Discoveries made in some underwater caves by Texas &M University at Galveston researchers in the Bahamas could provide clues about how ocean life formed on Earth millions of years ago, and perhaps give hints of what types of marine life could be found on distant planets and moons.

Tom Iliffe, professor of marine biology at the Texas A&M-Galveston campus, and graduate student Brett Gonzalez of Trabuco Canyon, Calif., examined three “blue holes” in the Bahamas and found that layers of bacterial microbes exists in all three, but each cave had specialized forms of such life and at different depths, suggesting that microbial life in such caves is continually adapting to changes in available light, water chemistry and food sources. Their work, also done in conjunction with researchers from Penn State University, has been published in Hydrobiologia.

“Blue holes” are so named because from an aerial view, they appear circular in shape with different shades of blue in and around their entrances. There are estimated to be more than 1,000 such caves in the Bahamas, the largest concentration of blue holes in the world.

‘We examined two caves on Abaco Island and one on Andros Island,” Iliffe explains. “One on Abaco, at a depth of about 100 feet, had sheets of bacteria that were attached to the walls of the caves, almost one inch thick. Another cave on the same island had bacteria living within poisonous clouds of hydrogen sulfide at the boundary between fresh and salt water. These caves had different forms of bacteria, with the types and density changing as the light source from above grew dimmer and dimmer.

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Scientists from Bristol University have developed a soap, composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water, that responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution. The soap’s magnetic properties were shown with neutrons at the Institut Laue-Langevin to result from tiny iron-rich clumps that sit within the watery solution. The generation of this property in a fully functional soap could calm concerns over the use of soaps in oil-spill clean ups and revolutionise industrial cleaning products.

Scientists have long been searching for a way to control soaps (or surfactants as they are known in industry) once they are in solution to increase their ability to dissolve oils in water and then remove them from a system. The team at Bristol University have previously worked on soaps sensitive to light, carbon dioxide or changes in pH, temperature or pressure. Their latest breakthrough, reported in Angewandte Chemie, is the world’s first soap sensitive to a magnetic field.

Ionic liquid surfactants, composed mostly of water with some transition metal complexes (heavy metals like iron bound to halides such as bromine or chlorine) have been suggested as potentially controllable by magnets for some time, but it had always been assumed that their metallic centres were too isolated within the solution, preventing the long-range interactions required to be magnetically active.

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London, Jan 17 (IANS) Six suspected unidentified flying objects (UFOs) were reportedly captured on camera in two counties of Britain.

The sightings were reported from Chatham in Kent and Loughton in Essex, around 50 km apart, The Sun reported.
Ernestas Griksas, 21, was clicking a cherry-picker outside his window at his home in Kent. When he looked at the photo, he spotted strange objects in the sky.
“There are two white discs I can’t explain. I’m nowhere near a flightpath. One is slightly fainter as if it is further away or going at a different speed,” he said.

In the second incident, car salesman Josh Cummins spotted four bright objects hovering in pairs as he drove to work in Essex.
“I nearly crashed. I stopped to take this picture with my mobile. It was like the UFOs were surfing the clouds. They were there for 15 seconds then vanished,” Cummins said.

INTEL SOURCE LINK: inewsone.com

By Katie Drummond

Soldiers could one day conduct covert operations in complete secrecy, now that Pentagon-backed physicists have figured out how to mask entire events by distorting light.

A team at Cornell University, with support from Darpa, the Pentagon’s out-there research arm, managed to hide an event for 40 picoseconds (those are trillionths of seconds, if you’re counting). They’ve published their groundbreaking research in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

This is the first time that scientists have succeeded in masking an event, though research teams have in recent years made remarkable strides in cloaking objects. Researchers at the University of Texas, Dallas, last year harnessed the mirage effect to make objects vanish. And in 2010, physicists at the University of St. Andrews made leaps towards using metamaterials to trick human eyes into not seeing what was right in front of them.

Masking an object entails bending light around that object. If the light doesn’t actually hit an object, then that object won’t be visible to the human eye.

Where events are concerned, concealment relies on changing the speed of light. Light that’s emitted from actions, as they happen, is what allows us to see those actions happen. Usually, that light comes in a constant flow. What Cornell researchers did, in simple terms, is tweak that ongoing flow of light — just for a mere iota of time — so that an event could transpire without being observable.

The entire experiment occurred inside a fiber optics cable. Researchers passed a beam of green light down the cable, and had it move through a lens that split the light into two frequencies, one moving slowly and the other faster. As that was happening, they shot a red laser through the beams. Since the laser “shooting” occurred during a teeny, tiny time gap, it was imperceptible.

Sure, the team’s got a ways to go before they’re able to mask 30 seconds of action, let alone several minutes. But the research certainly opens up new possibilities. For one, masking super-quick events, like those that occur with data transmission, could help conceal covert computer operations.

In the words of Nature editors, the research marks “a significant step towards full spatio-temporal cloaking.” But it could be decades before military personnel will basically be able to zap history, as it happens: According to Cornell scientists, it’d take a machine 18,600 miles long to produce a time mask that lasts a single second.

INTEL SOURCE LINK: Wired.com

From the Associated PressJanuary 15, 2012, 6:58 a.m.

By Adam Mann

Just 20 years ago, astronomers had no direct evidence that planets orbited other stars. Now, researchers estimate the Milky Way galaxy contains a huge number of planets, with Earth-sized worlds vastly outnumbering the rest.

“We find that, on average, every star has a planet, and since there are at least 100 billion stars, there are at least 100 billion planets,” said astronomer Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, who co-authored the new study, appearing Jan. 11 in Nature.

Sahu and his team calculated this number by searching for planets using a technique called gravitational microlensing. The method works because, according to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, a massive object bends the fabric of space-time.

Though a planet’s mass is relatively small, it is enough to curve space-time and create a “lens.” An exoplanet bends light as it passes in front of its parent star, causing a slight brightening of the star’s light.

Microlensing allows astronomers to look at a much larger sample of stars for exoplanets. Unlike other detection methods, such as looking for the slight wobble a planet exerts on its parent star, microlensing can discover planets with many different masses and distances from their star.

The team looked at roughly 30 different microlensing events and found that extrasolar planets caused three of them. Because microlensing observations are known to miss a certain percentage of planets, the researchers could use statistical analysis to get the true number of exoplanets in the galaxy.

“We think about one-sixth of stars should have a Jupiter-like planet, half have a Neptune-sized planet, and two-thirds should have an Earth,” said Sahu.

INTEL SOURCE LINK: wired.com