21 Nov

Posted at 11:26h in Scoop.it

A skeleton from the Cretaceous found in Japan reveals an early bird with a tail nub resembling the avians of today.

 

Birds are ancient creatures. Every hawk, sparrow, pigeon and penguin alive today has ancestral roots dating back to the Jurassic, when the first birds were just another form of raptor-like dinosaur. Dozens of fossils uncovered and described during the last three decades have illuminated much of this deep history, but the rock record can still yield surprises. A fossil recently found in Japan is one such unexpected avian that raises questions about what else may await discovery.

 

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.smithsonianmag.com

19 Nov

Posted at 15:33h in Scoop.it

Black holes ‘have no hair’: no attributes that can be used to tell them apart. Extreme black holes (spinning at maximally allowed rate) can have an additional property, permanent hair that is made of a massless scalar field. Nearly extreme black holes (like Gargantua, the black hole featured in the movie "Interstellar") have hair that is a transient phenomenon: nearly extreme black holes that attempt to regrow hair will lose it and become bald again.

 

The black holes of Einstein’s theory of relativity can be completely described by just three parameters: their mass, spin angular momentum, and electric charge. Since two black holes that share these parameters cannot be distinguished, regardless of how they were made, black holes are said to "have no hair"—they have no additional attributes that can be used to tell them apart.

 

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: phys.org

11 Nov

Posted at 11:35h in Scoop.it

Researchers, inspired by diving bell spiders and rafts of fire ants, have created a metallic structure that is so water repellent, it refuses to sink—no matter how often it is forced into water or how much it is damaged or punctured.

 

Could this lead to an unsinkable ship? A wearable flotation device that will still float after being punctured? Electronic monitoring devices that can survive in long term in the ocean? All of the above, says Chunlei Guo, professor of optics and physics, whose lab describes the structure in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces

 

.The structure uses a groundbreaking technique the lab developed for using femtosecond bursts of lasers to “etch” the surfaces of metals with intricate micro- and nanoscale patterns that trap air and make the surfaces superhydrophobic, or water repellent.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.rochester.edu

11 Nov

Posted at 11:34h in Scoop.it

2019 is the International Year of the Periodic Table of Elements. Here, we discuss the history of the periodic table as well as the designated year.

 

Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 — fill out the seventh row of the periodic table of the elements. All are superheavies. That’s why they sit at the base right of the bench (see above). Naming rights classically go to those who find an element. And that’s what happen here. Element 113 was found by scientists at RIKEN in Wako, Japan. They have requested to call it Nihonium, to be shortened as Nh. This name comes from Nihon. It’s Japanese for “Land of the Rising Sun,” which is what a lot of people call Japan. Element 115 will turn out to be Moscovium, abridged as Mc. It refers to the Moscow area. And that was where the combined organization for Nuclear Research is based (Dubna). It exposed number 115 in a teamwork with researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. That’s why Tennessee also gets a periodic table entry. It’s the home location of ORNL, Vanderbilt University & the University of Tennessee. So element 117 will become Tennessine and will be represented by the symbol Ts.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.comsol.com

07 Nov

Posted at 19:01h in Scoop.it

A clever new study shows that blue whales lean on their memory to guide their epic migrations.

 

The blue whales of the North Pacific spend their winters in their breeding grounds off California and Costa Rica. Come spring, they swim up the coast of North America toward the food-rich summer waters of the Pacific Northwest. They could make the journey in two months (and they do, on the reverse trip back south). Instead, they take twice that time, pausing to gorge themselves on blooms of krill that appear along the way. It’s a leisurely season-long tour of a continent-wide buffet line.

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.theatlantic.com