Month: April 2016

Explainer: what is antimatter?

By Roger Jones, Lancaster University.

Antimatter was one of the most exciting physics discoveries of the 20th century. Picked up by fiction writers such as Dan Brown, many people think of it as an “out there” theoretical idea – unaware that it is actually being produced every day. What’s more, research on antimatter is actually helping us to understand how the universe works.

Antimatter is a material composed of so-called antiparticles. It is believed that every particle we know of has an antimatter companion that is virtually identical to itself, but with the opposite charge. For example, an electron has a negative charge. But its antiparticle, called a positron, has the same mass but a positive charge. When a particle and its antiparticle meet, they annihilate each other – disappearing in a burst of light.

Such particles were first predicted by British physicist Paul Dirac when he was trying to combine the two great ideas of early modern physics: relativity and quantum mechanics. Previously, scientists were stumped by the fact that it seemed to predict that particles could have energies lower than when they were at “rest” (ie pretty much doing nothing). This seemed impossible at the time, as it meant that energies could be negative.

Dirac, however, accepted that the equations were telling him that particles are really filling a whole “sea” of these lower energies – a sea that had so far been invisible to physicists as they were only looking “above the surface”. He envisioned that all of the “normal” energy levels that exist are accounted for by “normal” particles. However, when a particle jumps up from a lower energy state, it appears as a normal particle but leaves a “hole”, which appears to us as a strange, mirror-image particle – antimatter.

Despite initial scepticism, examples of these particle-antiparticle pairs were soon found. For example, they are produced when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. There is even evidence that the energy in thunderstorms produces anti-electrons, called positrons. These are also produced in some radioactive decays, a process used in many hospitals in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanners, which allow precise imaging within human bodies. Nowadays, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can produce matter and antimatter, too.

Matter-antimatter mystery

Physics predicts that matter and antimatter must be created in almost equal quantities, and that this would have been the case during the Big Bang. What’s more, it is predicted that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle is interchanged with its antiparticle – a relationship known as CP symmetry. However, the universe we see doesn’t seem to obey these rules. It is almost entirely made of matter, so where did all the antimatter go? It is one of the biggest mysteries in physics to date.

Experimental area at CERN including the alpha experiment. Mikkel D. Lund/wikimeda, , CC BY-SA

Experiments have shown that some radioactive decay processes do not produce an equal amount of antiparticles and particles. But it is not enough to explain the disparity between amounts of matter and antimatter in the universe. Consequently, physicists such as myself at the LHC, on ATLAS, CMS and LHCb, and others doing experiments with neutrinos such as T2K in Japan, are looking for other processes that could explain the puzzle.

Other groups of physicists such as the Alpha Collaboration at CERN are working at much lower energies to see if the properties of antimatter really are the mirror of their matter partners. Their latest results show that an anti-hydrogen atom (made up of an anti-proton and an anti-electron, or positron) is electrically neutral to an accuracy of less than one billionth of the charge of an electron. Combined with other measurements, this implies that the positron is equal and opposite to the charge of the electron to better than one part in a billion – confirming what is expected of antimatter.

However, a great many mysteries remain. Experiments are also investigating whether gravity affects antimatter in the same way that it affects matter. If these exact symmetries are shown to be broken, it will require a fundamental revision of our ideas about physics, affecting not only particle physics but also our understanding of gravity and relativity.

In this way, antimatter experiments are allowing us to put our understanding of the fundamental workings of the universe to new and exciting tests. Who knows what we will find?

The ConversationRoger Jones, Professor of Physics, Head of Department, Lancaster University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Featured Photo Credit: Thomas Bresson/Flickr, CC BY-SA

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Here’s How Massive Mounds Formed on Mars

Massive mounds more than a mile high on Mars were carved by winds over billions of years, new research suggests. Their location helps pin down when water on the Red Planet dried up during a global climate change event.

The findings highlight the importance of wind in shaping the Martian landscape, a force that, on Earth, is overpowered by other processes, says lead author Mackenzie Day, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences.

“On Mars there are no plate-tectonics, and there’s no liquid water, so you don’t have anything to overprint that signature and over billions of years you get these mounds, which speaks to how much geomorphic change you can really instigate with just wind. Wind could never do this on Earth because water acts so much faster, and tectonics act so much faster.”

First spotted during NASA’s Viking program in the 1970s, the mounds are at the bottom of craters. Recent analysis by the Mars rover Curiosity of Mount Sharp, a mound over three miles high inside Gale Crater, has revealed that the thickest ones are made of sedimentary rock, with bottoms made of sediments carried by water that used to flow into the crater and tops made of sediments deposited by wind. However, how the mounds formed inside craters that were once full of sediments was an open question.

“There’s been a theory out there that these mounds formed from billions of years of wind erosion, but no one had ever tested that before,” Day says. “So the cool thing about our paper is we figured out the dynamics of how wind could actually do that.”

mars-mounds
This composite image looking toward the higher regions of Mount Sharp was taken on September 9, 2015, by NASA’s Curiosity rover. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS) Click/tap for larger image.

To test whether wind could create a mound, the researchers built a miniature crater 30 centimeters wide and 4 centimeters deep, filled it with damp sand, and placed it in a wind tunnel. They tracked the elevation and the distribution of sand in the crater until all of it had blown away. The model’s sediment was eroded into forms similar to those observed in Martian craters, forming a crescent-shaped moat that deepened and widened around the edges of the crater. Eventually all that was left of the sediment was a mound—which, in time, also eroded away.

day_marsmounds_figure
Sediment-filled craters on Mars (top) in different stages of erosion compared with results of a crater model in wind-tunnel experiment (bottom). Warm colors indicate high elevation, cool colors low elevation. (Credit: Mackenzie Day)

“We went from a filled crater layer cake to this mounded shape that we see today,” Day says.

To understand the wind dynamics, researchers also built a computer model that simulated how the wind flowed through the crater at different stages of erosion.

The mounds’ structure helps link their formation to climate change on Mars, with the bottom being built during a wet time, and the top built and mound shaped in a dry time, says Jackson School researcher Gary Kocurek.

“This sequence signals the change from a dominance of depositional processes by water during a wetter time, to wind reworking of these water-laid sediments with the onset of aridity, followed by wind erosion once these sediment supplies have been exhausted,” he says. “Overall, we are seeing the complete remaking of the sedimentary cycle on Mars to the one that characterizes the planet today.”

The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, helped scientists home in on Mars’ Noachian period, a geologic era that began about 3.7 billion years ago, as the period when Mars started to change from a wet world to a dry one. Scientists were able to link the climate change to the Noachian by studying the location of more than 30 mounds and finding that sedimentary mounds were only present on terrain that was exposed during that period.

NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the University of Texas at Dallas funded the work.

Source: Republished from Futurity.org as a derivative work under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Original article posted to Futurity by .

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Why X-ray astronomers are anxious for good news from troubled Hitomi satellite

Kevin Schawinski, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

On February 16, the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) successfully launched the ASTRO-H satellite from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. The space telescope named Hitomi – “pupil” in Japanese – carried with it the hopes and dreams of astrophysicists from around the world.

Hitomi carried a number of scientific instruments, but the most revolutionary was a device called an X-ray microcalorimeter. Astrophysicists around the world were waiting with excitement for the first observations with this instrument, which was designed to see things like the million-degree gas sloshing around galaxy clusters stirred by relativistic jets from supermassive black holes.

But before anyone could see those first data from Hitomi, a possibly fatal misfortune struck. On March 26, while the spacecraft was executing its first test observations in orbit, JAXA lost contact. The U.S. Joint Space Operation Center detected five pieces of debris in the area and Hitomi’s orbit suddenly changed.   https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/714577410503655425

What happened? We don’t know. It’s possible that a piece of space junk, or perhaps a micrometeorite, hit the spacecraft. Or maybe an onboard piece of equipment – a battery, a piece of scientific payload – failed and exploded. Signs point to the latter, since the spacecraft appears to be rapidly spinning. If an explosion caused a leak allowing, say, coolant to escape, this would spin up the spacecraft.

Astronomers use all sorts of electromagnetic radiation to learn about the universe – but X-ray spectra remain elusive. Philip Ronan, CC BY-SA

X-ray astronomy dreams

Astronomers use the electromagnetic spectrum – including visible or infrared light – to study stars, planets, galaxies and the universe as a whole. They have long used prisms and grisms to split the light into its components. Rather than just taking images, this spectroscopy allows astrophysicists to study the composition of objects in space and the conditions of the material that is emitting the light, including whether and how it moves around. Optical spectroscopy, for example, lets astronomers see how the stars in a galaxy move around and how old they are.

X-rays are near the far end of the eletromagnetic spectrum beyond the farthest ultraviolet, but not as far as Gamma rays.

Thanks to our atmosphere, X-rays from space don’t reach us at the Earth’s surface. That’s actually good news, since we’d all be in trouble: being constantly bombarded by X-rays leads to DNA damage, cancer and worse. But this also means we need to go to space to see X-rays from the cosmos. Astrophysicists have long wanted to put an X-ray high-resolution spectrograph into space – but the goal has so far remained elusive.

Perseus cluster of galaxies as seen by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The X-rays come from million-degree gases around the galaxy cluster. Giant bubbles and cavities show where the supermassive black hole blasted energy into the gas. NASA/CXC/IoA/A.Fabian et al., CC BY

X-ray astronomy got its start in the 1950s and ‘60’s with the first X-ray telescopes being launched on sounding rockets and balloons. Space telescopes followed, and with these, astronomers could take X-ray images or low-resolution spectra and made amazing discovery after discovery: the first black hole in our Milky Way galaxy; clusters of galaxies bathed in the glow of million-degree gas; all the way to a mysterious X-ray “background.” Soon after its launch in 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory finally resolved that X-ray background into a multitude of growing supermassive black holes in the early universe.

But the history of X-ray spectroscopic measurements in space is somewhat star-crossed. Before Hitomi was ASTRO-EII, known as Suzaku. Suzaku carried an X-ray microcalorimeter, but just a few weeks after launch, the instrument’s cooling system suffered a series of failures and lost all its coolant. Before that came ASTRO-E, which was lost during launch in 2000 when its M-V-4 rocket failed. And before that, NASA planned to fly an X-ray microcalorimeter on a mission called AXAF-S, which got canceled.

Visions of the hot and energetic universe

With a true high-resolution X-ray spectrograph in space we could finally see so much: we could see the motion, the ebb and flow, of million-degree gas sloshing around galaxy clusters as the supermassive black hole in the galaxy at the center of the cluster shoots unimaginable amounts of energy into it with its relativistic jets. We could watch the final gasps of matter as it falls into a feeding quasar, and see the distortion of spacetime itself due to Einstein’s general relativity. We could search for the “missing matter” which we believe must lurk in the vicinity of galaxies.

Artist’s conception of the ATHENA X-ray observatory. Credit: ATHENA/ESA

The next chance to fly such an instrument isn’t for a while. Astronomers can next pin their hopes on the ATHENA satellite, which the European Space Agency has selected as a flagship large-class mission. ATHENA will carry two X-ray instruments, a Wide Field Imager for taking large X-ray images of the sky, and a true X-ray calorimeter which will let us do high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy.

But ATHENA is currently not slated to launch until 2028, and no spacecraft has ever launched on time.

In space, no one can hear you ping

There is still hope for Hitomi: it may be only “mostly dead,” On March 30, JAXA received two pings from the damaged satellite. This means that at least some onboard systems were still running. Perhaps over a few months, Hitomi can be recovered and still do science.

JAXA has an incredible record in saving troubled spacecraft: they lost and reestablished contact with Hayabusa as it was trying to land on an asteroid, and when Akatsuki failed to enter its planned orbit around Venus, JAXA spent five years flying it through the solar system for a second, successful attempt.

The good news is that before its troubles, Hitomi did take some observations and sent them back to Earth… enough to amaze astrophysicists, but far too little to answer all the questions we have.

The ConversationKevin Schawinski, Assistant Professor of Galaxy & Black Hole Astrophysics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Featured Image Credit: JAXA, Akihiro Ikeshita

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This is Why Monarch Butterflies Could Go Extinct

There is a good chance that monarch butterflies will face a “quasi-extinction” in the next 20 years, researchers warn. Despite a favorable summer in 2015, the eastern migratory population declined 84 percent between 1996 and 2014.

Quasi-extinction  means that so few individual monarchs would exist that their migratory patterns would collapse and the population likely wouldn’t recover.

For a new study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers used historic trends to develop models that forecast future monarch populations. The team factored weather patterns and natural variations into the simulations and figured out the probability of the overall population sinking to various thresholds that could lead to quasi-extinction.

SAVING THE MONARCHS FROM EXTINCTION WILL REQUIRE “ALL HANDS ON DECK.”

The researchers tracked the current population of monarchs by measuring the area of land they occupied while overwintering in central Mexico. This year’s population covered a geographical area of roughly 10 acres, an improvement from its lowest point of about 1.7 acres during the winter of 2013-2014.

But that increase in population can be deceptive as it stems from favorable summer weather—not as a result of conservation efforts.

monarch-catepillar
Two monarch caterpillars devour a milkweed plant. (Credit: Vicki DeLoach/Flickr)

“The weather was very good for monarchs in the Midwest, so we saw a rebound in the population,” says John Pleasants, adjunct assistant professor of ecology, evolution, and organismal biology at Iowa State University. “But that doesn’t mean we’ve done anything to move the needle in terms of the population’s capacity.”

The varying population thresholds account for the wide gap in the probability between 11 and 57 percent for the chances of quasi-extinction. Scientists don’t know exactly how low the monarch population would have to sink to collapse their migratory patterns, so researchers examined several scenarios.

The size of the population at the overwintering sites in central Mexico averaged about 18.5 acres between 1994 and 2006. That area has shrunk to just over seven acres on average since then.

The loss of milkweeds, upon which monarchs rely to lay eggs and feed caterpillars, has played a major role in the decline of the population in North America. Milkweeds have all but disappeared from Midwestern agricultural fields over the last 15 years due to the use of herbicides that contain glyphosate. The lower number of milkweeds on the landscape has imposed a ceiling on the monarch population capacity that can’t be lifted without a dramatic expansion of milkweed outside of agricultural fields.

(Credit: NatureNerd (probably outside)/Flickr)
Monarch resting on milkweed. (Credit: NatureNerd (probably outside)/Flickr)

A conservation goal included in a national pollinator strategy announced last year aims to increase the number of milkweeds to support a monarch population of about 15 acres. This would cut the probability of quasi-extinction in half, according to the research team’s projections, but would require something on the order of nearly 2 billion additional milkweed plants on the landscape, Pleasants says.

Saving the monarchs from extinction will require “all hands on deck,” Pleasants says, and calls on citizen scientists to step up by planting milkweed in yards and gardens. Systematic planting of milkweed along roadsides or on land designated for conservation would help even more. “Anything anyone can do could be helpful.”

Brice Semmens, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, is the lead author of the study. The research was conducted as part of the Monarch Conservation Science Partnership, a US Geological Survey-led team of scientists and resource managers working to inform the management of monarch butterflies. Their work was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Source: Republished from Futurity.org as a derivative work under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Original article posted to Futurity by .

Featured Photo Credit: Andrew C/Flickr

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How drones can improve scientific research in the field

By Elizabeth Basha, University of the Pacific.

Drones – and promises about drones – seem ubiquitous these days. And some of what we associate with drones comes with varying degrees of scariness.

We think of automated planes shooting missiles, drones flying near sensitive nuclear power plants or quadcopters crashing into crowds while filming. If we think about everyday possibilities, we envision toys for children or companies promising deliveries, which sounds like a futuristic version of Hitchcock’s horror film “The Birds.”

However, drones – or, to use the technical term, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – show promise to help with a large number of societal and environmental problems.

As a researcher in aerial robotics, I’m trying to bring some cutting-edge ideas for using drones closer to reality. Some of these projects aim to keep sensors alive, measure hazardous or remote environments, and deal with scenarios that would be dangerous to humans.

Links to power and data

As our world becomes more filled with sensors – such as on roads and bridges, as well as machines – it will be important to ensure the increasingly distributed monitoring devices have power. Here, drones can help. UAVs can provide wireless recharging to hard-to-access locations such as sensors monitoring bridges or floating sensors on lakes.

Idealized figure representing a number of sensors (in red) monitoring a bridge and the UAV flying to wirelessly recharge the sensors’ batteries. Carrick Detweiler, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Idealized figure representing a number of sensors (in red) monitoring a bridge and the UAV flying to wirelessly recharge the sensors’ batteries. Carrick Detweiler, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, CC BY-ND

Dr. Carrick Detweiler at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and I have developed a system that allows a UAV to fly to a bridge, identify which battery to charge, and wirelessly recharge it, in a manner similar to those pads on which you can just drop your cellphone.

Over time, the UAV can visit repeatedly, recharging all of the batteries and keeping all the sensors live. That will provide more data to determine when the bridge needs repair. Lack of even one or two key pieces of data can make the rest of the monitoring less helpful, so having functioning, charged sensors is critical to keeping the information flowing.

An Ascending Techologies Hummingbird quadcopter, which serves as the base UAV for wireless recharging of sensors, monitoring of crops and measuring of water. Randall Gee, University of the Pacific, CC BY-ND

Our ongoing research also explores how to retrieve measurements from floating sensors, which will allow us to monitor water quality. Similar to working with bridge monitors, the UAV flies over the sensors, collecting data from each one and returning to a base station.

This speeds up data processing, and improves data collection: without the UAV, researchers would have to get in a boat to collect all of the sensors. This is tedious and can be expensive, as the scientists need to drive a boat to a boat ramp, spend all day collecting the data from the sensors, reset the sensors and then analyze the data.

If a sensor has failed in the time since the last visit, the scientist will discover this only when collecting data and will have lost all potential data, creating a hole in the data set and making it more difficult for the scientist to understand that environment. With a UAV, the scientist can relax in her office, send the UAV out for data on a daily basis, quickly identify failed sensors and have the UAV replace those sensors. The likelihood of gathering a good set of data that the scientist can use to learn more about our environment then increases.

In addition to supporting monitoring devices, UAVs can take measurements themselves. Research at UNL is using UAVs to measure agricultural crop heights; Arizona State University scholars are gathering remote imagery to study the role of water in the environment; and Swiss researchers are mapping forest trails.

Without UAVs, these tasks are harder. Crop heights would require farmers to visit all of their fields; ecohydrology would need expensive satellite or plane data collection; and forest trail mapping would require regular confirmation from hikers. These are only a few of the many ways that UAVs can help gather hard-to-measure things in hard-to-reach locations.

Disaster response

UAVs can also help respond to disasters. We are exploring how UAVs can monitor rivers to predict floods, an extension of our prior work that only used sensors.

Timely prediction of flooding requires extensive data, something easily obtainable in urban, developed areas. For rural and less developed areas, though, the infrastructure to measure rivers and weather for prediction is often too expensive. UAVs can supplement measurements to easily provide the appropriate information to improve predictions and save lives.

Dr. Detweiler is also looking at how to start controlled burns with UAVs, to help fight wildfires and help with land management. Fire breaks help restrict wildfire movement, but creating them is dangerous to firefighters who are directly in the line of the fire.

A UAV can fly close to the fire and drop small capsules in precise locations. Those capsules self-ignite and start a small controlled burn. Firefighters do not have to get close at all; they just have to identify the location for the UAV.

They can also help with more man-made disasters. A group at DePaul University uses UAVs to monitor the Dead Sea and reveal archaeological sites that are being looted. Typically solving this problem would use satellites, where measurements are expensive and rare. UAVs provide more frequent and cheap options that could allow archaeologists to save these sites.

As promising as UAVs are, though, much of the potential of these systems remains distant. Until the FAA decides how best to manage these systems (especially in the commercial context), UAVs will not fly around freely, especially out of the eyesight of a pilot. In addition, technical challenges remain, including reliable methods for avoiding obstacles and handling changing weather conditions (such as sudden high winds).

Overall, UAVs have great potential for the good and useful. Hopefully, we remember that when the news focuses on the dangerous and frivolous.

The ConversationElizabeth Basha, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of the Pacific

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Featured Photo Credit: Beawiharta Beawiharta/Reuters

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Meet the First Puppies Born by I.V.F. [Video]

The first litter of puppies born by in vitro fertilization shows promise for conserving endangered canid species, say researchers.

The breakthrough also opens the door to using gene-editing technologies to eradicate heritable diseases in dogs and for study of genetic diseases. Canines share more than 350 similar heritable disorders and traits with humans, almost twice the number as any other species.

Scientists transferred 19 embryos to the host female dog, who gave birth to seven healthy puppies, two from a beagle mother and a cocker spaniel father, and five from two pairings of beagle fathers and mothers.

“Since the mid-1970s, people have been trying to do this in a dog and have been unsuccessful,” says Alex Travis, associate professor of reproductive biology in the Baker Institute for Animal Health in Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

RARE BREEDS AND SPECIES

The findings have wide implications for wildlife conservation because, Travis says, “We can freeze and bank sperm, and use it for artificial insemination. We can also freeze oocytes, but in the absence of in vitro fertilization, we couldn’t use them. Now we can use this technique to conserve the genetics of endangered species.”

In vitro fertilization allows conservationists to store semen and eggs and bring their genes back into the gene pool in captive populations. In addition to endangered species, this can also be used to preserve rare breeds of show and working dogs.

With new genome editing techniques, researchers may one day remove genetic diseases and traits in an embryo, ridding dogs of heritable diseases. While selecting for desired traits, inbreeding has also led to detrimental genetic baggage. Different breeds are predisposed to different diseases; golden retrievers are likely to develop lymphoma, while Dalmatians carry a gene that predisposes them to blockage with urinary stones.

“With a combination of gene editing techniques and IVF, we can potentially prevent genetic disease before it starts,” Travis says.

Finally, since dogs and humans share so many diseases, dogs now offer a “powerful tool for understanding the genetic basis of diseases,” Travis says.

EMBRYO SUCCESS

For successful in vitro fertilization, researchers must fertilize a mature egg with a sperm in a lab to produce an embryo. They must then insert the embryo into a host female at the right time in her reproductive cycle.

The first challenge was to collect mature eggs from the female oviduct. The researchers first tried to use eggs that were in the same stage of cell maturation as other animals, but since dogs’ reproductive cycles differ from other mammals, those eggs failed to fertilize. Through experimentation, graduate student and first author Jennifer Nagashima and colleagues found if they left the egg in the oviduct one more day, the eggs reached a stage where fertilization was greatly improved.

The second challenge was that the female tract prepares sperm for fertilization, requiring researchers to simulate those conditions in the lab. Nagashima and colleague Skylar Sylvester found that adding magnesium to the cell culture properly prepared the sperm.

“We made those two changes, and now we achieve success in fertilization rates at 80 to 90 percent,” Travis says.

The final challenge for the researchers was freezing the embryos. Travis and colleagues delivered Klondike, the first puppy born from a frozen embryo in the Western Hemisphere in 2013. Freezing the embryos allowed the researchers to insert them into the recipient’s oviducts (called fallopian tubes in humans) at the right time in her reproductive cycle, which occurs only once or twice a year.

Coauthors include Nucharin Songsasen, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, National Zoological Park.

The National Institutes of Health, the Baker Institute for Animal Health, Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, and the Smithsonian Institution funded the study, which was described in the journal PLOS ONE,

Source: Republished from Futurity.org as a derivative work under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Original article posted to Futurity by .

Featured Photo Credit:  Mike Carroll/College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University

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Breakthrough Device Rotates a Single Cell to Create 3D Images using a Smartphone

A new low-cost device will allow researchers to take 3D images of single cells or organisms using only a smartphone, replacing the need for an existing device that costs more than $200,000.

The device uses acoustic waves to vibrate trapped bubbles in a series of small cavities. The vibration creates microvortexes in the flowing liquid that are tunable so the sample rotates in any direction and at any desired speed.

“Currently confocal microscopes are required in many biological, biochemical, and biomedical studies, but many labs do not have access to a confocal microscope, which costs more than $200,000,” says Tony Jun Huang, a professor of engineering science and mechanics and chair in bioengineering sciences at Penn State.

Huang and his group created the device called acoustofluidic rotational manipulation (ARM).

“Our ARM method is a very inexpensive platform and it is compatible with all the optical characterization tools. You can literally use a cellphone to do three-dimensional imaging.”

To demonstrate the device’s capabilities, the researchers rotated C. elegans, a model organism about a millimeter in length frequently used in biological studies. They also acoustically rotated and imaged a HeLa cancer cell.

(a) A schematic of the experimental setup. The piezoelectric transducer that generates acoustic waves is placed adjacent to the microfluidic channel. The acoustic waves actuate air microbubbles trapped within sidewall microcavities. (b) An optical image showing a mid-L4 stage C. elegans trapped by multiple oscillating microbubbles. Scale bar = 100 μm. (Credit: Tony Jun Huang/Penn State)
(a) A schematic of the experimental setup. The piezoelectric transducer that generates acoustic waves is placed adjacent to the microfluidic channel. The acoustic waves actuate air microbubbles trapped within sidewall microcavities. (b) An optical image showing a mid-L4 stage C. elegans trapped by multiple oscillating microbubbles. Scale bar = 100 μm. (Credit: Tony Jun Huang/Penn State) Click/tap for larger image.

Existing methods of manipulating small objects depend on the optical, magnetic, or electrical properties of the specimen, and/or damage the specimen due to laser heating. The ARM method, on the other hand, uses a gentle acoustic wave generated by a power similar to ultrasound imaging, and at a lower frequency. The device is also compact and simple to use.

“Our method is a valuable platform for imaging and studying the effect of rotation at the single cell level,” says Adem Ozceki, graduate student in engineering science and mechanics and one of the lead authors of the study published in Nature Communications. “More important, with the capacity to rotate large numbers of cells in parallel, researchers will be able to perform high-throughput, single-cell studies.”

The National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and the Center for Nanoscale Science at Penn State supported the work.

Source: Republished from Futurity.org as a derivative work under the the Attribution 4.0 International license.  Original article posted to Futurity by .

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Can I trust my robot? And should my robot trust me?

By Riccardo Bevilacqua, University of Florida.

If we are serious about long-term human presence in space, such as manned bases on the moon or Mars, we must figure out how to streamline human-robot interactions.

Right now, even the most basic of robots seem to have impenetrable brains. When I bought an autonomous vacuum cleaner, one that roams the house on its own, I thought I was going to save time and be able to enjoy a book or a movie, or play longer with the kids. I ended up robot-proofing every room, making sure wires and cables are out of the way, closing doors, placing electronic signposts for the robot to follow and much more – often daily. I cannot fully understand or predict what the system will do, so I don’t trust it. As a result, I play it safe, and spend time doing things to accommodate the needs I imagine the robot might have.

As a space roboticist, I think about this sort of problem happening in orbit. Imagine an astronaut on a spacewalk, working on repairing something damaged on the outside of the spacecraft. Several tools might be needed, and parts to mend or replace others. An autonomous spacecraft could serve as a floating toolbox, holding parts and tools until they’re needed, and staying close to the astronaut as she moves around the area needing to be fixed. Another robot could be clamping parts together before they are permanently fastened.

How will these robots know where they’ll be needed to go next, to be useful but not in the way? How will the astronaut know whether the robots are planning to move to the place she actually needs? What if something comes loose unexpectedly – can the person and the machinery figure out how to stay out of each other’s way while handling the situation efficiently? In weightless space, spatial orientation is difficult and the dynamics of moving around one another are not intuitive.

Problems around effective communication between people and their machines – particularly about actions and intentions – arise throughout the field of robotics. They must be solved if we are to fully take advantage of the potential robots enable for us.

Feeling safe crossing the road

Understanding robots is already an increasing problem here on Earth. One day I found myself walking down a California road where autonomous cars are tested. I asked myself, “How would I know if a driverless vehicle is going to stop at the crosswalk?” I have always relied on eye contact and cues from the driver, but those options may be soon gone.

Robots have trouble understanding us, too. I recently read of an autonomous car unable to process a situation where a bicycle rider balanced himself for some time at an intersection, without putting his feet down. The onboard algorithms could not determine if the biker was going or staying.

A self-portrait of the Mars rover Curiosity.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

When we look at space exploration and defense, we find similar problems. NASA has not used the full abilities of some of its Mars rovers, simply because the engineers could not be sure what would happen if the metallic pets were free to explore and investigate the Red Planet on their own. The humans didn’t trust the machines, so they prevented them from doing as much as they could.

The Department of Defense often uses crews of 10 or more trained personnel to support a single unmanned aerial vehicle up in the sky. Is such a drone really autonomous? Does it require the people, or do the people need it? In any case, how do they interact?

What is “autonomy,” really?

Do drones need people or do people need drones? U.S. Air Force

Do drones need people or do people need drones?
U.S. Air Force

While “autonomy” means “self-governance” (from Greek), no man is an island; the same appears to be valid for our robotic creations. Today we see robots as agents able to operate independently – like my vacuum cleaner – but still part of a team – the family’s efforts to keep the house clean. If they are truly working with us, rather than instead of us, then communication is key, as well as the ability to infer intent. We may go solo for most duties, but sooner or later we will need to be able to connect with the rest of the team.

The problem is that autonomous machines and humans do not fully understand each other, and often speak in languages each other does not know – and has not yet started to learn.

The question for the future is how we transmit intent between humans and robots, in both directions. How do we learn to understand – and then to trust – machines? How do they learn to trust us? What cues might each offer the other? Understanding intentions and trusting our fellow humans is already a bumpy ride, but at least we have known cues we can rely on – like pedestrian-driver eye contact at a crosswalk. We need to find new ways to read robots’ minds, the same way they need to be able to understand ours.

Perhaps an astronaut could be given a specialized display to show what the helper spacecraft’s intentions are, much like the gauges in an airplane cockpit show the plane’s status to the pilot. Maybe the displays would be embedded in a helmet visor, or enhanced by sounds that have specific meanings. But what information would they transmit, and how would they know it?

These questions are open ground for new work, the type of learning we’ll need to find to unlock an exciting future of unimaginable exploration in which a new species, the robot, can lead us farther than ever before.

The ConversationRiccardo Bevilacqua, Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Florida

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Featured Photo Credit:  NASA Johnson/flickr

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Athletes look for an edge in a new place: virtual reality

Galen Clavio, Indiana University, Bloomington

Virtual reality (VR) appears ready to take the entertainment world by storm in 2016. In addition to the much-hyped Oculus Rift, major corporations such as Facebook, Sony and Samsung are poised to release high-quality VR headsets to the public this year. After years of VR being discussed as the “next big thing,” this may be the year consumers will be able to get their hands on actual products.

It turns out some athletes have already begun exploring the promise of VR. Sports teams – both professional and collegiate – are taking advantage of the unique qualities of VR video to understand games in new and unique ways. Stanford’s STRIVR system, for example, provides services for its teams as well as for Clemson University and several NFL teams.

As a researcher and teacher of new media technology in sports journalism, I have had my opinion on VR changed dramatically over the course of the last year. My initial feeling was that VR was little more than a new fad that would fade, along the same lines as 3D television. But after using the technology and seeing its applications, I have changed my mind completely on it. VR technology is a radical departure from traditional video presentation, and it has myriad applications in both consumer media and in athletic practice.

We are already seeing certain sports take advantage of these applications. At the Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology at Indiana University, five sports teams actively use VR, including men’s basketball and football. According to Cuban Center videographer Patrick Dhaene, that number is expected to double next year.

VR and sports training

Coaches and players have been using regular two-dimensional video for multiple generations, generally relying on a wide camera angle to capture the entirety of a formation or play. This can make players feel distant from the material they are studying.


A traditional football team training video session.

With VR, however, the player is able to put on a headset and experience a play from a much closer vantage point – as if they are inside the play as it takes place.

A quarterback wearing a VR headset can take a simulated snap and physically turn his head left or right in real time as the play progresses, helping him learn both the progressions of his wide receivers and the positioning of the defense.

Players can use VR to help memorize plays and formations without having to step onto the field, by repeatedly watching different aspects of looped plays within the VR headset. Coaches enjoy the benefits of players using VR to experience play repetitions, without the potential for injury that comes from being on the practice field.

How it works

The video that athletes and coaches see in a VR environment is constructed differently than normal video. Providing the user with an immersive environment requires different types of lenses and cameras, and computers must aid in production.

The typical VR video consists of footage from multiple cameras, shooting and recording in sync with each other. These cameras are generally fastened to a “rig” that holds the cameras in place. The rig is then anchored to a pedestal, allowing it to remain motionless during filming.

A virtual reality camera rig. Indiana University athletics, Author provided

To make a VR film of a football practice focused on the offensive side of the ball, for example, the camera rig is stationed near the quarterback in the backfield. Each play is then run as normal, with the quarterback taking the snap, going through his progressions and making a pass.

Once the practice is over, the real work begins for the video crew.

For each play, a VR producer must assemble the footage from all the cameras into a single 180- or 360-degree visual field, a process known as “stitching.” This is arguably the most important part of the VR process, as improper stitching can render the video unusable.

After a play is properly stitched, players can view it through a VR headset, allowing them to concentrate on different areas of the play. Quarterbacks can even turn their heads away from the line of scrimmage and watch themselves throwing the ball, in order to evaluate their mechanics.

Does it help?

Academic research on the effectiveness of VR-aided sports training is still in its preliminary stages. Comments from both college and professional athletes who have experienced VR-aided training have been almost uniformly positive. But only now are scientists entering a stage where broader adoption of the technology will allow proper evaluation of the mental and psychological impacts of VR.

There are certain limitations to VR in the sports training environment. Camera rigs and production computers are expensive to purchase and difficult to learn how to use. Rigs generally must stay stationary during filming, because moving rigs tend to produce video that causes motion sickness in users. And the need for a pedestal makes capturing in-game VR footage for instructional purposes difficult.

Furthermore, VR isn’t a panacea for real-world practice. Using VR-aided training is unlikely to lead to consistently perfect throws or defenders who sniff out every play before it starts.

However, the comments from players, coaches and VR specialists show a tremendous amount of potential, allowing players an unprecedented perspective on the game that extends on-field practice time into the film room. As the technology continues to mature, we should expect the teams using it to be operating with a competitive advantage.

The ConversationGalen Clavio, Associate Professor of Sports Media; Director of the National Sports Journalism Center, Indiana University, Bloomington

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Featured Photo Credit: Indiana University Athletics, Author provided

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Science Rocks My Week: Our Most Popular Stories of the Week

Another amazing week in Science!

  • A team of computer scientists try hacking an Android phone while another team releases a completely open source low-power microprocessor;
  • Biologists in Alaska notice a butterfly that’s been under their noses for decades and realize it’s a new species;
  • Medical researchers discover a method that is 100 times more effective for delivering new neurons to the brain;
  • Astronomers explain why our moon has tilted over time;
  • How fish mouths are helping scientists design better filters;
  • New research into a shelved drug yields a potent broad-spectrum antiviral ;
  • And so much more…

Here are this week’s most popular stories on Science Rocks My World as voted by your clicks:

What if the FBI tried to crack an Android phone? We attacked one to find out

smartphone-531250_1280The Justice Department has managed to unlock an iPhone 5c used by the gunman Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, last December. The high-profile case has pitted federal law enforcement agencies against Apple, which fought a legal order to work around its passcode security feature to give law enforcement access to the phone’s data. The FBI said it relied on a third party to crack the phone’s encrypted data, raising questions about iPhone security and whether federal agencies should disclose their method.

But what if the device had been running Android? Would the same technical and legal drama have played out?

READ MORE!

Surprising Discovery of an Ancient Butterfly Species in Alaska

Some might say it takes a rare breed to survive the Alaska wilderness. The discovery of what is possibly the first new species from the Last Frontier in 28 years may prove that theory correct.

Now, researchers think the butterfly, Tanana Arctic (Oeneis tanana), could be the result of a rare and unlikely hybridization between two related species, both specially adapted for the harsh arctic climate, perhaps before the last ice age…

READ MORE!

Breakthrough ‘Fiber Islands’ 100 Times More Effective for Treating Brain Diseases

fiber-islandsBiomedical scientists have figured out how to convert adult tissue-derived stem cells into human neurons on 3D “scaffolds,” or tiny islands of fibers.

The technology could someday help treat people with Parkinson’s disease and other devastating brain-related conditions, researchers say.

For a new study, scientists injected the scaffolds, loaded with beneficial neurons to replace diseased cells in mouse brains…

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Here’s Why the Moon has Tilted Over Time

Half_moon_in_the_skyThe moon may not have always had the same face pointed toward the Earth. Instead, the “Man in the Moon” nodded up and down, due to heating and volcanic eruptions on the side facing Earth.

Researchers made the discovery while trying to explain maps of lunar polar hydrogen. The hydrogen, discovered by NASA’s Lunar Prospector mission in the 1990s, is believed to represent water ice, protected from the sun’s rays in cold, permanently shadowed craters near the moon’s north and south poles. If ice were exposed to direct sunlight…

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Is global warming causing marine diseases to spread?

image-20160322-32306-101jp1tGlobal climate change is altering the world’s oceans in many ways. Some impacts have received wide coverage, such as shrinking Arctic sea ice, rising sea levels and ocean warming. However, as the oceans warm, marine scientists are observing other forms of damage.

My research focuses on diseases in marine ecosystems. Humans, animals and plants are all susceptible to diseases caused by bacteria, viruses, parasites and fungi. Marine diseases, however, are an emerging field…

Here’s Why Geysers On Saturn’s Moon Have Nonstop Eruptions

casini-eruptionsThe Cassini spacecraft has observed geysers erupting on Saturn’s moon Enceladus since 2005, but the process that drives and sustains these seemingly endless eruptions has remained a mystery.

Now scientists have pinpointed the mechanism by which cyclical tidal stresses exerted by Saturn can drive those long-lived eruptions…

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What fish mouths teach us about engineering clog-free filters [Video]

9546645557_3c62860453_kFilter-feeding fish accomplish a feat that human technologies cannot: species including goldfish, menhaden and basking sharks filter tiny algal cells or shrimp-like prey from huge volumes of water without clogging their oral filters.

Since fish have been filtering particles for more than 150 million years longer than human beings, we suspected fish may have evolved filter designs that use unknown processes to remain unclogged. So we decided to investigate…

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Every Part of this Microprocessor is Open Source

pulpino_chiptray-768x439Software source code and hardware designs tend to be closely guarded trade secrets. But researchers recently made the full design of one of their microprocessors available as an open-source system.

Luca Benin, a professor at ETH Zurich involved with the project, says making the system open source maximizes the freedom of other developers to use and change the system. “It will now be possible to build open-source hardware from the ground up…

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