scipsy:

Images produced with Diffusion spectrum magnetic resonance imaging (DSI) a new tool developed by Van J Wedeen. Here’s an interview, and here’s a slide show.

(via freshphotons)

Can You See Me Now? New X-Ray System Reveals Fine Detail

X-rays can help reveal anything from bombs hidden in luggage to tumors in breasts, but some potentially vital clues might be too faint to capture with conventional methods. Now a new x-ray technique adapted from atom smashers could resolve more key details.

Conventional x-ray imaging works much like traditional photography, relying on the light—in this case, x-rays—that a target absorbs, transmits and scatters. To make out fine details, one typically needs a lot of x-rays, either over time, which can expose targets to damaging levels of radiation, or all at once from powerful sources such as circular particle accelerators, or synchrotrons, which are expensive.

Instead physicist Alessandro Olivo of University College London and his colleagues suggest imaging an object by looking for very small deviations in an x-ray’s direction as it moves through that object. Their idea is to take such x-ray phase-contrast imaging, which has been used in synchrotrons for more than 15 years, and use it with conventional x-rays.

(via Scientific American)

Lunar orbiters find most recent volcanos on dark side of the Moon

The Earth’s moon was formed by a collision between two separate bodies early in the history of the solar system. That collision left the Moon completely molten, and provided it with both a large reservoir of heat and an interior that produced huge outpourings of basaltic rock, which formed the dark maria that can easily be seen on the body’s surface. These features are also associated with volcanic domes that indicate a more familiar and subdued form of volcanism also occurred on the Moon, albeit rarely. Now, researchers think they’ve spotted the most recently formed volcanoes on the Moon, hidden on the dark side and far away from any maria.

(via Ars Technica)

The laser is a very special light source: the spatial, temporal, and frequency aspects of laser light can be exquisitely controlled. This control has enabled much of modern life, and it has had a major impact on research itself. But even the smallest laser is rather large. And many of the things we like to do with light, like imaging, are limited by the fact that normal optical elements can only focus light to a spot with a diameter that is something like the wavelength of light.

To compensate for this shortcoming, researchers have turned to the world of surface plasmon polaritons. The nice thing about plasmons is that they involve an interaction between electrons in a metal and a light field that leads to the wavelength becoming much shorter. The result is that plasmon optics are much smaller and can focus light to much smaller spot sizes. 

The dirty little secret of plasmons is that they decay away very quickly, making them tough to work with. To overcome this, researchers are working on plasmonic laser sources, called spasers.

If you’re thinking, “I’ve been here before,” you’re not wrong. In 2009, a group of researchers published the first results on a spaser. In that work, the researcher took what might be considered the chocolate-coated nut approach. Take a small gold ball and coat it in a plastic material that lases. To make the spaser go, you simply put millions of them in water and shoot a enormous laser pulse into the water—voilà, a small number of the plastic-coated gold balls will start to lase. Of course, the light goes in every direction and it isn’t much use unless you were looking for a weakly glowing cell of cloudy water. More work was certainly required.

The latest work is a natural extension of that previous effort. Instead of spheres, the researchers used gold and silver wires. These were also coated in a plastic material that could lase. Like the previous work, the researchers used another laser to excite the plastic. 

In this case, however, the details of the laser action are a little different. The plastic material absorbs light and emits photons at a lower frequency. Some of this light is captured by the wire, exciting a surface plasmon polariton that travels around the circumference of the wire. The field of the plasmon passes through the plastic material, stimulating more emission into the plasmon, increasing its intensity.

(via Ars Technica)

In Your Face: Close-Up Look at Doomed Comet | Wired Science 

NASA’s Stardust-Next spacecraft flew past Comet Tempel 1 at 8:38 Pacific time Monday night, snapping photos as it sped by.

In 2005, the Deep Impact probe blew a crater into Tempel 1 with an 800-pound metal slug. Since then, Tempel 1 has completed an orbit around the sun, losing ice and other material to the sun’s hot glare along the way. The new images will give astronomers new insight into how a comet is slowly destroyed by the sun.

“This is something we’ve never been able to see before,” said principal investigator Joe Veverka of Cornell University in an interview on NASA TV during the flyby. “We know every time a comet comes close to the sun, it loses material. But we don’t know where those changes occur.”

Stardust-Next, which originally launched as “Stardust” in 1999, swooped within 124 miles of Tempel 1’s icy, dirty core at about 24,300 miles per hour.

The spacecraft took a total of 72 science images, 46 as it approached and 26 as it receded from the comet. As it approached, it snapped pictures once every 6 seconds.

 The new images started arriving at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, about three hours after the spacecraft made its closest approach. Each image took 15 minutes to download. The Stardust crew wanted to download the five closest images first, but an unknown error sent the photos in the order in which they were taken. The astronomers had to wait until 6 a.m. Tuesday Pacific time to get the good stuff.

Luckily, the images were everything the science team hoped for.

“If you ask me, was this mission 100 percent successful, in terms of the science? I would have to say no,” Veverka said in a press conference Feb. 15. “It was 1,000 percent successful!”

Stardust-Next shot photos of new terrain that had never been seen before, as well as areas on Tempel 1 that had been covered by Deep Impact. The images showed that several regions changed significantly over the past five years. One of the most interesting areas looks like a blanket of material that erupted from beneath the comet’s surface and flowed downhill. That flow is now receding due to erosion, Veverka said.

“It goes much against the idea that [comets are] just icy dirtballs where nothing has happened since their formation,” Veverka said. “Apparently a lot of things have happened.”

charlepaedia:

Collatz Map Fractal

The Collatz Conjecture: Take any natural number n. If n is even, divide it by 2 to get n/2, if n is odd multiply it by 3 and add 1 to obtain 3n + 1. Repeat the process indefinitely. The conjecture is that no matter what number you start with, you will always eventually reach 1. It has been called “Half Or Triple Plus One”, sometimes called HOTPO. The property has also been called oneness. 

(via proofmathisbeautiful)

This is absolutely gorgeous.

proofmathisbeautiful:

macmankev:

freshphotons:

Spontaneously Modulated Spin Textures in a Dipolar Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensate. Via.

unknownskywalker:

Planck Sees Perseus

This long-wavelength shoes low activity, star-formation region in the constellation Perseus, as seen by Planck.

The image show three physical processes taking place in the dust and gas of the interstellar medium. At the lowest frequencies, Planck maps emission caused by high-speed electrons interacting with the Galaxy’s magnetic fields. An additional diffuse component comes from spinning dust particles emitting at these frequencies. At intermediate wavelengths of a few millimetres, the emission is from gas heated by newly formed hot stars.

At still higher frequencies, Planck maps the meagre heat given out by extremely cold dust. This can reveal the coldest cores in the clouds, which are approaching the final stages of collapse, before they are reborn as fully-fledged stars. The stars then disperse the surrounding clouds.

The delicate balance between cloud collapse and dispersion regulates the number of stars that the Galaxy makes. Planck will advance our understanding of this interplay hugely, because, for the first time, it provides data on several major emission mechanisms in one go.

Source: ESA, NASA

proofmathisbeautiful:

snafubar:

stellagarrick:

E = m c² [Explored] (via Sprengben [why not get a friend?])

Make me think of Jones Polynomials for some reason..

proofmathisbeautiful:

biophysicalresonance:

Ahhhh! This is so amazing! Taking videos of atomic processes with UEM (Ultrafast Electron Microscopy)! Click through for the article.

The future is now.