An Electric Car That Actually Goes Far?
Researchers have long had high hopes for lithium-air batteries, a device that has the potential to store 10 times more energy than the best lithium-ion batteries on the market today. But so far, lithium-air batteries have been unstable, falling apart after a few charges. Now researchers report that they’ve made the first stable lithium-air batteries. If the batteries can leap other hurdles needed to make them practical, they may one day give electric cars a driving range similar to today’s gas guzzlers.
For lithium-air batteries to operate, several different components all need to work together. |  |
Tube map used to plot Londoners' life expectancy
A version of the Tube map has been produced to show how life expectancy varies from station to station.
The contrast it depicts between Tube stops is stark, with the variation in life expectancies of children born near stations only minutes apart being years different. For example, it shows there is a 20-year difference in life expectancy between those born near Oxford Circus and others born close to some stations on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR). |  |
Scientists say Earth is likely to dodge strong solar outburst
A gigantic sunspot unleashed an intense solar flare early Thursday, though the solar storm shouldn't pose any serious problems to us here on Earth, scientists say.
The flare erupted from a sunspot known as AR 1520 at 1:13 a.m. ET Thursday and peaked about 45 minutes later. The outburst qualifies as an M7.7-class solar flare, meaning it's a bit weaker than the sun's most powerful blast, X-class flares. |  |
BP spill, cold water tied to dolphin deaths, study finds
The 2010 BP oil spill contributed to an unusually high death rate for dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, a new study suggests.
Between January and April 2011, 186 dead bottlenose dolphins washed ashore between Louisiana and western Florida. Most alarmingly, nearly half of these casualties were calves, which is more than double the usual proportion of young to old dolphins found dead. Scientists now blame both natural factors and human catastrophe for the unusual die-off.
Between January and April 2011, 186 dead bottlenose dolphins washed ashore between Louisiana and western Florida. Most alarmingly, nearly half of these casualties were calves, which is more than double the usual proportion of young to old dolphins found dead. Scientists now blame both natural factors and human catastrophe for the unusual die-off.
Wet climate may have fueled Mongol invasion
Beginning in the 13th century, the Mongol Empire spread across Asia and into the Middle East like wildfire, growing into the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever seen.
Historians have long speculated that periods of drought pushed the Mongol hordes to conquer their neighbors, but preliminary new findings suggest that theory may be exactly backward. Instead, consistent rain and warm temperatures may have given the Mongols the energy source they needed to conquer Eurasia: grass for their horses. |  |
A sublime search for the ancient sagas in Iceland
Icelandophilia is a rare condition, shared by figures as diverse as Joseph Banks, Joseph Goebbels and W H Auden – who claimed that while "he was not always thinking about Iceland ... he was never not thinking about Iceland".
The claim is a curious one (recorded by Simon Armitage on his 1994 visit to the country) but it strikes a chord with anybody whose imagination has also been captured by the Islendingasogur, the Icelandic sagas. This corpus of 40-odd narratives written between the 1200s and 1400s is a summit of medieval letters. Unesco underlined their importance by awarding to Reykjavik the status of City of Literature las year. (Dublin, Edinburgh, Melbourne and the Midwest college town of Iowa City are also members of this elite club, along with – as of May this year – Norwich.).
The claim is a curious one (recorded by Simon Armitage on his 1994 visit to the country) but it strikes a chord with anybody whose imagination has also been captured by the Islendingasogur, the Icelandic sagas. This corpus of 40-odd narratives written between the 1200s and 1400s is a summit of medieval letters. Unesco underlined their importance by awarding to Reykjavik the status of City of Literature las year. (Dublin, Edinburgh, Melbourne and the Midwest college town of Iowa City are also members of this elite club, along with – as of May this year – Norwich.).
Starlings in danger after numbers plummet 80p per cent
The population recorded during the last winter by the RSPB's annual Big Garden Birdwatch show the population has fallen by almost a third in the last ten years and 80 per cent since 1979.
Famous for its spectacular aerial displays and chirpy, chattering song, the starling is one of our most popular and recognisable birds. But 40 million have vanished from the European Union since 1980 - at a rate of 150 a hour - with the crash triggering concern about its future as a widespread and familiar bird. |  |
An olive stone from 150BC links pre-Roman Britain to today's pizzeria
Iron Age Britons were importing olives from the Mediterranean a century before the Romans arrived with their exotic tastes in food, say archaeologists who have discovered a single olive stone from an excavation of an Iron Age well at at Silchester in Hampshire.
The stone came from a layer securely dated to the first century BC, making it the earliest ever found in Britain – but since nobody ever went to the trouble of importing one olive, there must be more, rotted beyond recognition or still buried. |  |
Crops suffer as drought intensifies in U.S. breadbasket
The most expansive drought in more than a half century intensified this week and stretched further into major farm areas of the western Midwest where crops had largely been shielded from the harsh conditions that decimated yields further east.
The moderate drought in parts of eastern Nebraska, northern Illinois and much of the top corn and soybean state Iowa was downgraded to a severe drought in the past week, climate experts said Thursday, and forecasts showed little relief in sight. |  |
Your Perfume May Soon Be Produced by Bacteria
The next time you savor the sweet flavor of vanilla ice cream or the fresh orange scent of a hand soap, you may have bacteria to thank. Fragrance companies are now looking to lab-engineered bacteria and yeast to produce fragrances normally derived from plants, reports Chemical & Engineering News. The story is an interesting look at how the somewhat secretive fragrance industry is evolving.
For centuries, humans have worked to harness good smells. Bottling a scent required painstakingly extracting plant oils from crops often grown in far-flung countries. The commercial fragrance market, which is responsible for the scents in everything from food and drinks to cleaning products and perfume, relies on a steady supply of these oils. But a natural disaster or corrupt government practice can easily dry up a source. |  |
Why the 2012 Sumatra Earthquake Was a Weird One
Already a curiosity for its sheer size, the 8.6-magnitude earthquake that shook the seafloor west of the Indonesian island of Sumatra on April 11 appears to have been even weirder than scientists thought.
A new study reveals the quake zigzagged along four faults, three of which are set perpendicular to each other. From above, the layout looks like a city street grid. "We call it an earthquake in a maze," said Lingsen Meng, lead author of the study and a graduate student in seismology at Caltech. |  |
Daytime lightning on Saturn spotted by Cassini
(SPACE.com) A NASA spacecraft orbiting Saturn has captured an amazing view of lightning in broad daylight on the ringed planet.
The Cassini orbiter captured the daytime lightning on Saturn as bright blue spots inside a giant storm that raged on the planet last year. NASA unveiled the new Saturn lightning photos Wednesday (July 18), adding that the images came as a big surprise. "We didn't think we'd see lighting on Saturn's day side --only its night side," said Ulyana Dyudina, a Cassini imaging team associate at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, in a statement. "The fact that Cassini was able to detect the lightning means that it was very intense.". |  |
First spiral galaxy in early Universe stuns astronomers
Astronomers have spotted the earliest known spiral galaxy, dating to just three billion years after the Big Bang.
Theories of galaxy formation held that the Universe was still too chaotic a place to allow such a perfectly formed or "grand-design" spiral to form. It should take far longer for gravity to bring matter into thin, neat discs. But a team reporting in Nature says the galaxy BX442 got the gravitational "kick" it needed to form a spiral from a smaller "dwarf galaxy" orbiting it. |  |
New chip captures power from multiple sources: light, heat and vibrations
Researchers at MIT have taken a significant step toward battery-free monitoring systems — which could ultimately be used in biomedical devices, environmental sensors in remote locations and gauges in hard-to-reach spots, among other applications.
Previous work from the lab of MIT professor Anantha Chandrakasan has focused on the development of computer and wireless-communication chips that can operate at extremely low power levels, and on a variety of devices that can harness power from natural light, heat and vibrations in the environment. The latest development, carried out with doctoral student Saurav Bandyopadhyay, is a chip that could harness all three of these ambient power sources at once, optimizing power delivery. |  |
Physics team proposes a way to create an actual space-time crystal
Earlier this year, theoretical physicists Frank Wilczek, of MIT put forth an idea that intrigued the research community. He suggested that it should be possible to construct a so called space-time crystal by adding a fourth dimension, movement in time, to the structure of a crystal, causing it to become an infinitely running clock of sorts. At the time, Wilczek acknowledged that his ideas on how to do so were inelegant, to say the least. Now another international team led by Tongcang Li has proposed a way to achieve what Wilczek proposed using a far more elegant process. They have posted a paper on the preprint server arXiv describing what they believe is a real-world process for creating an actual space-time crystal that could conceivably be carried out in just the next few years.
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New type of chemical bond may form in extreme magnetic fields of stars
Bonds between atoms are electrical in character: atoms share electrons or mutually ionize, creating an attractive force binding them together. However, researchers are now suggesting that it may be possible to generate magnetic bonds, resulting in stable molecules of different types than exist on Earth. While these molecules can't be produced with even our strongest laboratory magnets, they could form in the extreme magnetic fields near white dwarfs and neutron stars, and their unique spectral signatures may make them visible through observations.
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The most secure password is one you don't have to remember
The problem with even the most secure password in the world is that you have to remember it — and if you can remember it, that means that a hacker or a judge can convince you to turn it over. But researchers at Stanford and Northwestern Universities, led by Hristo Bojinov, have created a system where you put in your password ... without even knowing it.
It takes advantage of the fact that your brain records some things without your knowing you've recorded them. Even typing takes advantage of this — it would probably take you quite a while to recreate the layout of your keyboard exactly, but you can type quickly and without hesitation. Similarly, the researchers thought, you should be able to "know" a password without being able to write or recite it, by a process called "implicit learning.".
It takes advantage of the fact that your brain records some things without your knowing you've recorded them. Even typing takes advantage of this — it would probably take you quite a while to recreate the layout of your keyboard exactly, but you can type quickly and without hesitation. Similarly, the researchers thought, you should be able to "know" a password without being able to write or recite it, by a process called "implicit learning.".
Court Battle: Corporate Power Vs. Human Genes
A company can't own genes, said groups fighting to release patents held by Myriad Genetics Inc. at a U.S. appeals court Friday.
Structure of the BRCA1 protein, a gene that can have mutations that lead to breast or ovarian cancer. (emw/creative commons) The Salt Lake City-based Myriad has patents on two genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer creating a monopoly on genetic tests for them, which prevents women from being able to get tests from other laboratories or even second opinions and provides insured profits for Myriad. “Patent law was never intended to interfere with the rights of scientists and doctors to conduct their research and exchange ideas freely,” said Chris Hansen, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “Human DNA occurs in nature. It cannot belong to a particular company." |  |
Medieval bras discovered at Austrian castle
Fashion experts have been surprised by the discovery of four bras around 600 years old in an Austrian castle.
The underwear style was thought to be a little over 100 years old as women abandoned tight corsets, but the linen versions unearthed by archaeologists date back to the middle ages, the University of Innsbruck said on Wednesday. |  |