science in review: june 2010
Another bit of science fiction became reality last month as the first solar sail was unfurled on june 3rd, 2010, by the japanese spacecraft on its way to Venus.
Also in really impressive news, artificial nanoparticle antibody, made of plastic, was tested in vivo, and worked. It was imprinted with sensitivity to bee venom, injected into bloodstream of mice who were given lethal injections of the venom, and it saved them. I have to admit, nanoscience is getting exciting.
Speaking of hot topics, graphene was in several publications, one of which showed how to make 30-inch sheets of it, big enough for LCDs and touchscreens. (It is better than the common indium tin oxide, especially in terms of flexibility and price)
Physics had a lot of interesting stuff going on: tau-neutrino oscillated from mu-neutrinos shot from CERN was directly observed.
Photoemission was shown to be not instant: it takes an extra 21 attoseconds to kick an electron off a 2p orbital compared to the 2s orbital of a neon atom. Which is also the new record for the shortest directly measured time interval.
The australians who already stopped light for a second, are further improving their quantum memory for light, promising hours soon.
A curious student earned himself a first-name article in Nature and a PhD by building a theory of bubble bursting, which explains how surface bubble break-up happens and why is there sometimes a ring of smaller daughter bubbles created.
Another experiment you can do yourself: stretch a dribble of spit between two fingers and little beads on a string will form. A theory to explain them was just published in Nature as well (it’s not as useless as you’d think, it explains similar beads in inkjet printers, in the industrial processes involving polymer solutions, etc)
Yet another curious student created a brownian motion motor, imagined in 1912 and proved impossible (in equilibrium gas) by Feynman in 1963.
In more bizarre physics, a “dark pulse laser” was built, a quantum dot laser producing impulses of.. dark.
Not as much jumped at me in biology news, but the antibiotic property of honey, known for thousands of years, was finally identified – it’s a protein called defensin-1, a part of the honey bee immune system (aided by sugar, hydrogen peroxide, and methylglyoxal). And the four-leaf clover gene was identified so we can genetically engineer luck.
In unfortunate news, The AIDS denialists rejoice as the investigation into misconduct of their crazy leader Peter Duesberg concluded with “insufficient evidence”. (After over 330,000 deaths were attributed to his health policies in South Africa, he responded with the now withdrawn article in 2009 which was so bad it prompted the investigation, but Berkley closed it last month saying “The university relies on the scholarly peer-review process, rather than disciplinary procedures, for evaluating the value of scientific work”)
In an astronomical disappointment, the rings around Saturn’s moon Rhea, announced in 2008 were ruled out.
And, just for the sake of the cool title, I have to quote the video recordings of sprites and elves.
Crossposted fromLiveJournal