World's First Magnetic Soap Invented

Watch out, Mr. Clean. Scientists in the United Kingdom have just created the world's first magnetic soap, and they're saying it could revolutionize the way we take on mega-cleanups.

Chemists have long wanted to achieve magnetic soap that works on an industrial level because it would give environmental remediation experts the ability to precisely control a cleanup using magnetic force. But scientists assumed that mixing metal into detergents wasn't the answer since the metal particles would likely be so isolated within the mixture they wouldn't respond well to a magnet.

Recently, however, several University of Bristol scientists led by chemistry professor Julian Eastoe successfully created working magnetic soap.

Robot Builds Itself With Foam

They did it by dissolving iron in a bunch of inert materials similar to those usually found in fabric softener. Adding iron created metallic centers in the soap particles, so that the soap clung to a magnet when it was placed in solution.

Using a magnet, the scientists were able to change characteristics of the soap such as its electrical conductivity and melting point. That responsiveness could be extremely useful for environmental remediation or industrial waste cleanup because the cleaner would only work when needed.

The soap's magnetic properties also make the substance easy to collect and remove once it's been used, according to the scientists. Imagine putting a bunch of this soap on an oil spill and then being able to almost reel it in.

Dish Soap Helps Slide New Bridge Into Place

Eastoe and his colleagues were initially so surprised by the way their soap behaved that they took it to a special research lab in France and put it under a "neutron microscope." Indeed, the iron particles were pulling together. The group published the details of their creation in the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie (abstract).

Although the magnetic soap is unlikely to be turned into a household cleaner in the near future, Eastoe said in a statement that just proving the soap can be made means potential for commercially available industrial cleaners. For now, the scientists are continuing to work on the soap in the lab. Let's hope they perfect it soon. The list of EPA Superfund sites is still long.

Photo: Unlike normal soaps, the newly created magnetic one on the right sticks to a magnet. Credit: University of Bristol.

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Kepler's Laws Rule the Worlds (that's right ... all of them)

Earlier this month, fans of science may have heard a lot of commotion about the transit of Venus. The transit of Venus describes an event that happens at most twice a century in which Venus passes directly in a path directly between the Earth and the Sun. When the moon does this, it's an eclipse. When Venus does it, it's the transit of Venus.

The commotion was mostly related to the rarity of the event and the fact that it was truly beautiful, for those who were able to witness it. (Remember, don't stare directly at the sun to observe any astronomical event.) If you missed it, then you can check out the transit of Venus images over at About.com Space. Comedian/faux political pundit Stephen Colbert nailed it when he identified the transit of Venus as:

"Truly one of the most majestic examples of something passing in front of something else."

But once upon a time, the transit of Venus carried some pretty heavy stakes. In 1769, nations around the world (well, okay, mostly Europe) sent expeditions to measure the time of the transit of Venus. Using these calculations, they were able to apply Kepler's laws of planetary motion to figure out the distance between the Earth and the Sun. By having a more precise measurement of this distance, it improved a navigator's ability to calculate longitude while at sea, which ultimately had benefits for warfare and trade. (Back then, it seems, funding pure scientific endeavors wasn't any more popular than it is now.)

The reason this works is that Kepler's laws govern the motion of planets orbiting the sun, defining the paths that these planets take and the rates at which they move. Kepler derived these values from careful observations maintained by his mentor, astronomer Tycho Brahe, over the course of his lifetime. So, in other words, Kepler knew that his laws applied to the motion of the planets, but he didn't have a firm theoretical explanation for why this was. It was later shown that Kepler's laws could be derived from Newton's law of gravity, developed nearly a century later in 1687, thus providing Kepler's laws with a theoretical framework as well as the empirical support of evidence. It is always nice to have both, after all.

Kepler's Second Law:
A line from the sun to each planet sweeps out equal areas in equal time.
Source: Wikipedia via GNU Free Documentation License

With these laws firmly in place, the only thing that remained was to make measurements of?the transit of Venus and then apply some angular calculations to figure out the resulting details about the solar system ... which is where the 1769 transit of Venus expeditions come in.

The adventure of three of the major expeditions is described in thrilling detail in Mark Anderson's recent book The Day the World Discovered the Sun. ?I've got to admit that I'm not necessarily the sort of guy who jumps at the chance to read travelogues of eighteenth century scientific expeditions ... but if you are, then it should definitely rank high on your reading list!

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World's Most Powerful Laser Fires Most Powerful Blast

The world's largest laser was turned on for a fraction of a second. It unleashed the most powerful laser blast in history.

The largest laser in the world was turned on for a fraction of a second last week -- and it unleashed the most powerful laser blast in history.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) -- a laser test facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. -- turned on its 192 laser beams for a brief instant on March 15, unleashing a record-setting 1.875-megajoule blast into a target chamber.

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The lasers were combined, gathered and focused through a series of lens into a 2.03-megajoule shot, said Ed Moses, NIF director -- a record for the facility.

That pulse of energy lasted for just 23 billionths of a second, yet it generated 411 trillion watts of power, NIF said -- 1,000 times more than the entire United States consumes at any given instant.

“It’s a remarkable demonstration of the laser from the standpoint of its energy, its precision, its power, and its availability,” Moses told Nature magazine.

But it’s barely half the battle. NIF hopes to dramatically increase the power of the laser shots by the end of year, intending to ultimately use the facility to harness the energy reaction that occurs naturally within the sun: fusion.

“This event marks a key milestone in the National Ignition Campaign’s drive toward fusion ignition,” Moses said.

In fission, atoms are split and the massive energy released is captured. The NIF aims for fusion, the ongoing energy process in the sun and other stars where hydrogen and helium nuclei are continually fusing and releasing enormous amounts of energy. In the ignition facility, beams of light converge on pellets of hydrogen isotopes to create a similar, though controlled, micro-explosion.

As the beams move through a series of amplifiers, their energy increases exponentially. From beginning to end, the beams' total energy grows from one-billionth of a joule to a potential high of four million joules, NIF said -- a factor of more than a quadrillion.

And it all happens in about five millionths of a second.

Because the laser is on for the merest fraction of a second, it costs little to operate -- between $5 and $20 per blast, said spokeswoman Lynda Seaver. But the potential is enormous.

NIF’s managers hope by the end of the year to reach a break-even point, where the energy released is equal to if not greater than the energy that went into the blast.

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“We have all the capability to make it happen in fiscal year 2012,” Moses told Nature.

Experts aren't so sure, citing challenges that NIF and other types of fusion have had in the past.

Glen Wurden, a plasma physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, told Nature scientists should be wary of putting all their eggs in the laser basket.

“It’s premature right now,” he told the magazine, citing the troubles that have plagued a competing approach to fusion and its flagship project in France.

More from FoxNews/SciTech

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New iPad – World’s First Tablet to Support Bluetooth 4.0

Apple is slowly extending support for Bluetooth 4.0 throughout its entire family of products.

The company's first Bluetooth 4.0 products were the MacBook Air and Mac Mini, which were introduced in July last year. The iPhone 4S, introduced in October last year, was the first smartphone to support the new wireless standard, and with the new iPad, Apple brings the same, low power, high speed Bluetooth standard to its tablet.

Just in case you're not aware, Bluetooth 4.0 is the latest specification of the wireless standard, which, in addition to supporting higher theoretical speeds, also greatly reduces power consumption.

With an ecosystem of tightly integrated products, Apple is in a position to actually create a great experience by tying all of its devices together using Bluetooth 4.0. Apple did something very similar with AirPlay, except that AirPlay wasn't a standard created by a third party, but by Apple itself.

There have, in fact, been rumors about Apple planning to add Bluetooth 4.0 support to AirPlay, in addition to the support over Wi-Fi. That would work wonders for battery life of iOS devices and MacBooks.

Not just Apple devices, but even third party accessories, especially health related gadgets and sensors, would benefit greatly from the improved Bluetooth 4.0 specification. For example, a Bluetooth 4.0 compatible heart rate monitor can run for more than a year without a battery change. These sensors can, in turn, be coupled with apps to create a rich experience for the end user.

Bluetooth 4.0 hasn't caught a lot of momentum till now, which is presumably why it didn't earn a mention at Apple's media event, but when the standard starts picking up, almost all Apple devices would already be ready to take advantage of it.

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Earth Sheds Light on Alien Worlds

Scientists use light reflected back to Earth from the moon to get a planet-wide picture. It is the angle, or polarization, of the light that is key. Scientists would like to get a look at Earthshine without having it bounce off the moon.

Using the moon as a giant mirror, scientists looked at reflected light from Earth and figured out a way to pick out telltale signs of life, a practice run for looking for life on planets beyond the solar system.

The research builds on earlier work to collect all the light reflected off Earth and analyze it for the chemical fingerprints of vegetation, oxygen, water and other signs of life. Rather than looking at the brightness, however, the scientists study how the light is polarized, a measurement that can more easily be made from very distant exoplanets as well.

PHOTOS: Top Ten Places to Find Alien Life

“In the past, there have been very accurate polarization measurements of the Earth's blue sky from the ground and these measurements showed the absorption bands (of gases) and the vegetation very clearly. However, those were local measurements -- a small path of the sky overhead -- so they didn't prove you can also see it in the whole Earth observations,” Daphne Stam, with the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, wrote in an email to Discovery News.

In exoplanet research, polarization is a very useful tool for two reasons, adds Christoph Keller, a professor of experimental physics at The Netherlands’ Leiden Observatory.

First is that starlight reflected by an exoplanet is polarized, like sunlight bouncing off Earth, but the light coming directly from the star is not.

“Polarization measurements are like filters that block the much brighter starlight and let only the much dimmer exoplanet light through,” Keller told Discovery News.

Second, is that these measurements of polarized light contain much more information about the surface and atmosphere of planets than regular measurements of light’s intensity.

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“Polarization, for instance, can say something about the size and composition of liquid droplets and small particles in a planetary atmosphere,” Keller said.

Ideally, scientists would like to get a look at Earthshine without having it bounce off the moon, but instruments to make that measurement from space currently don’t exist.

“This is the only way to see the Earth (as) it looks from space, but actually observing from the ground,” lead researcher Michael Sterzik, deputy director of the European Space Agency’s La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile, wrote in an email to Discovery News.

“The final motivation is to establish a viable astronomical techniques to study and analyze the atmopsheres and surfaces of exoplanets, and in particular biosignatures,” Sterzik added.

For now, since Earth is the only example of a life-hosting planet, it is the best stand-in for Earth-like planets beyond.

Sterzik’s research appears in this week’s Nature.

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Is this �World’s Smallest� flash drive too small?

Every time you need to find your flash drive, it always ends up in an odd place because it’s small, and easily misplaced. Seeing as this epidemic is happening all over the world, Deonet has given us a solution, which is to make The World’s Smallest USB stick.

The logic behind it is obviously that if something is small, it makes sense that it would be easier to find if it were even smaller. That’s a valid line of thought, right? It will come out later this month, and will measure a measly 19.5X14.5X2.9mm. You can choose from 4, 8, and 16GB capacities, though having all the storage space in the world won’t help if you can’t find it. There isn’t exactly a definite price out just yet, but you’ll no doubt be charged a big price for this small stick.

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Knock, Knock, Who's There? The World's Funniest Joke!

Two researchers walked into a bar, and a third one ducked. Are you laughing? Well, we know that's not the answer. Back in 2002, researchers at the University of Herfordshire wanted to find the "world's funniest joke."

To find the answer, Richard Wiseman a Professor of Psychology at the university started a program called LaughLab to ascertain the answer to that very complex research question. The question was designed to find the funniest joke across all cultures, regions, demographics and countries; not an easy task.

The year-long study was a collaboration between the University of Hertfordshire and The British Science Association. It involved "people sending in their favorite jokes, and rating how funny they found the jokes submitted by others," according to LaughLab's website.  "The project attracted attention from the international media, resulting in the website receiving over 40,000 jokes and 1.5 million ratings."

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Of the 40,000 jokes submitted the winner was sent by Gurpal Gosall, a 31-year-old psychiatrist from Manchester, England.

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: "OK, now what?"

The study exposed ties across nations for humorous word play. The study also broke joke popularity down by country.

The United States' data was skewed slightly when newspaper columnist Dave Barry "urged readers to submit jokes that simply ended with the punch line: 'There's a weasel chomping on my privates.'" This caused the weasel jokes to be propelled above any other when they received over 1,500 weasel-chomping gags. This was the most popular:

At the parade, the Colonel noticed something unusual going on and asked the Major:
"Major Barry, what the devil's wrong with Sergeant Jones' platoon?
They seem to be all twitching and jumping about."
"Well sir," says Major Barry after a moment of observation. "There seems to be a weasel chomping on his privates."

Aside from weasel jokes, the funniest in the United States was:

A man and a friend are playing golf one day at their local golf course. One of the guys is about to chip onto the green when he sees a long funeral procession on the road next to the course. He stops in mid-swing, takes off his golf cap, closes his eyes, and bows down in prayer. His friend says: "Wow, that is the most thoughtful and touching thing I have ever seen. You truly are a kind man." The man then replies: "Yeah, well we were married 35 years."

According to the study, People from The Republic of Ireland, the UK, Australia and New Zealand expressed a strong preference for jokes involving word plays.

Patient: "Doctor, I've got a strawberry stuck up my bum."
Doctor: "I've got some cream for that."

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Whereas, Americans and Canadians preferred "gags where there was a sense of superiority -- either because a person looked stupid, or was made to look stupid by another person."

Texan: "Where are you from?"
Harvard grad: "I come from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions."
Texan: "Okay – where are you from, jackass?"

Aside from the human-submitted jokes the researchers wanted to assess computer-generated humor. They inserted five of the computer-generated jokes and while four performed poorly one scored higher than one third of all the human jokes.

Q: "What kind of murderer has moral fiber?"
A: "A cereal killer."

LaughLab didn't just wait for the results to roll in, they also mined the data discovering the perfect length for a joke -- around 100 words -- the best animal to use in place of a person -- a duck, and that Germans appreciate a wide variety of humor -- so if you're going to tell a joke, find a German as they're the most likely to laugh.

"Humor is vital to communication and the more we understand about how people's culture and background affect their sense of humor, the more we will be able to communicate effectively, " Wiseman said. "These results are really interesting -- it suggests that people from different parts of the world have fundamentally different senses of humour."

Now if you'll excuse me, there is a weasel chomping on my privates.

Full results of the study were published in Wiseman's book, Quirkology or the full paper is available on Wiseman's website.

Sources: LaughLab, New Scientist
Image: iStockPhoto

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World's Tiniest Steam Engine Built

The world’s smallest heat engine just demonstrated that what works for big things also works for small things -– validating an important piece of physics and maybe pointing the way to new kinds of microelectromechanical systems.

A heat engine, also called a Stirling engine, uses the temperature difference in a fluid to drive a piston. In the simplest configuration, the fluid (or gas) is heated and expands, driving a piston. As the gas expands it cools, the piston compresses it, and the gas is moved past a heat exchanger, which starts the cycle again. Stirling engines  are used in a variety of industries, notably as heat pumps in refrigeration and in more modern renewable fuel power plants.

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In this case, a team led by Clemens Bechinger, professor at the University of Stuttgart and Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, and his colleague Valentin Blickle, built a Stirling engine only a few micrometers across, using a tiny plastic bead floating in water.

Instead of a physical piston in a cylinder, the physicists used a laser beam with variable intensity. The optical forces of the laser limited the motion of the plastic particle, just like the compression and expansion of gas in the cylinder of a large Stirling engine. The particle then does work (meaning it transmitted a force over distance) on the optical laser field. An old-fashioned steam engine of this type would use coal or wood to heat the fluid, but this team used a laser beam instead. The whole system coos whenever the laser is switched off.

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The results show that tiny Stirling engines could be built and work reliably for delivering mechanical motion when an external power source can be used.

Via Max Planck Institute

Image: Fritz Höffeler / Art For Science

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Vroom! World's Fastest Cells Drag Race

Ladies and gentlemen, start your... Petri dishes.

It may not have been the Indy 500, but a line of fetal mesenchymal bone marrow cells from Singapore recently out-dashed dozens of contenders to take the checkered flag at the World Cell Race. Claiming their title as the world's fastest cells, the microscopic racers zoomed across a Petri dish at the whiplash-inducing speed of 5.2 microns per minute, or 0.000000194 miles per hour.

PHOTOS: 20 Best Microphotos of 2011

Results were announced December 3 at the American Society for Cell Biology's annual meeting in Denver, Colo. Fifty participating labs from around the world used 70 cell lines to not only race, but examine cell movement during the development of embryos, organs and cancer.

Teams shipped the cells frozen to designated laboratories in Boston, London, Heidelberg, Paris, San Francisco and Singapore. Once thawed, the cells were placed in "race tracks" that were 400 microns long (0.015748 inches) and coated with a substance that gave the little guys some tire-like traction. Digital cameras recorded the cells for 24 hours to determine, out of the 200 cells, which one was the fastest to reach the end of the track.

BLOG: Stem Cells Could Save Endangered Species

A line of unaltered breast epithelial cells took second place and third place went to the the same cell type only altered to reflect patterns observed in cancerous cells. Researchers responsible for the winning cells received Nikon digital cameras and World Cell Race medals.

[Via Nature]

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New Batch of Giant Alien Worlds Found

Astronomers found 18 Jupiter-sized planets orbiting distant stars. The discovery boosts the number of known alien worlds to well past 700. The finding also sheds light on how planets form around stars.

A new haul of 18 Jupiter-sized gas giant planets have been detected orbiting stars bigger than our sun, according to a release by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

The find boosts the number of known planets circling huge stars by 50 percent. Studying the newly found planets could also help astronomers better understand how planets -- including ones in our own solar system -- form and grow.

The new batch of alien worlds was announced on the heels of another recent discovery of 50 newly found planets from another team of astronomer, bringing the list of identified alien planets well past 700.

ANALYSIS: Exoplanet Count Sails Past 700 Alien Worlds

"It's the largest single announcement of planets in orbit around stars more massive than the sun, aside from the discoveries made by the Kepler mission," said John Johnson, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech, in the release. Findings on the discovery were published in the December issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

The Kepler space telescope has so far identified more than 1,200 possible planets, though most of those have not yet been confirmed.

Using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii -- with follow-up observations using the McDonald and Fairborn Observatories in Texas and Arizona, -- the researchers surveyed about 300 stars.

They zeroed-in on stars that are more than one and a half times more massive than the sun.

To detect planets, the astronomers looked for stars that wobble, which can be caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. By searching for the signature wobble in the distant stars, the team found 18 planets with masses similar to Jupiter's.

The researchers say that the findings lend further support to the theory that planets grow from seed particles that accumulate gas and dust in a disk surrounding a newborn star.

SLIDE SHOW: Exquisite Exoplanetary Art

According to this theory, tiny particles start to clump together, eventually snowballing into a planet. If this theory is accurate, the characteristics of the resulting planetary system -- such as the number and size of the planets, or their shapes -- depends on the mass of the star.

A more massive star would create a bigger disk, which in turn would offer up more material to produce a greater number of giant planets.

"It's nice to see all these converging lines of evidence pointing toward one class of formation mechanisms," Johnson said in the release.

In another twist, the new batch of planets appear to have orbits that are mostly circular, while planets around sun-like stars span a wide range of circular to elliptical paths. Johnson said he's now trying to find an explanation.

View the original article here

Is This the World's First Space Beer? No.

Has a brewing company finally managed to launch their beverage into space? Will astronauts finally be able to swig a brewski in low-Earth orbit? Have scientists finally found a solution to the anti-social "wet burp" phenomenon?

Well, according to the brewers of Natural Light -- the fifth largest-selling beer in the U.S. -- a couple of Facebook fans have done just that: They've successfully launched a can of "Natty Light" into space! But to call a beer "space beer," it actually has to go into space -- something this can hasn't done.

ANALYSIS: Space Beer Reaches for Final Frontier

Friends Danny B. and Rich T. approached the company with the idea to send the beer into space, and the reaction unsurprisingly was "Go for it!," according to the Natural Light Facebook page.

After constructing a "spacecraft" out of a Styrofoam cooler, packing it with thermal gloves and placing a camcorder plus GPS tracker inside, all the two men  needed was a vacuum-packed full can of Natty Light plus an empty stand-in. Oh yes, and a weather balloon to attach the whole kit to.

What was the craft called? "The Aluminum Fullcan." Where was it going? "The Nattmosphere." Genius.

ANALYSIS: On Tap: Space Beer Testing

The launch was a success (see video below), with the Natty Light Facebook fanpage (which generated the space beer buzz in the first place) reporting that the Aluminum Fullcan ascended to more than 90,000 feet before the balloon popped. The Aluminum Fullcan then dropped to Earth via parachute, and  Danny and Rich picked it up two hours later, floating in a river (or lake?) 60 miles from the launch site.

Mission success? Yes and no.

Yes? The stunt generated a buzz, culminating in overly excited articles in the international tabloid press. It was a viral campaign that obviously worked.

No? THE BEER NEVER WENT INTO SPACE.

I know this will probably seem like a technicality to Danny, Rich and the brewing company, but 17 miles is nowhere near "space." The internationally recognized boundary where the Earth's atmosphere ends and space begins is around 62 miles in altitude -- a boundary known as the Kármán line. Sadly, weather balloons don't go that high. If they did, NASA would use really big balloons to carry astronauts to the space station.

WIDE ANGLE: Space Food and Orbital Dining

Space beer has become something of a fascination for me (particularly its implications for human space settlement), and I'm glad to report that the "first" space beer isn't going to be a light beer! The first bona fide space beer -- as in, a beer that is brewed for the purpose of being enjoyed in space -- will most likely be a strong, reduced-carbon dioxide stout. Nice!

Earlier this year, the Australian 4 Pines Brewing Company, working with Astronauts4Hire, actually put some research into the space beer conundrum and, after a series of zero-G flights, developed "Vostok."

Vostok is a full-flavored, low-carbon dioxide beer that not only addresses the loss of taste during long-duration spaceflight, it also reduces the risk of the "wet burp."

To quote an earlier Discovery News article:

"(In space) there's little gravity to keep the fluid in your stomach, but you still need to vent that carbon dioxide that is expanding inside your belly. You try to burp ... but you end up venting the carbon dioxide, beer, and whatever else was inside your stomach through your mouth and nose. This, my friends, is called a "wet burp"; an explosive near-vomit experience guaranteed to gross out anyone who has the misfortune to be floating around with you."

Sorry, Danny and Rich -- nice try (and I am impressed by the effort), but your can of beer that went into the "Nattmosphere" barely pushed into the stratosphere, so it's not space beer. It's just "beer that floated really high."

But one thing I've learned when consuming alcoholic beverages, things always seem a little exaggerated. So, after finishing your sixth can of Natty Light, feel free to impress your friends by saying it's the world's first space beer (just hope they don't read Discovery News).

Image: Not the beer you think it is (YouTube/Natural Light)

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World's Largest Tesla Coils Set To Strike

If the words "World's Largest Tesla Coils" don't set your blood aboil, you might want to check if you still have a pulse. Hands down, this has to be one of the coolest projects Discovery News has ever written about. I'm so amped that my head is thundering with heavy metal. Here's why:

Electrical engineer Greg Leyh and his high voltage colleagues at the Lightning on Demand organization near San Fransisco are raising money to build two 120-foot Tesla coils that researchers hope will help unlock some of the secrets behind arguably one of nature's most beautiful and deadly forces: lightning.

BLOG: Scientists Build Self-Replicating Molecule

Besides sounding like the name of a heavy metal band, the "Lightning Foundry" project will boast the world's largest Tesla coils, which will stand ten stories high and will encompass a football field-sized area. Such coils should be able to generate 200-foot-long electrical arcs.

Previous research has shown that lab-generated electric arcs start to behave more like natural lightning when they are longer than 200 feet. In an effort to better understand the physics and behavior of lightning, Leyh and his team also plan on generating even longer arcs.

The research, of course, spring-boards off the work of genius Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, a pioneer of electromagnetism technology in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

BLOG: Are We All Geniuses?

As Leyh and his team wait for enough funds to roll in, they are using a functional 1:12 scale prototype to glean information and test new designs before they embark upon the bigger version of the Lightning Foundry.

[via GizMag]

Photo: Dave Reede/AgStock Images/Corbis

View the original article here

New Batch of Giant Alien Worlds Found

Astronomers found 18 Jupiter-sized planets orbiting distant stars. The discovery boosts the number of known alien worlds to well past 700. The finding also sheds light on how planets form around stars.

A new haul of 18 Jupiter-sized gas giant planets have been detected orbiting stars bigger than our sun, according to a release by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

The find boosts the number of known planets circling huge stars by 50 percent. Studying the newly found planets could also help astronomers better understand how planets -- including ones in our own solar system -- form and grow.

The new batch of alien worlds was announced on the heels of another recent discovery of 50 newly found planets from another team of astronomer, bringing the list of identified alien planets well past 700.

ANALYSIS: Exoplanet Count Sails Past 700 Alien Worlds

"It's the largest single announcement of planets in orbit around stars more massive than the sun, aside from the discoveries made by the Kepler mission," said John Johnson, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech, in the release. Findings on the discovery were published in the December issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

The Kepler space telescope has so far identified more than 1,200 possible planets, though most of those have not yet been confirmed.

Using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii -- with follow-up observations using the McDonald and Fairborn Observatories in Texas and Arizona, -- the researchers surveyed about 300 stars.

They zeroed-in on stars that are more than one and a half times more massive than the sun.

To detect planets, the astronomers looked for stars that wobble, which can be caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. By searching for the signature wobble in the distant stars, the team found 18 planets with masses similar to Jupiter's.

The researchers say that the findings lend further support to the theory that planets grow from seed particles that accumulate gas and dust in a disk surrounding a newborn star.

SLIDE SHOW: Exquisite Exoplanetary Art

According to this theory, tiny particles start to clump together, eventually snowballing into a planet. If this theory is accurate, the characteristics of the resulting planetary system -- such as the number and size of the planets, or their shapes -- depends on the mass of the star.

A more massive star would create a bigger disk, which in turn would offer up more material to produce a greater number of giant planets.

"It's nice to see all these converging lines of evidence pointing toward one class of formation mechanisms," Johnson said in the release.

In another twist, the new batch of planets appear to have orbits that are mostly circular, while planets around sun-like stars span a wide range of circular to elliptical paths. Johnson said he's now trying to find an explanation.

View the original article here