Science

The Advanced Technology Solar Telescope will be built on top of Haleakala on Maui, Hawaii, the National Science Foundation announced last week. The 143 foot tall, 13 foor diameter telescope will be the largest optical solar telescope in the world when completed. The site, the University of Hawaii's Science City, an 18-acre grouping of observatories close to Haleakala’s summit, lies within Haleakala National Park; the construction of another observatory in addition to the existing installations, has been opposed by environmentalists, and still needs to pass a vote by the state Board of Land and Natural Resources before it can begin.Read more

A new type of artificial larynx is being developed by researchers at the the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. The new voice box will do away with the robotic, harsh sounding speech produced by current devices, such as that used by physicist Stephen Hawking. The system senses contact between the palate and tongue to figure out which word is being mouthed, with the aid of speech recognition software, and generates audio using a speech synthesizer. Read more

An experiment at the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory has confirmed that spinons, which are particle-like magnetic excitations, can be confined in a magnetic insulator similarly to how quarks are confined within individual protons and neutrons. The finding, could offer new avenues of study in Quantum Chromodynamics, a theory that describes fundamental interactions of quarks.

The spinon confinement observations were made by an international team of physicists, who describe the theory and their new observations in the November 29th issue of Nature Physics.Read more

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), due to be launched December 9 at 9:09 a.m. EST, is ready for it’s roll-out to the launch pad. The satellite is designed for polar orbit around the Earth, to search the sky for 9 months for hidden cosmic objects, such as very cool stars known as "brown dwarfs", dark asteroids and the most luminous galaxies.

"The eyes of WISE are a vast improvement over those of past infrared surveys," Edward Wright, mission principal investigator, said. "We will find millions of objects that have never been seen before."Read more

Engineers at the UC San Diego are developing control systems for herds of tiny robotic ocean explorers which might one day assist in predicting where ocean currents will carry oil spills. Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego are developing the underwater robotic ocean drifters. The autonomous robots are intended to help find and describe underwater ocean currents on the order of a few kilometres. Such currents are not well understood, yet they are important to the understanding of marine protected areas, algal blooms, oil spills, and the path sewage takes after it is pumped into the ocean.Read more

Materials scientists at Johns Hopkins have found a new use for sodium beta-alumina, a compound that has until now been thought of as an electrical conductor. The researchers have found a way to use it as a thin film insulator. By orienting the compound in a different way, the material blocks the flow of electricity, but can induce large electric currents elsewhere. The material could have important usages in transistor technology as well as in screen-enabled devices such as electronic books. Read more