|  Tractor beams of science fiction becoming a reality  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The tractor beam, a staple of science fiction including "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" that is employed to grab spaceships and other things remotely, is entering the realm of reality. Researchers on Tuesday said they have developed a tractor beam that uses high-amplitude sound waves to levitate, move and rotate small objects without making contact with them. "As a mechanical wave, sound can exert significant forces on objects.
| Read More » Private Spaceflight Industry Aims to Shake Off a Rough Year  | Over the past 12 months, robotic resupply missions to the International Space Station (ISS) launched by both Orbital ATK and SpaceX failed, and Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo broke apart during a test flight, killing the vehicle's co-pilot and seriously wounding its pilot. Orbital ATK and SpaceX plan to be flying again before the year is out, for example, and Virgin Galactic is nearly finished building SpaceShipTwo number two.
| Read More » Falling Space Junk Will Burn Up In Earth's Atmosphere Next Month  | A piece of space junk will fall back to Earth next month, giving researchers a chance to study how incoming objects behave when they hit the planet's atmosphere. The object, which is known as WT1190F, is expected to enter Earth's atmosphere on Nov. 13 above the Indian Ocean, about 62 miles (100 kilometers) south of Sri Lanka. "The object is quite small, at most a couple of meters in diameter, and a significant fraction if not all of it can be expected to completely burn up in the atmosphere," Tim Flohrer, of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Space Debris Office at the European Space Operations Center in Germany, said in a statement.
| Read More » 'Let's Go Mets!' Astronaut Mike Massimino Roots for His Home Team  | Attention, sports fans! Game 1 of the 2015 World Series between the New York Mets and the Kansas City Royals launches tonight (Oct. 27), and not even astronauts are immune to baseball fever. "The Mets are about to begin the World Series and I want to wish them the best of luck," Massimino says in the 21-second video.
| Read More » Real-Life 'Tractor Beam' Can Levitate Objects Using Sound Waves  | It may seem straight out of "Star Trek," but it's real: Scientists have created a sonic "tractor beam" that can pull, push and pirouette objects that levitate in thin air. The sonic tractor beam relies on a precisely timed sequence of sound waves that create a region of low pressure that traps tiny objects that can then be manipulated solely by sound waves, the scientists said in a new study. Though the new demonstration was just a proof of concept, the same technique could be adapted to remotely manipulate cells inside the human body or target the release of medicine locked in acoustically activated drug capsules, said study co-author Bruce Drinkwater, a mechanical engineer at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.
| Read More » Cutting Sugar Made Obese Kids Healthier in 10 Days There can be no more dancing around the fact that, for children, consuming added sugar contributes to a litany of chronic diseases, particularly obesity, Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, scientists concluded in new research published today (Oct. 27). In the study, researchers closely monitored 43 obese children and found that reducing the consumption of added sugar — even while maintaining the same number of calories, and the same amount of non-sugary junk food such as potato chips — led to a dramatic improvement in a cluster of health measures in just 10 days. The kids lowered their cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar and lost a little weight, too, despite no change in their calorie intake or physical activity. Read More » Leading Causes of Death in the US: What's Changed Since 1969? Five of the six top causes of death in America — including stroke, cancer and diabetes — now have lower death rates than they have in past years, according to a new report. To investigate the deadliest conditions in the United States, researchers pulled national mortality data from death certificates, looking at the period from 1969 to 2013. Deaths from stroke had the most substantial decrease, falling 77 percent (from 156 deaths per 100,000 people to 36 deaths per 100,000 people) during the study period, and heart disease was close behind, down by about two-thirds (from 520 deaths per 100,000 people to 169 deaths per 100,000 people), the researchers found. Read More » Tractor beams of science fiction becoming a reality  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The tractor beam, a staple of science fiction including "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" that is employed to grab spaceships and other things remotely, is entering the realm of reality. Researchers on Tuesday said they have developed a tractor beam that uses high-amplitude sound waves to levitate, move and rotate small objects without making contact with them. "As a mechanical wave, sound can exert significant forces on objects.
| Read More » NASA Astronauts Making Spacewalk Debut at Space Station Today: Watch Live  | American astronauts Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren plan to spend nearly six-and-a-half hours working outside the International Space Station during their spacewalk, which will be dedicated to "station upgrades and maintenance tasks," according to NASA. Both Kelly and Lindgren have said they are excited for today's spacewalk, which will include (among other tasks) the installation of a protective cover on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a $2 billion particle physics detector that has been performing science on the station's exterior since 2011.
| Read More » Einstein Is Right About General Relativity — Again  | Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity has been proven right again — and this time, physicists have pinned down just how precise it is: Any deviations from his theory of general relativity are so small that they would change calculations by just one part in 10,000 to one part in 100,000. Time after time, experiments have proved that Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes the way gravity behaves, especially when dealing with high speeds and large masses. In the new study, physicists looked at gobs of data on planetary orbits to look for tiny anomalies that couldn't be explained by either Isaac Newton's theory of gravity — in which gravity is a force between objects that depends on their masses — or Einstein's general relativity theory, which says gravity is a warping of space-time itself.
| Read More » Gem-Filled Warrior's Tomb Discovered in Ancient Greek City  | Archaeologists who thought they were excavating the site of an ancient house in Greece recently uncovered something much more rare: a wealthy Bronze Age warrior's tomb, chock-full of precious metals and colorful gemstones. The tomb, which dates back some 3,500 years to 1500 B.C., was found by an international group of researchers led by archaeologists from the University of Cincinnati. Gold cups and jewelry, as well as hundreds of beads made from precious stones like amethyst and jasper, also surrounded the remains of the deceased Mycenaean warrior, who once lived near what is now the city of Pylos, on the southwest coast of Greece.
| Read More » Record-Breaking 408 Earthquakes Hit Bay Area City Over Past 2 Weeks  | A whopping 408 earthquakes have hit San Ramon, California, in the past two weeks, including 11 in one 24-hour stretch. This record-breaking earthquake swarm is nothing to fear, however, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Periods of tectonic unrest are common in the area and probably don't presage a larger quake, the USGS said.
| Read More » What Would an Alien Megastructure Look Like? Sci-Fi Authors Weigh In  | Researchers aren't sure what's going on, and they have posited that some sort of light-blocking "alien megastructure" is a possible — though unlikely — explanation. "We are the most skeptical people on the planet," Robert J. Sawyer, a Canadian sci-fi writer who regularly discusses alien life in his novels, told Space.com. Sawyer added that journalists, by contrast, often pump up the news because they "smell front page." And while Sawyer supports the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) because it is so cheap to listen for radio signals, he said it's meaningful that, in five decades of searching, nothing has come up so far.
| Read More » For 'The Ordinary Spaceman' Clayton Anderson, Astronaut Life Is Anything But  | When Clayton Anderson began to write about his 30-year NASA career, he was warned that astronaut memoirs are "a dime a dozen, and all the same." But that didn't deter him — and his new book is far from an "ordinary" space narrative. In "The Ordinary Spaceman: From Boyhood Dreams to Astronaut" (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), Anderson traces his childhood, career, 15 applications to the astronaut training program and, finally, his training and two flights to space (one of which was a long-duration flight), Anderson covers his daily activities and unusual experiences with detailed and humorous observations. In a recent interview, Space.com caught up with Anderson to hear more about his new memoir, the challenges of being an astronaut and unusual space pastimes.
| Read More » 290-Million-Year-Old Creature Could Sprout New Limbs  | If an ancient amphibian lost a limb or a tail, it could simply sprout a new one, according to researchers who found fossil evidence of limb regeneration dating back 290 million years. The finding shows that some Carboniferous and Permian period animals had regenerative abilities a full 80 million years before salamanders, one of the few modern-day animal groups that can fully regenerate their limbs and tail, existed in the fossil record. The fact that other tetrapods — a group comprised of four-legged vertebrates, including amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds — had regenerative abilities suggests there are multiple ways to regrow limbs, said study lead researcher Nadia Fröbisch, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in Berlin.
| Read More » Google Can Help You Find the Perfect Halloween Costume  | Not sure what to be for Halloween? Google may be able to help. A new Google Trends tool shows you what costumes are popular right now in your area and around the country, so you can be sure to wear something more original than, say, a Stormtrooper costume to this weekend's festivities.
| Read More » DIY Halloween Costumes: 7 Geeky Getups for Any Party  | With Halloween less than a week away, science nerds everywhere are scrambling to put the finishing touches on their costumes. A Halloween costume depicting dark matter can pretty much look however you want it to look, because no one knows what dark matter really is. Adorn yourself in these articles of clothing, and then slink around the party, saying mysterious things like, "Are my axions showing?" Also, be sure to do a lot of unpredictable things, like grab people and hold them in one place (explain that dark matter was once believed to be a sort of "glue" that held galaxies in place) and then push them away (explain that astronomers are no longer sure that dark matter actually serves as an anchor for anything).
| Read More » Dog robot copes with tough terrain By Jim Drury Swiss researchers have built an electrically actuated, walking, climbing, running four-legged robot that can handle difficult terrain. The 'dog' robot is called StarlETH - its name pronounced 'Starlet' and featuring the acronym for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH). According to lead researcher Marco Hutter, "it's meant to be a robot that can climb over obstacles, so being very versatile. Read More » Watch This Amazing World View Test Flight for Balloon-Based Space Tourism  | Arizona-based World View Enterprises, which aims to loft paying customers to the stratosphere beneath a giant balloon, launched an uncrewed test flight Saturday (Oct. 26). "This test flight is symbolic of a major step towards a new era of accessible space travel for us all," World View CEO and co-founder Jane Poynter said in a statement. Saturday's trial demonstrated that World View's system can lift off gently, successfully transition from balloon floating to aerodynamic parafoil flight at high altitudes, and descend and land smoothly, company representatives said.
| Read More » New Disk of Young Stars Found in Milky Way  | A group of young stars has been caught loitering near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a region previously thought to be dominated by a more mature population. Astronomers say the stars form a disk (previously unknown to scientists) that passes through the outer part of the dusty, peanut-shaped bulge at the galactic center. The thick forest of dust located at the Milky Way's galactic center is a place where even the bright flame of a burning star can be nearly impossible for astronomers to see.
| Read More » Spacewalkers prep station for space taxi parking spots By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - Two U.S. astronauts wrapped up nearly seven hours of electrical work and maintenance chores outside the International Space Station on Wednesday, part of an ongoing upgrade to prepare the outpost for new commercial space taxis. Station commander Scott Kelly and flight engineer Kjell Lindgren left the station's airlock around 8:30 a.m. Eastern time (1230 GMT), the first spacewalk for both astronauts. NASA had hoped to have the station outfitted with two new berthing slips before the end of the year so that commercial space taxis under development by Boeing and privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, would have places to park. Read More » | |
