By tracking atmospheric features on Neptune, a UA planetary scientist has accurately determined the planet’s rotation, a feat that had not been previously achieved for any of the gas planets in our solar system except Jupiter.
A day on Neptune lasts precisely 15 hours, 57 minutes and 59 seconds, according to the first accurate measurement of its rotational period made by University of Arizona planetary scientist Erich Karkoschka. (more…)
*By comparing theory with data from STAR, Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues map phase changes in the quark-gluon plasma*
In its infancy, when the universe was a few millionths of a second old, the elemental constituents of matter moved freely in a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons. As the universe expanded, this quark–gluon plasma quickly cooled, and protons and neutrons and other forms of normal matter “froze out”: the quarks became bound together by the exchange of gluons, the carriers of the color force.
“The theory that describes the color force is called quantum chromodynamics, or QCD,” says Nu Xu of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the spokesperson for the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. “QCD has been extremely successful at explaining interactions of quarks and gluons at short distances, such as high-energy proton and antiproton collisions at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. But in bulk collections of matter – including the quark-gluon plasma – at longer distances or smaller momentum transfer, an approach called lattice gauge theory has to be used.” (more…)
Tiny hairs on bats’ wings act as speedometers
COLLEGE PARK, Md.- Anyone watching bats skillfully maneuvering through the air to catch their dinner is impressed by how they quickly change direction and speed. Now researchers in the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland believe they have uncovered one of the secrets of bats’ aerodynamic prowess: rows of microscopic, domed hairs on their wings that might act like speedometers and stall indicators. (more…)
Samples of icy spray shooting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus collected during Cassini spacecraft flybys show the strongest evidence yet for the existence of a large-scale, subterranean saltwater ocean, says a new international study led by the University of Heidelberg and involving the University of Colorado Boulder.
The new discovery was made during the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, a collaboration of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Launched in 1997, the mission spacecraft arrived at the Saturn system in 2004 and has been touring the giant ringed planet and its vast moon system ever since. (more…)
A new advance by UCLA biochemists has brought scientists one step closer to developing treatments that could delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and prevent the sexual transmission of HIV.
The researchers report that they have designed molecular inhibitors that target specific proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease and HIV to prevent them from forming amyloid fibers, the elongated chains of interlocking proteins that play a key role in more than two dozen degenerative and often fatal diseases. (more…)
Southern California’s high desert has been a stand-in for Mars for NASA technology testing many times over the years. And so it is again, in a series of flights by an F/A-18 aircraft to test the landing radar for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission.
The flight profile is designed to have the F/A-18 climb to 40,000 feet (about 12,000 meters). From there, it makes a series of subsonic, stair-step dives at angles of 40 to 90 degrees to simulate what the Mars radar will see while the spacecraft is on a parachute descending through the Martian atmosphere. The F/A-18 pulls out of each dive at 5,000 feet (about 1,500 meters. Data collected by these flights will be used to finesse the Mars landing radar software, to help ensure that it is calibrated as accurately as possible. (more…)
In a recent publication in Physical Review Letters, physicists at the University of Arizona propose a way to translate the elusive magnetic spin of electrons into easily measurable electric signals. The finding is a key step in the development of computing based on spintronics, which doesn’t rely on electron charge to digitize information.
Unlike conventional computing devices, which require electric charges to flow along a circuit, spintronics harnesses the magnetic properties of electrons rather than their electric charge to process and store information. (more…)
Astronomers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa have discovered a new comet that they expect will be visible to the naked eye in early 2013.
Originally found by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Maui, on the night of June 5-6, it was confirmed to be a comet by UH Mānoa astronomer Richard Wainscoat and graduate student Marco Micheli the following night using the Canada-France-Hawaiʻi Telescope on Mauna Kea. (more…)
