back to life after 400 years of death

 

Bryophytes

Plants found in the Arctic and from the Little Ice Age back to life.

This plant is not typical of ordinary houseplants. This species is often called bryophytes dry all winter long last showing signs of life again after some time.

But that they could survive in a frozen glacier for 400 years is a surprise.

Researchers from the University of Alberta found that these plants originated from the Canadian Arctic glaciers, according to BBC News.

This glacier is frozen partially so scientists can see this plant. They then picked up and brought to the lab.

"When we look at the plants in detail and take it to the lab, I realized there are stalks that grow new lateral branches, and I know this is being regenerated plants in the field, and I was very surprised," said Catherine La Farge who reports their findings on BBC News.

This is not the first unique finding in the Arctic. Scientists revealed last month that they found evidence of an ancient camel there - as is now found in the Sahara desert - in Arctic Canada, 3.5 million years ago.

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3D Printing: Food in Space

3D Printing

NASA and a Texas company are exploring the possibility of using a "3D printer" on deep space missions in a way where the "D" would stand for dining.

NASA has awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I contract to Systems and Materials Research Consultancy of Austin, Texas to study the feasibility of using additive manufacturing, better known as 3D printing, for making food in space. Systems and Materials Research Consultancy will conduct a study for the development of a 3D printed food system for long duration space missions. Phase I SBIR proposals are very early stage concepts that may or may not mature into actual systems. This food printing technology may result in a phase II study, which still will be several years from being tested on an actual space flight.

As NASA ventures farther into space, whether redirecting an asteroid or sending astronauts to Mars, the agency will need to make improvements in life support systems, including how to feed the crew during those long deep space missions. NASA's Advanced Food Technology program is interested in developing methods that will provide food to meet safety, acceptability, variety, and nutritional stability requirements for long exploration missions, while using the least amount of spacecraft resources and crew time. The current food system wouldn't meet the nutritional needs and five-year shelf life required for a mission to Mars or other long duration missions. Because refrigeration and freezing require significant spacecraft resources, current NASA provisions consist solely of individually prepackaged shelf stable foods, processed with technologies that degrade the micronutrients in the foods.

Additionally, the current space food is selected before astronauts ever leave the ground and crew members don't have the ability to personalize recipes or really prepare foods themselves. Over long duration missions, a variety of acceptable food is critical to ensure crew members continue to eat adequate amounts of food, and consequently, get the nutrients they need to maintain their health and performance. 

NASA is funding this phase I six-month $125,000 study on 3D printing of foods to determine the capability of this technology to enable nutrient stability and provide a variety of foods from shelf stable ingredients, while minimizing crew time and waste. NASA selected this proposal because the research team, subcontractors and consultants included premier food rheology and flavor expertise that would be required for a novel product development system. The work plan for this feasibility study also was well laid out and the technology offers the potential to meet some of the food requirements using basic food components for long duration missions. 

NASA recognizes in-space and additive manufacturing offers the potential for new mission opportunities, whether "printing" food, tools or entire spacecraft. Additive manufacturing offers opportunities to get the best fit, form and delivery systems of materials for deep space travel. This's why NASA is a leading partner in the president's National Network for Manufacturing Innovation and the Advanced Manufacturing Initiative. 

3D printing is just one of the many transformation technologies that NASA is investing in to create the new knowledge and capabilities needed to enable future space missions while benefiting life here on Earth. 

Source:

www.nasa.gov

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WAS FOUND HEAVEN SITES GREEK WERE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS YEARS OLD

Illustration of Neanderthal Primordial man

ATHENA - Anthropologists find sites beach "paradise" Greek who once inhabited by Neanderthal humans approximately 100,000 years ago. These findings reveal a population derived from Kalamakia Middle Paleolithic cave site in Mani peninsula, southern Greece.

Neandhertal believed to be extinct about 30 thousand years ago. Researchers also believe that Greece become Neandhertal protection areas, where early humans tend to be on the site approximately 40 thousand years ago.

So, this site dubbed "paradise" for early humans who inhabit the waterfront in Mani peninsula, southern Greece. Various kind of food sources, like a hunted animal and plants found in this location.

Katerina Harvati, chief investigator Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironments, University of Tubingen said, researchers studying the remains and identify some Neanderthal who represented children, adolescents and adult men and women.

"The site is very close to the sea. During glacial time’s lower sea level, so there will likely be open coastal plains. These would be ideal habitat for wildlife species that are hunted man," said Harvati, as quoted by Discovery, Thursday (23/5 / 2013).

Several types of deer and the Pyrenean ibex hunting target Neanderthals. Researchers also revealed that these early humans to consume turtle meat, shells and manufacture tooling through the shell.

Researchers also believe that Neandhertal inhabits caves along the coast of Mani Peninsula. "Identification of bones and teeth Neandhertal represent many individuals in the cave Kalamakia that supports the emergence of the human species in southern Greece," said Eric Delson of Lehman College of the City University, New York. (FMH)

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New Material Can Enhance Energy, Computer, Lighting Technologies

Ball and Stick Model

Arizona State University researchers have created a new compound crystal material that promises to help produce advances in a range of scientific and technological pursuits.

ASU electrical engineering professor Cun-Zheng Ning says the material, called erbium chloride silicate, can be used to develop the next generations of computers, improve the capabilities of the Internet, increase the efficiency of silicon-based photovoltaic cells to convert sunlight into electrical energy, and enhance the quality of solid-state lighting and sensor technology.

Ning's research team of team of students and post-doctoral degree assistants help synthesize the new compound in ASU's Nanophotonics Lab in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, one of the university's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

The lab's erbium research is supported by the U.S. Army Research Office and U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Details about the new compound are reported in the Optical Materials Express on the website of the Optical Society of America.

The breakthrough involves the first-ever synthesis of a new erbium compound in the form of a single-crystal nanowire, which has superior properties compared to erbium compounds in other forms.

Erbium is one of the most important members of the rare earth family in the periodic table of chemical elements. It emits photons in the wavelength range of 1.5 micrometers, which are used in the optical fibers essential to high-quality performance of the Internet and telephones.

Erbium is used in doping optical fibers to amplify the signal of the Internet and telephones in telecommunications systems. Doping is the term used to describe the process of inserting low concentrations of various elements into other substances as a way to alter the electrical or optical properties of the substances to produce desired results. The elements used in such processes are referred to as dopants.

"Since we could not dope as many erbium atoms in a fiber as we wish, fibers had to be very long to be useful for amplifying an Internet signal. This makes integrating Internet communications and computing on a chip very difficult," Ning explains.

"With the new erbium compound, 1,000 times more erbium atoms are contained in the compound. This means many devices can be integrated into a chip-scale system," he says. "Thus the new compound materials containing erbium can be integrated with silicon to combine computing and communication functionalities on the same inexpensive silicon platform to increase the speed of computing and Internet operation at the same time."

Erbium materials can also be used to increase the energy-conversion efficiency of silicon solar cells.

Silicon does not absorb solar radiation with wavelengths longer than 1.1 microns, which results in waste of energy -- making solar cells less efficient.

Erbium materials can remedy the situation by converting two or more photons carrying small amounts of energy into one photon that is carrying a larger amount of energy. The single, more powerful photon can then be absorbed by silicon, thus increasing the efficiency of solar cells.

Erbium materials also help absorb ultraviolet light from the sun and convert it into photons carrying small amounts of energy, which can then be more efficiently converted into electricity by silicon cells. This color-conversion function of turning ultraviolet light into other visible colors of light is also important in generating white light for solid-state lighting devices.

While erbium's importance is well-recognized, producing erbium materials of high quality has been challenging, Ning says.

The standard approach is to introduce erbium as a dopant into various host materials, such as silicon oxide, silicon, and many other crystals and glasses.

"One big problem has been that we have not been able to introduce enough erbium atoms into crystals and glasses without degrading optical quality, because too many of these kinds of dopants would cluster, which lowers the optical quality," he says.

What is unique about the new erbium material synthesized by Ning's group is that erbium is no longer randomly introduced as a dopant. Instead, erbium is part of a uniform compound and the number of erbium atoms is a factor of 1,000 more than the maximum amount that can be introduced in other erbium-doped materials.

Increasing the number of erbium atoms provides more optical activity to produce stronger lighting. It also enhances the conversion of different colors of light into white light to produce higher-quality solid-state lighting and enables solar cells to more efficiently convert sunlight in electrical energy.

In addition, since erbium atoms are organized in a periodic array, they do not cluster in this new compound. The fact that the material has been produced in a high-quality single-crystal form makes the optical quality superior to the other doped materials, Ning says.

Like many scientific discoveries, the synthesis of this new erbium material was made somewhat by accident.

"Similar to what other researchers are doing, we were originally trying to dope erbium into silicon nanowires. But the characteristics demonstrated by the material surprised us," he says. "We got a new material. We did not know what it was, and there was no published document that described it. It took us more than a year to finally realize we got a new single-crystal material no one else had produced."

Ning and his team are now trying to use the new erbium compound for various applications, such as increasing silicon solar cell efficiency and making miniaturized optical amplifiers for chip-scale photonic systems for computers and high-speed Internet.

"Most importantly," he says, "there are many things we have yet to learn about what can be achieved with use of the material. Our preliminary studies of its characteristics show it has many amazing properties and superior optical quality. More exciting discoveries are waiting to be made."

Source : Science Daily

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Four-wheel nanocar takes to the road

Nano Car

A "four-wheel drive car" less than one billionth the length of an average SUV has been built and operated by researchers in the Netherlands and Switzerland. The molecular machine is about 1 nm long and uses electrons as fuel as it navigates across a copper surface. The tiny device could find use in nanometre-sized robotics or as tiny transporters that shift molecules around.

Molecular machines are common in nature. Motor proteins, for example, can move along a surface to transport molecular-sized cargo and are often used to build structures within living cells. Scientists would like to make their own versions of motor proteins, and indeed they have already designed and demonstrated single molecules that can move across surfaces. But these have been mostly passive: to ensure that they travel in a certain direction, they have had to be pulled or pushed.

Now, Ben Feringa of the University of Groningen and colleagues have demonstrated a truly active single-molecule vehicle. Constructed around an organic, carbon-based frame, it has four "wheels" or rotor parts, connected to the body via carbon–carbon double bonds. When the tip of a nearby scanning tunnelling microscope fires electrons at these bonds, they break and re-form the other way round. This process is known as isomerization and causes the wheels to turn, and the vehicle to move forward.

Steering by symmetry

Feringa and colleagues could make their molecular vehicle move in two ways, by adjusting the symmetry or "chirality" of the rotor parts. In one, the vehicle moves along a random path, something that has been performed before with active molecular machines. However, the researchers could also make the vehicle drive in a nearly straight line.

"The important step taken, in my opinion, is that we have shown that we can propel a single molecule along a surface and control directionality," said Feringa. "This is exactly what happens with protein nanomotors that 'walk' along filaments with control of directionality," he added.

'Milestone' reached

Ludwig Bartels at the University of California at Riverside, US, agrees that the ability to control direction is a major step forward. "This work is a milestone towards controlled transport of molecular species across surfaces," he says. "But much work remains – most importantly, the replacement of the energy source away from the tip of a tunnelling microscope (which could in the first place just drag any molecule along, irrespective of its nature), and the achievement of concerted motion of the substrate linkers so that the motion becomes really straight."

James Tour of Rice University in Texas, US, thinks the demonstration brings scientists closer to the goal of using synthetic molecular machines to assemble structures, rather like enzymes do inside the body. "This is an important and fundamental milestone in the quest for nanomachines that will one day do useful work," he says.

The research is described in Nature 479 208.

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