James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

Far from the protective embrace of the Sun, the edge of our Solar System would seem to be a cold, empty, and dark place. The yawning space between us and the nearest stars was for a long time thought to be a frighteningly vast expanse of nothingness.

Until recently, it was somewhere that humankind could only peer into from afar. Astronomers paid it only passing attention, preferring instead to focus their telescopes on the glowing masses of our neighboring stars, galaxies, and nebula.

But two spacecraft, built and launched in the 1970s, have for the past few years been beaming back our first glimpses from this strange region we call interstellar space. As the first man-made objects to leave our Solar System, they are venturing into uncharted territory, billions of miles from home. No other spacecraft has traveled as far.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

A team of physicists in New York has discovered a material that conducts electricity with perfect efficiency at room temperature — a long-sought scientific milestone. The hydrogen, carbon, and sulfur compound operates as a superconductor at up to 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the team reported today in Nature. That’s more than 50 degrees hotter than the previous high-temperature superconductivity record set last year.

“This is the first time we can really claim that room-temperature superconductivity has been found,” said Ion Errea, a condensed matter theorist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain who was not involved in the work.

“It’s clearly a landmark,” said Chris Pickard, a materials scientist at the University of Cambridge. “That’s a chilly room, maybe a British Victorian cottage,” he said of the 59-degree temperature.

Yet while researchers celebrate the achievement, they stress that the newfound compound — created by a team led by Ranga Dias of the University of Rochester — will never find its way into lossless power lines, frictionless high-speed trains, or any of the revolutionary technologies that could become ubiquitous if the fragile quantum effect underlying superconductivity could be maintained in truly ambient conditions. That’s because the substance superconducts at room temperature only while being crushed between a pair of diamonds to pressures roughly 75% as extreme as those found in the Earth’s core.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Long ago, in lands that were always warm, people got ice from the heavens.

At sunset, they poured water into shallow earthen pits or ceramic trays insulated with reeds. All through the night, the water would radiate its heat into the chilly void of space. By morning, it turned to ice — even though the air temperature never dropped below freezing.

This wasn’t magic; it was science.

For centuries, desert dwellers in North Africa, India, and Iran tapped into the law of physics called radiative cooling. All objects — people, plants, buildings, planets — give off heat in waves of invisible light. On a clear, starry night, that radiation can rise through the atmosphere until it escapes Earth entirely. Coldness, which is really the absence of heat, is created through this invisible connection to the cosmos.

The world now cools off with the help of more than 3.5 billion refrigerators and air conditioners, a number that is quickly growing. But those appliances are also a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. In seeking relief from the heat, humans are making the globe even hotter, compounding the demand for cooling.

To break that cycle, University of California at Los Angeles materials scientist Aaswath Raman wants to turn ancient technology into a 21st-century tool.

.

By Sarah Kaplan

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The Cold War had been concluded for less than a decade when NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and two Russian cosmonauts, Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko, crammed themselves into a Soyuz spacecraft and blasted into orbit on Halloween, 20 years ago.

Two days later their small spacecraft docked with the International Space Station, then a fraction of the size it is today. Their arrival would herald the beginning of what has since become 20 years of continuous habitation of the laboratory that NASA, leading an international partnership, would continue to build for another decade.

Born of a desire to smooth geopolitical tensions in the aftermath of the great conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, the space station partnership has more or less succeeded—the station has remained inhabited despite the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, and later, nearly a decade of no US space transportation. NASA, Roscosmos, and the European, Japanese, and Canadian partners have been able to rely on one another.

Not that it has been easy. Tensions have existed from those very first moments on the station. Shepherd, who would serve as the first ISS commander over his more experienced cosmonaut counterparts, wanted to nickname the station “Alpha.” He had support for this from Krikalev, but some Russian space officials believed their earlier Mir space station had earned that honor. The new station, they believed, ought to be named “Beta.” NASA, too, had not signed off on this designation.

.

The essentially complete International Space Station in 2010, as seen by space shuttle Atlantis.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________