with strong colliding stellar winds comprise a separate new population of high-energy gamma-ray sources.
This is an artist’s impression of the clash of powerful stellar winds.
Credit: NASA/C. Reed
Massive binary star systems with highly luminous and hot Wolf-Rayet stars and massive (tens solar masses) OB companion generate strong stellar winds. Its percussion may lead to producing a fierce photon flux with an energetic potential of more than a hundred mega electronvolt (MEV), when a distance separating stars is relatively short. That phenomenon was considered as a possible source of gamma-radiation for a long while.
Strong stellar winds are generated in the binary systems consisting of highly luminous and hot Wolf-Rayet stars and massive ( several tens solar masses) OB companions. Wind collision may produce strong photon emission with photon energies exceeding hundred mega electronvolts (MeV). This phenomenon was considered as a possible source of gamma-radiation for a long while.
Though such radiation was detected only once, with the famous Eta Carinae, which was observed for more than four centuries (particularly intensively – after 1834, when one of its stars underwebt an explosion and for some time was the most luminous star in the sky) ).
Eta Carinae is comparatively close to Earth – around 7,5 — 8 thousand light years. The stars in this system weight 120 and (30-80) solar masses respectively, and shine brighter than millions of suns. If they were 10 parsec (30 light years) away from the Earth, they would be just as luminous as the Moon, while the Sun would be invisible on such distance. Naturally, Eta Carinae was the first candidate to consider and seven years ago high-energy radiation from this system was finally detected.
Eta Carinae
Credit: NASA
However, one example was not enough to confirm the model of binary stars emitting high-energy radiation, and the search for similar sources was continued, which turned out to be a tricky task.
“Recent calculations proved such star types as Eta Carinae to be incredibly rare – probably, one per a galaxy like we inhabit, or less,’ said Maxim Pshirkov, my colleagues’ research resulted in no certain findings. In 2013 an American-Austrian research team composed a list of seven stellar systems containing Wolf-Rayet stars, where a radiation could most probably appear. This research was based on two years of observations and lacked data, so it was only possible to set an upper limit on the HE radiation. I decided to utilize larger set of data seven years of Fermi-LAT observations. As the result – it was discovered that Gamma Velorum is the source of gamma-radiation at 6.σ. confidence level”
This system contains two stars with masses of 30 and 10 solar masses. Their orbital parameters are well-studied and they are separated by about the same distance as Earth and Sun. The luminosity of this binary system is about 200 thousand times higher than of the Sun and strong stellar winds have very high mass loss rate: hundred-thousandth and two ten-millionth of the solar mass every year.
Though these figures seem to be small, actually this amount is huge, particularly comparing to the solar wind which only amounts to 10-14 solar mass per annum As the stellar winds in the Gamma Velorum system collide on a speed exceeding 1000 kilometers per second, particles are accelerated in the shock. Though an exact mechanism of this acceleration is still unknown, it definitely leads to a high energy photon radiation that turned out to be detected by Fermi LAT.
An attentive reader who followed the process of searching for Higgs boson in the Large Hadron Collider has probably faced the standard deviation that Pshirkov mentions and remembered that in physics a hypothesis is proved on a statistical accuracy higher than 5σ. That means it is confirmed with a probability higher than 99,999%. In other words Pshirkov’s discovery with its six standard deviations is definitely reliable, though it’s still not far away from the threshold. According to the article, it was partly a pure luck that helped the researcher.
“Searching for similar sources in the very galactic plane is much more complicated, since it is a powerful gamma-ray source itself, and detecting small photon excess coming from colliding stellar winds becomes much more difficult with this background,” says the scientist. “But the Gamma Velorum system lies above the plane surface and it is comparatively close to us. The discovery would not probably happen, if it was further away or closer to the plane.”
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Scientists at the University of Southampton have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years.
Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.
The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving. As a very stable and safe form of portable memory, the technology could be highly useful for organisations with big archives, such as national archives, museums and libraries, to preserve their information and records.
Eternal 5D data storage
Credit: University of Southampton
The technology was first experimentally demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kb digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D.Now, major documents from human history such as Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton’s Opticks, Magna Carta and Kings James Bible, have been saved as digital copies that could survive the human race. A copy of the UDHR encoded to 5D data storage was recently presented to UNESCO by the ORC at the International Year of Light (IYL) closing ceremony in Mexico.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights recorded into 5D optical data
Credit: University of Southampton
The documents were recorded using ultrafast laser, producing extremely short and intense pulses of light. The file is written in three layers of nanostructured dots separated by five micrometres (one millionth of a metre).The self-assembled nanostructures change the way light travels through glass, modifying polarisation of light that can then be read by combination of optical microscope and a polariser, similar to that found in Polaroid sunglasses.
Coined as the ‘Superman memory crystal’, as the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz. The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.
Professor Peter Kazansky, from the ORC, says: “It is thrilling to think that we have created the technology to preserve documents and information and store it in space for future generations. This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilisation: all we’ve learnt will not be forgotten.”
The researchers will present their research at the photonics industry’s renowned SPIE—The International Society for Optical Engineering Conference in San Francisco, USA this week. The invited paper, ‘5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Writing in Glass’ will be presented on Wednesday 17 February.
The team are now looking for industry partners to further develop and commercialise this ground-breaking new technology.
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Newly-excavated village in the Jordan Valley sheds light on the historical shift from foraging to agriculture, say Hebrew University of Jerusalem archaeologists.
Archaeologists from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem revealed in Israel a prehistoric village, dated around 12,000 years ago, in excavations in the fertile Jordan Valley.
The site, named NEG II, is located in Nahal (wadi) Ein-Gev, at the middle of the perennial stream that flows west to the Sea of Galilee.
A series of excavations on site revealed an abundance of findings, including human burial remains, flint tools, art manifestations, faunal assemblage, ground stone and bone tools. The excavated area revealed an extensive habitation with deep cultural deposits (2.5 to 3 meters deep) and the site is estimated as covering roughly 1200 m2.
Surprisingly, the village differs markedly from others of its period in Israel. The findings encapsulate cultural characteristics typical of both the Old Stone Age — known as the Paleolithic period, and the New Stone Age — known as the Neolithic period.
“Although attributes of the lithic tool kit found at NEG II places the site chronologically in the Paleolithic period, other characteristics – such as its artistic tradition, size, thickness of archaeological deposits and investment in architecture – are more typical of early agricultural communities in the Neolithic period,” said Dr. Leore Grosman, from the Institute of Archaeology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who led the excavations.
“Characterizing this important period of potential overlap in the Jordan Valley is crucial for the understanding of the socioeconomic processes that marked the shift from Paleolithic mobile societies of hunter-gatherers to Neolithic agricultural communities,” added Dr. Grosman.
Excavations revealed buildings of a Natufian village
Credit: Dr. Leore Grosman
The Paleolithic period is the earliest and the longest period in the history of mankind. The end of this period is marked by the transition to settled villages and domestication of plants and animals as part of the agricultural life-ways in the Neolithic period.
In a research, published in the journal PLOS ONE, the archeologists described the village as one of the latest settlements in the Levant region of the Late Natufian – the last culture of the Paleolithic period.
The Natufian culture (about 15,000-11,500 years B.P.) is known from sites all over the Levant – from the Negev and the Sinai in the south to Syria and Lebanon in the north.
NEG II was occupied in the midst of the cold and dry global climatic event known as the Younger Dryas (12,900–11,600 years B.P.), where temperature declined sharply over most of the northern hemisphere. Affected by climatic changes, Late Natufian groups in the Mediterranean zone became increasingly mobile and potentially smaller in size.
However, excavations at NEG II show that groups in the Jordan Valley became more sedentary and potentially larger in size.
“The buildings represent at least four occupational stages and the various aspects of the faunal assemblage provide good indications for site permanence. In addition, the thick archaeological deposits, the uniformity of the tool types and the flint knapping technology indicate intensive occupation of the site by the same cultural entity,” said Dr. Grosman.
Researchers say that this shift in settlement pattern could be related to greater climatic stability due to a lesser effect of the Younger Dryas in the region, higher cereal biomass productivity and better conditions for small-scale cultivation.
These factors had provided the ingredients necessary to taking the final steps toward agriculture in the southern Levant, researchers say.
“It is not surprising that at the very end of the Natufian culture, at a suite of sites in the Jordan Valley, that we find a cultural entity that bridges the crossroads between Late Paleolithic foragers and Neolithic farmers,” said Dr. Grosman.
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Very specific conditions are needed for a tiny seed to grow into a mighty tree. Providing these conditions helps to preserve biodiversity, as plants produced from cuttings are essentially clones. EU-funded researchers have developed an innovative propagation unit where plantlets can thrive, along with tailor-made growth protocols for many species.
The Zephyr project has developed a new, zero-impact growth chamber for forest plants: a sustainable controlled environment where tender shoots can thrive under the watchful “eyes” of a robotic nursery assistant. Key components of the new system include a rotating set of trays under an array of LED lamps, a robotic arm equipped with a camera, and wireless microsensors that keep tabs on the plants.
The project is due to end in November 2015, and the partners are currently putting the final touches to their system. Standard growth chambers based on their prototype could be available within a year, says project manager Carlo Polidori, and customised units designed to meet specific requirements will also be on offer.
New growth, firmly rooted in research
Many of the partners in the Zephyr consortium are SMEs that had already collaborated in earlier EU-funded projects, shaping some of the components on which the proposed system relies. Further crucial parts, such as the stereoscopic camera, were developed elsewhere, and Zephyr contributed the microsensors.
“The real innovation in Zephyr is putting all these things together to produce a very competitive, highly automated unit,” says Polidori. In contrast to other growth chambers used in silviculture, Zephyr’s prototype uses neither pesticides and nor fertilisers, he notes.
It is also greener, requiring far less water, soil, energy and space, he adds. Moisture is recycled, plants are grown in individual pots containing the optimal amount of substrate, and instead of the 10 overhead lamps required by comparable systems, it relies on a mere 3, which are powered by solar panels. The combination of wireless microsensors and camera inspection means that conditions in the chamber can be monitored remotely.
More bark for the buck
One of the Zephyr growth chamber’s particular strengths is that it provides uniform conditions, Polidori notes. In the current, “static” chambers, treelings remain in the same spot for large stretches of time, and some are thus nearer to key components, such as lamps, than others.
In the prototype unit, all seedlings in a batch benefit from the same amounts of light, moisture and warmth, he adds. Seedlings are placed on revolving trays, taking turns in the best spots. The system thus produces plantlets of consistent quality, with the strong roots they will need to survive out in the wild.
And, better yet, it can produce them just in time, Polidori adds. Seedlings can thus be made available at the very beginning of the planting season, giving them plenty of time to get established before the days get short and cold.
In addition to the actual chamber, Zephyr has produced growth protocols for a wide variety of species. This guidance notably details the type of soil required for individual species, obviating the need for fertilisers, Polidori explains. The partners also use specific spectra to boost plant growth.
It’s a compelling system, but it’s not yet out of the woods. As a next step, the partners intend to develop the prototype into a reasonably priced standard module, which according to Polidori could be coming to a forest near you by late 2016. The prototype, he explains, contains particularly sophisticated versions of some components, meeting research needs that aren’t relevant to production environments. Customised units including such parts will, however, be available to clients with specific requirements.
As a further advance, the partners are considering an innovative business model for the commercialisation of their system. Known as a “distributed company”, this arrangement will enable the entities involved to cooperate without setting up a new company, Polidori notes. Zephyr may thus break new ground not just for plant propagation, but also for the marketing of knowledge-based products and services, stimulating growth in more ways than one.
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The weather patterns that typically bring moisture to the southwestern United States are becoming more rare, an indication that the region is sliding into the drier climate state predicted by global models, according to a new study.
“A normal year in the Southwest is now drier than it once was,” said Andreas Prein, a postdoctoral researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) who led the study. “If you have a drought nowadays, it will be more severe because our base state is drier.”
Weather systems that typically bring moisture to the southwestern United States are forming less often, resulting in a drier climate across the region. This map depicts the portion of overall changes in precipitation across the United States that can be attributed to these changes in weather system frequency. The gray dots represent areas where the results are statistically significant.
Credit: Andreas Prein, NCAR.
Climate models generally agree that human-caused climate change will push the southwestern United States to become drier. And in recent years, the region has been stricken by drought. But linking model predictions to changes on the ground is challenging.
In the new study—published online today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union—NCAR researchers grapple with the root cause of current drying in the Southwest to better understand how it might be connected to a warming climate.
Subtle shift yields dramatic impact
For the study, the researchers analyzed 35 years of data to identify common weather patterns—arrangements of high and low pressure systems that determine where it’s likely to be sunny and clear or cloudy and wet, among other things. They identified a dozen patterns that are typical for the weather activity in the contiguous United States and then looked to see whether those patterns were becoming more or less frequent.
“The weather types that are becoming more rare are the ones that bring a lot of rain to the southwestern United States,” Prein said. “Because only a few weather patterns bring precipitation to the Southwest, those changes have a dramatic impact.”
The Southwest is especially vulnerable to any additional drying. The region, already the most arid in the country, is home to a quickly growing population that is putting tremendous stress on its limited water resources.
“Prolonged drought has many adverse effects,” said Anjuli Bamzai, program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funded the research, “so understanding regional precipitation trends is vital for the well-being of society. These researchers demonstrate that subtle shifts in large-scale weather patterns over the past three decades or so have been the dominant factor in precipitation trends in the southwestern United States.”
The study also found an opposite, though smaller, effect in the Northeast, where some of the weather patterns that typically bring moisture to the region are increasing.
“Understanding how changing weather pattern frequencies may impact total precipitation across the U.S. is particularly relevant to water resource managers as they contend with issues such as droughts and floods, and plan future infrastructure to store and disperse water,” said NCAR scientist Mari Tye, a co-author of the study.
The climate connection
The three patterns that tend to bring the most wet weather to the Southwest all involve low pressure centered in the North Pacific just off the coast of Washington, typically during the winter. Between 1979 and 2014, such low-pressure systems formed less and less often. The associated persistent high pressure in that area over recent years is a main driver of the devastating California drought.
This shift toward higher pressure in the North Pacific is consistent with climate model runs, which predict that a belt of higher average pressure that now sits closer to the equator will move north. This high-pressure belt is created as air that rises over the equator moves poleward and then descends back toward the surface. The sinking air causes generally drier conditions over the region and inhibits the development of rain-producing systems.
Many of the world’s deserts, including the Sahara, are found in such regions of sinking air, which typically lie around 30 degrees latitude on either side of the equator. Climate models project that these zones will move further poleward. The result is a generally drier Southwest.
While climate change is a plausible explanation for the change in frequency, the authors caution that the study does not prove a connection. To examine this potential connection further, they are studying climate model data for evidence of similar changes in future weather pattern frequencies.
“As temperatures increase, the ground becomes drier and the transition into drought happens more rapidly,” said NCAR scientist Greg Holland, a co-author of the study. “In the Southwest the decreased frequency of rainfall events has further extended the period and intensity of these droughts.”
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Very specific conditions are needed for a tiny seed to grow into a mighty tree. Providing these conditions helps to preserve biodiversity, as plants produced from cuttings are essentially clones. EU-funded researchers have developed an innovative propagation unit where plantlets can thrive, along with tailor-made growth protocols for many species.
The Zephyr project has developed a new, zero-impact growth chamber for forest plants: a sustainable controlled environment where tender shoots can thrive under the watchful “eyes” of a robotic nursery assistant. Key components of the new system include a rotating set of trays under an array of LED lamps, a robotic arm equipped with a camera, and wireless microsensors that keep tabs on the plants.
The project is due to end in November 2015, and the partners are currently putting the final touches to their system. Standard growth chambers based on their prototype could be available within a year, says project manager Carlo Polidori, and customised units designed to meet specific requirements will also be on offer.
New growth, firmly rooted in research
Many of the partners in the Zephyr consortium are SMEs that had already collaborated in earlier EU-funded projects, shaping some of the components on which the proposed system relies. Further crucial parts, such as the stereoscopic camera, were developed elsewhere, and Zephyr contributed the microsensors.
“The real innovation in Zephyr is putting all these things together to produce a very competitive, highly automated unit,” says Polidori. In contrast to other growth chambers used in silviculture, Zephyr’s prototype uses neither pesticides and nor fertilisers, he notes.
It is also greener, requiring far less water, soil, energy and space, he adds. Moisture is recycled, plants are grown in individual pots containing the optimal amount of substrate, and instead of the 10 overhead lamps required by comparable systems, it relies on a mere 3, which are powered by solar panels. The combination of wireless microsensors and camera inspection means that conditions in the chamber can be monitored remotely.
More bark for the buck
One of the Zephyr growth chamber’s particular strengths is that it provides uniform conditions, Polidori notes. In the current, “static” chambers, treelings remain in the same spot for large stretches of time, and some are thus nearer to key components, such as lamps, than others.
In the prototype unit, all seedlings in a batch benefit from the same amounts of light, moisture and warmth, he adds. Seedlings are placed on revolving trays, taking turns in the best spots. The system thus produces plantlets of consistent quality, with the strong roots they will need to survive out in the wild.
And, better yet, it can produce them just in time, Polidori adds. Seedlings can thus be made available at the very beginning of the planting season, giving them plenty of time to get established before the days get short and cold.
In addition to the actual chamber, Zephyr has produced growth protocols for a wide variety of species. This guidance notably details the type of soil required for individual species, obviating the need for fertilisers, Polidori explains. The partners also use specific spectra to boost plant growth.
It’s a compelling system, but it’s not yet out of the woods. As a next step, the partners intend to develop the prototype into a reasonably priced standard module, which according to Polidori could be coming to a forest near you by late 2016. The prototype, he explains, contains particularly sophisticated versions of some components, meeting research needs that aren’t relevant to production environments. Customised units including such parts will, however, be available to clients with specific requirements.
As a further advance, the partners are considering an innovative business model for the commercialisation of their system. Known as a “distributed company”, this arrangement will enable the entities involved to cooperate without setting up a new company, Polidori notes. Zephyr may thus break new ground not just for plant propagation, but also for the marketing of knowledge-based products and services, stimulating growth in more ways than one.
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Work of physicists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), in which they connected two materials with unusual quantum-mechanical properties through a quantum constriction, could open up a novel path towards both a deeper understanding of physics and future electronic devices. Their results have just been published in the journal Science.
The researchers work with atoms that are trapped in laser beams and thus isolated from any external disturbance. Lasers are also used to cool the atoms to temperatures lower than those found anywhere else in the entire Universe. These ‘ultracold’ temperatures then enable creating clean materials that possess intriguing quantum-mechanical properties, such as unusual superconductivity.
Artist’s view of the quantum point contact between two cold atom clouds.
Thierry Giamarchi, professor at the UNIGE and responsible for the theoretical part of the study, explains: “In a cold-atom superconductor, the particles interact very strongly, whereas the interaction is usually very weak. This brings out strong-interaction effects through cooling could be compared to freezing water: the basic system is the same, but the result after cooling is very different.”
The experimental team in Zurich, led by Tilman Esslinger and Jean-Philippe Brantut, has now overcome the challenges to efficiently transport ultracold atoms between two quantum superconductors with strong interactions through a single quantum point, a so-called quantum point contact. “With this new quantum connection, we can now reveal new effects in these superconducting quantum systems. It is a fundamental breakthrough in the way we can use quantum physics with cold atoms”, says Giamarchi, from UNIGE’s Faculty of Science.
A collaboration serving innovation
In general, it is difficult to produce a clean junction between quantum materials. Thanks to the collaboration between the teams in Geneva and Zurich, an important step has now been taken towards developing efficient junctions. For their ultracold atoms, the researchers produced junctions with a transparency close to 100 %. This advance is a crucial step towards understanding quantum transport in ultracold atoms and will enable fundamental studies of superconductors and other quantum materials. But interconnecting quantum materials such as superconductors might bring also new possibilities for more efficient information processing, beyond what is possible with techniques currently available for connecting, in computers and electronic devices, active elements such as transistors to form electronic circuits.
Now that junctions between quantum materials with strong interactions can be produced, scientists might eventually create novel materials that can be used in everyday applications. The unconventional approach developed in Geneva and Zurich therefore establishes the first basis for new technologies and opens up a new research direction that might lead to creating ultrafast and robust electronic networks — a dream that many physicists share.
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A team of world-class scientists will grow potatoes under Martian conditions in a bid to save millions of lives.
The experiment, led by the International Potato Center (CIP) and NASA, is a major step towards building a controlled dome on Mars capable of farming the invaluable crop in order to demonstrate that potatoes can be grown in the most inhospitable environments.
The goal is to raise awareness of the incredible resilience of potatoes, and fund further research and farming in devastated areas across the globe where malnutrition and poverty are rife and climbing.
Conserving the genetic resources of potato and sweetpotato has been a major priority of CIP since its founding in 1971. CIP maintains the largest collections of potato (more than 4,000 varieties) and sweetpotato (more than 8,000 varieties) in the world. The genebank holds over 80% of the world’s native potato and sweetpotato cultivars and over 80% of the known species of wild potato. It also maintains more than 1,500 accessions of native Andean root and tuber crops (ARTCs). CIP conserves and preserves the genetic diversity of these valuable crops so that future generations can benefit from the amazing benefits of these treasured crops — much of which is yet to be discovered. By maintaining these collections, CIP conserves this diversity in perpetuity so new discoveries can be made.
Credit: International Potato Center/Memac Ogilvy
“How better to learn about climate change than by growing crops on a planet that died two billion years ago?” said Joel Ranck, CIP Head of Communications. “We need people to understand that if we can grow potatoes in extreme conditions like those on Mars, we can save lives on Earth.”
Currently, famine affects 842 million people around the world. Global warming creates poor soil conditions and increases the prevalence of pests and disease which have the combined effect of limiting harvests globally but particularly in vulnerable areas where poverty, malnutrition and food insecurity already exist.
For years, Peru-based global research and development organization, CIP, has been testing the robustness of potatoes in the most unlikely places. Beyond the ability to thrive in such challenging conditions, they are also highly nutritious. An excellent source of vitamin C, iron, and zinc, they contain critical micronutrients missing in vulnerable communities globally. CIP’s scientists use research and development innovations to fight malnutrition, lift people out of poverty and increase food security around the world.
The potato’s center of diversity is in the Andean region. It was domesticated roughly 3800 years ago along the shores of Lake Titicaca in Peru. Farmers today use the traditional knowledge of their ancestors to grow this Andean treasure. Still the potato has its vulnerabilities, climate change being one of the most severe challenges. In Potato Park in Pisac, Peru near Cusco, farmers use ancient methods and modern research to learn more about how climate change will affect potato as the Earth’s temperature increases.
These Quechua-speaking farmers demonstrate one of several test plots planted one hundred meters apart ascending up the slope of a mountain. They monitor temperature, rainfall, and pests and diseases to see which potato varieties perform best under the conditions at each level of altitude. In general Potato requires a period of cold weather to perform best. Slowly that critical temperature required is moving up the hillside, requiring farmers to cultivate fields at higher and higher elevations as pests and diseases thrive in the warmer conditions at elevations in which they had not previously existed.
Credit: International Potato Center/Memac Ogilvy
Understanding atmospheric changes on the surface of Mars will help build more dynamic and accurate simulation centers on Earth, providing further research for both CIP and NASA, who are looking to pioneer space farming for future manned missions to other planets and moons in our solar system.
“I am excited to put potatoes on Mars and even more so that we can use a simulated Martian terrain so close to the area where potatoes originated.” said Julio E. Valdivia-Silva, SETI Researcher Associate of NASA, who is leading the project’s science team.
The project is led by Will Rust, Creative Director of Memac Ogilvy Dubai. He conceived the idea while working closely with CIP to spread the word of how the potato could be the answer to global hunger. Will connected the CIP and NASA teams to initiate this project to support life on Mars and to bring direct benefit to smallholder farmers on Earth who deserve more food secure futures as well.
By using soils almost identical to those found on Mars, sourced from the Pampas de La Joya Desert in Peru, the teams will replicate Martian atmospheric conditions in a laboratory and grow potatoes. The increased levels of carbon dioxide will benefit the crop, whose yield is two to four times that of a regular grain crop under normal Earth conditions. The Martian atmosphere is near 95 per cent carbon dioxide.
Potatoes are clonally propagated, meaning that potatoes leftover and chosen from the recent harvest are saved for the next planting season. The potatoes saved are genetically identical to the potatoes planted the season before. This is an important aspect of the potato as a food security crop because if disease free and high quality planting material is used it can be reused in subsequent seasons if cared for properly.
Credit: International Potato Center/Memac Ogilvy
“The extraordinary efforts of the team have set the bar for extraterrestrial farming. The idea of growing food for human colonies in space could be a reality very soon.” said Chris McKay, planetary scientist of the NASA Ames research centre.
Melissa Guzman, Astrobiologist at NASA Ames, stated, “The image of students building plant growth payloads and communicating virtually from labs in California, Lima, and Dubai is exciting for the future of planetary exploration and astrobiology.
“We see the science, educational, and humanitarian goals as being intertwined. In the process of working together toward establishing a community on Mars, our students will also be establishing a community on Earth,” she added.
Tübingen researchers and Iranian archaeologists find evidence of raw materials trade between Bronze Age Iran and Mesopotamia
Many of us have seen the impressive statues of ancient Mesopotamian rulers in the Louvre and the British Museum. They bear witness to the wealth of Bronze Age Akkadian and Sumerian city-states more than four thousand years ago. But they are made of black diorite and gabbro stone not found in the region of today’s Iraq and northeastern Syria. Where did it come from? The blocks of stone must have been transported along ancient roads from distant trading partners to the Bronze Age cities of Mesopotamia.
The Jiroft plain – the fertile oasis of an early civilization in Iran.
Photo: Professor Peter Pfälzner
A team of researchers from the University of Tübingen’s Resource Cultures collaborative research center has investigated the origins of the stone and the methods used to move such heavy loads over great distances. The team from Tübingen collaborates with the Iranian Center of Archaeological Research (ICAR) to find the answers and is jointly headed by Professor Peter Pfälzner and Nader Soleimani.The archaeologists found diorite and gabbro in the Iranian province of Kerman, not far from the Persian Gulf, which matches that used in the Mesopotamian statues. In the same area, the archaeologists also found deposits of chlorite, which was used to make stone vessels traded as far away as Mesopotamia and the Levant. Close to these deposits, the researchers found petroglyphs and Early Bronze Age settlements, indicating that the stone was quarried during the Jiroft Culture of southeastern Iran (approx. 3000-2000 B.C.), and that it was traded across the Near East.
One of the recently-discovered settlements may have been a production and distribution center for the valuable stone. “This shows that the civilizations of Mesopotamia and southeastern Iran were in direct contact in the Early Bronze Age,” says Pfälzner of the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies. “The Persian Gulf most likely served as a trade route.” Pfälzner said this illustrated the great significance of this waterway in the international ties between important regions – from the Bronze Age to the present day.
Pottery shards at a newly-discovered settlement on the Jiroft plain.
Photo: Professor Peter Pfälzner
Pfälzner and his Iranian colleague Nader Soleimani are jointly heading research into an area of 110 by 120 kilometers in Iran’s Kerman Province – both on the ground and from the air using unmanned aircraft. Until now, there has been little archaeological research conducted in the hot, dry region south of the city of Jiroft. Using aerial photography, the team creates 3D models of ancient settlements (tells) from the Jiroft Culture era and other historical periods up to the coming of Islam. Along the potential trade routes running between high mountain chains to the coast of the Persian Gulf, the team is looking out for Early Bronze Age way-stations and any other trade activity. The German-Iranian team has so far mapped and investigated 42 settlements.
Now that the initial investigations have yielded results, work is set to resume in Iran in February 2016. The researchers are hoping to find out more about where the Bronze Age trade routes ran between the Jiroft Culture and the city-states of Mesopotamia, as well as what sort of effects this early long-distance trade had on Iranian civilizations more than four thousand years ago.
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Continental transform faults evolve when two plates slide along each other. The most prominent examples are the San Andreas Fault in California and the North Anatolian Fault in Turkey. Earthquakes along those faults typically do not exceed earthquake magnitudes around M8 but occur at shallow depth thus posing a major threat to nearby metropolitan regions such as San Francisco or Istanbul.
Overlooking the San Francisco Bay, in close proximity to the San Andreas Fault in California
Photo: P. Martínez-Garzón, GFZ
To estimate the seismic hazard and resulting risk it is essential to know the maximum earthquake magnitude to be expected along particular faults. This, however, is not trivial since instrumental recordings date back only 150 years while the recurrence period for the largest earthquakes can be much longer.
A team of scientists from the GFZ German Centre for Geosciences in collaboration with the University of Southern California has now presented a global evaluation of observed maximum earthquakes along all major transform faults allowing to better estimate the maximum earthquake strengths.
The major findings of the study are that for 75% of the data the observed maximum magnitude generally scales with the offset across the faults if exceeding 10 km. The offset across a fault results from the continuous slip of several mm to a few cm per year leading to offsets of kilometers after millions of years. Furthermore, it was found that the length of the rupture of individual earthquakes scales with mapped fault length.
For the remaining 25% of the earthquakes a larger coseismic stress drop was found to occur. ‘This means that those earthquakes release more seismic energy during the rupture process and they all occur along faults with low slip rates allowing to distinguish them from the majority of events that show a direct relation to cumulative offset’ says GFZ-scientist Patricia Martínez-Garzón, lead author of the study.
The results contribute towards developing refined building codes, risk mitigation concepts and early-warning systems and are, thus, of great relevance for millions of people living in population centers near .transform faults
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Although renowned for creating delight in children, farts are not considered the best way to make friends and influence people. But there is an upside: the production of gas means that your body is hosting the right kinds of bacteria. To encourage these ‘good’ bugs – known as our microbiome – we need to eat fibre.
Credit: CSIRO
“Fermentable components of dietary fibre have a critical role in feeding the gut microbiome,” said Dr Trevor Lockett, Head of the Gut Health and Nutrition Group at CSIRO Food and Nutrition.“This part of fibre is fermented mostly to short chain fatty acids, a process which creates gas.”
Fermentation is a chemical process that breaks down carbohydrates in fibre: bacteria do it in our bowels to create food for themselves. Molecules that improve the health of their host – that’s you – are also produced. Dr Lockett presented an update on his group’s latest research at ‘Bugs, Bowels and Beyond’, the 2015 National Scientific Conference of the Australian Society for Medical Research held in Adelaide, South Australia last week.
Credit: CSIRO
He focused in particular on recent findings describing how different dietary components influence the microbiome, and determine their production of not just gas, but also molecules that are beneficial in the large intestine.“For example, we know now that bacteria living in the large intestine produce a short chain fatty acid known as butyrate, which can reduce inflammation by stimulating regulatory immune cells,” he said.
“We’re now seeking to expand some of this work to see if we can improve inflammatory bowel disease.”
The component in food that manages to make it through digestive processes in the stomach and small intestine to feed the microbiome in the large intestine is known as resistant starch.
You can improve the proportion of resistant starch in your diet by eating unrefined whole grains, pulses and legumes, unripe bananas and cooked and cooled foods such as potatoes, pasta and rice. Dr Lockett explained that in addition to conducting fundamental research, scientists at the CSIRO work across the fields of nutrition and agriculture for product development.
“As our understanding of the beneficial components of dietary fibre has improved, we’ve been able to inform colleagues who are growing grains for cereal purposes,” he explained.
“If we can include and enrich resistant starch in marketable grains, perhaps we can drive health benefits.”
Dr Lockett’s CSIRO colleague Dr Bianca Benassi-Evans – who is based in the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI) building – has recently trialed two non-genetically modified barley grains to determine their impact on bowel health. Comparing the two candidate CSIRO barley grains against regular barley and puffed rice as breakfast meals in a sample of 20 adults, she found both to have desirable features.
“Our grains increased the acidity in stool samples, and increased bowel production of butyrate, a short chain fatty acid,” she said.
“Both of these outcomes are biomarkers of good bowel health.”
Additional studies are currently taking place, through which Dr Benassi-Evans hopes these grains may end up in your cereal aisle.
“What you choose in that supermarket can have dramatic effects on gut health,” she said.
Which breakfast products make you fart is a question you’ll have to determine yourself.
New Horizons scientists made this false color image of Pluto using a technique called principal component analysis to highlight the many subtle color differences between Pluto’s distinct regions. The image data were collected by the spacecraft’s Ralph/MVIC color camera on July 14 at 11:11 AM UTC, from a range of 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers).
This image was presented by Will Grundy of the New Horizons’ surface composition team on Nov. 9 at the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in National Harbor, Maryland.
By University of Seville and National University of Singapore.
An experiment in Singapore has pushed quantum weirdness close to its absolute limit.
Researchers from the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and the University of Seville in Spain have reported the most extreme ‘entanglement’ between pairs of photons ever seen in the lab. The result was published 30 October 2015 in Physical Review Letters.
This experiment at the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore has made a record measurement of entanglement — approaching the quantum limit with extreme precision.
Photo Credit: Alessandro Cerè / Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore
The achievement is evidence for the validity of quantum physics and will bolster confidence in schemes for quantum cryptography and quantum computing designed to exploit this phenomenon.
“For some quantum technologies to work as we intend, we need to be confident that quantum physics is complete,” says Poh Hou Shun, who carried out the experiment at CQT. “Our new result increases that confidence,” he says.
Local realism
Entanglement says that two particles, such as photons, can be married into a joint state. Once in such a state, either particle observed on its own appears to behave randomly. But if you measure both particles at once, you notice they are perfectly synchronized.
Albert Einstein was famously troubled by this prediction of quantum physics. He didn’t like the randomness that came with just one particle. He said “God does not play dice”. He didn’t like the correlations that came with two particles, either. He referred to this as “spooky action at a distance”.
Experiments since the 1970s have been collecting evidence that quantum predictions are correct. Recently an experiment in the Netherlands became the first to do away with all assumptions in the data-gathering.
Technically known as a ‘loophole-free Bell test’, the experiment leaves no wiggle room in meaning: entangled particles do behave randomly, and they synchronize without exchanging signals. (The results appeared in Nature on 21 October 2015, doi:10.1038/nature15759).
Entangled to the max
In the lab in Singapore, Poh and his colleagues also performed a Bell test. But instead of closing loopholes, their setup pushes the entanglement towards its theoretical maximum.
They make entangled photons by shining a laser through a crystal. The photons interact with the crystal in such a way that occasionally, one splits into two and the pair emerges entangled. The team control the photons with an array of lenses, mirrors and other optical elements to optimize the effect.
The researchers looked at 33.2 million optimized photon pairs. Each pair was split up and the photons measured separately, then the correlation between the results quantified.
In such a Bell test, the strength of the correlation says whether or not the photons were entangled. The measures involved are complex, but can be reduced to a simple number. Any value bigger than 2 is evidence for quantum effects at work. But there is also an upper limit.
Quantum physics predicts the correlation measure cannot get any bigger than 2sqrt(2) ~2.82843. In the experiment at CQT, they measure 2.82759 ± 0.00051 – within 0.03% of the limit. If the peak value were the top of Everest, this would be only 2.6 metres below the summit.
No extensions
The record result also rules out a proposed extension to quantum theory. Earlier this year, Alexei Grinbaum with CEA in France put forward a model in which quantum physics is just an effective description of a more fundamental theory. He calculated a new limit on the correlation measure using tools from information theory. The calculations considered how much information an observer can hold about a two-particle system, and gave a limit on the correlation measure sitting just 0.1% under the quantum limit.
“You need a very precise measurement to be able to distinguish the quantum limit, and that was our achievement,” says Christian Kurtsiefer, a Principal Investigator at CQT and co-author on the paper. The team’s result exceeds the Grinbaum limit by enough to rule out the model behind it.
Entanglement doesn’t allow faster-than-light communication, but it can be used for secret messaging and to speed up some calculations. Checking that it’s possible to reach the quantum limit for correlations is valuable for these applications: their security and reliability depends on this limit being fundamental.
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A continuing look at a Maya village in El Salvador–frozen in time by a blanket of volcanic ash from 1,400 years ago–shows the farming families who lived there went about their daily lives with virtually no strong-arming by the elite royalty lording over the valley.
Instead, archaeological evidence indicates significant interactions at the village of Ceren took place among families, village elders, craftspeople and specialty maintenance workers. This research comes from a new University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder) study, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Ceren is the best-preserved ancient Maya village in all of Latin America. In A.D. 660, the village was blasted by toxic gas, pummeled by lava bombs and then choked by a 17-foot layer of ash falling over several days after the Loma Caldera volcano, less than half a mile away, erupted.
Structures at Ceren were buried in up to 17 feet of ash over a period of several days, freezing the 1,400-year-old village in time.
Credit: University of Colorado
Discovered in 1978 by CU-Boulder anthropology Professor Payson Sheets, Ceren has been called the “New World Pompeii.” The degree of preservation is so great researchers can see marks of finger swipes in ceramic bowls, and human footprints in gardens that host ghostly ash casts of corn stalks. Researchers have also uncovered thatched roofs, woven blankets and bean-filled pots.
Some Maya archaeological records document “top-down” societies, where the elite class made most political and economic decisions, at times exacting tribute or labor from villages, said Sheets. But at Ceren, the villagers appear to have had free reign regarding their architecture, crop choices, religious activities and economics.
“This is the first clear window anyone has had on the daily activities and the quality of life of Maya commoners back then,” said Sheets, who is directing the excavation. “At Ceren we found virtually no influence and certainly no control by the elites.”
This is a view of the Ceren sacbe buried under about 16 feet of ash. The trench on the left side was a drainage canal to catch excess rainwater.
Credit: University of Colorado
A paper on the subject appears in the current issue of Latin American Antiquity published by the Society for American Archaeology. The 10-acre Ceren research area was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993.
Ceren is believed to have been home to about 200 people. Researchers have excavated 12 buildings, including living quarters, storehouses, workshops, kitchens, religious buildings and a community sauna. There are dozens of unexcavated structures, and perhaps even another settlement or two under the Loma Caldera volcanic ash, which covers an area of roughly two square miles, Sheets said. Thus far, no bodies have been found, an indication a precursor earthquake may have given residents a running start just before the eruption.
The only relationship Ceren commoners had with Maya elite was indirect, through public marketplace transactions in El Salvador’s Zapotitan Valley. There, Ceren farmers likely swapped surplus crops or crafts for coveted specialty items like jade axes, obsidian knives and colorfully decorated polychrome pots, all of which elites arranged to have brought to market from a distance. Virtually every Ceren household had a jade axe–which is harder than steel–used for tree cutting, building and woodworking.
“The Ceren people could have chosen to do business at about a dozen different marketplaces in the region,” said Sheets. “If they thought the elites were charging too much at one marketplace, they were free to vote with their feet and go to another.”
Professor Payson Sheets points to the imprint of several toes from a footprint left on the Ceren sacbe. Footprints pointed away from village and may have been made by Mayans fleeing the volcanic eruption.
Credit: Rachel Egan, University of Colorado
One of the excavated community buildings has two large benches in the front room, which Sheets believes were used by village elders when making decisions. One decision would have involved organizing the annual crop harvest festival, a celebratory eating and drinking ritual that appears to have been underway at Ceren when the Loma Caldera volcano abruptly blew just north of the village, said Sheets.
He believes the villagers fled south, perhaps along a white road leading away from the village discovered under 15 feet of ash in 2011. The elevated road, known as a sacbe (SOCK-bay), is about 2 meters wide and made from white tightly packed volcanic ash, with drainage ditches along each edge. The sacbe appears to split in the village and lead toward the plaza and two religious structures: the large ceremonial building and a second, smaller structure used by a female shaman.
Unique research
“There are two aspects that make this project unique,” said John Yellen, NSF program manager for the Ceren excavations. “The first is the incredible degree of preservation at Ceren, which captures in such detail a moment in time. The second is the perseverance and ingenuity of Dr. Sheets, who devised effective techniques to address a broad range of questions involving Ceren’s agricultural practices and its social organization.”
Prior to the discovery of Ceren’s sacbe, such “white way” roads–which often connected temples, plazas and towns and had strong practical, political and spiritual connotations–were known only from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and all were lined on each side with paving stones, unlike the Ceren sacbe, said Sheets.
Measurements with an instrument known as a penetrometer indicated the sacbe was extraordinarily hard. This was, in part, because villagers must have vigorously pounded sections of the sacbe with heavy objects over a period of days, he said. In addition, tiny, angular grains of the ash, or tephra used to build the sacbe lock together in a tight matrix when packed down under moist conditions. The center of the sacbe was slightly grooved, an indication people walked single file as they headed to their crop fields or perhaps traveled to and from the nearby town of San Andres.
“The western canal of the sacbe was crisp and well formed and had apparently been worked on just days before the eruption,” said Sheets. “But it looks like the workers hadn’t gotten around to maintaining the eastern canal before the volcanic event.”
The team, which has dug 10 test pits so far in an attempt to trace the path of the sacbe from Ceren south, found several dozen footprints on its outer, softer edges. “More than half of the footprints were headed south away from the village, away from the danger,” Sheets said. “I think at least some of them were left by people fleeing the eruption.”
Who built and maintained the sacbe–now known to stretch at least 150 meters from the village and may well go all the way to San Andres–is still a mystery. “We think the work was done on the household level with multiple families involved, perhaps supervised by village elders,” said Sheets.
There also is evidence that residents of particular households at Ceren were responsible for the upkeep of certain community structures, said Sheets. One household, for example, contained an inordinate amount of pots and firewood that the researchers speculated were used during activities in the domed community sauna building. That sweat bath, which could comfortably seat about a dozen people, had a central firebox where water was poured to create the desired steam and heat, Sheets said.
In 2009, Sheets and his team discovered intensively cultivated manioc (cassava) fields at Ceren. It was the first and only evidence of intense manioc cultivation at any New World archaeology site. Sheets and others believe such large manioc crops could have played a vital role in feeding indigenous societies living throughout tropical Latin America. Today, dried manioc powder is used in the region to make tortillas and tamales, and fermented manioc is used to make alcoholic beverages.
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