A new potentially life-bearing “super-Earth” has been discovered orbiting a relatively nearby star. Described as the “best candidate” for supporting liquid water — and therefore life — the planet (GJ 667Cc) is believed to be about 4.5 times the size of Earth. The parent star (GJ 667C) is 22 light years away, and this is the second potentially Earth-like rock scientists have discovered orbiting the M-class dwarf. With a 28.15 day cycle, it’s calculated to receive 90 percent as much light as Earth, and much of that is infrared (meaning the actual energy delivered is about equal) — crucially hinting at similar temperatures and favourable conditions. Not enough is known about the atmosphere right now to fully nail the water prospects, but it’s still our best hope of discovering life as we (don’t) know it yet.

SOURCE via Scientific American

We know it’s cliche to say something sounds like science fiction, but this is seriously one of the more far out there concepts we’ve ever heard. Researchers from UT Arlington and Northwestern University are working with surgeons from the Brooke Army Medical Center on a project called Biomask. The idea is to skip surgery and have patients wear a mask, layered with sensors, actuators and medicine delivery tools for several months while their face slowly regenerates.

The outside of the medical miracle would be a hard shell to protect the electronics and the injured person’s healing face. Underneath, a second layer would monitor tissue growth, watch for infections and feed data back to doctors. An on board system would be able to dynamically alter the treatment, sending antibiotics or stem cells where they’re needed.

The team actually hope to turn this facial reconstruction mask into a reality by 2017, a goal that we’ll diplomatically call optimistic.

SOURCE via Wired

NASA released dramatic new findings from the planet-scouting Kepler spacecraft project Thursday. Looks like the universe is way, way more crowded than we had realized.

The Space Administration announced Thursday that the Kepler Spacecraft has discovered 26 new exoplanets in 11 systems. This nearly doubles the number of confirmed exoplanets, bringing the tally to 60, and upping the number of known extra-solar star systems to 16. Another 2,300 celestial candidates are awaiting confirmation of their planet-ness. And, according to Kepler program scientist Doug Hudgins, all of these bodies were discovered, “in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist.” Not a bad haul for such a small swath of space.

The new planets range in size from 1.5-times the size of Earth to larger than Jupiter. You can put away your “Take Me to Your Leader” t-shirts, though—every one of the new 26 planets orbits its star far more closely than Venus does; placing them well out of the habitable zone needed to sustain life and liquid water.

SOURCE via The Register

Rather than trying to shrink current data storage technologies further, IBM took the opposite approach and designed a new system from the ground up, building it individual atoms. The new storage could lead to 100-fold increases in chip densities. Take that, Moore’s Law.

Researchers at IBM, in conjunction with the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science, used a scanning tunneling microscope to line up iron atoms that comprise the magnetic storage system. They found that twelve iron atoms, assembled in two rows of six, was the minimum number necessary to stably hold a single bit of information. Eight pairs of rows, obviously, are needed to hold a byte. Conventional hard drives require more than a million atoms per bit, topping a half billion per byte.

Unfortunately researchers aren’t holding their breath waiting for this technology to come to market. Its production would require an entirely new fabrication process and the huge capital outlay for equipment and facilities that comes with it. The prototype itself only existed in an extremely low-temperature environment and data had to be written with a scanning tunneling microscope.

The situation wasn’t a complete wash, however. IBM identified a type of magnetism that could prove extremely useful in future data storage products. Known as antiferromagnetism, it’s the inverse of the force what keeps your kids art on the fridge. Conventional magnetism doesn’t work well on the atomic scale as neighboring magnets would interfere with one another. Antiferromagnetism, on the other hand, inhibits this interaction and allows researchers to build much smaller structures.

SOURCE via Popular Science

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin said that a new form of graphene could essentially prevent laptops and other electronics from overheating and enable chip companies and device manufacturers to pack much more powerful chips into mobile devices.

Graphene, an atom-thick layer of carbon, typically consists of 98.9 percent 12C (carbon) and 1.1 percent 13C, but the graphene created by the University of Texas at Austin scientists represents 99.9 percent 12C and isotopically pure carbon. In their experiments, the material was 60 percent more effective at managing and transferring heat than normal graphene, the scientists said.

“This demonstration brings graphene a step closer to being used as a conductor for managing heat in a variety of devices. The potential of this material, and its promise for the electronic industry, is very exciting,” said Rodney Ruoff, a physical chemist at the University’s Cockrell School.

“Because self-heating of fast and densely packed devices deteriorates their performance, graphene’s ability to conduct heat well will be very helpful in improving them,” added Alexander Balandin, a professor of Electrical Engineering, chair of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California Riverside and a corresponding author of the research paper published in the journal Nature Materials.

“Initially, graphene would likely be used in some niche applications, such as thermal interface materials for chip packaging or transparent electrodes in photovoltaic solar cells or flexible displays,” he continued. “But, in a few years, the uses of graphene will be diverse, broad and far-reaching because the excellent heat conduction properties of this material are beneficial for all its proposed electronic applications.”

SOURCE via Eureka

There may have been a time when things such as highly intelligent robots, self-healing electronics, and self-healing highly intelligent human killing robots were reserved for the science fiction genre of books and movies, but nowadays it seems like we can expect any science fiction technology to come to life.

In a report published last week, University of Illinois engineers were able to create a method in which electronics with damaged circuits would be able to automatically repair themselves. The best part of it is that the entire process takes place in a matter of seconds. The self-healing technology involves creating circuits with gold lining and a layer of microcapsules.

If a circuit is damaged or broken, most likely due to temperature issues or scratching, the microcapsules automatically disperse themselves into the cracks, filling the gap and restoring conductivity to the circuit. The new self-healing technology could lead to more durable and longer lasting electronics, which is always a good thing, unless that electronic happens to be the T-1000.

SOURCE via Popsci

Automakers are being pinched to increase safety and improve fuel efficiency, but those two goals often work against each other. That could change thanks to a material that is 99.99-percent air.

Ward’s Automotive reports that the California Institute of Technology, HRL Laboratories and the University of California-Irvine have combined to develop a micro-lattice material that is said to be 100 times lighter than Styrofoam and strong like steel. We’d call this material paper-thin, but the truth is even more impressive: the material is comprised of tiny woven tubes that are 1,000 times thinner than a human hair.

The U.S. Department of Defense is obviously interested in this material for top-secret projects like next-generation aircraft, but the micro-lattice is also of great interest to the auto industry. The material could greatly reduce weight and drag, which would in turn significantly increase efficiency. At the same time, the material can reportedly almost completely recover after stress of up to 50 percent and has impressive energy absorbing characteristics. That means the material could also be a safety asset, which is good news for automakers and consumers.

Cal Tech Professor Julia Greer adds that the material could ultimately replace any non heavy-steel component that isn’t already light in weight. A material with less air would reportedly be the next step in the evolution of lightweight metals, and the scientists are working on a nano-lattice that can do just that.

We don’t know much about these micro and nano materials, but we’re guessing it will be a while before the materials are inexpensive enough for automotive applications. But if the U.S. government and airplane manufactures can jump aboard and bring down the manufacturing costs, we could see this type of material helping automakers achieve those 50+ mile per gallon fuel economy standards. For more information and a demonstration of the micro-lattice’s properties, check out the videos after the jump.

Digitizing your analog archives? Vinyl to CD / MP3 / iPod turntables might do well enough for your old 45s, but the folks at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory prefer to listen to their old beats by taking pictures of them. More specifically, restoration specialists are using a system called IRENE/3D to snap high resolution images of damaged media. The cracked discs — often made of wax on brass or composition board — are then repaired digitally, letting researchers play the digitized discs with an emulated stylus. So far, the team has recovered a handful of 125 year old recordings from a team in Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta laboratory. The all-digital system gives researchers a hands-off way to recover audio from relic recordings without running the risk of damaging them in the process — and no, they probably won’t let you use it to listen to that beat up copy of the White Album you’ve had in your closet since eighth grade. Hit the source link to hear what they’ve recovered.

SOURCE via Berkeley Lab

Researchers at Purdue University found that arrays of plasmonic nanoantennas can be used to manipulate the phase, a wave shape, of light as it propagates. The scientists now believe that they have found a path that could enable more powerful microscopes, telecommunications and computers. Specifically, the discovery is expected to have effects on technologies for “steering and shaping laser beams for military and communications applications, nanocircuits for computers that use light to process information, and new types of powerful lenses for microscopes.”

The research builds on a previous modification how scientists have described how light reflects and refracts or bends while passing from one material into another, which is referred to as Snell’s law. Each material has its own refraction index and all natural materials show positive refraction indexes. However, Purdue’s nanoantennas can change the refraction and even achieve negative angles.

“Importantly, such dramatic deviation from the conventional Snell’s law governing reflection and refraction occurs when light passes through structures that are actually much thinner than the width of the light’s wavelengths, which is not possible using natural materials,” said Vladimir Shalaev, scientific director of nanophotonics at Purdue’s Birck Nanotechnology Center. “Also, not only the bending effect, refraction, but also the reflection of light can be dramatically modified by the antenna arrays on the interface, as the experiments showed.”

According to the scientists, the nanoantennas feature V-shaped structures that are made of gold and are placed on top of a silicon layer. The antennas are 40 nm wide. Shalaev said that they are able to transmit light through an ultrathin “plasmonic nanoantenna layer” that is about 50 times smaller than the wavelength of light it is transmitting. “This ultrathin layer of plasmonic nanoantennas makes the phase of light change strongly and abruptly, causing light to change its propagation direction, as required by the momentum conservation for light passing through the interface between materials,” Shalaev said.

SOURCE via Purdue University

Much like the Hubble Telescope before it, the Kepler Spacecraft Observatory has turned out to be an astonishing scientific resource. It’s already been established that Kepler is ridiculously adept at locating extrasolar planets, with a possible 99% success rate that defies some of the most optimistic early estimates. Among those recent planetary discoveries is the confirmation of an Earth-like world currently called Kepler 22b, a so-called ‘super earth’ twice the size of our own. As fantastic a discovery as that was, 22b is officially old news as of today, thanks to NASA’s announcement that the Kepler Observatory has nabbed an even more remarkable discovery: not one, but two confirmed Earth-sized planets.

Unlike Kepler 22b, whose large size guarantees a high-gravity environment unsuitable for humans, the two latest discoveries, both in the Kepler 20 star system, are almost the same size as our own lovely planet. Kepler 20E has a radius approximately .87 times the size of earth, just slightly smaller than Venus. Kepler 20F (that images is an artist’s conception) is just barely larger, measuring 1.03 times Earth’s girth. Both planets are thought to be of terrestrial (rocky) composition with masses similar to Earth’s, making them perfect fits for bodies conditioned over millions of years of evolution to Earth standard G.

There’s just one catch. Though Kepler 20 is similar to our own sun, none of its planets are remotely habitable. The Kepler 20 star system has a total of 5-detected planets, all of which orbit at a distance that puts them within the orbit of Mercury around our own sun. That means extremely fast orbits and correspondingly horrid surface temperatures; Kepler 20F orbits Kepler 20 every 19 (earth) days and enjoys a mercury-esque 800 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s positively chilly compared to Kepler 20E’s incomprehensibly hot 1400 degrees and incredible 6.1 day orbit. So don’t pack your astro-vacation gear just yet.

Even though we have yet to find another place to call home, it has now been proved we have the ability. Thus the Kepler mission can consider itself justified. Now if we could only figure out how to actually reach any of the planets we discover…

SOURCE via CNN