Scientists Make Research ‘jelly’ Grow More Like Biological Tissues

Eric Magnus Lensherr-sphere

Magnetospheres: How Do They Work?

The sun, Earth, and many other planets are surrounded by giant magnetic bubbles.

Space may seem empty, but it’s actually a dynamic place, dominated by invisible forces, including those created by magnetic fields.  Magnetospheres – the areas around planets and stars dominated by their magnetic fields – are found throughout our solar system. They deflect high-energy, charged particles called cosmic rays that are mostly spewed out by the sun, but can also come from interstellar space. Along with atmospheres, they help protect the planets’ surfaces from this harmful radiation.

It’s possible that Earth’s protective magnetosphere was essential for the development of conditions friendly to life, so finding magnetospheres around other planets is a big step toward determining if they could support life.

But not all magnetospheres are created equal – even in our own backyard, not all planets in our solar system have a magnetic field, and the ones we have observed are all surprisingly different.

Earth’s magnetosphere is created by the constantly moving molten metal inside Earth. This invisible “force field” around our planet has an ice cream cone-like shape, with a rounded front and a long, trailing tail that faces away from the sun. The magnetosphere is shaped that way because of the constant pressure from the solar wind and magnetic fields on the sun-facing side.

Earth’s magnetosphere deflects most charged particles away from our planet – but some do become trapped in the magnetic field and create auroras when they rain down into the atmosphere.

We have several missions that study Earth’s magnetosphere – including the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, Van Allen Probes, and Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (also known as THEMIS) – along with a host of other satellites that study other aspects of the sun-Earth connection.

Mercury, with a substantial iron-rich core, has a magnetic field that is only about 1% as strong as Earth’s. It is thought that the planet’s magnetosphere is stifled by the intense solar wind, limiting its strength, although even without this effect, it still would not be as strong as Earth’s. The MESSENGER satellite orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015, helping us understand our tiny terrestrial neighbor.

After the sun, Jupiter has by far the biggest magnetosphere in our solar system – it stretches about 12 million miles from east to west, almost 15 times the width of the sun. (Earth’s, on the other hand, could easily fit inside the sun.) Jupiter does not have a molten metal core like Earth; instead, its magnetic field is created by a core of compressed liquid metallic hydrogen.

One of Jupiter’s moons, Io, has intense volcanic activity that spews particles into Jupiter’s magnetosphere. These particles create intense radiation belts and the large auroras around Jupiter’s poles.

Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon, also has its own magnetic field and magnetosphere – making it the only moon with one. Its weak field, nestled in Jupiter’s enormous shell, scarcely ruffles the planet’s magnetic field.

Our Juno mission orbits inside the Jovian magnetosphere sending back observations so we can better understand this region. Previous observations have been received from Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, Ulysses, Galileo and Cassini in their flybys and orbits around Jupiter.

Saturn’s moon Enceladus transforms the shape of its magnetosphere. Active geysers on the moon’s south pole eject oxygen and water molecules into the space around the planet. These particles, much like Io’s volcanic emissions at Jupiter, generate the auroras around the planet’s poles. Our Cassini mission studies Saturn’s magnetic field and auroras, as well as its moon Enceladus.

Uranus’ magnetosphere wasn’t discovered until 1986 when data from Voyager 2’s flyby revealed weak, variable radio emissions. Uranus’ magnetic field and rotation axis are out of alignment by 59 degrees, unlike Earth’s, whose magnetic field and rotation axis differ by only 11 degrees. On top of that, the magnetic field axis does not go through the center of the planet, so the strength of the magnetic field varies dramatically across the surface. This misalignment also means that Uranus’ magnetotail – the part of the magnetosphere that trails away from the sun – is twisted into a long corkscrew.

Neptune’s magnetosphere is also tilted from its rotation axis, but only by 47. Just like on Uranus, Neptune’s magnetic field strength varies across the planet. This also means that auroras can be seen away from the planet’s poles – not just at high latitudes, like on Earth, Jupiter and Saturn.

Does Every Planet Have a Magnetosphere?

Neither Venus nor Mars have global magnetic fields, although the interaction of the solar wind with their atmospheres does produce what scientists call an “induced magnetosphere.” Around these planets, the atmosphere deflects the solar wind particles, causing the solar wind’s magnetic field to wrap around the planet in a shape similar to Earth’s magnetosphere.

What About Beyond Our Solar System?

Outside of our solar system, auroras, which indicate the presence of a magnetosphere, have been spotted on brown dwarfs – objects that are bigger than planets but smaller than stars.

There’s also evidence to suggest that some giant exoplanets have magnetospheres. As scientists now believe that Earth’s protective magnetosphere was essential for the development of conditions friendly to life, finding magnetospheres around exoplanets is a big step in finding habitable worlds.  

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It seems nuCLEARer now

The Sun’s Energy Doesn’t Come From Fusing Hydrogen Into Helium (Mostly)

“It might surprise you to learn that hydrogen-fusing-into-helium makes up less than half of all nuclear reactions in our Sun, and that it’s also responsible for less than half of the energy that the Sun eventually outputs. There are strange, unearthly phenomena along the way: the diproton that usually just decays back to the original protons that made it, positrons spontaneously emitted from unstable nuclei, and in a small (but important) percentage of these reactions, a rare mass-8 nucleus, something you’ll never find naturally occurring here on Earth. But that’s the nuclear physics of where the Sun gets its energy from, and it’s so much richer than the simple fusion of hydrogen into helium!”

Ask anyone where the Sun (or any star) gets its energy from, and most people will correctly answer “nuclear fusion.” But if you ask what’s getting fused, most people – including most scientists – will tell you that the Sun fuses hydrogen into helium, and that’s what powers it. It’s true that the Sun uses hydrogen as its initial fuel, and that helium-4 is indeed the end product, but the individual reactions that take place to turn hydrogen into helium are surprisingly diverse and intricate. There are actually four major reactions that take place in the sun: fusing two protons into deuterium, fusing deuterium and a proton into helium-3, fusing two helium-3 nuclei into helium-4, and fusing helium-3 and helium-4 in a chain reaction to produce two helium-4 nuclei. Note that only one of those reactions actually turns hydrogen into helium, and that’s not what makes up either the majority of reactions or the majority of the Sun’s energy!

The Sun fuses hydrogen into helium, but that’s not the only thing that powers it. Come find out how the Sun really works today!

Sound metal, don't you think?

Engineers 3-D print high-strength aluminum, solve ages-old welding problem using nanoparticles

HRL Laboratories has made a breakthrough in metallurgy with the announcement that researchers at the famous facility have developed a technique for successfully 3D printing high-strength aluminum alloys—including types Al7075 and Al6061—that opens the door to additive manufacturing of engineering-relevant alloys. These alloys are very desirable for aircraft and automobile parts and have been among thousands that were not amenable to additive manufacturing—3D printing—a difficulty that has been solved by the HRL researchers. An added benefit is that their method can be applied to additional alloy families such as high-strength steels and nickel-based superalloys difficult to process currently in additive manufacturing.

“We’re using a 70-year-old nucleation theory to solve a 100-year-old problem with a 21st century machine,” said Hunter Martin, who co-led the team with Brennan Yahata. Both are engineers in the HRL’s Sensors and Materials Laboratory and PhD students at University of California, Santa Barbara studying with Professor Tresa Pollock, a co-author on the study. Their paper 3D printing of high-strength aluminum alloys was published in the September 21, 2017 issue of Nature.

Additive manufacturing of metals typically begins with alloy powders that are applied in thin layers and heated with a laser or other direct heat source to melt and solidify the layers. Normally, if high-strength unweldable aluminum alloys such as Al7075 or AL6061 are used, the resulting parts suffer severe hot cracking—a condition that renders a metal part able to be pulled apart like a flaky biscuit.

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A battery that eats CO2

By Khai Trung Le

A new type of battery developed by researchers at MIT could be made partly from carbon dioxide captured from power plants. Rather than attempting to convert carbon dioxide to specialized chemicals using metal catalysts, which is currently highly challenging, this battery could continuously convert carbon dioxide into a solid mineral carbonate as it discharges.

The battery is made from lithium metal, carbon, and an electrolyte that the researchers designed. While still based on early-stage research and far from commercial deployment, the new battery formulation could open up new avenues for tailoring electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion reactions, which may ultimately help reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.

Currently, power plants equipped with carbon capture systems generally use up to 30 percent of the electricity they generate just to power the capture, release, and storage of carbon dioxide. Anything that can reduce the cost of that capture process, or that can result in an end product that has value, could significantly change the economics of such systems, the researchers say.

Betar Gallant, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, said, ‘Carbon dioxide is not very reactive. Trying to find new reaction pathways is important.’Ideally, the gas would undergo reactions that produce something worthwhile, such as a useful chemical or a fuel. However, efforts at electrochemical conversion, usually conducted in water, remain hindered by high energy inputs and poor selectivity of the chemicals produced.

The team looked into whether carbon-dioxide-capture chemistry could be put to use to make carbon-dioxide-loaded electrolytes — one of the three essential parts of a battery — where the captured gas could then be used during the discharge of the battery to provide a power output.

The team developed a new approach that could potentially be used right in the power plant waste stream to make material for one of the main components of a battery. By incorporating the gas in a liquid state, however, Gallant and her co-workers found a way to achieve electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion using only a carbon electrode. The key is to preactivate the carbon dioxide by incorporating it into an amine solution.

‘What we’ve shown for the first time is that this technique activates the carbon dioxide for more facile electrochemistry,’ Gallant says. ‘These two chemistries — aqueous amines and nonaqueous battery electrolytes — are not normally used together, but we found that their combination imparts new and interesting behaviors that can increase the discharge voltage and allow for sustained conversion of carbon dioxide.’

The battery is made from lithium metal, carbon, and an electrolyte that the researchers designed. While still based on early-stage research and far from commercial deployment, the new battery formulation could open up new avenues for tailoring electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion reactions, which may ultimately help reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.

It`s hunting season!

NASA’s incredible exoplanet-hunting telescope is about to launch

There is some good news on the horizon for astronomers, astrophysicists, planetary geologists, and people who just like learning neat things about far-away worlds. It's TESS, short for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which, if all goes well, will launch on Monday evening aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

It’s been a hard month for space telescopes. First we learned that Kepler is running out of fuel, signaling the end of its second life as an exoplanet hunter. Then we got word that the much-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope faces yet another delay.

But there is some good news on the horizon for astronomers, astrophysicists, planetary geologists, and people who just like learning neat things about far-away worlds. It’s TESS—short for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. If all goes well, the new telescope will launch on Monday evening aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. It’s a relatively small satellite, but researchers have giant hopes for what it might discover. It has the potential to identify thousands of new planets, hundreds of rocky worlds like Earth, and dozens of planets hanging out in their star’s habitable zone (where liquid water could exist on the surface), all within our own little corner of the galaxy.

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Solar powered sea slugs shed light on search for perpetual green energy

The sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, steals millions of green-colored plastids, which are like tiny solar panels, from algae. Credit: Karen N. Pelletreau/University of Maine

A Northeast sea slug sucks raw materials from algae to provide its lifetime supply of solar-powered energy, according to a study by Rutgers University-New Brunswick, USA.

‘It’s a remarkable feat because it’s highly unusual for an animal to behave like a plant and survive solely on photosynthesis,’ said Debashish Bhattacharya, senior author of the study and professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology at Rutgers-New Brunswick. ‘The broader implication is in the field of artificial photosynthesis. That is, if we can figure out how the slug maintains stolen, isolated plastids to fix carbon without the plant nucleus, then maybe we can also harness isolated plastids for eternity as green machines to create bioproducts or energy. The existing paradigm is that to make green energy, we need the plant or alga to run the photosynthetic organelle, but the slug shows us that this does not have to be the case.’

The sea slug Elysia chlorotica, a mollusk that can grow to more than 2 inches long, has been found in the intertidal zone between Nova Scotia, Canada, and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, as well as in Florida. Juvenile sea slugs eat the nontoxic brown alga Vaucheria litorea and become photosynthetic – or solar-powered – after stealing millions of algal plastids, which are like tiny solar panels, and storing them in their gut lining, according to the study published online in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

This particular alga is an ideal food source because it does not have walls between adjoining cells in its body and is essentially a long tube loaded with nuclei and plastids, Bhattacharya said. ‘When the sea slug makes a hole in the outer cell wall, it can suck out the cell contents and gather all of the algal plastids at once,’ he said.

Read the full study here: Cheong Xin Chan, Pavel Vaysberg, Dana C Price, Karen N Pelletreau, Mary E Rumpho, Debashish Bhattacharya. Active Host Response to Algal Symbionts in the Sea Slug Elysia chlorotica. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2018; DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msy061

First DNA sequence from a single mitochondria

DNA sequences between mitochondria within a single cell are vastly different, found researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. This knowledge will help to better illuminate the underlying mechanisms of many disorders that start with accumulated mutations in individual mitochondria and provide clues about how patients might respond to specific therapies. The findings are published in Cell Reports this week.

Journal reference: Cell Reports 

Manual isolation of a single live mitochondria. The mitochondria can be seen under a microscope where a thin glass tube can be used to isolate the mitochondria from the dendrite region of the mouse neuron. Credit: Jacqueline Morris and Jaehee Lee, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

New process allows 3-D printing of nanoscale metal structures

Synthesizing organic scaffolds that contain metal ions enables 3-D printing of metallic structures that are orders of magnitude smaller than previously possible

For the first time, it is possible to create complex nanoscale metal structures using 3-D printing, thanks to a new technique developed at Caltech.

The process, once scaled up, could be used in a wide variety of applications, from building tiny medical implants to creating 3-D logic circuits on computer chips to engineering ultralightweight aircraft components. It also opens the door to the creation of a new class of materials with unusual properties that are based on their internal structure. The technique is described in a study that will be published in Nature Communications on February 9.

In 3-D printing – also known as additive manufacturing – an object is built layer by layer, allowing for the creation of structures that would be impossible to manufacture by conventional subtractive methods such as etching or milling. Caltech materials scientist Julia Greer is a pioneer in the creation of ultratiny 3-D architectures built via additive manufacturing. For instance, she and her team have built 3-D lattices whose beams are just nanometers across – far too small to be seen with the naked eye. These materials exhibit unusual, often surprising properties; Greer’s team has created exceptionally lightweight ceramics that spring back to their original shape, spongelike, after being compressed.

Greer’s group 3-D prints structures out of a variety of materials, from ceramics to organic compounds. Metals, however, have been difficult to print, especially when trying to create structures with dimensions smaller than around 50 microns, or about half the width of a human hair.

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It`s gonna be Moon Soon season in India!! @neysastudies

India Is Preparing to Land on The Moon For The First Time in The Country's History

Go India!

The last time any country put boots or, rather, little metal feet, on the Moon was in 2013, when China landed its Yutu rover there. Before that, you’d have to look back to the 1970s to find anything built by Earthlings that camped out on the surface of the Moon.

But in 2018, India says it will be ready to join the ranks of the moon lander. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is getting ready to land its very first lunar rover by the end of March 2018, as part of its Chandrayaan-2 mission.

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Origami, 3D printing merge to make complex structures in one shot

By merging the ancient art of origami with 21st century technology, researchers have created a one-step approach to fabricating complex origami structures whose light weight, expandability, and strength could have applications in everything from biomedical devices to equipment used in space exploration. Until now, making such structures has involved multiple steps, more than one material, and assembly from smaller parts.

“What we have here is the proof of concept of an integrated system for manufacturing complex origami. It has tremendous potential applications,” said Glaucio H. Paulino, a professor at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a leader in the growing field of origami engineering, or using the principles of origami, mathematics and geometry to make useful things. Last fall Georgia Tech became the first university in the country to offer a course on origami engineering, which Paulino taught.

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