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Most cultural institutions and research laboratories still rely on magnetic tape to archive their collections. Hitachi recently announced that it has developed a medium that can outlast not only this old-school format but also CDs, DVDs, hard drives and MP3s. The electronics giant partnered with Kyoto University's Kiyotaka Miura to develop “semiperpetual” slivers of quartz glass that Hitachi says can preserve information for hundreds of millions of years with virtually no degradation. The prototype is made of a square of quartz two centimeters wide and two millimeters thick. It houses four layers of dots that are created with a femtosecond...

A string of 13 dwarf galaxies are in orbit around the galaxy Andromeda. The galaxies are spread across a flat plane more than one million light years wide and 30,000 light years thick, moving in synchonicity with each other. The phenomenon is unlike behaviour of other observed galaxies and suggests a hole in our knowledge of galaxy formation. A string of 13 dwarf galaxies in orbit around the massive galaxy Andromeda are not behaving as they should. The galaxies are spread across a flat plane more than one million light years wide and only 30,000 light years thick, moving...

It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time1. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery. Lord Kelvin defined the absolute temperature scale in the mid-1800s in such a way that nothing could be colder than absolute zero. Physicists later realized that the absolute temperature of a gas is related to the average energy of its particles. Absolute zero corresponds to the theoretical state in which particles have no...

"Propulsion,” the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “I just want to see the propulsion stuff.”........This is before Taylor would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers......But when his parents brought him to a toy store, [for a toy crane] the boy saw it as an act of provocation. “No,” he yelled, stomping his foot. “I want a real one. This is about the time any other father might have put his own foot down....

...The latest results from the ATLAS detector at the LHC suggest that when we look at its decay into two photons, we find that the new boson's mass is about 3 gigaelectronvolts greater than when calculated from its decay into particles called Z bosons. Albert De Roeck, one of the key Higgs hunters at ATLAS's sibling detector, CMS, finds this puzzling. "The results are barely consistent," he says... The ATLAS team also announced new results from analysing the Higgs boson's rate of decay into pairs of photons. The standard model of particle physics predicts exactly how often this should happen....

Recent observations prove revisions might be necessary for long support theory Data gathered by a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NSIT) suggest that certain aspects of the highly regarded quantum electrodynamics theory might require some revising.Observations made with the NSITÂ’s electron beam ion trap have led to questions regarding the accuracy of the quantum electrodynamics theory. What the group discovered, via the NSITÂ’s Electron Beam Ion Trap, is that ions with a strongly positive charge can display electrons that behave in ways inconsistent with what the theory suggests should happen. About the quantum electrodynamics theory The...

Free whitepaper – Shutterfly and Cleversafe: The Path to a Picture Perfect Data Storage Solution A state of magnetism predicted in 1987 has been observed for the first time at MIT, with researchers saying that it might one day find applications in storage and communications technologies. The “one day” is still quite some way off, however, with the researchers only at the very beginning of observing the properties of what’s called a “quantum spin liquid” (QSL). The properties of a quantum spin liquid are revealed in the spin properties of atoms in a crystal. Rather than settling into a stable...

Dec. 7, 2012 – By Steven B. Krivit – Researchers from Toyota Central Research and Development Laboratories performed an independent replication of a Mitsubishi low-energy nuclear reaction transmutation experiment, according to a physicist from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries speaking at the American Nuclear Society LENR session on Nov. 14 in San Diego, Calif. The physicist, Yasuhiro Iwamura, told the ANS audience that the Toyota researchers confirmed that nuclear changes from one element to another took place without the use of high-energy nuclear physics. Most scientists who have not followed this field closely consider such profound claims inconceivable. Toyota used a LENR...

Cold Fusion Pioneer says LENR is not Fusion Published November 20, 2012. | By jennifer. The man who invented the term “cold fusion” now says that the effect popularly described as cold fusion or low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) is not fusion. Professor Emeritus Steven E. Jones told Sterling D. Allan of Pure Energy Systems that he’s not sure what to call the effect. Jones is the man who came up with the term cold fusion in a Scientific American article in July 1987. Jones was actually researching the phenomenon two full years before Pons and Fleischmann put it on...

EnlargeEngineers at Caltech have created a device (illustrated here) that can focus light into a point just a few nanometers (billionths of a meter) across -- an achievement they say may lead to next-generation applications in computing, communications, and imaging. Credit: Young-Hee Lee (Phys.org)—As technology advances, it tends to shrink. From cell phones to laptops—powered by increasingly faster and tinier processors—everything is getting thinner and sleeker. And now light beams are getting smaller, too. Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a device that can focus light into a point just a few nanometers (billionths of a...

A discovery that promises transistors – the fundamental part of all modern electronics – controlled by laser pulses that will be 10,000 faster than today's fastest transistors has been made by a Georgia State University professor and international researchers. Professor of Physics Mark Stockman worked with Professor Vadym Apalkov of Georgia State and a group led by Ferenc Krausz at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and other well-known German institutions.There are three basic types of solids: metals, semiconductors, used in today's transistors, and insulators – also called dielectrics.Dielectrics do not conduct electricity and get damaged or break...

While the year 2011 will be remembered for the remarkable progress in cold fusion achieved in Italy and more particularly by the E-cat reactors of Andrea Rossi, the year 2012 will be remembered for the slow progress of its recognition by the mainstream establishments. Cold fusion, known also as LENR, is a new and safer type of nuclear energy that will rival the currently used unsafe nuclear power. Its advantages are unparalleled: a lack of radioactive waste and byproducts that could be used for a weapon; abundance of fuel (nickel) without the need for mining of radioactive uranium with the...

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A new galaxy class has been identified using observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Gemini South telescope, and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). Nicknamed “green bean galaxies” because of their unusual appearance, these galaxies glow in the intense light emitted from the surroundings of monster black holes and are amongst the rarest objects in the Universe. Many galaxies have a giant black hole at their center that causes the gas around it to glow. However, in the case of green bean galaxies, the entire galaxy is glowing, not just the centre. These new observations reveal the largest and brightest...

University of North Dakota scientist Mark Hoffmann's version of Star Search goes a long way -- a very long way -- out into the universe. Hoffmann, a computational chemist, and his colleagues Tryve Helgaker, a well-known Norwegian scientist, and co-authors E.I. Tellgren and K. Lange, also working in Norway, have discovered a molecular-level interaction that science had puzzled over for decades but had never seen. That discovery, it turns out, may redefine how science views chemical compound formation. It also answers questions about what goes on in places like white dwarfs, the super dense cores of stars nearing the end...

Explosive debut A droplet of xylene containing a tin compound is ignited, and then explodes to produce uniform nanoparticles (courtesy: Ch. Rosebrock & L. Mädler, Univ. Bremen). It was a pretty explosive premiere for a movie about a chemical reaction. A microscopic droplet drifted across the screen — almost in homage to the panning gun barrel of the James Bond movies — and then: bang! Scientists watching the scene last week at a meeting of the Materials Research Society (MRS) in Boston, Massachusetts, were gripped, because the death of the droplet was also an act of creation. Lutz Mädler, a...

<p>A plan now before Congress would create a national park spread over three states to protect the aging remnants of the atomic bomb project from World War II, including an isolated cabin where grim findings threw the secretive effort into a panic.</p>

This week marks the 70th anniversary of a turning point in human history. It was on December 2, 1942, that Enrico Fermi ordered the control rods pulled from the nuclear reactor he had built under the west stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field stadium, thereby initiating the first artificial sustained-fission reaction in human history. A cryptic message flashed the electrifying news back to Washington. “The Italian navigator has landed in the new world.” The consequences of Fermi’s success were profound. Within two and a half years, the Manhattan Project advanced to build both uranium-isotope-separation and plutonium-manufacturing facilities on...

Enrico Fermi This week marks the 70th anniversary of a turning point in human history.It was on December 2, 1942, that Enrico Fermi ordered the control rods pulled from the nuclear reactor he had built under the west stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field stadium, thereby initiating the first artificial sustained-fission reaction in human history. A cryptic message flashed the electrifying news back to Washington. “The Italian navigator has landed in the new world.”The consequences of Fermi’s success were profound. Within two and a half years, the Manhattan Project advanced to build both uranium-isotope-separation and plutonium-manufacturing facilities on...

Hubble observations of a speedy galaxy weigh on the Milky Way and indicate that our galaxy is at least a trillion times as massive as the sunMilky Way GREAT GALAXY: The Milky Way maintains a fleet of some two dozen satellite galaxies whose motions help reveal its mass. Image: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team Although scientists know the masses of the sun and Earth, it's a different story for the galaxy. Mass estimates range widely: At the low end, some studies find that the galaxy is several hundred billion times as massive as the sun whereas the largest values exceed two trillion...