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Submission + - Scientists Synthesized Metallic Nitrogen (eurekalert.org)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: A team of scientists from China, US, and UK successfully turned nitrogen, the dominant gas in Earth's atmosphere, into a metallic fluid when subjected to the extreme pressure and temperature conditions found deep inside the Earth and other planets. Their findings are published by Nature Communications . "Our findings could inform the efforts to create forms of energetic nitrogen polymers as well as superconducting, metallic states of a sister diatomic molecule, hydrogen or H2, which could revolutionize the energy sector if reliably synthesized,” according to team member Nicholas Holtgrewe. The project was funded by by the (US) National Science Foundation, the (US) Army Research Office, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chinese Academy of Science, the British Council Researcher Links Programme, and other sources.

Submission + - NASA Provides Details of Unique Method for 3d Printing on Other Planets (3dprint.com)

Submitted by ErnieKey
ErnieKey writes: A major application of 3d printing that could revolutionize space travel, is that of ultimately using 3d printers to create structures on non-terrestrial bodies like the moon, other planets, and even asteroids. Researchers from NASA's Kennedy Space Center have been working to develop solutions to materials issues, and recently presented initial findings on the potential for using in-situ materials like basalt for 3D printing. Their innovative method is based on only using in-situ supplies, and not materials that need to be brought into space.

Submission + - NASA's $349 Million Empty Tower (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a scathing indictment of the NASA bureaucracy, the Washington Post documents a $349 million project to construct a laboratory tower that was closed as soon as it was finished. "[The tower was] designed to test a new rocket engine in a chamber that mimicked the vacuum of space. ... As soon as the work was done, it shut the tower down. The project was officially 'mothballed' — closed up and left empty — without ever being used. ... The reason for the shutdown: The new tower — called the A-3 test stand — was useless. Just as expected. The rocket program it was designed for had been canceled in 2010. ... The result was that NASA spent four more years building something it didn’t need. Now, the agency will spend about $700,000 a year to maintain it in disuse. ... Jerked from one mission to another, NASA lost its sense that any mission was truly urgent. It began to absorb the vices of less-glamorous bureaucracies: Officials tended to let projects run over time and budget. Its congressional overseers tended to view NASA first as a means to deliver pork back home, and second as a means to deliver Americans into space. In Mississippi, NASA built a monument to its own institutional drift."
Science

Submission + - Stem Cells Safe for Rare Brain Disorder (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Four young boys with a rare, fatal brain condition have made it through a dangerous ordeal. Scientists have safely transplanted human neural stem cells into their brains. Twelve months after the surgeries, the boys have more myelin—a fatty insulating protein that coats nerve fibers and speeds up electric signals between neurons—and show improved brain function, a new study in Science Translational Medicine reports. The preliminary trial paves the way for future research into potential stem cell treatments for the disorder, which overlaps with more common diseases such as Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis.
Math

Submission + - Mathematicians Extend Einstein's Special Relativity Beyond Speed of Light 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Christian Science Monitor reports that despite an apparent prohibition on faster-than-light travel by Einstein’s theory of special relativity, applied mathematician James Hill and his colleague Barry Cox say the theory actually lends itself easily to a description of velocities that exceed the speed of light. "The actual business of going through the speed of light is not defined," says Hill whose research has been published in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society A. "The theory we've come up with is simply for velocities greater than the speed of light." In effect, the singularity at the speed of light divides the universe into two: a world where everything moves slower than the speed of light, and a world where everything moves faster. The laws of physics in these two realms could turn out to be quite different. In some ways, the hidden world beyond the speed of light looks to be a strange one. Hill and Cox's equations suggest, for example, that as a spaceship traveling at super-light speeds accelerated faster and faster, it would lose more and more mass, until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero. "We are mathematicians, not physicists, so we've approached this problem from a theoretical mathematical perspective," says Dr Cox. "Should it, however, be proven that motion faster than light is possible, then that would be game changing. Our paper doesn't try and explain how this could be achieved, just how equations of motion might operate in such regimes.""

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