Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Audacious space heist aims to bring home bits of mysterious martian moon (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In 1543, Portuguese merchants caught in stormy winds ran aground on Tanegashima, a verdant island enveloped by crystal-blue waters just south of the Japanese mainland. To those living there, these sailors—the first Europeans known to set foot in Japan—were nothing short of aliens from a distant land, bringing with them strange customs, an unfamiliar language, and new technology.

Nearly 5 centuries later, the island is once again serving as a bridge to an alien world. On 20 October, a rocket will blast off from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA’s) Tanegashima Space Center, flinging a spacecraft the size of a car to Mars. When it arrives, it’ll swoop around the planet before landing on a lumpy island floating above it. And that’s when the real drama begins.

We live in an age of space heists. In recent years, the United States and Japan have retrieved material from several asteroids with smash-and-grab spacecraft. After reaching an asteroid this summer, China is set to return samples from it next year, and it recently conducted the first sample return from the far side of the Moon.

But Japan’s $350 million Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is going to do something even more audacious: Fly to Phobos (ancient Greek for “fear”), one of the two small, battered moons of Mars, and land on the roughly Manhattan-size body not once, but twice. Using two novel extractors, MMX will gather several tablespoons’ worth of material and return the treasure to Earth in 2031. “Phobos will be the second best known moon in the Solar System,” says Matija Cúk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute.

Those precious few grams of material could resolve the mystery of Phobos’s origin—and, potentially, that of its diminutive partner, Deimos (“dread”). Scientists are split on whether the moons are captured asteroids or the consolidated remnants of material thrown up by a long-ago martian impact. But regardless of their genesis, MMX researchers say it’s likely they have since picked up a dusting of material blasted off Mars itself. “This is not going to be just a Phobos sample return mission,” says Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built one of MMX’s sample extractors. “It’s going to be Phobos and Mars.”

Submission + - The world will end next month, a 1960 paper in Science predicted (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: “A physicist has put a definite date on Doomsday,” The New York Times wrote on 4 November 1960. “He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D. On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself.”

The newspaper was right—but the prediction was wrong. That week, Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues published a paper in Science with the stunningly succinct title “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026.”

The work was based on a simple observation: The time it took for the human population to double in size kept getting shorter. Using population estimates from about 400 B.C.E. until 1958 C.E., the authors—all from the department of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—came up with an equation that best described the trend. If things continued the way they were going, the number of humans on Earth would rise faster and faster, reaching more than 25 billion by 2020.

The researchers didn’t calculate when humanity would run out of food, land, or energy. They just concluded that at some point this year, the equation ceased to give meaningful results because the predicted population shot toward infinity. That was their doomsday. “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve,” they wrote. “They will be squeezed to death.”

Comment Re:Wake me when they actually shift (Score 2) 91

The bigger you are, the harder it is to turn the ship in an emergency. See Titanic.

At some point the inertia of change isn't worth it, as you suggested. It is possible, but is it worth it?

The last way to look at this is a way to start the process of diversifying our Tech holdings. Windows, Office, Adobe, VMWare etc. But here is my take, STEAM is showing the way out. We're not there yet, but the tide appears to be turning (to keep the nautical terms going).

Submission + - Nazi Germany had no hope of making an atomic bomb, uranium cubes reveal (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: One morning in August 2013, Timothy Koeth was out for a jog on the University of Maryland (UMD) campus in College Park when the university’s radiation safety officer called and asked to see him urgently. The materials scientist, “all sweaty and out of breath,” he recalls, met the officer in a parking lot, where she opened her car’s trunk and produced a lunch bag. Inside, nestled in paper towels, was a gray cube, 5 centimeters wide and startlingly dense.

“She says, ‘Do you know what this is?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but do you know what this is?’”

Confirming Koeth’s suspicions was a handwritten note accompanying the cube: “Taken from the reactor that [Adolf] Hitler tried to build.” The officer handed it over and wished him a happy birthday. “She knew my birthday was in a few days,” he says.

The safety officer had recovered the cube of Nazi uranium from the drawer of a deceased geology faculty member whose office was being cleared out, Koeth says. That unexpected gift helped propel an investigation that would overturn Koeth’s own understanding of Germany’s nuclear effort during World War II. He and colleagues once thought the Germans could have built a working nuclear reactor—a step toward an atomic bomb—by pooling their scattered supplies. Now, measurements of surviving uranium cubes, archival research, and computer simulations indicate that even Germany’s combined stocks would have been insufficient.

The study, published this week in PNAS Nexus, challenges a postwar claim by Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who led Germany’s final reactor experiment, B8. He suggested a small addition of uranium would have allowed it to sustain a nuclear chain reaction.

A working reactor could have produced plutonium, one option for making a bomb. For wartime Germany, it was the only realistic path, says Malte Göttsche, a physicist at TU Darmstadt and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. German scientists investigated the alternative—uranium enrichment—but “Germany’s efforts remained limited to some research,” he says. B8’s immediate goal was simply to sustain a chain reaction; success would have left Germany far from producing enough plutonium for a weapon.

Submission + - Five physics breakthroughs that should have won a Nobel Prize—but didn't (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Next week, the Nobel Prizes will raise a handful of scientists to global, if fleeting, fame. Since the Nobels were first presented in 1901, the physics prize has honored advances ranging from the discovery of the electron and the development of quantum mechanics to the detection of gravitational waves and the modeling of climate change. There’s no doubt the prize has identified momentous achievements.

Still, when looking back on the physics awards, it’s clear they have missed some of the most important discoveries in the field. In fact, for various reasons, several foundational concepts in modern physics were never honored with a Nobel. Here is a list of five seminal developments in physics that did not earn a Nobel Prize—at least, not yet—in increasing order of obviousness.

This list of missed Nobels isn’t comprehensive. “You could probably come up with 100 of these,” says Michael Norman, a condensed matter physicist at Argonne National Laboratory. The list also doesn’t address snubs in which the Nobel Committee omitted a key scientist from an award—such as the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which honored Otto Hahn for the discovery of nuclear fission, but left out Lise Meitner, who explained how it works.

Making a list of missed Nobel Prizes may be foolhardy, but as Nobel laureate Albert Einstein once wrote: “Everybody has to sacrifice at the altar of stupidity from time to time.”

Slashdot Top Deals

try again

Close