Capturing the Sun, Lunar Flashlights and Mirror Magic

The Stellarator - limitless power ?

Research into Nuclear Fusion is making great leaps forward as news comes in of the generation of hydrogen plasma which reached 80 million° C for a quarter of a second .
That may not seem a big deal, but for a brief time, we emulated the sun .
In the Max Planck Institute in Germany, they have achieved the beginnings of what could be limitless fuel from a source that is little more than salt water.
News to ponder.
This gives us a huge insight into future power.
MIT in the U.S.A. have also made inroads into this research although it's being detailed with reference to 'Tony Stark'.
I doubt whether it has anything to do with Iron Man (personally, in my childhood, I preferred Daredevil, but hey ho ) .
The point is that ultimately we get closer to a real alternative to fossil fuels and the resultant pollutants.

Could we see the return of the lightbulb ?

Staying with the MIT thread, they have been busy redefining lightbulbs - I don't know about you, but part of me was sad to see the decline of the familiar lightbulbs in favour of the energy efficient but colder LEDs.
Apparently, MIT have found a way to reflect wasted energy back into filament bulbs as even more light !
It may not be up there with potential limitless energy, but it's still a move in the right direction.
So yay, for all those who are working for the good of humanity .

Elsewhere - in Barcelona, Spain to be exact, scientists have created a wormhole (in a bathtub, apparently)
The article states that this wormhole is more like the ' cloak of invisibility' , as though people can't digest accurate scientific information without populist allegories, but I have wandered off topic - the point is that the wormhole is capable of moving information in the form of a magnetic shield from one place to another.
For me, the relevant parallel is that it could be used to remotely assess brain / body issues without the need for an MRI scan - anyone unfortunate enough to have endured this claustrophobic machine will know what a bonus that would be.

Scientists following genomes and DNA have discovered a possible overhaul of history, with not one, but two apparent population upsets - one approximately 50,000 years ago, and one 15,000 years ago just after the last ice age, when indigenous hunter-gatherers were supplanted by a sudden influx from an unknown populace.
It's early days yet, but this could seriously upset the apple cart.


The James Webb Telescope has had all of its mirrors attached, and is nearing completion.
Due for launch in French Guiana in 2018, it will afford unprecedented views of ancient galaxies, possibly right back to the purported ' Big Bang' - well, a couple hundred million years after, but who's counting ?

Artists impression of the 'Lunar Flashlight'    pic © NASA

Space Launch System / Orion is basically a rocket full of hitchhikers (well, 13 CubeSats, TBH ) and is due to launch soon-ish.
One of its payloads is shown above .
It's a cubesat with a hovering flashlight, for exposing those dark craters on the moon - specifically hidden areas of frozen water ice, although I'm sure that many will hope for hidden alien bases and such.
The Lunar Flashlight will also boast a Solar Sail, which , as well as powering the CubeSat flight to the moon, will be used to reflect sunlight into the dark craters.
On an almost serious level though - did anyone wonder how we managed to name all the moons in our solar system except our own ?
Just asking.

2,274 satellites overhead...

 An 'overseer' satellite , part of the EDRS initiative was recently launched (29th Jan 2016) and is now dutifully logging information from all the other satellites currently orbiting the Earth.
 It's good to know that at least there is an attempt to centralise information from the ever-increasing number of satellites (2,274 at last count) around our globe.


...and finally, a recent picture of the North polar vortex at Saturn, taken by Cassini. The explorer will next flyby Titan on Feb 16 2016.

NASA / JPL / Caltech

Vanishing Planets , Alien Balls and Hydrogen Pi

In recent news, our closest Earth-like planetary neighbour, the snappily - named Alpha Centauri bb , a mere 4.3 light years away, has vanished.
 Conspiracy a go - go !
Not really, it was only discovered in 2012, and that was due to the wobble of a star which indicated an Earth-sized planet nearby.
The fact is that it may have never existed, just one problem when trying to determine an objects existence based on vague data.
So there we have the disappearance of something that possibly never was.
Good thing we didn't send out a probe, eh?

With the current increase in better quality telescopes free of light pollution (i.e. in orbit), it's surely only a matter of time before some entrepeneur offers unique planetary names, perhaps as gifts for the person who has everything, and whose tastes are jaded by constant indulgence and a lack of restraint , - which makes me wonder , given the proposed joint lunar mission between Europe and Russia, how are they going to negotiate all those lunar land deeds that have been sold ?

Oort cloud                                    © NASA jpg

In other news,astronomers have discovered the furthest object in the solar system , a small world known as V774104 in the Oort cloud .
If its orbit doesn't bring it closer to the sun, then apparently it will be of interest to astronomers (as a world from the beginning of the solar system) , but they're holding off until the orbit can be accurately determined - which takes a year.
Essentially they're hoping that its orbit has never been affected by Neptune.
Planetary scientist Michael Brown said :
"There's no reason to be excited yet".
Heady stuff, eh?

V774104  in all its glory...                         © S Sheppard, C Trujillo & S Tholen

Meanwhile back on Earth...
A flurry of metallic balls have dropped from the sky, four at the last count, in Spain and Turkey.
Possibly man-made and pertaining to satellites or even a hoax (check the smiling people handling the strange, possibly toxic objects...) hmmm...
Oddly though, this is news the day before the landing of the space junk known as WT1190F.
I say landing, but it's actually scheduled to crash into the ocean a few kilometres south of Sri Lanka.
That's if there is anything left after re-entry.
Interesting and odd though, that it should be flagged in advance, when so many similar incidents occur without prior information.

Cryovolcanoes on Pluto                  ©NASA/JPL/ Sci-News

In still other news, it is now believed that Pluto houses at least two cryovolcanoes, hinting at a subsurface ocean.
To reduce the scientific terms to reality : this means ice volcanoes.
The mind boggles.
Does this mean that they erupt in showers of snowballs ?
Or that, instead of molten lava slides, we have rivers of slush with dry-ice fog, for dramatic effect ?

Water is an element as much as fire, but how bizarre!
So, with Enceladus, Ganymede, possibly Europa and now Pluto, we have a slew of potential water worlds in our solar system.
Quite a change from the dry, rocky and cratered planets that were illustrated (artists depiction) in text books in my youth .
Infact, I remember being quite devastated that there was such a dissonance between tne exotic alien worlds presented in film and the likes of Star Trek, and the dull reality of our nearest neighbouring planets.

It is a thing, apparently!

Usb cable and quantum mechanics...

Bringing all this speculation down to an individual level - I read an interesting piece of conjecture which speculated that objects which are theoretically entangled - for instance, one in a black hole , and the other on the opposite side of the universe, could be conjoined by a wormhole.
Wormholes are a great sci-fi staple as a method of taking shortcuts through 'spacetime', and the idea of wormholes providing a link between two 'entwined' particles would neatly eliminate gaps in the theory of relativity, as well as giving us an example of quantum mechanics at work in our universe-
Why not? After all, the signs are already here, on an almost hum-drum level.
Seriously - a daily occurence.
For instance, say you want to insert a usb cable into your pc.
Annoyingly, it doesn't fit first time.
So you flip it, and try again. No.
Flip it again - it works .

This implies a superposition - a third state of readiness for the cable.
But we know it only has two sides...in this dimension.


Let's not stop there - a recent discovery is the presence of the equation pi in the base state of the hydrogen atom, which, if true, hints at a level of prior knowledge that defies linear time .


Until next time!