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Berkeley Lab scientists join their KamLAND colleagues to measure the radioactive sources of Earth's heat flowWhat spreads the sea floors and moves the continents? What melts iron in the outer core and enables the Earth's magnetic field? Heat. Geologists have used temperature measurements from more than 20,000 boreholes around the world to estimate that some 44 terawatts (44 trillion watts) of heat continually flow from Earth's interior into space. Where does it come from? Radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth's crust and mantle is a principal source, and in 2005 scientists in the KamLAND collaboration, based in...

White dwarfs are the burned-out cores of stars like our Sun. Astronomers have discovered a pair of white dwarfs spiraling into one another at breakneck speeds. Today, these white dwarfs are so near they make a complete orbit in just 13 minutes, but they are gradually slipping closer together. About 900,000 years from now - a blink of an eye in astronomical time - they will merge and possibly explode as a supernova. By watching the stars converge, scientists will test both Einstein's theory of general relativity and the origin of some peculiar supernovae.The two white dwarfs are circling...

Scientists in Israel say they have invented a way of turning traffic into electricity. The bright sparks at the country's Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa have developed a road that generates power when vehicles pass over it. And they hope the technology will reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. In a university car park, Haim Abramovich and his team run a heavy truck repeatedly over a special stretch of tarmac. "The name of the game is harvesting," he told Sky News. "Harvesting means energy which is available but is going to waste. "So what I want to is to...

At least the first two parts of it, third part to be added shortly: http://vimeo.com/26432848 NPA stands for Natural Philosophy Alliance: http://www.worldnpa.org/main/

FULL TITLE: Voice of Thomas Edison's talking doll is heard again after 123 years as scientists crack the code of mysterious metal ring For decades it lay in the bottom of a secretary's desk drawer, its purpose unknown. But now, 123 year after it was made, the secret of this bent metal ring, which was found in Thomas Edison's laboratory, has finally been uncovered. Scientists have found that the microscopic grooves on the ring make up the tune of 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' and mark the world's first attempt at a talking doll and the dawn of America's recording industry...

Scientists claim antimatter breakthrough Scientists have announced the first large-scale production of antimatter. A team based at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva say they have developed a large amount of the substance. Antimatter is a reverse form of ordinary matter. When the two kinds of matter meet they annihilate each other in an enormous burst of energy. It's this process which provides the power source for Starship Enterprise in its film and TV space adventures. Physicists have made only very small quantities of antimatter before. But the CERN team say they have made at least 50,000 atoms...

Physicists claim antimatter breakthrough Physicists in Switzerland say they have captured antimatter for the first time. Scientists have often wondered whether they can get energy from the reaction when antimatter and matter collide. Until now they have found it difficult to make and control antiatoms. Researchers on the ATRAP experiment at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva, now think they have succeeded. New Scientist reports they have made and stored thousands of antiatoms indefinitely in a particle trap. The team, led by Gerald Gabrielse of Harvard University, used powerful magnetic and electric fields to slow and ...

So - Dan Brown's turgid blockbuster Angels and Demons, in which a nefarious papal official nicks a vial of antimatter from CERN as part of a complicated scheme to become Pope by menacing the Vatican with explosive destruction. Twaddle? Or actually a perfectly feasible plan ripped from today's headlines, style of thing? Just a few minor technical errors hereWe here on the Reg particle-meddling desk naturally have no interest in the arcane Vatican rules of succession, the putative Illuminati secret society, the likelihood of finding a priest in the Pope's inner circle who would be capable of flying a helicopter...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. European scientists say they have created enough antihydrogen — a type of the mirror-image, antimatter stuff that fictionally powers spaceships on Star Trek — to test a widely held basic model of the universe. While antihydrogen has been made before, the more than 50,000 atoms created at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva are "by far, the most produced," said Jeffrey Hangst, a leader of the ATHENA collaboration, one of two groups of physicists working on antihydrogen at CERN. The quest to understand and manipulate antimatter is one of the most...

Canadian researchers instrumental in game-changing antimatter studyScience fiction is fast approaching science fact as researchers are progressing rapidly toward "bottling" antimatter. In a paper published online today by the journal Nature Physics, the ALPHA experiment at CERN, including key Canadian contributors, reports that it has succeeded in storing antimatter atoms for over 16 minutes. While carrying around bottled antimatter like in the movie Angels and Demons remains fundamentally far-fetched, storing antimatter for long periods of time opens up new vistas for scientists struggling to understand this elusive substance. ALPHA managed to store twice the antihydrogen (the antimatter partner to normal...

What a preposterous world we live in, where developments in invisibility cloak tech are common enough to draw yawns. Fine, you unmovable automatons, how about a time cloak? Is that something you might be interested in? Researchers at Cornell have designed, built and demonstrated the first “cloak” that hides events in time. The process relies on similar methods of distorting electromagnetic fields as invisibility cloaks, but it exploits a time-space duality in electromagnetic theory: diffraction and dispersion of light in space are mathematically equivalent. Scientists have used this theory to create a “time-lens [that] can, for example, magnify or compress...

A new study combining data from ESO's Very Large Telescope and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory has turned up a surprise. Most of the huge black holes in the centres of galaxies in the past 11 billion years were not turned on by mergers between galaxies, as had been previously thought. At the heart of most, if not all, large galaxies lurks a supermassive black hole with a mass millions, or sometimes billions, times greater than that of the Sun. In many galaxies, including our own Milky Way, the central black hole is quiet. But in some galaxies, particularly early...

Cheap solar panels. The most powerful transistors ever. Even the ability to make a fighter jet invisible. Each of these breakthroughs has been announced in the last two weeks. Each relies on one of the most basic elements mined from the earth. And each could line your pockets with cash if you move quickly enough. They all involve a wonder substance called graphene. It’s made from graphite – the same stuff you find in the center of a pencil. Except graphene consists of a single layer of carbon atoms. Let’s hopscotch through these new developments… Researchers in India have discovered...

Robert E Godes explains Brillouin energy and Los Alamos National Lab Situation 4 ShareRobert E Godes has explained what Brillouin Energy is and will be doing with Los Alamos National Lab in the comments to one of my prior articles Brillouin Energy Corporation (BEC) technology uses the hydrogen in ordinary water in a nuclear process that produces no hazardous waste. The process stimulates a Controlled Electron Capture Reaction (CECR) in a catalyst. This process creates low energy neutrons. The neutrons generate heat as they are captured, building heavier elements. BED is using a process with some similarities to Rossi energy...

Charges build up due to exchange of material, study suggests A balloon rubbed against the head can be both a hair-raising and a hair-tearing experience, a new study suggests. Clumps of balloon and hair invisible to the naked eye may break off each object during contact and stick to the other. The existence of this exchange could challenge traditional theories about how static electricity builds up, a process known as contact electrification. “The basic assumptions people have made about contact electrification are wrong,” says Bartosz Grzybowski, a physical chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. He and his colleagues describe...

For popular historians, there is a constant tension between patching up a holey narrative and honoring a commitment to the facts, as rickety as these often are. Perhaps authors of historical fiction have an easier time of it; they use facts as the yeast to grow fully formed characters, convincing dialogue and a credible story line. We are eager partners in these literary deceptions, for the opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder with Renault's Alexander or Graves's Claudius. Nonfiction historians are hogtied; no amount of speculative verbiage can truly fill an absence of facts. Such is the case with Fibonacci...

US particle physicists are inching closer to determining why the Universe exists in its current form, made overwhelmingly of matter. Physics suggests equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been made in the Big Bang. In 2010, researchers at the Tevatron accelerator claimed preliminary results showing a small excess of matter over antimatter as particles decayed. The team has submitted a paper showing those results are on a firmer footing.

It's official: science is the new rock and roll.That's according to the physicist and author of Free Radicals Michael Brooks, who argues that scientists have laboured under the suffocating blanket of sober respectability for too long. It's time to throw off the shackles and celebrate the truly creative endeavour that science really is. After World War II, he argues, science was given a makeover - turned into a brand much like Coca-Cola, Disney or McDonald's. Science had proved its worth in the heat of battle, but while Penicillin and radar had helped us survive it was the awesome destructive power...

Berkeley Lab Scientists Find Unique Luminescence in Tetrapod NanocrystalsObservation of a scientific rule being broken can sometimes lead to new knowledge and important applications. Such would seem to be the case when scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) created artificial molecules of semiconductor nanocrystals and watched them break a fundamental principle of photoluminescence known as “Kasha’s rule.” Named for chemist Michael Kasha, who proposed it in 1950, Kasha’s rule holds that when light is shined on a molecule, the molecule will only emit light (fluorescence or phosphorescence) from its lowest energy excited...

Magnetic microprocessors could use million times less energy than today's silicon chipsFuture computers may rely on magnetic microprocessors that consume the least amount of energy allowed by the laws of physics, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineers. Today's silicon-based microprocessor chips rely on electric currents, or moving electrons, that generate a lot of waste heat. But microprocessors employing nanometer-sized bar magnets – like tiny refrigerator magnets – for memory, logic and switching operations theoretically would require no moving electrons. Such chips would dissipate only 18 millielectron volts of energy per operation at room temperature, the...