NASA just found 600 million gallons of water in craters on the Moon’s north pole. Can you say MOON BASE?
The water was discovered by an Indian radar probe. Scientists say it could be used for fresh drinking water or oxygen. For a Moon base.
“The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought,” said Paul Spudis, a NASA engineer who works with the Mini-SAR radar equipment.
Too bad we’ve cut funding to NASA and are abandoning the Moon. Looks like we’ll have to depend on corporate sponsorship . . .
Link to PopSci article
A team of international scientists, without the help of a time-traveling Scott and a 512k Mac, have discovered a transparent metal. Unfortunately, we’re talking sodium, and not aluminum. And it’s at a pressure of about 2 million atmospheres.
The team, led by Artem Oganov, Professor of Theoretical Crystallography at Stony Brook University, and Yanming Ma, the lead author and professor of physics at Jilin University in China, was able to demonstrate that sodium turns transparent under pressure.
Typically, elements turn metallic at high pressure—forming a lattice of positive ions surrounded by electrons. Metallic elements are magnetic and conductive. It even happens to hydrogen, in the highly pressurized center of gas giants like Saturn and Pluto. Sodium does just the opposite, first becoming an insulator, then transparent like glass.
Ma and Oganav used mathematical models to predict sodium’s surprising response under pressure, but hadn’t tested them. Mikhail Eremets, the leader of an experimental group at Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, engineered several experiments to test the theories.
The discovery will help scientists study the chemistry found at the center of gas giants and stars.
Link to ScienceDaily article
Subrata Roy, a professor at the University of Florida, is building a flying saucer that will slide around on a cushion of plasma. All jokes about little green men and tinfoil hats aside, his concept seems feasible. Roy plans to cover his flying disk with electrodes that will zap the surrounding air, ionizing it to create magnetically charged plasma that will repel the air around it. By varying the juice that flows to electrodes across the disk’s surfaces, and thus the amount of repulsive plasma, he’ll be able to steer.
The professor’s first flying disk will measure about six inches across. In the future he plans to build larger and larger disks, eventually allowing you to don a bubble helmet, hop in and scare the bejesus out of simple farm folk.
Roy’s plasma-surfing disk is nothing new. American physicist Thomas Townsend Brown created a flying disk in the 1920s based on the same principle, which later became known as the Biefeld-Brown effect. More disks were supposedly created in the ’50s and ’60s by various arms of the U.S. Military. Most believe they were never mass produced due to the tremendous amount of electricity (and thus energy) required to keep them aloft. Modern ultra capacitors may harbor enough energy to make the disk fly without trailing miles of cable, but it remains to be seen.
Link to Scientific American article.
Wikipedia entry on Anti-Gravity.
Scientists have discovered new evidence that the basic building blocks of life were sprinkled across the solar system like the spores of a great intergalactic mushroom. The joint team of U.S. and U.K. scientists uncovered nucleobases—the bits that make up DNA and RNA—within fragments of the Murchishon meteorite, which plowed into the Australian desert in 1969.
The two nucleobases, racil and xanthine (which, incidentally would be fantastic names for fraternal twins), were analyzed to ensure that they weren’t created when the meteorite crashed to earth. Both compounds contained heavy carbon atoms which can only be formed in space.
Lead researcher Dr Zita Martins, of the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, told ScienceDaily that primeval life on earth could have incorporated nucleobases from meteorites about 3.8 to 4.5 billion years ago, when meteor showers were common.
The discovery gives hope that life could flourish across the universe. Co-researcher Professor Mark Sephton, in a ScienceDaily article:
“Because meteorites represent left over materials from the formation of the solar system, the key components for life — including nucleobases — could be widespread in the cosmos. As more and more of life’s raw materials are discovered in objects from space, the possibility of life springing forth wherever the right chemistry is present becomes more likely.”
Link to ScienceDaily article.
