‘Magnetic electricity’ discovered

Researchers have discovered a magnetic equivalent to electricity: single magnetic charges that can behave and interact like electrical ones.

The work is the first to make use of the magnetic monopoles that exist in special crystals known as spin ice.

Writing in Nature journal, a team showed that monopoles gather to form a “magnetic current” like electricity.

The phenomenon, dubbed “magnetricity”, could be used in magnetic storage or in computing.

Magnetic monopoles were first predicted to exist over a century ago, as a perfect analogue to electric charges.

Although there are protons and electrons with net positive and negative electric charges, there were no particles in existence which carry magnetic charges. Rather, every magnet has a “north” and “south” pole.
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Paperweight

A lightweight battery that could be used to identify and track objects

MANY an engineer has dreamed of making a battery as light, thin and flexible as paper. Such a device would dramatically trim the weight and dimensions of whatever it powered. Now Albert Mihranyan of Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues have built a battery that is, in essence, made of paper. It is lightweight and slim, and although still unsuitable for everyday use, could be employed to trace products supplied to shops or baggage passing through airports.

Batteries work by electrochemistry. Each contains two electrodes (an anode and a cathode) immersed in an electrolyte. A lithium-ion battery, the sort that powers mobile phones and laptop computers, typically has an anode made of carbon, a cathode made of lithium cobalt oxide and an electrolyte of a lithium salt in an organic solvent. When the battery is being charged, electrons are pumped into the cathode. That forces lithium ions to move away from it and into the anode. When the battery is being used, drawing the current pulls the lithium ions out of the anode and back to the cathode.
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Wi-fi ‘to get a whole lot easier’

The world of wi-fi is to become a whole lot easier thanks to a major technology upgrade, says an industry group.

The Wi-Fi Alliance said it would soon finish work on a new specification called Wi-Fi Direct.

It will let wi-fi devices like phones and laptops connect to one another without joining a traditional network.

The Wi-Fi Alliance – whose members include Intel, Apple and Cisco – hopes devices with the new technology will be on the market by the middle of 2010.

Owners of devices without Wi-Fi Direct will be able to upgrade through a software download, says the technology consortium.

The Wi-Fi Alliance’s marketing director, Kelly Davis-Felner, told BBC News: “This is going to be a quick and convenient way to use wi-fi in future to print, synch, share and display.

“The consumer is going to experience this as a very easy-to-use mechanism that will be quite seamless.”
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Winning ways

Prizes for optical fibres, charge-coupled devices, ribosomes and telomeres

HOW do you look through a window that is 100km thick? That, in essence, was the question facing Charles Kao in 1966. For working out the answer, Dr Kao has been awarded part of this year’s Nobel prize for physics. Besides being thick, the window was narrow: it was an optical fibre. Dr Kao’s prize is a belated recognition of his contribution to the telecommunications revolution of the past few decades. But better late than never.

The rest of the physics prize goes almost as belatedly to Willard Boyle and George Smith who, in 1969, ushered the charge-coupled device (CCD) into being, paving the way for the digital camera. The chemistry prize went to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath for working out the structure of ribosomes—the parts of living cells that translate genetic information into proteins. And the physiology prize went to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for their work on telomeres, the DNA caps that stop the ends of chromosomes either unravelling or sticking to one another.
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What happened to global warming?

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man’s influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.
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How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.
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US spacecraft set for Moon crash

Nasa is set to crash two unmanned spacecraft into the Moon in a bid to detect the presence of water-ice.

A 2,200kg rocket stage will be first to collide, hurling debris high above the lunar surface.

A second spacecraft packed with science instruments will analyse the contents of this dusty cloud before meeting a similar fate.

The identification of water-ice in the impact plume would be a major discovery, scientists say.

Not least because a supply of water on the Moon would be a vital resource for future human exploration.

The existence of water-ice in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles had previously been postulated by scientists, but never confirmed.
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Nobel Prize for chemistry of life

The 2009 chemistry Nobel Prize has been awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath.

The prize is awarded for the study of the structure and function of the ribosome – the cell’s protein factory.

The ribosome translates genetic code into proteins – which are the building blocks of all living organisms.

It is also the main target of new antibiotics, which combat bacterial strains that have developed resistance to traditional antibiotic drugs.

These new drugs work by blocking the function of ribosomes in bacterial cells, preventing them from making the proteins they need to survive.
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Nobel honours ‘masters of light’

Three scientists who corralled light to transform our communications systems share this year’s physics Nobel Prize.

Briton Charles Kao is lauded for his work in helping to develop fibre optic cables, the slender threads of glass that carry phone and net data as light.

Willard Boyle and George Smith, both North Americans, are recognised for their part in the invention of the charge-coupled device, or CCD.

This light detector initiated the digital camera revolution.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which administers the prize, said half of the award would go to Kao, who was born in Shanghai, China, in 1933 and holds UK-US citizenship.

It was his insight while working in Britain in the 1960s, said the academy, which allowed researchers to take fibre optics to a new level – to enable these thin cables to transmit light over much longer distances than had previously been possible.
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NASA: There is water in lunar soil

(CNN) — There is more water on the moon in more locations than originally thought, a discovery that may bolster NASA’s long-held goal of setting up an outpost there, a researcher said Thursday.

One ton of the moon’s surface — in which the water’s ingredients are held — could yield as much as 32 ounces, or one quart, of water, according to three reports from research teams who studied data from three spacecrafts.

Although that amount isn’t large, said geological sciences professor Jack Mustard, the findings show “there are ways you could convert these amounts of water into higher amounts” that could support human activity.

The water was discovered in rocky environments and in craters, Mustard said.
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