'Astronauts' to emerge from 520-day mock Mars mission

Six men will emerge from a simulated spaceship on 4 November, ending a 520-day journey without ever really leaving home.

The Mars 500 experiment kept them confined in a 72-square-metre "spaceship" in Moscow, Russia, for the most realistic mock mission to the Red Planet ever attempted.

Doctors have been monitoring the crew's immune systems, sleep cycles, hormone levels and other vital signs that might suffer after a year and a half in a hamster cage. One intriguing study monitors salt levels in the astronauts' urine to see if men's hormones go through phases akin to women's menstrual cycles.

Meanwhile, psychologists have been watching the crew's moods to see how they hold up after being isolated for so long. As well as helping future astronauts stay upbeat, the results could help soldiers dealing with stress and fatigue.

The crew seems anxious to come home. "The goal is around the corner!" crew member Diego Urbina tweeted on 23 October. In a 13 October blog post, he mused about his experience. "Now that it is coming to an end, I am still convinced that this was not a journey into the cosmos, but a journey to know ourselves and our minds," he wrote, "to realise how important respect and communication are in order to achieve a functional crew, how fundamental are the links to the real world, thin and fragile as they may be in this situation."

Mounting evidence for a wet Mars

With five craft actively studying Mars, watery discoveries are coming in torrents. And the evidence points to the liquid kind, not just ice, which we've known was there for a long time. Most planetary scientists dream of finding liquid water on the Red Planet, and that may well happen in the next year or two.In the past 12 months, three significant discoveries have made the existence of water on Mars the new orthodoxy. They are the latest in a series of milestones stretching back a century that have shaped our understanding of water on Mars.

Imaginary canals (early 1900s)

In 1895 American astronomer Percival Lowell reported his observations of an intricate network of canals across the Red Planet. The canals were commonly portrayed as a last-ditch attempt by an advanced, intelligent species trying to sustain a drying world. But they turned out to be just tricks of the eye. The succession of spacecraft that visited Mars in the 1960s and 1970s revealed a world more parched than Earth's driest desert.

Tantalising tributaries (1970s-1990s)

No sooner had a succession of spacecraft revealed how dry Mars is today than evidence started flowing in of a very different past. The density of the modern Martian atmosphere is less than 1 per cent that of Earth's, far too thin to hold water droplets. But sinuous channels across the surface suggest a time when it was substantial enough to sustain a rainfall cycle. A variety of surface features revealed by ever sharper cameras seemed to indicate huge, catastrophic floods early in the planet's history, including basins that may have been lake beds and even signs that there may have been an ocean covering most of the northern hemisphere.

But all the signs indicating water were indirect, leading some scientists to propose alternative mechanisms for producing the observed features. Perhaps a fizzy slush of frozen carbon dioxide was responsible for the channels, or thin lava, or flowing ice. As long as the evidence was circumstantial there was room for alternative theories, and all references to water remained tentative.

Possibility of puddles (2002)

In 2002, the sharp-eyed Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft started spotting features suggestive of liquid water on the surface of Mars - not 4 billion years ago, but in the very recent past and maybe even today. Water seemed to be seeping from canyons and craters to form steep, dark gullies. And though the amounts were small, the potential significance was huge. It raised the possibility that there may once have been bodies of liquid water somewhere in the planet's crust. Maybe they provided moist, cosy habitats that lasted long enough for life to develop and even for it to persist today.

Again, all these signs were indirect. Though they seemed to show water, some suggested that the flows came from melting patches of snow and did not really amount to much liquid. Maybe they were flows of powdery dust with no liquid at all. From orbit, there was just no way to be sure.

Clearly mud (2004)

Last March direct and unambiguous evidence for water on Mars arrived. Measurements made by NASA's Opportunity rover on Meridiani Planum showed clearly that the material making up the rock had once been sopping wet.

The proof was chemical, morphological and mineralogical. Cavities in the rock showed places where salt crystals must have dissolved; concentrations of sulphur revealed where salty water had evaporated; perfect spheres of the iron oxide mineral haematite appear to have been built up layer by layer in water; and jarosite, a mineral that can only form in water, was clearly identified in the rock.

But Opportunity's evidence still only proved the presence of water briefly, at some point long ago in the planet's history - and only in the soil itself. There was still no proof that it had ever flowed or rippled across the surface.

A shallow sea (2004)

It took a deeper look into the layered Martian rock to find clear signs that water had once formed rivers, lakes and shallow seas. Wave patterns in layers of sand preserved in the stone show distinctive arcs. They are quite unlike any patterns on Earth produced by winds, but exactly like those due to the action of shifting currents or waves.The spot where Opportunity landed was once covered in water, perhaps a shallow salty ocean.

Seas that stayed (2004)

For the last few months Opportunity has been deep inside a crater called Endurance. Layer after layer has shown that there was water during the period when the 20 metres of rock studied by Opportunity were deposited. What's more, material filling the cracks that run through the layers suggests that it was deposited by water. For that to happen there must have been enough time for one set of sodden sediments to compact into stone brittle enough to crack before it became drenched in water once again. The random distribution of grain sizes shows the minerals were laid down by water, not wind.

Mars rover to climb a Mountain

It's official: The next Mars rover will explore a 5-kilometre-high mountain of sediment inside a crater called Gale, NASA announced today.

The Curiosity rover is scheduled to launch between 25 November and 18 December. It will examine Martian rocks and soil to learn about the history of the planet's climate and to look for chemical traces of life.

There has been vigorous debate about where to send the rover. At a meeting in May, competing camps made their final arguments for each of the four sites then on the shortlist.

"These are all like different flavours of ice cream – all fantastic but slightly different," said John Grant of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, one of the organisers of the May meeting, at a NASA press conference today.

In recent weeks, NASA said it had narrowed that list to two craters: Gale and Eberswalde.

Runner-up

Eberswalde contains a beautifully preserved fan of sediment from an ancient river delta. On Earth, organic material gets concentrated in such sediment, so this would be a good place to look for signs of past life on Mars.

But on Friday, NASA announced it will send Curiosity, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), to Gale crater instead.

There, a giant mound of layered sediment rises 5 kilometres from the crater floor. It is not known exactly how it got there, but the sediment contains clays, a sure sign that it was exposed to liquid water at some point.

"If you start at the bottom of the pile of layers and you go to the top, it's like reading a novel," said John Grotzinger, the rover's project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "And we think Gale crater is going to be a great novel about the early environmental evolution of Mars."

Multiple sites

It is too dangerous to land on the mountain itself, so Curiosity will touch down on a flatter part of the crater floor, then drive up the mountain.

But first, it will take a look at sediment deposited at the landing site by a river that once flowed into the crater. That sediment and the clays in the mountain are two of the places in Gale that may have been habitable and left organics behind.

But organics could also be preserved in several other places where life may once have existed. One is an ancient river canyon that cuts into the mountain. There are also layers in the mountain containing sulphate minerals, which require water to form. And there are also cracks in the mountain that appear to have been waterlogged in the past.

"There was a real preference for Gale in that it's not a one-trick pony," said Michael Meyer of NASA Headquarters in Washington DC. "There's several different environmental settings that can be explored [there], any one of which might have some possibility of preserving organics."

Organic hunt

Grotzinger agrees: "It has exceptionally high diversity for different kinds of habitable environments and it is possible that some of those might preserve organic carbon."

"Organic carbon" means any complex carbon-based molecules, whether they come from living things or some other source. For example, Mars has probably received organic carbon from meteorite impacts.

Grotzinger noted that finding organic carbon will be "a very, very difficult challenge" based on experience with Earth geology. Even though life is abundant on our home planet, ancient rocks very rarely preserve organic material, he says.

"We hope to be able to look for organic carbon," he said. "What we can promise to deliver with MSL is an understanding of the environmental history of Mars."

Evidence for Mars floods all dried up?

Lava, not water, may have carved the biggest channels on Mars.

Ever since NASA's Mariner 9 spacecraft beamed back the first images of the channels in the 1970s, most people have assumed they were created by massive floods. But David Leverington of Texas Tech University in Lubbock says flowing water would have left behind much more sediment than is seen. There are also few minerals that form in liquid water present.

Lava, however, is known to have carved big channels on the moon. And Leverington points out that some of the channels on Mars start on the flanks of volcanoes and end in large deposits of solidified lava (Geomorphology, DOI: 10.1016/j.geomorph.2011.05.022).

Kelin Whipple of Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe agrees that lava probably carved the huge channels, such as Kasei Valles (shown). He says the study calls into question the case for huge volumes of water – and possibly an ocean – on ancient Mars.

But Phil Christensen, also at ASU, says clays and fans of sediment still point to the existence of smaller Martian lakes and rivers. These would be better places to search for life, he says, because they would have held water for longer periods than the giant channels, where floods – if there ever were any – would have been fleeting. "Lakes and deltas are probably the places people are going to look for life,"

Venus has an ozone layer, too

Long ago, Venus was thought to be Earth's twin – until measurements of its atmosphere revealed it to be a sweltering hellhole stifled by a runaway greenhouse effect. Now Europe's Venus Express spacecraft has found a new trait that both Earth and our sister planet share: an ozone layer.

The finding could help astronomers home in on life on other planets.

Venus Express found ozone's spectral signature in a layer 100 kilometres up in the planet's atmosphere, at concentrations of no more than 1 per cent those found in Earth's atmosphere.

Computer models suggest that Venus's ozone is formed when sunlight breaks up carbon dioxide molecules. The oxygen atoms freed in this reaction meet up on the planet's cooler night side to form molecular pairs (O₂) and triplets (ozone, or O₃).

"The key chemical reactions operating in Earth's upper stratosphere may also operate on Venus," write Franck Montmessin of the LATMOS atmospheric research centre in France and his colleagues in a paper describing the results.

Ozone is important for life on Earth because it blocks damaging ultraviolet radiation from the sun. On Earth its abundance suggests the breakup of CO₂ by sunlight was not its only source. Instead, ozone, along with molecular oxygen, O₂, also originated from oxygen atoms generated by CO₂-eating photosynthetic microbes at least 2.4 billion years ago.

Some astrobiologists have suggested that an atmosphere containing carbon dioxide, molecular oxygen and ozone all at once could be a sign of life.

But the new result, along with the fact that Mars had previously been found to have ozone at a concentration of 0.3 per cent that of Earth, suggests the mere presence of these molecules is not enough to prove the existence of life below.

Instead, it bolsters the idea that a planet must have at least 20 per cent as much ozone as Earth to suggest life. "On Venus as on Mars, the positive identification of this triplet is not associated with biological activity on this planet," the researchers write.

Alien bright lights, big city could reveal ET

Extraterrestrial civilisations could give themselves away by the night-time glow of their cities. And if there is one lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system, we are ready to find it.

Existing telescopes could spot cities the size of Tokyo out to the edge of the solar system, and future telescopes could detect well-lit planets around other stars, a new study suggests. "This opens a new window for a search for extraterrestrial civilisations," says Avi Loeb of Harvard University.

The mainstream search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), now running for more than 50 years, relies on the hope that aliens will either leak or broadcast radio signals out into space.

In recent years, however, humanity's own radio voice has softened with the shift to cable and Earthward-pointed satellite broadcasts, while our cities have grown brighter. If we are any guide, alien hunters should look to city lights instead, argue Loeb and Edwin Turner of Princeton University.

In the unlikely event that ET has built a Tokyo-sized city beyond Neptune on an icy object in the Kuiper belt, the Hubble Space Telescope could detect its glittering lights, Loeb calculates.

Round trip

The distance from Earth to objects in the Kuiper belt changes as they all orbit the sun. But the objects' brightness will vary by different amounts, depending on the source of the light. That's because light decreases exponentially according to the distance it travels.

So light originating on the object would vary differently to light originating on the sun, travelling to the object and then being reflected back to telescopes. Observing how the object's brightness changes as its distance varies should let astronomers distinguish an inhabited world from one that's merely sunny.

Even ground-based telescopes should be able to detect artificial lighting: they could distinguish the spectral signature of sunlight glinting off a Kuiper belt object from the direct glow of alien street lights, he says.

"It should be possible to tell what source of light is being used," he says. "Existing astronomical facilities are capable of detecting the artificial light of a single city."

Exocity lights

Loeb admits that finding technologically advanced aliens in the outer regions of our own solar system is a long shot, because they would be far from the life-giving glow of the sun. But he says astronomers should search for them anyway: upcoming surveys, like those planned for the future Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, are already due to collect light from thousands of Kuiper belt objects.

"Many people might say it's extremely unlikely, so why do it?" says Loeb. "But if we can do it without extra expending of resources, why not just do it?"

Greg Laughlin, who studies extrasolar planets at the University of California, Santa Cruz, thinks this "is a good SETI search strategy", though he's sceptical about aliens in the Kuiper belt. "I would be willing to bet money that there are no artificially lit objects in our solar system. But of course, I could lose that bet."

Future space telescopes could search for artificial light on extrasolar planets, however. "This idea has its best applicability outside the solar system," Laughlin says.

Of course, the plan could hit some practical snares. When Loeb's home lost power for three days after a freak snowstorm last weekend, he thought, "I hope the aliens do not use [the same] electric company, or else their lighting will not be consistent."

Earth calling: A short history of radio messages to ET

The human race first deliberately advertised its existence on the outer panels of space probes, some of which were engraved with codes and images containing information about itself. These immediately prompted arguments about how much we should give away about ourselves.

However, if we really want to break the ice with our cosmic neighbours, it will probably be by sending messages that travel at the speed of light, not at the speed of a Pioneer probe.

A lot of effort has gone into some of the messages, with some researchers even developing an artificial language called Lincos – which so far has not been used in any actual messages.

As part of our special feature marking the 50th anniversary of the search for extraterrestrial life, we round up humanity's radio messages to the stars.

1974: Arecibo message

The first message to be transmitted in the hope of contacting an alien civilisation was quite short, containing just 1679 "bits" of information. This figure was used deliberately: it is the product of two prime numbers, 23 and 73, and if the message is displayed as a 23-by-73 grid it shows a series of simple pictures.

The message was transmitted by the Arecibo radio telescope. It was sent, just once, to the globular cluster M13, where it should arrive in the year 26,974.

1986: Poetica Vaginal

Joe Davis is an artist and a research affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the mid-1980s, he became concerned that no image of humans had been sent into space representing the details of human genitals or reproduction.

So he led a project to transmit the sounds of vaginal contractions towards neighbouring star systems. To do so, he recorded the vaginal contractions of ballet dancers.

The messages were to be sent from MIT's Millstone Hill Radar to Epsilon Eridani, Tau Ceti and two other stars. However, only a few minutes of footage was transmitted before the US air force, which had jurisdiction over the facility, shut the project down.

Nevertheless, the vaginal sounds that were sent will have reached Epsilon Eridani in 1996 and Tau Ceti in 1998. It is unclear what sort of reply we should expect.

1999: Cosmic Call 1

The Cosmic Call messages used the Interstellar Rosetta Stone developed by researchers Yvan Dutil and Stéphane Dumas (PDF). It was based on mathematical and scientific concepts that are thought to be universal, in the hope that any alien who intercepted the messages would understand them. It was followed by short text messages.

The messages were sent using the RT-70 Radio Astronomical Telescope in the Ukraine.

2001: Teen-Age Message

Alexander Zaitsev, a radio engineer at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and part of the team behind the Cosmic Call messages, was also responsible for this endeavour, in which a group of Russian teenagers sent a message into space.

It used the same transmitter as the Cosmic Call messages, but included analogue information, most notably a concert of electronic music played on the once-revolutionary instrument called the theremin.

The message was sent to six stars, including 47 Ursae Majoris, the first star to be found to have a solar system similar to ours, where any inhabitants will be able to listen to the concert in 2047.

2003: Cosmic Call 2

Four years after it was first transmitted, the Interstellar Rosetta Stone was sent out again, to another five stars. This time, the message included photos and other multimedia files.

Both sets of messages were funded by a company called Team Encounter, which also planned to launch a spacecraft equipped with a solar sail. This would have carried a payload of hair samples, photographs and other items into deep space. However, the company seems to have folded, and the launch never took place.

2005: Craigslist

For the first time, a website was beamed into space. The website in question was the classified listings service Craigslist.

The site was transmitted by a company called the Deep Space Communications Network, which specialises in beaming messages from members of the public into space. It sends its messages into open space, rather than to specific stars, so it is unlikely anybody will pick them up.

2008: Across the Universe

The Beatles song Across the Universe was sent out by NASA in February 2008, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the agency's founding.

The message was aimed at Polaris, the Pole Star, and should arrive there in 2439. However, Zaitsev criticised the message, noting defects in the method of transmission and also that Polaris is a supergiant star that probably cannot support life.

2008: A Message from Earth

Not content with two Cosmic Calls and a Teen-Age Message, Zaitsev set up a new project called A Message from Earth. This sent out 501 messages selected by a competition on the social networking site Bebo.

As well as half a million members of the public, various celebrities suggested messages, including The X-Files actress Gillian Anderson and the pop band McFly. All these people are now effectively ambassadors for the human race.

The entire capsule was transmitted, again using the RT-70 Radio Astronomical Telescope, towards the planet Gliese 581c, which is so Earth-like it could have liquid water on its surface. The message should arrive in 2028.

2008: Doritos advert

It was a busy year for any extraterrestrial eavesdroppers. In June, radars in the Arctic circle spent 6 hours broadcasting an advert for Doritos into space. The research institute involved, EISCAT, was apparently paid for its efforts by Doritos, hopefully staving off a funding crisis.

Once again, the star 47 Ursae Majoris was chosen as the target of the message.

Later that year, in a second act of intragalactic spamming, the sci-fi movie The Day the Earth Stood Still was beamed towards Alpha Centauri.

2009: Hello from Earth

Last August, Cosmos magazine collected goodwill messages from members of the public and chose the best ones for inclusion in a message called Hello from Earth.

It was sent from the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex in Australia to the planet Gliese 581d, which is one of the wettest and lightest extrasolar planets known to exist. As the name suggests, it is in the same system as Gliese 581c, which was the recipient of A Message from Earth. The message should arrive in 2029.

2009: RuBisCo message

Artist Joe Davis, who we met previously when he sent recordings of vaginal contractions to nearby stars, returned to the fray on the 25th anniversary of the original Arecibo message.

This time he was a little less racy, transmitting the genetic code for the plant enzyme RuBisCo, which is essential for photosynthesis. RuBisCo is the most abundant protein on Earth, largely because it is so slow and inefficient, so it is certainly representative of life on Earth.

Unlike Poetica Vaginal, this transmission went fairly smoothly – though Davis did have to use his iPhone to get the data into the radio telescope.

Music Phone "Ondo"

Conceptual mobile phone for the music enthusiast who seeks to interactively capture, edit and share sounds. The Ondo concept enables OEMs to visualize a new form of user interaction for mobile phones. Going beyond software-based solutions of other products, it is specifically designed to effectively collect pure sounds and is specially constructed to create a tactile sound editing experience. Like a portable recording studio, “Ondo” makes mixing tracks easy, because each “stick” picks up isolated sounds from each individual instrument. Made from form-sensitive flexible materials, the “Ondo” allows the user to modify recorded sounds by physically twisting and bending the device.

NASA mulls sending part of space station to an asteroid

The International Space Station, the $100 billion outpost that has steadfastly orbited the Earth for more than a decade, may get a chance to explore new horizons when it retires in 2020. NASA is considering using part of it to build a spaceship that would be sent to an asteroid, while also mulling more exotic artificial-gravity designs reminiscent of Arthur C Clarke.

President Barack Obama jettisoned his predecessor's plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 and in April proposed to send them to an asteroid by 2025 instead.

NASA is now trying to work out the details of how to carry out such a mission and is hosting a conference on the topic in Washington, DC, on Tuesday and Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Brian Wilcox of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, presented (pdf) some of the ideas generated by the agency's engineers during brainstorming sessions in January and June.

Mother ship Tranquility

One idea is to take apart the International Space Station, which is currently set to be retired in 2020, and use one of its crew compartments to build an asteroid-bound spacecraft in orbit instead of launching a similar capsule from Earth.

"These [asteroid] missions are going to occur at about the time that the space station is near retirement, so one has to wonder, 'Is it possible to use assets from the station as part of your mission complement?'" he said.

A space station compartment called Node 3 or Tranquility, which launched to the station aboard a shuttle mission in February, is particularly attractive for recycling because it has docking ports that could be used to attach to a pair of smaller, more nimble spacecraft. After arriving at the asteroid, astronauts could enter the smaller spacecraft and detach from the main ship in order to inspect the asteroid up close

Wireless Home Phone.

Very nice and unexpected for the type and shape of your home phone! He called The Eclipse DECT. Phone consists of a base unit and handset embedded together in a single and continuous ellipsoidal form factor. It features a crystal clear display and High Quality Duplex speakerphone, amongst other standard stuff. It looks very modern and attractive!   

Did comet killing spark Christmas light show?

Object type: Gamma-ray burst
Constellation: Andromeda

The timing could hardly have been more auspicious. Like a 2000-year-old gamma-ray echo of the biblical star of Bethlehem, on Christmas day 2010 an unprecedented tussle broke out in the heavens.

It sent a flood of high-energy radiation towards Earth that lasted much longer than is typical for a gamma-ray burst (GRB). Now it seems the peculiar event clashes with the leading theory for how such blasts of radiation form, and may instead involve the grisly demise of a comet.

At 18:37 GMT on 25 December 2010, the spectacular light show erupted, though you would have needed gamma-ray eyes to see it. Researchers did the next best thing, watching it with instruments on NASA's Swift satellite.

Gamma-rays are extremely energetic photons and it takes a very violent event to produce them in large quantities. Hundreds of GRBs flash on and off in the sky like fireflies each year. Satellites designed to detect nuclear bomb blasts first noticed them in the late 1960s and the Swift satellite was launched in 2004 to study them in greater detail.

X-ray spikes

Swift's observations have bolstered the two main theories for how GRBs form. Short bursts lasting less than a couple of seconds appear to arise when two neutron stars, ultra-dense remnants of dead stars, collide. Longer bursts lasting up to a few minutes may be due to the collapse of massive stars to form a black hole or neutron star.

But the Christmas burst kept pumping out gamma-rays for half an hour – much longer than normal. Like other GRBS, it also gave off an X-ray glow that lasted longer than the gamma rays. But X-rays from a normal GRB tend to fade smoothly. Those from this GRB spiked every hour or two for the first 10 hours.

The event's unusual characteristics have led researchers to dust off one of the earliest theories for the origin of gamma-ray bursts: that they come from comets that stray too close to neutron stars.

Massive teaspoon

Neutron stars are ultra-dense balls of neutrons, subatomic particles left behind when a massive star burns out and collapses. A teaspoon of neutron-star material contains a mass in the billions of tonnes. As a result, a typical neutron star weighs slightly more than the sun, despite being only about 20 kilometres across.

The high density gives neutron stars very powerful gravitational fields, rivalling that of a black hole. A comet straying within a few thousand kilometres of a neutron star would be torn to shreds.

The comet fragments would then rain down on the neutron star, unleashing a torrent of gamma rays when they reach its surface. Crucially, these clumps of matter falling onto the star could also produce the signature X-ray spikes that were a feature of the Christmas GRB, says a team led by Sergio Campana of the Brera Astronomical Observatory in Merate, Italy, in Nature.

Christmas death

But comet slaughter isn't the only explanation, according to a second team led by Christina Thöne of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain. In another study in Nature, they argue that a neutron star merging with a red giant star could also explain the unusually long-lived Christmas burst. Such a smash-up with a red giant would unleash much more energy than the decimation of a comet, so would have to occur in a distant galaxy to avoid appearing brighter than what was observed.

The event remains mysterious for now, since definitive proof is lacking for either scenario, writes Enrico Costa of the Space Astrophysics and Cosmic Physics Institute in Rome, Italy, in a commentary in Nature. But the Christmas event is a clear reminder that we have so much to learn about the causes of violent GRBs.

"Whatever the case, it's hard to escape the fascination of a possible comet death on Christmas Day," Costa writes.

Journal references: Nature, DOIs: 10.1038/nature10592 and 10.1038/nature10611

Single particle is the smallest Stirling engine yet

The 200-year-old Stirling engine has inspired a power generator made of a single particle just 3 micrometres wide.

Overshadowed by its steam and internal combustion brethren, the Stirling engine is a quiet, efficient alternative that compresses a fixed amount of gas inside a cylinder.

As it is compressed, the gas heats up and expands, pushing a piston, before cooling due to the loss of energy, only to be compressed again.

In their tiny mimic, Clemens Bechinger and Valentin Blickle at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, replaced the cylinder with a laser that confines the motion of a 3-micrometre-wide lump of melamine in water.

Pent-up particle

A zap of heat from another laser builds up tension in this optical "trap": like a compressed gas, the particle is aching to break free. Widening the trap by modifying the first laser lets it do so, expending the pent-up energy.

"The use of a laser source to provide the required rapid localised heating on the microscopic scale appears to be novel," says Alan Tucker, leader of the Stirling Cycle Research Group at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He calls the technique sophisticated but says that he "struggles" to envision any practical applications.

But Bechinger says that the microscopic engine is allowing his team to investigate the balance between maximum power and maximum efficiency on the nanoscale – which could in turn inform the design of future micromechanical machines.

Journal Reference: Nature Physics, DOI: 10.1038/nphys2163

What if there is no Higgs boson?

This could be it. The Large Hadron Collider finally has enough data to explore every nook and cranny where the elusive Higgs boson could be hiding. LHC physicists will announce the results of their latest hunt on Tuesday at CERN in Switzerland.

What if they find nothing? New Scientist takes a look at alternatives to the Higgs.

What is the Higgs boson?

It is the last undiscovered member of the standard model of particle physics, the leading theory describing how particles and forces interact. The mysterious particle is thought to give all other particles mass, but the standard model can't predict what the Higgs itself weighs.

Where might the Higgs be hiding?

The Higgs may be produced fleetingly when particles smash into each other at high speeds, and for years physicists have been looking for evidence of it at various particle colliders. They have gradually ruled out its existence at different masses, but there is still a narrow mass range, between 115 and 141 gigaelectronvolts, where the simplest version of the Higgs could take refuge.

What will LHC physicists report next week?

Rumour has it they have found hints of the Higgs at a mass of 125 gigaelectronvolts, about 133 times the mass of a proton. What is known for sure, though, is that researchers from the LHC's main detectors, ATLAS and CMS, will separately present the past year's worth of data from the proton collider. That represents more than 300 trillion high-speed particle collisions, more than twice the amount of data reported at a conference in August. That is still not enough data to be able to rule the Higgs definitively in or out, but it should be enough to show hints of the Higgs if it exists in the mass range that had previously not been scrutinised.

What if there is still no sign of the Higgs?

This time, if nothing materialises, physicists will really start giving up. "If we witness a lack of events in the full mass range, then clearly we will start disfavouring the presence of the standard model Higgs boson in LHC data," says CMS spokesperson Guido Tonelli. "To really exclude it we would need additional data. But if in this amount of data we don't see any indication that something is happening, the most likely hypothesis is that we have to look for another solution."

Are there other solutions?

"I think there are alternatives to the Higgs," says Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin, who, together with Sheldon Glashow of Boston University and Abdus Salam of Imperial College London, wrote the standard model in the 1960s. Giving up on the Higgs boson opens the door for more exotic kinds of physics, including extra particles and extra forces.

Do we need a Higgs boson to give things mass?

No, says theorist Matt Strassler of Rutgers University in New Jersey. The Higgs boson is just a ripple in the so-called Higgs field, which is really what is thought to give all other particles mass. "The poor Higgs field labors in obscurity, protecting the universe from catastrophe but getting none of its deserved credit," Strassler writes in his blog.

Physicists are only looking for the Higgs particle because it is the easiest way to access the field. If they don't see it, then it suggests the field is different from the one predicted by the standard model. Normally, particles in fields are like ripples in ponds – photons are ripples in the electromagnetic field, for example. But if the field is more like molasses than water, then the ripples die away too quickly for us to detect.

That means matter might get its mass from a thick Higgs-like field that has no associated particle. To get such a goopy field, theorists need to add in more exotic possibilities – such as new particles or forces of nature. "You can't get the situation where there's no Higgs particle there unless you add something else," Strassler told New Scientist.

What about more exotic possibilities?

The existence of a new force, called technicolour, could also give particles mass without the need for a Higgs boson. Technicolour would act like a heavy-duty version of the strong nuclear force, which binds quarks together in the nuclei of atoms. The technicolour force would fill space with pairs of still more new particles, which would form a soup through which other particles would travel, gaining mass in the process.

"That would be an outstanding alternative if the Higgs isn't there," Weinberg says. "In that case there would be a whole host of other particles, probably at higher energy, that the LHC might discover. But it wouldn't find the Higgs. There wouldn't be a Higgs, in the usual sense."

Are there even more exotic ideas?

The existence of a fourth dimension of space, beyond the three we experience, could explain why particles have different masses – a fact that is usually attributed to the Higgs boson.

Wounded galaxy is crux of cosmic whodunnit

Object type: Galaxy
Distance: 300 million light-years

A wounded galaxy is bleeding an astonishingly long trail of gas into space, yet there is no obvious perpetrator.

Frustrating even the most resolute of cosmic detectives, this crime scene illustrates the dangers that galaxies face – the loss of such a large volume of gas can eventually kill. It also suggests we may need to revise our theories of how and where they can be wounded.

Space is a dangerous place for galaxies. Collisions with other galaxies, near misses and other forms of violence can dramatically alter or even destroy them.

Our own Milky Way has gobbled up smaller galaxies in the past and is expected to be transformed from an elegant spiral into a diffuse blob of stars in a likely merger with the nearby Andromeda galaxy a few billion years from now.

Hydrogen trail

Even when disturbances do not destroy galaxies, they can strip them of the gas they need to produce new generations of stars and planets, effectively sterilising them.

The latest known victim of such intergalactic violence is called FGC 1287. It appears perfectly healthy in visible light, which shows only its stars, but new radio evidence from the Very Large Array in New Mexico reveal that it is severely wounded, bleeding a vast trail of gas into space.

This galactic tail is one of the longest ever seen, stretching across 800,000 light years. "When we looked at the data, we were amazed," says Tom Scott of the Andalucia Institute of Astrophysics in Granada, Spain, who led the study.

The tail is made of billions of suns' worth of hydrogen gas that has somehow bled from FGC 1287 – more gas than remains in the galaxy itself. But the cause of the galactic haemorrhage is hard to pin down.

Bloody footprints

"FGC 1287 is completely different from any case we have seen before," says team member Luca Cortese of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany.

One possible explanation is the galaxy's location at the edge of a cluster of other galaxies. When a galaxy falls into a cluster, it often has gas stripped away by "headwinds" created as the galaxy moves through the cluster's own gas.

But X-ray observations of the cluster's gas suggest it is too thin at FGC 1287's location to make the galaxy feel much of a wind, says the team.

A near miss with another galaxy might be a better lead and could explain why the galaxy's stars are not in disarray. In a brief encounter at high speed, the second galaxy's gravity could have pulled away loosely bound gas without disturbing its stars, which are more tightly bound to the galaxy by gravity. Intriguingly, like bloody footprints leaving a crime scene, the gas trail points in the direction of another galaxy.

Violent mystery

The case is not closed, however, because the suspect galaxy looks much less massive and shows no sign of trauma itself. It is not clear how it could have made such a large impact on the heavier galaxy without being wounded itself.

That leaves FGC 1287's condition a mystery. Whatever the solution, the team say the case suggests we have a lot to learn about how violence befalls galaxies. Perhaps FGC 1287 is enduring stronger winds than expected, or another galaxy not obviously connected to it will turn out to be its attacker.

"This discovery might open a new chapter in our understanding of environmental effects on galaxy evolution," says team member Elias Brinks of the University of Hertfordshire, UK.

Journal reference: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-3933.2011.01169.x

10 Great Equipments of NASA's Rover CURIOSITY have

NASA next Mars rover  a 1-ton robotic beast that will take planetary exploration to the next level.
The car-size Curiosity rover is the centerpiece of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, slated to blast off Saturday (Nov. 26) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Curiosity's main goal is to assess whether the Red Planet is, or ever was, capable of supporting microbial life. The rover will employ 10 different science instruments to help it answer this question once it touches down on the Red Planet in August 2012. Here's a brief rundown of these instruments (and one more on the rover's heat shield): Mast Camera (MastCam) The MastCam is Curiosity's workhorse imaging tool. It will capture high-resolution color pictures and video of the Martian landscape, which scientists will study and laypeople will gawk at. MastCam consists of two camera systems mounted on a mast that rises above Curiosity's main body, so the instrument will have a good view of the Red Planet environment as the rover chugs through it. MastCam images will also help the mission team drive and operate Curiosity. 
Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI)
MAHLI will function much like a high-powered magnifying glass, allowing Earthbound scientists to get up-close looks at Martian rocks and soil. The instrument will take color pictures of features as tiny as 12.5 microns — smaller than the width of a human hair. MAHLI sits on the end of Curiosity's five-jointed, 7-foot (2.1-meter) robotic arm, which is itself a marvel of engineering. So mission scientists will be able to point
their high-tech hand lens pretty much wherever they want.
Mars Descent Imager (MARDI)
MARDI, a small camera located on Curiosity's main body, will record video of the rover's descent to the Martian surface (which will be accomplished with the help of a hovering, rocket-powered sky crane) MARDI will click on a mile or two above the ground, as soon as Curiosity jettisons its heat shield. The instrument will then take video at five frames per second until the rover touches down. The footage will help the MSL team plan Curiosity's Red Planet rovings, and it should also provide information about the geological context of the landing site, the 100-mile-wide (160-km) Gale Crater.
Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM)
SAM is the heart of Curiosity; at 83 pounds (38 kilograms), it makes up about half of the rover's science payload. SAM is actually a suite of three separate instruments — a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph and a laser spectrometer. These instruments will search for carbon- containing compounds, the building blocks of life as we know it. They will also look for other elements associated with life on Earth, such as hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. The SAM instrument suite is located in Curiosity's main body. The rover's robotic arm will drop samples into SAM via an inlet on the rover's exterior. Some of these samples will come from the interior of rocks, powder bored out by a 2-inch (5- centimeter) drill situated at the end of the arm. None of Curiosity's predecessors could get deep into Martian rocks, so scientists are excited about the drill. "For a geologist that studies rocks, there's nothing better than getting inside," said MSL deputy project scientist Joy Crisp, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin)
CheMin will identify different types of minerals on Mars and quantify their abundance, which will help scientists better understand past environmental conditions on the Red Planet. Like SAM, CheMin has an inlet on Curiosity's exterior to accept samples delivered by the rover's robotic arm. The instrument will shine a fine X-ray beam through the sample, identifying minerals' crystalline structures based on how the X-rays diffract. "This is like magic to us," Crisp told SPACE.com. X-ray diffraction is a leading diagnostic technique for Earthbound geologists, she explained, but it hasn't made it to Mars yet. So CheMin should help Curiosity provide more definitive mineral characterizations than previous Mars rovers such as Spirit and Opportunity have been able to achieve.
Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam)
For sheer coolness, it's tough to beat ChemCam. This instrument will fire a laser at Martian rocks from up to 30 feet (9 meters) away and analyze the composition of the vaporized bits. ChemCam will thus enable Curiosity to study rocks that are out of reach of its flexible robotic arm. It will also help the mission team determine from afar whether or not they want to send the rover over to investigate a particular landform.
ChemCam is composed of several different parts. The laser sits on Curiosity's mast, along with a camera and a small telescope. Three spectrographs sit in the rover's body, connected to the mast components by fiber optics. The spectrographs will analyze the light emitted by excited electrons in the vaporized rock samples.
Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS)
APXS, which sits at the end of Curiosity's arm, will measure the abundances of various chemical elements in Martian rocks and dirt. Curiosity will place the instrument in contact with samples of interest, and APXS will
shoot out X-rays and helium nuclei. This barrage will knock electrons in the sample out of their orbits, causing a release of X-rays. Scientists will be able to identify elements based on the characteristic energies of these emitted X-rays. Spirit and Opportunity were outfitted with a previous version of APXS and used the
instrument to help elucidate the prominent role water has played in shaping the Martian landscape.
Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN)
DAN, located near the back of Curiosity's main body, will help the rover search for ice and water-logged minerals beneath the Martian surface. The instrument will fire beams of neutrons at the ground, then note the speed at which these particles travel when they bounce back. Hydrogen atoms tend to slow neutrons down, so an abundance of sluggish neutrons would signal underground water or ice. DAN should be able to map out water concentrations as low as 0.1 percent at depths up to 6 feet (2 m).
Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD)
The toaster-size RAD is designed specifically to help prepare for future human exploration of Mars. The instrument will measure and identify high-energy radiation of all types on the Red Planet, from fast-moving protons to gamma rays. RAD's observations will allow scientists to determine just how much radiation an
astronaut would be exposed to on Mars. This information could also help researchers understand how much of a hurdle Mars' radiation environment might have posed to the origin and evolution of life on the Red Planet.
Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS)
This tool, which sits partway up Curiosity's mast, is a Martian weather station. REMS will measure atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction, air temperature, ground temperature and ultraviolet radiation. All of this information will be integrated into daily and seasonal reports, allowing scientists to get a detailed look at the Martian environment.
MSL Entry, Descent and Landing Instrumentation (MEDLI)
MEDLI isn't one of Curiosity's 10 instruments, since it's built into the heat shield that will protect the rover on its descent through the Martian atmosphere. But it's worth a few words here. MEDLI will measure the temperatures and pressures the heat shield experiences as the MSL spacecraft streaks through the Martian sky. This information will tell engineers how well the heat shield, and their models of the spacecraft's trajectory, performed. Researchers will use MEDLI data to improve designs for future Mars-bound
spacecraft.

Concept for Future Eco Drive Monorail.

Amazing concept of the railway infrastructure of the future. Efficient operation of old and new. Two trains move in one direction, or may move in different directions. As well as trains rush through the old familiar railway. So, the Eco Drive Monorail (EDM) will expand the existing rail network which has struggled to keep up with high demand at peak commuter times. It offers a range of environmentally friendly technologies and innovative design features. Will the reality of this concept remains to be seen. 

Designer : Philip Pauley

     

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Amoeba Modular USB Flash Drive Concept

The memory concept allows to break your USB stick into compartments, allowing you to store different data on each. Files on the device can easily sorted due to the category based partitions. When you need to share data with a friend simply unplug the correct compartment and hand it over. Partitions are assigned to personal information, documents, photos and music, with each able to be used on its own. A new concept has bee designed by Hyunsoo Song from SADI which overcomes the problem in a simple way.

Will We Find Oceans On Pluto?

The recent announcement that there might be lakes just under the comparatively thin circular, bumpy features on the surface of the Jovian moon Europa offers tantalizing evidence that the icy outer bodies of the solar are much more dynamic and interesting than thought.

Equally as amazing are the water geysers on the Saturnian moon Enceladus that were discovered by NASA's Cassini orbiter. They must be fueled by a huge water reservoir under the icy crust.

And, add to this list Titan and Ganymede that also might have subsurface oceans.

WATCH VIDEO: PLUTO... DEMOTED!

ANALYSIS: Pluto May Live in a Rough Neighborhood

Given these discoveries, it's not too far fetched to think that the icy dwarf planet Pluto could have subsurface oceans too -- making it much more than simply the "ice ball" that is quickly shrugged off by the "Pluto is not a planet" detractors.

Billions of years ago Pluto must have been warmer. This would have resulted from a a collision between Pluto and another Kuiper belt object that gave birth to large companion moon Charon and the three additional smaller satellites.

After the impact, Pluto and Charon would have been extremely close together, and spinning rapidly. The strong gravitational tidal pull between the two should have produced enough heat to melt the interior turning Pluto into a giant Slush Puppie. Pluto could have been like Europa for hundreds of millions of years before completely re-freezing over.

Or did it?

Pluto may have a thin shell of nitrogen covering a shell of water mixed with antifreeze-like ammonia. Some models predict a planet-wide ocean with an average depth of 100 miles beneath a 100-mile thick crust. Pluto's not exactly the best place for ice fishing.

ANALYSIS: Pluto, Sponsored By McDonalds

If the ocean is deep enough to contact a rocky core, it would allow for the mixing minerals and salts into the water. Would this nurture the development of some sort of exotic silicon-based "cyrolife" that uses dinitrogen in place of water?

However, the question is most likely a moot point because Pluto offers the lowest chances of identifying life elsewhere in the solar system. A sample return mission would be exorbitantly expensive and extraordinarily difficult compared to looking for extraterrestrial life much closer to Earth.

The planet is so hard to get to, that we will have only a few weeks of close-up views of the Pluto system when NASA's New Horizons craft flies through it in mid-July 2015.

ANALYSIS: Pluto Might be Bigger, But Eris is More Massive

Could the presence of a past or present subsurface ocean be deduced from the craft's brief encounter? Well maybe, but only because we have years worth of data of the icy moons in the Saturnian system, and Jupiter's Galilean satellites as well.

Familiar features may pop up even in long-range pre-encounter views of Pluto. For example, New Horizons will be able to precisely measure Pluto's diameter. If the planet were slightly oblate it would be evidence for a solidified frozen "bulge," left over from when Pluto spun more rapidly. If Pluto still has a liquid mantle, material would still flow, reducing the size of the bulge.

If New Horizons imaging reveals a world covered with a crazyquilt "chaotic terrain" of the Europa-type surface fractures, then it would be evidence that an ocean existed at some point. Pluto might also be covered with dead cryovolcanoes that were produced when liquid from the ocean forced its way to the surface. However, the discovery of still-active geysers on the planet would be an eye-popper, and unequivocal evidence for a subterranean ocean.

ANALYSIS: Eris and Pluto Find Common Ground

Regardless, I have no doubt that New Horizons will uncover an extraordinarily complex Plutonian landscape. To date, the best of the Hubble Space Telescope pictures of Pluto show a remarkably variegated surface with of bright and dark regions, some of it molasses colored from photochemical effects from the sun.

Ten weeks out from closest approach, the New Horizons probe's photographic resolution will exceed Hubble's. The entire planet will be photo-mapped. At closest approach, features as small as twice the length of a football field will be discernible on Pluto.

Unfortunately, half of the planet will be in darkness during the brief close encounter. Scientists will be left to speculate for decades what secrets the unseen hemisphere might hold.

My prediction is that the images from the near encounter will leave astrogeologists with many more questions than answers about Pluto's history, internal structure, and dynamics. And, that's not to mention the chances of a subterranean ocean that is perhaps as illusory as the mythological river Styx in the Underworld.

Image credits: ESA, NASA

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