Warp Speed

Onboard the starship Enterprise, you're hanging out with the crew members, enjoying a game of poker. You're traveling at impulse speed during a leisurely deep-space exploration, and everyone has some downtime. But wait -- all of a sudden, the ship receives an urgent message from a Federation admiral, informing the crew of an outbreak of war in the Neutral Zone. The Enterprise is ordered to report to the situation as soon as possible. The area in question is about 20 light years (117 trillion kilometers) away, but this is no problem in the "Star Trek" universe. The captain adjusts the ship's warp drive appropriately, and you settle in for warp speed. Traveling faster than the speed of light, you should arrive to your destination in just a few minutes.

For as long as humans have looked up to the skies, space has fascinated us, and astronomers and philosophers alike have asked the most fundamental questions while staring at the stars. What are we doing here, anyway? How did the universe begin, and are there other, parallel universes that mirror ours? Is there life out there in other galaxies, and what would it be like to travel there?

While we haven't quite answered these questions yet, we at least have science fiction like "Star Trek" to test the human imagination. Everything from H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" to "Star Trek" to Joss Whedon's "Firefly" series has touched on the possibilities of time travel, teleportation and, of course, warp speed. But how does something like warp speed fit into reality and our universe? Is warp speed just a wacky science fiction device, or is it theoretically possible? How does it work in the "Star Trek" universe? For everything on warp speed, infinity and beyond, read the following pages.

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Whether you’re a serious multitasker or a multimedia enthusiast, performance matters. So why limit yourself? Unlock your full potential with the ultimate smart performance of the new Intel® Core™ i7 processor.
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A combination of greater cache size and higher frequencies give you ultimate performance for the toughest tasks.

• Intel® Turbo Boost Technology◊1: Automatically speeds up your processor when your PC needs extra performance.
   
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• Connect In More Places: Access to the internet, whether in your home or while you're mobile, is increasingly important. At home you have a variety of wired and wireless connectivity options with your Intel® Core™ i7 processor–powered PC. What about when you're on the move? You're covered there as well. Pairing Intel®-powered devices with a wireless broadband service package and a tiny USB modem from your service provider enables you to enjoy high-speed broadband internet just about anywhereΣ without depending on WiFi hotspots. So power up and get connected!
   

How Nanorobots Will Work

Imagine going to the doctor to get treatment for a persistent fever. Instead of giving you a pill or a shot, the doctor refers you to a special medical team which implants a tiny robot into your bloodstream. The robot detects the cause of your fever, travels to the appropriate system and provides a dose of medication directly to the infected area.

Surprisingly, we're not that far off from seeing devices like this actually used in medical procedures. They're called nanorobots and engineering teams around the world are working to design robots that will eventually be used to treat everything from hemophilia to cancer.

As you can imagine, the challenges facing engineers are daunting. A viable nanorobot has to be small and agile enough to navigate through the human circulatory system, an incredibly complex network of veins and arteries. The robot must also have the capacity to carry medication or miniature tools. Assuming the nanorobot isn't meant to stay in the patient forever, it also has to be able to make its way out of the host.

In this article, we'll learn about the potential applications of nanorobots, the various ways nanorobots will navigate and move through our bodies, the tools they will use to heal patients, the progress teams around the world have made so far and what theorists see in the future.

Several engineers, scientists and doctors believe that nanorobot applications are practically unlimited. Some of the most likely uses include:

• Treating arteriosclerosis: Arteriosclerosis refers to a condition where plaque builds along the walls of arteries. Nanorobots could conceivably treat the condition by cutting away the plaque, which would then enter the bloodstream. Nanorobots may treat conditions like arteriosclerosis by physically chipping away the plaque along artery walls.

• Breaking up blood clots: Blood clots can cause complications ranging from muscle death to a stroke. Nanorobots could travel to a clot and break it up. This application is one of the most dangerous uses for nanorobots -- the robot must be able to remove the blockage without losing small pieces in the bloodstream, which could then travel elsewhere in the body and cause more problems. The robot must also be small enough so that it doesn't block the flow of blood itself. 

• Fighting cancer: Doctors hope to use nanorobots to treat cancer patients. The robots could either attack tumors directly using lasers, microwaves or ultrasonic signals or they could be part of a chemotherapy treatment, delivering medication directly to the cancer site. Doctors believe that by delivering small but precise doses of medication to the patient, side effects will be minimized without a loss in the medication's effectiveness. 

• Helping the body clot: One particular kind of nanorobot is the clottocyte, or artificial platelet. The clottocyte carries a small mesh net that dissolves into a sticky membrane upon contact with blood plasma. According to Robert A. Freitas, Jr., the man who designed the clottocyte, clotting could be up to 1,000 times faster than the body's natural clotting mechanism [source: Freitas]. Doctors could use clottocytes to treat hemophiliacs or patients with serious open wounds.
   
• Parasite Removal: Nanorobots could wage micro-war on bacteria and small parasitic organisms inside a patient. It might take several nanorobots working together to destroy all the parasites.
   
• Gout: Gout is a condition where the kidneys lose the ability to remove waste from the breakdown of fats from the bloodstream. This waste sometimes crystallizes at points near joints like the knees and ankles. People who suffer from gout experience intense pain at these joints. A nanorobot could break up the crystalline structures at the joints, providing relief from the symptoms, though it wouldn't be able to reverse the condition permanently.
   
• Breaking up kidney stones: Kidney stones can be intensely painful -- the larger the stone the more difficult it is to pass. Doctors break up large kidney stones using ultrasonic frequencies, but it's not always effective. A nanorobot could break up a kidney stones using a small laser.
   

Cool as a Jupiter

Astronomers have found more than 400 planets outside our solar system. These distant worlds are full of surprises: Some are giant and made of gas, like Jupiter, and others seem to be rocky, like big versions of Earth. All these faraway orbs are called exoplanets — short for “extrasolar” planets because they’re outside our solar system — and astronomers find more all the time.

Scientists recently found an exoplanet that’s really cool — literally. Most exoplanets are much hotter even than the gas giants in our solar system (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). But the newly discovered planet, called COROT-9b, is different. Its temperatures don’t soar as high, and as a result it’s probably more like Jupiter and Saturn than other known exoplanets are. (The planet was first spotted by the COROT telescope, which is why “COROT” is in its name.)

On COROT-9b, the low temperatures on the surface are around -23º Celsius (-9.4º degrees Fahrenheit) and the highs reach 157 º C (314 º F). COROT-9b is 1,500 light years away. (A light year is the distance light can travel in one year, or about 5.9 trillion miles.)

Other planets have been found with lower temperatures, but COROT-9b is special for another reason. It “transits” its star, which means it passes directly between its star and the Earth. Astronomers can learn more about a distant planet that transits than they can about a planet that doesn’t transit. So when a transiting planet shows up, the scientists get excited.

Hans Deeg, who worked on the new study of COROT-9b, says this is the first time a cooler planet has been found to transit. Deeg works at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain. Most transiting planets are “weird — inflated and hot,” Didier Queloz, another scientist who worked on the study, told Science News. Queloz works at the Geneva Observatory in Sauverny, Switzerland.

As a planet passes in front of its star, it blocks out some light. (This is sort of like a solar eclipse, when the moon passes between the Earth and the Sun.) When astronomers measure the blocked light, they can quickly calculate the size of the planet.

They can also learn about the atmosphere of a transiting planet. The light that comes from the star is made of waves — in fact, it’s made of many waves of different wavelengths. Each different wavelength is a different color, even though all together the waves look white. As this light passes through the atmosphere of the exoplanet, different kinds of atoms absorb different wavelengths of light. Eventually that light reaches Earth. By measuring which wavelengths are “missing,” astronomers can figure out which atoms in the atmosphere absorbed the light.

Even though COROT-9b is cooler than many other exoplanets, it’s probably not habitable. That means it’s too early to pack your bags because people can’t live there. But, as Sara Seager, an exoplanet expert at MIT, told Science News, if this planet has a rocky moon, there may be hope of finding a new planet to call home.

And even if things don’t work out with COROT-9b, there are other worlds to consider, worlds much closer to home. The study of exoplanets is just getting started: hundreds may have been found, but scientists think there are millions of new worlds in our galaxy, just waiting to be discovered.

Time to start planet hunting!

Superheavy element 117 heaviest named element is official

Everything on Earth that scientists can see, measure or study is made of atoms — and atoms are named by what type of element they are. You probably know the name of many elements, such as oxygen, gold or hydrogen. Others, such as cadmium or xenon, may sound strange and exotic. In any case, elements are everywhere: You, your shoes, your desk, cars, water, air — all made of elements.

Now, there’s a new kid on the block: Elements, meet copernicum.

This element was officially named on February 19, but the element itself isn’t new. German scientists made and observed it in 1996. But in the 14 years since then, other scientists have been working to study and validate the original findings. A scientific breakthrough is “validated” when other scientists can perform the same experiment and get the same results. Validation is an important part of the scientific process because it demonstrates that a scientific discovery was not a mistake.

All that hard work finally paid off when the element finally received its name, copernicum, from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (the organization in charge of making sure chemists all over the world use the same words to mean the same things.) Copernicum is named in honor of Nicolaus Copernicus, a 16th century Polish scholar who proposed that Earth orbits the sun (rather than that everything orbits Earth) and that Earth turns on its own axis. These ideas may seem obvious now, but in 16th century Europe, they were revolutionary.

Scientists organize all the elements on a chart called the Periodic Table. Each element gets a symbol and its own number, and copernicum gets the symbol Cn and the number 112. This number means that inside every atom of copernicum are 112 protons. Protons are particles inside the nucleus, or core, of every atom. The lightest element, hydrogen, has only one proton inside each atom.

Its 112 protons make copernicum the heaviest known element with a name. It was first observed by Sigurd Hofmann, a scientist at the Center for Heavy Ion Research, or GSI, in Darmstadt, Germany. Hofmann and his team created copernicum in the laboratory when they blasted atoms of lead (each with 82 protons) with zinc isotopes, kinds of zinc atoms that each had 30 protons.

This was no easy process: You can’t just shoot one atom at another and expect the atoms to buddy up. In 1996, Hofmann and his team had to figure out a way to get all the protons together — and stick. They used a machine, called the Universal Linear Accelerator, that can accelerate atoms up to 10 percent the speed of light. After a week of working on these high-speed collisions, Hofmann’s team found copernicum — even though it quickly vanished. Most of the superheavy elements in copernicum’s neighborhood — those that are heavier than uranium — tend to be unstable, which means they decay into smaller atoms quickly.

Now, 14 years after Hofmann’s experiment, other scientists are able to make copernicum and validate Hofmann’s original work. Scientists are excited about copernicum. If such a superheavy atom can be created, then even heavier elements might be waiting in the future. “One of the exciting things is, how far can we keep going?” says nuclear chemist Paul Karol of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

POWER WORDS (adapted from the Yahoo! Kids Dictionary)

element A substance composed of atoms all having the same number of protons in the nucleus. Elements cannot be reduced to simpler substances by normal chemical means.

atom A unit of matter, the smallest unit of an element, having all the characteristics of that element and consisting of a dense, central, positively charged nucleus surrounded by a system of electrons.

proton A stable, positively charged subatomic particle.

uranium A heavy, silvery-white, metallic element that is radioactive, toxic and easily oxidized. It has 92 protons in each atom.

F-35 Performs Its First Fully Vertical Landing

 After cost overruns, a series of delays, and almost a decade of hype, the F-35 Lighting finally performed a vertical landing for the first time. Yesterday at 1 P.M., after descending from a 150-foot-high hover, the test plane touched down on the tarmac at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station. This is a significant step forward for the F-35, as its vertical takeoff and landing capability are crucial to the fighter's role as a replacement for the aging Harrier jet.

The test began with a short runway takeoff at 93 miles per hour, after which the pilot swung around, positioned the plane over the runway, and lowered it down. The test pilot, a former Royal Air Force aviator with experience piloting VSTOL planes, said he found landing the F-35 vertically far easier than landing older planes, like the Harrier, the same way.

This test moves the F-35 program significantly closer to deployment. In fact, the Marine Corps hopes to start training its first round of F-35 pilots this fall. However, with February's announcement that the entire program has been delayed a year, and cost overruns threatening automatic program restructuring under the Nunn-McCurdy Amendment, I wouldn't bet on the Marines keeping to that schedule, even in light of this recent successful test.

Chemical computer that mimics neurons to be created

A promising push toward a novel, biologically-inspired "chemical computer" has begun as part of an international collaboration.

The "wet computer" incorporates several recently discovered properties of chemical systems that can be hijacked to engineer computing power.

The team's approach mimics some of the actions of neurons in the brain.

The 1.8m-euro (£1.6m) project will run for three years, funded by an EU emerging technologies programme.

The programme has identified biologically-inspired computing as particularly important, having recently funded several such projects.

What distinguishes the current project is that it will make use of stable "cells" featuring a coating that forms spontaneously, similar to the walls of our own cells, and uses chemistry to accomplish the signal processing similar to that of our own neurons.

The goal is not to make a better computer than conventional ones, said project collaborator Klaus-Peter Zauner of the University of Southampton, but rather to be able to compute in new environments.

The type of wet information technology we are working towards will not find its near-term application in running business software," Dr Zauner told BBC News.

"But it will open up application domains where current IT does not offer any solutions - controlling molecular robots, fine-grained control of chemical assembly, and intelligent drugs that process the chemical signals of the human body and act according to the local biochemical state of the cell."

Lipids and liquids

The group's approach hinges on two critical ideas.

First, individual "cells" are surrounded by a wall made up of so-called lipids that spontaneously encapsulate the liquid innards of the cell.

Recent work has shown that when two such lipid layers encounter each other as the cells come into contact, a protein can form a passage between them, allowing chemical signalling molecules to pass.

Second, the cells' interiors will play host to what is known as a Belousov-Zhabotinsky or B-Z chemical reaction. Simply put, reactions of this type can be initiated by changing the concentration of the element bromine by a certain threshold amount.

The reactions are unusual for a number of reasons.

But for the computing application, what is important is that after the arrival of a chemical signal to start it, the cell enters a "refractory period" during which further chemical signals do not influence the reaction.

That keeps a signal from propagating unchecked through any connected cells.

Such self-contained systems that react under their own chemical power to a stimulus above a threshold have an analogue in nature: neurons.

"Every neuron is like a molecular computer; ours is a very crude abstraction of what neurons do," said Dr Zauner.

"But the essence of neurons is the capability to get 'excited'; it can re-form an input signal and has its own energy supply so it can fire out a new signal."

This propagation of a chemical signal - along with the "refractory period" that keeps it contained within a given cell - means the cells can form networks that function like the brain.

'Real chance'

Frantisek Stepanek, a chemical computing researcher at the Institute of Chemical Technology Prague in the Czech Republic, said the pairing of the two ideas was promising.

"If one day we want to construct computers of similar power and complexity to the human brain, my bet would be on some form of chemical or molecular computing," he told BBC News.

"I think this project stands a real chance of bringing chemical computing from the concept stage to a practical demonstration of a functional prototype."

For its part, the team is already hard at work proving the idea will work.

"Officially the project doesn't start until the first of February," said Dr Zauner, "but we were so curious about it we already sent some lipids to our collaborators in Poland - they've already shown the lipid layers are stable."

Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes

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The controlled fusion of atoms - creating conditions like those in our Sun - has long been touted as a possible revolutionary energy source.

However, there have been doubts about the use of powerful lasers for fusion energy because the "plasma" they create could interrupt the fusion.

An article in Science showed the plasma is far less of a problem than expected.

The report is based on the first experiments from the National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US that used all 192 of its laser beams.

Along the way, the experiments smashed the record for the highest energy from a laser - by a factor of 20.

Star power

Construction of the National Ignition Facility began at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1997, and was formally completed in May 2009.

The goal, as its name implies, is to harness the power of the largest laser ever built to start "ignition" - effectively a carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion.
It is markedly different from current nuclear power, which operates through splitting atoms - fission - rather than squashing them together in fusion.

Proving that such a lab-based fusion reaction can release more energy than is required to start it - rising above the so-called breakeven point - could herald a new era in large-scale energy production.

In the approach Nif takes, called inertial confinement fusion, the target is a centimetre-scale cylinder of gold called a hohlraum.

It contains a tiny pellet of fuel made from an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium.

During 30 years of the laser fusion debate, one significant potential hurdle to the process has been the "plasma" that the lasers will create in the hohlraum.

The fear has been that the plasma, a roiling soup of charged particles, would interrupt the target's ability to absorb the lasers' energy and funnel it uniformly into the fuel, compressing it and causing ignition.

Siegfried Glenzer, the Nif plasma scientist, led a team to test that theory, smashing records along the way.

"We hit it with 669 kilojoules - 20 times more than any previous laser facility," Nif's Siegfried Glenzer told BBC News.

That isn't that much total energy; it's about enough to boil a one-litre kettle twice over.

However, the beams delivered their energy in pulses lasting a little more than 10 billionths of a second.

By way of comparison, if that power could be maintained, it would boil the contents of more than 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools in a second.

'Dramatic step' 

 Crucially, the recent experiments provided proof that the plasma did not reduce the hohlraum's ability to absorb the incident laser light; it absorbed about 95%.

But more than that, Dr Glenzer's team discovered that the plasma can actually be carefully manipulated to increase the uniformity of the compression.

"For the first time ever in the 50-year journey of laser fusion, these laser-plasma interactions have been shown to be less of a problem than predicted, not more," said Mike Dunne, director of the UK's Central Laser Facility and leader of the European laser fusion effort known as HiPER.

"I can't overstate how dramatic a step that is," he told BBC News. "Many people a year ago were saying the project would be dead by now."

Adding momentum to the ignition quest, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced on Wednesday that, since the Science results were first obtained, the pulse energy record had been smashed again.

They now report an energy of one megajoule on target - 50% higher than the amount reported in Science.

The current calculations show that about 1.2 megajoules of energy will be enough for ignition, and currently Nif can run as high as 1.8 megajoules.

Dr Glenzer said that experiments using slightly larger hohlraums with fusion-ready fuel pellets - including a mix of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium as well as tritium - should begin before May, slowly ramping up to the 1.2 megajoule mark.

"The bottom line is that we can extrapolate those data to the experiments we are planning this year and the results show that we will be able to drive the capsule towards ignition," said Dr Glenzer.

Before those experiments can even begin, however, the target chamber must be prepared with shields that can block the copious neutrons that a fusion reaction would produce.

But Dr Glenzer is confident that with everything in place, ignition is on the horizon.

He added, quite simply, "It's going to happen this year."

Chile earthquake: Shock effect on Earth's axis

The earthquake that struck Chile on Saturday may have shifted the Earth's axis and created shorter days, according to scientists at Nasa. Richard Gross, a geophysicist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said the 8.8 magnitude quake could have moved the Earth's axis by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8cm) – enough to shorten a day by about 1.26 microseconds.

A large quake can shift huge amounts of rock and alter the distribution of mass on the planet. When that distribution changes, it changes the rate at which the planet rotates, which determines the length of a day.

"The length of the day should have got shorter by 1.26 microseconds," Gross told the Bloomberg news agency. "The axis about which the Earth's mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds."

Gross previously used the technique to estimate the shift caused by the 2004 Sumatran quake that caused the Indian Ocean tsunami. That 9.1 magnitude quake shifted the Earth's axis by 2.3 milliarcseconds and shortened a day by 6.8 microseconds.

David Kerridge, a seismologist with the British Geological Survey, said the Chile and Sumatra earthquakes were based on subduction, in which one tectonic plate slides under another, redistributing the Earth's overall mass. The effect was similar to that for an ice dancer who moved their arms in and out to accelerate and slow their spin.

"As the ice skater puts when she's going around in a circle, and she pulls her arms in, she gets faster and faster. It's the same idea with the Earth going around if you change the distribution of mass, the rotation rate changes."

Earthquakes caused by plates sliding past each other, such as the recent event in Haiti, do not have the same impact on the Earth's rotation.

Gross said the Chilean earthquake shifted the Earth's axis a greater distance than the larger Sumatran event because it was further from the equator. The fault that caused the Chilean quake also dips into the Earth at a steeper angle, which meant it moved more mass.

Alien spotting comes down to Earth

The first step to finding alien life in our galaxy is working out what sort of planet an alien might call home. Almost 400 exoplanets - planets orbiting stars outside our solar system - have been spotted and now it’s time to take a closer look.

Dr Giovanna Tinetti from UCL is working on a new observation technique which will make it easier than ever to take a glimpse at the atmospheres of exoplanets, revealing further clues as to any potential inhabitants. Last month, her team of astronomers from UCL and NASA identified organic molecules in the atmosphere of a planet (the catchily named HD 189733b) nearly 63 light years away.

With these kinds of distances, bottling a sample of alien air to take back to the lab is not an option. Instead, astronomers analyse the radiation emitted from, or reflected by, a planet - a method known as spectroscopy. The various molecules in the planet's atmosphere absorb different wavelengths of radiation, leaving a telltale pattern in the overall spectrum of light captured by telescopes. By recognising these fingerprints, researchers can deduce the composition of the planet’s atmosphere.

‘We are interested in looking at light in the infrared end of the spectrum, so basically it’s thermal light emitted by the planet’, explains Tinetti. ‘The reason for this is that most of the molecules that we’re interested in, for example carbon dioxide or methane, have a much stronger signature in this part of the spectrum.’

Bringing spectroscopy back to Earth

Spectroscopy is nothing new, but has previously been confined to outer space. ‘Until now we’ve typically used space telescopes, in particular Hubble and Spitzer, for doing this type of measurement,’ says Tinetti. ‘It’s easier because you don’t have the Earth’s atmosphere in between you and the exoplanet.’

These space telescopes however have limited capability and are shared with many other researchers working on different projects, so there simply isn’t time to make the detailed observations needed to catalogue exoplanets. Instead, Tinetti and her team have optimised the infrared spectroscopy technique to produce accurate results without leaving our planet.

‘We’ve been trying to push our technique to work from the ground because we really want to concentrate all the capabilities of all the ground telescopes to keep working on the subject and have more and more measurements,‘ says Tinetti.

The method still needs a few tweaks, but in a few years’ time relatively small ground telescopes worldwide will be able to cast their gaze on far flung atmospheres, speeding up the search for habitable exoplanets. ‘The fact that we’ve now been able to reproduce results from space has opened a huge door,’ adds Tinetti.
Answers in the air

The composition of a planet’s atmosphere can tell us whether it could foster life, or even if life might already be there. Likewise, our own atmosphere could give away our presence to an alien observer .

Aliens equipped with similar telescopes to Tinetti's could easily spot water vapour and carbon dioxide in the air, suggesting that life is possible on Earth. More intriguing clues would be the presence of ozone and, if they were also looking in the visible end of the spectrum, oxygen.

‘They would be extremely surprised to see a huge signature of ozone, because ozone, like oxygen, is a very reactive type of molecule, and unless you have a constant supply in the planetary atmosphere it’s very rare that you have these molecules for a long time. So if you see a very strong signature it means that there’s a source. That would tell them that something very interesting was going on,’ comments Tinetti.

Our place in the universe

Exoplanet research isn't just about finding little green men. ‘It’s also about putting our planet and our solar system in general into a broader context – understanding how unique we are, if solar systems like ours are very frequent or very rare,’ adds Tinetti.

Even though our knowledge of other planets in our galaxy is increasing rapidly, there is still plenty left to discover. ‘One of the very interesting things about exoplanets is that they keep surprising you,’ she says. ‘No matter how many theoretical predictions you make, chances are you are not completely right.’

Ultimately, Tinetti hopes that a proposed space telescope known as THESIS will see the light of day and become the first space mission dedicated to characterising exoplanet atmospheres: ‘If we have space based mission like THESIS then we can do wonders… we shall see!’