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A team of Argentinian scientists have made a significant breakthrough in developing materials which could be used to surround chemical pollutants and break them down without causing further environmental damage. The methodology will be applicable to a range of situations, such as chemical spills in water, at landfill sites, in factiory or industrial situations, and just about anywhere that the contamination occurs.

The material consists of a silica hydrogel surrounded by pollutant-destroying microorganisms. In tests, the microorganisms were a filamentous fungus which produced enzymes which degraded an organic dye, malachite green. The hydrogel acted as a barrier to prevent any contamination into the environment, and also to protect the fungus itself from being destroyed.

By varying the microorganism used in the material, the technique could theoretically be applied to almost any organic contaminant; the relatively simple process required to create the materials means that this breakthrough will provide cheap, sustainable and easily-expandable methods to clean up environmental pollution.

Silica-alginate-fungi biocomposites for remediation of polluted water
Mercedes Perullini, Matías Jobbágy, Nora Mouso, Flavia Forchiassin and Sara A. Bilmes, J. Mater. Chem., 2010
DOI: 10.1039/c0jm01144d

Discover more about environmental pollution and water chemistry on Intute.

The final edition of the Spotlight science magazine has been added this week. The articles featured are:

Energy, all at sea
Floating wind turbines could capture the energy of higher wind speeds further out to see and address some of the noise and unsightliness complained about by those with turbines closer to home.
http://www.intute.ac.uk/hottopics/2010/07/energy-all-at-sea/

How low can you go?
We’re repeatedly advised to switch off electrical devices, like TVs and DVD players at the mains outlet rather than leaving them in standby mode, to turn to compact fluorescent bulbs and to turn them off when illumination is no longer necessary, to do our laundry at lower temperatures, to run the dishwasher only when it’s full, and to avoid using energy-hungry power showers. All those kilowatts add up to a lot of power wasted if we don’t.
http://www.intute.ac.uk/hottopics/2010/07/how-low-can-you-go/

Nitrogen-fixing aliens
Scientists hope that Titan, a moon of Saturn, with its nitrogen-rich atmosphere, could act as a model system for terrestrial chemistry before life began on our planet. Now, another step towards that goal has emerged as researchers at the University of Arizona have incorporated atmospheric nitrogen into organic macromolecules under conditions resembling those on Titan
http://www.intute.ac.uk/hottopics/2010/07/nitrogen-fixing-aliens/

A retrospective of Spotlight and its 10 year association with Intute and the predecessor RDN hub PSIgate will be released during July.

Here at Intute, we do love to keep an eye on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and once again the folks over in Switzerland have given us something newsworthy to report.

Recent particle collision rates have topped 10,000 per second, which is almost double the previous record, and sets the LHC well on the way to becoming the world’s most powerful collider. Scientists are attempting to discover the “Higgs boson” (“God particle”) which they believe will explain why matter has mass, and which they say, somewhat grandly, will help “unlock the mysteries of the Universe”.

The LHC has been beset by operational problems and has spent much of its lifetime inoperable and under repair. The scientists working at CERN hope that by spending the next few months gradually increasing the collider’s operational power and by closely monitoring the 4 experiments currently taking place, the machine’s potential will be realised. Ultimately, one aim is to generate mini black holes to study, and from there, the world of particle physics may be completely revolutionised.

The Tevatron particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois, USA, has operated at higher intensities, but the LHC is expected to surpass its collision records before much longer.

A fuller account of the experiments taking place and their significance in the world of particle physics is available at the BBC website.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/science_and_environment/10430234.stm

The Voyager spacecraft, the most remote man-made objects in the Universe, are both set to pass the 12,000 day points of their missions by mid July. Voyager 2, which famously discovered the Great Dark Spot on Neptune, passed the milestone on June 28, while its sister craft will reach the landmark on July 13.

The spacecraft are now in the region of space known as the heliosphere, at the edge of the Solar system, and are expected to leave the Solar system by 2015. At a distance of some 21 billion kilometres and 33 years post-launch, the craft remain contactable from Earth.

Perhaps most famously, the Voyager craft produced a wealth of new information about the gas giant planets, discovering many new moons and providing an incredible array of data for NASA scientists to process.

The Voyager missions can be followed from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory website
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

Read more about Voyager, interstellar space, and space missions at Intute.

The idea of a quantum computer, able to solve highly complex mathematical problems in rapid time, has been a pipe dream in the electronics world for quite some time. Now, a staggering physics breakthrough may be bringing that dream closer to reality. A report published in Nature indicates that scientists have managed to create a state in which an electron can exist in two places simultaneously – and they have done so in the material from which computer chips are created.

A joint British-Dutch team from the University of Surrey, University College London, Heriot-Watt University, and the FOM Institute for Plasma Physics, Utrecht reports that by employing a far-infrared, very short, high intensity pulse from the Dutch FELIX laser, an electron orbiting within silicon was put into two states at once. This “quantum superposition state” is highly useful for the transmission of processed information and for information processing itself, and is a pre-requisite in the quantum model.

The fact that the team have achieved this in a silicon chip is of especial excitement; the generation of affordable quantum computers would radically affect thousands of areas of our lives in which computers are employed, from security to the much-enhanced processing of datasets and problems.

Discover more about quantum computers, silicon chips and nanotechnology at Intute.

The full article appears in the Nature journal and this report has been derived from materuial published at ScienceDaily.
University College London (2010, June 23). ‘Quantum computer’ a stage closer with silicon breakthrough. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 28, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2010/06/100623132110.htm

According to an article published in Science magazine, a new method of attaching a chemical molecule to drugs may bring down the time and cost of new drug development rapidly. One way that pharmaceutical companies increase the effectiveness of its products is by adding a fluorine-containing structure called a trifluoromethyl group to the drug – this is hard to break down in the body and thus increases the lifecycle of the drug and enhances its benefits. However the process currently used to attach the molecule to the drug is costly and requires adverse conditions which can cause problems during the synthetic stages.

The new method, which uses a palladium catalyst, means that the fluorinated molecule can be added much later in the synthetic cycle and much more efficiently. For decades now, researchers have unsuccessfully tried to discover a catalytic route to adding the fluorine-containing molecule, and finally a group led by MIT Chemistry Professor Stephen Buchwald managed to discover the exact temperature, chemical composition of the catalyst and other factors required for the binding process.

In addition to quickening the process of new drug development, the technique and catalyst could be applied to a wide range of existing drugs and products, including agricultural compounds, diabetic and arthritic treatment drugs, and Prozac.

For full details, check out the Science article below.
1.Eun Jin Cho, Todd D. Senecal, Tom Kinzel, Yong Zhang, Donald A. Watson, Stephen L. Buchwald. The Palladium-Catalyzed Trifluoromethylation of Aryl Chlorides. Science, 2010; 328 (5986): 1679-1681 DOI: 10.1126/science.1190524

You can read much more about drug development, catalysis and palladium on Intute.

A new and relatively inexpensive “correction aid” for telescopes has been developed that will enable stargazers to see a much sharper view of the night sky than ever before. Roger Hamelinck from the Eindhoven University of Technology has devised a mirror which removes the atmospheric distortion observed in existing images and provides a new depth of clarity.

Described as a telescope “putting on spectacles”, the technology basically consists of an ultrathin deformable mirror, to which tiny deformations are applied using actuators. This sharpens up the image, removing any atmospheric distortion. Previous versions of this technology used thicker mirrors and generated large amounts of (image distorting) heat, but the new model requires little energy and generates negligible distortion. Even better, the mirrors are scaleable and backwards compatible with existing telescopes, which means that such a mirror could be applied both to existing equipment and also to the newer, large mirrors such as the forthcoming European Extra Large Telescope.

Discover more about telescopes, observatories and the night sky at Intute.

The official “hurricane season” commences on June 1, and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has issued a statement forecasting a windy time ahead. The NOAA predicts that between 14 and 23 storms could hit the region over a 6 month period, with up to half strong enough to be rated as a hurricane. Perhaps more alarmingly, the organisation predicts that up to 7 “major” hurricanes could be in evidence, with the potential to cause catastrophic damage and loss of life.

In more detailed terms, a major hurricane is one in which there are maximum sustained 1-minute surface winds of at least 50 m/s (111 mph). This is the equivalent of category 3, 4 and 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, and one in which the surface winds are 50% higher than the less severe basic hurricane (74 mph).

Hurricane Andrew

The Intute World Guide contains a current weather advisory map from the NOAA/US Weather Service, which is updated regularly. This includes storm warnings alongside a range of other conditions, and covers both continental North America and Hawaii, alongside Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa.

Intute contains numerous resources dedicated to severe weather and storms. Try the following sections and searches:

Storms | Hurricanes | Severe weather

May’s features from our science writer, David Bradley, are now online.

Quark, strangeness, and charm

Quarks are apparently inseparable elementary particles from which protons and neutrons are composed. They have intriguing quantum properties that are labelled with everyday words, such as colour, strangeness, and up and down that belie their mystery and disguise the mathematical analogues of electric charge for which these words are shorthand. One property that has been notoriously difficult to determine, is the mass of a quark.

Metallic liquid crystals

A new class of materials formed by combining liquid crystals and metal clusters glow intensely red and in the infra-red region of the electromagnetic spectrum when irradiated over a broad range of wavelengths. The materials, dubbed clustomesogens, could be used in analytical instrumentation and potentially in display technologies.

Scrubbing up knowledge of submarine volcanoes

A study of the shape of pumice from three adjacent submarine lava dome volcanoes in the western Pacific reveal that explosive volatility driven by the movement of molten magma is lower in deeper water. The shape of pumice stones, which are formed by expansion of magmatic volatiles as the magma rises to the sea surface, is different depending on the water depth and so can be a useful indicator of the evolution and eruption of underwater volcanoes.

April 24th saw the 20th anniversary of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST), a flagship program designed to scour the heavens and capture millions of images and data about the Universe.

Much of Hubble’s data is publicly available, and thousands of its iconic images have been used in academic studies, on Internet sites, and in television and movie productions over the past two decades. Yet it seems incredible to believe that a flawed mirror almost halted the data capture before it began, with repairs undertaken in 1993. Successive shuttle missions have carried out further upgrades and repairs, enabling the telescope’s lifespan to extend way beyond the 10 years initially envisaged.

Source: Hubblesite.org

Perhaps the most renowned moment in Hubble history came in 1993, when it recorded the so-called “Hubble Deep Field” image. Pointed at an apparently “empty” piece of sky in the Ursa Major constellation, Hubble returned an image that was full of galaxies, stars and other bodies. It revealed comprehensively the power and precision of the instrument, and NASA researchers spent the next two years building on that initial image.

Source: Hubblesite.org

Another stated aim of Hubble was to discover the true age of the Universe. Thanks to its deep scanning facilities, the data returned enabled NASA scientists to accurately determine the age as 13.7 billion years.

Source: Hubblesite.org

NASA provides a wealth of online resources for Hubble enthusiasts, astronomers and the general public. Why not visit the Hubble 20th Anniversary Resources website, and discover images, videos and a series of articles about the historic discoveries made by the HST. You can also find many resources about the Hubble Space Telescope on Intute.

Happy 20th Anniversary, Hubble.