World's Newest Lava Lake Appears in Africa

Heralded by fiery lava fountains and plumes of poisonous gas, a new lava lake has appeared atop one of Africa's most active volcanoes for the first time in 75 years.

The lava lake at Nyamuragira volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) simmers deep within the summit's North Pit Crater. Though the churning lava seems to come and go, scientists think the volcano may eventually spawn a long-lived lava lake.

At the moment, "it's a very small, bubbling lava lake," said Benoit Smets, a volcanologist at the European Center for Geodynamics and Seismology in Luxembourg. "It disappears and reappears, but if the current activity continues, we will probably have a lava lake like we have at [neighboring volcano] Nyiragongo within a few years to decades."

Both Nyamuragira and the neighboring Nyiragongo are part of the Virunga volcanic chain in the East African Rift near Lake Kivu and DR Congo's border with Rwanda. The volcanoes are among the few on Earth that have sustained lava lakes for several decades. Nyamuragira's last molten pool emptied in 1938 in spectacular fashion, with lava pouring out of the summit and flowing more than 18 miles (30 kilometers) to Lake Kivu.

The new lava lake is at the bottom of a 1,650-foot-deep (500 meters) crater left behind by that flood.

Volcano vigilance

Scientists have anticipated the new lava lake's birth since March 2012, when Nyamuragira's last eruption suddenly ended with earthquakes and powerful explosions. The violence marked a collapse at the pit crater, likely in response to lava flows partially emptying the volcano's underground magma chamber, Smets said. (Between Nov. 8, 2011, and March 2012, Nyamuragira's forested slopes were flooded with 7 billion cubic feet (200 million cubic meters) of lava.)

Those rumbles opened a new route within the volcano for magma to travel up to the summit, akin to the volcano clearing its throat, researchers think. "We felt this was the first sign of a future lava lake," Smets told Live Science.

The idea that a lava lake would form was also justified by the volcano's pattern of past eruptions. Nyamuragira seems cycle its eruptions, with outbursts progressing in time from bottom to top. For instance, after the summit lava lake drained in the 1930s, the next eruptions were at the base of the volcano, Smets said. By the 1990s, eruptions were higher up, breaking through fissures close to the summit, he said.

When did the lake form?

Nestled within Nyamuragira's summit caldera, the pitlike crater and lava lake are often obscured by clouds of sulfur dioxide gas. Nyamuragira vents more sulfur dioxide than any other volcano in the world, said Robin Campion, a volcanologist at the Universidad Nacional Auto?noma de Me?xico in Mexico City.

Campion said he thinks the sulfur dioxide emissions suggest the lava lake actually formed soon after the pit crater collapsed in 2012. Sulfur dioxide gas levels never dropped off after the 2011-2012 eruption ended, Campion said. "I noticed something was very strange, because I was constantly seeing that [sulfur dioxide] was quite high," Campion told Live Science. "Only the formation of a lava lake could explain these high values."

Campion published his findings Nov. 7 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

But Smets disagrees that the lake formed that long ago. In early July, United Nations peacekeepers dropped Smets and a group of scientists from the DR Congo, Belgium, Luxembourg and Italy off at the summit by helicopter, to check on the crater. They saw fire fountains spurting from the crater, but there was no lava lake there yet, Smets reported Oct. 21 in Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union.

But Campion countered that the photos from that July helicopter survey actually show a fountaining lava lake. He noted that in Hawaii, Kilauea volcano's lava lake was also filled with vigorous fire fountains soon after it formed. "I really think is the early stages of a permanent lava lake," he said.

Distant observers have also weighed in on the debate. Earlier this year, satellites picked up hotter-than-usual temperatures above Nyamuragira in April and late June, leading NASA's Earth Observatory to conclude that a new lava lake had formed. The activity died down in August and then spiked again this month.

The summit also started glowing red at night in April and June, and scientists at the Goma Volcano Observatory — the Congolese scientific institute in charge of volcano monitoring — detected unusual earthquake swarms that are typical of molten rock (magma) moving underground during these months.

The back-and-forth reflects both science at work and the difficulty of working in the DR Congo, researchers said. Smets said the debate was finally settled this month, when Goma Volcano Observatory scientists saw an active lava lake during a Nov. 6 helicopter survey. Researchers often must rely on visual or satellite monitoring of DR Congo volcanoes because, for safety reasons, instruments often can't be left in the field, Smets said. In the eastern part of the country, near the volcanoes, dozens of armed groups continue to fight, despite peace agreements. More than 21,000 U.N. personnel were in the country as of Sept. 30.

Read more at Discovery News

Ripples in Space-Time Could Reveal 'Strange Stars'

By looking for ripples in the fabric of space-time, scientists could soon detect "strange stars" -- objects made of stuff radically different from the particles that make up ordinary matter, researchers say.

The protons and neutrons that make up the nuclei of atoms are made of more basic particles known as quarks. There are six types, or "flavors," of quarks: up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange. Each proton or neutron is made of three quarks: Each proton is composed of two up quarks and one down quark, and each neutron is made of two down quarks and one up quark.

In theory, matter can be made with other flavors of quarks as well. Since the 1970s, scientists have suggested that particles of "strange matter" known as strangelets -- made of equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks -- could exist. In principle, strange matter should be heavier and more stable than normal matter, and might even be capable of converting ordinary matter it comes in contact with into strange matter. However, lab experiments have not yet created any strange matter, so its existence remains uncertain.

One place strange matter could naturally be created is inside neutron stars, the remnants of stars that died in catastrophic explosions known as supernovas. Neutron stars are typically small, with diameters of about 12 miles (19 kilometers) or so, but are so dense that they weigh as much as the sun. A chunk of a neutron star the size of a sugar cube can weigh as much as 100 million tons.

Under the extraordinary force of this extreme weight, some of the up and down quarks that make up neutron stars could get converted into strange quarks, leading to strange stars made of strange matter, researchers say.

A strange star that occasionally spurts out strange matter could quickly convert a neutron star orbiting it in a binary system into a strange star as well. Prior research suggests that a neutron star that receives a seed of strange matter from a companion strange star could transition to a strange star in just 1 millisecond to 1 second.

Now, researchers suggest they could detect strange stars by looking for the stars' gravitational waves -- invisible ripples in space-time first proposed by Albert Einstein as part of his theory of general relativity.

Gravitational waves are emitted by accelerating masses. Really big gravitational waves are emitted by really big masses, such as pairs of neutron stars merging with one another.

Pairs of strange stars should give off gravitational waves that are different from those emitted by pairs of "normal" neutron stars because strange stars should be more compact, researchers said. For instance, a neutron star with a mass one-fifth that of the sun should be more than 18 miles (30 km) in diameter, whereas a strange star of the same mass should be a maximum of 6 miles (10 km) wide.

The researchers suggest that events involving strange stars could explain two short gamma-ray bursts -- giant explosions lasting less than 2 seconds --seen in deep space in 2005 and 2007. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) did not detect gravitational waves from either of these events, dubbed GRB 051103 and GRB 070201.

Neutron star mergers are the leading explanations for short gamma-ray bursts, but LIGO should, in principle, have detected gravitational waves from such mergers. However, if strange stars were involved in both of these events, LIGO would not have been able to detect any gravitational waves they emitted, researchers said. (The more compact a star is within a binary system of two stars, the higher the frequency of the gravitational waves it gives off.)

Still, future research could detect strange-star events. Using the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (aLIGO), whose first observing run is scheduled for 2015, the researchers expect to detect about 0.13 mergers per year of neutron stars with strange stars, or about one such merger every eight years. Using the Einstein Telescope currently being designed in the European Union, the scientists eventually expect to detect about 700 such events per year, or about two per day.

Read more at Discovery News

Ancient marine algae provides clues of climate change impact on today's microscopic ocean organisms

A study of ancient marine algae, led by the University of Southampton, has found that climate change affected their growth and skeleton structure, which has potential significance for today's equivalent microscopic organisms that play an important role in the world's oceans.

Coccolithophores, a type of marine algae, are prolific in the ocean today and have been for millions of years. These single-celled plankton produce calcite skeletons that are preserved in seafloor sediments after death. Although coccolithophores are microscopic, their abundance makes them key contributors to marine ecosystems and the global carbon cycle.

There is, therefore, much current interest in how coccolithophore calcification might be affected by climate change and ocean acidification, both of which occur as atmospheric carbon dioxide increases.

The research, published in Nature Communications, examined preserved fossil remains of coccolithophores from a period of climate warming and ocean acidification that occurred around 56 million years ago -- the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) -- and provides a much-needed long-term perspective of coccolithophore response to ocean acidification.

Dr Sarah O'Dea, from Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton and lead author of the study, says: "Our results show that climate change significantly altered coccolithophore calcification rates at the PETM and has the potential to be just as significant, perhaps even more so, today. Ultimately then, it is the factors that influence where species live, their abundance, how fast they grow and their ability to adapt to environmental change that is likely to control future coccolithophore calcite production."

The study investigated two key PETM coccolithophores, Coccolithus pelagicus and Toweius pertusus, both of which are directly related to species that dominate the modern ocean.

It found that calcification rates of C. pelagicus and T. pertusus halved during the PETM, due to changes in environmental factors that influenced their growth. The response of each species was, however, different, and involved intervals of slowed growth in C. pelagicus and an overall reduction in the size of the skeletal components -- coccoliths -- in T. pertusus. Intriguingly though, there was very little evidence for any response to ocean acidification, other than perhaps a slight thinning of C. pelagicus coccoliths..

Dr Samantha Gibbs, from Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton, who was Dr O'Dea's PhD supervisor and co-author of the study, says: "A key objective was to record calcification in fossil coccolithophores in a way that enabled direct comparison with measurements from living specimens. Our novel technique involved analysing coccolithophore skeletal remains and applying observations from modern specimens to estimate, for the first time, calcification rates of fossil coccolithophores."

Read more at Science Daily

Invisible shield found thousands of miles above Earth blocks 'killer electrons'

A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered an invisible shield some 7,200 miles above Earth that blocks so-called "killer electrons," which whip around the planet at near-light speed and have been known to threaten astronauts, fry satellites and degrade space systems during intense solar storms.

The barrier to the particle motion was discovered in the Van Allen radiation belts, two doughnut-shaped rings above Earth that are filled with high-energy electrons and protons, said Distinguished Professor Daniel Baker, director of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). Held in place by Earth's magnetic field, the Van Allen radiation belts periodically swell and shrink in response to incoming energy disturbances from the sun.

As the first significant discovery of the space age, the Van Allen radiation belts were detected in 1958 by Professor James Van Allen and his team at the University of Iowa and were found to be composed of an inner and outer belt extending up to 25,000 miles above Earth's surface. In 2013, Baker -- who received his doctorate under Van Allen -- led a team that used the twin Van Allen Probes launched by NASA in 2012 to discover a third, transient "storage ring" between the inner and outer Van Allen radiation belts that seems to come and go with the intensity of space weather.

The latest mystery revolves around an "extremely sharp" boundary at the inner edge of the outer belt at roughly 7,200 miles in altitude that appears to block the ultrafast electrons from breeching the shield and moving deeper towards Earth's atmosphere.

"It's almost like theses electrons are running into a glass wall in space," said Baker, the study's lead author. "Somewhat like the shields created by force fields on Star Trek that were used to repel alien weapons, we are seeing an invisible shield blocking these electrons. It's an extremely puzzling phenomenon."

A paper on the subject was published in the Nov. 27 issue of Nature.

The team originally thought the highly charged electrons, which are looping around Earth at more than 100,000 miles per second, would slowly drift downward into the upper atmosphere and gradually be wiped out by interactions with air molecules. But the impenetrable barrier seen by the twin Van Allen belt spacecraft stops the electrons before they get that far, said Baker.

The group looked at a number of scenarios that could create and maintain such a barrier. The team wondered if it might have to do with Earth's magnetic field lines, which trap and control protons and electrons, bouncing them between Earth's poles like beads on a string. The also looked at whether radio signals from human transmitters on Earth could be scattering the charged electrons at the barrier, preventing their downward motion. Neither explanation held scientific water, Baker said.

"Nature abhors strong gradients and generally finds ways to smooth them out, so we would expect some of the relativistic electrons to move inward and some outward," said Baker. "It's not obvious how the slow, gradual processes that should be involved in motion of these particles can conspire to create such a sharp, persistent boundary at this location in space."

Another scenario is that the giant cloud of cold, electrically charged gas called the plasmasphere, which begins about 600 miles above Earth and stretches thousands of miles into the outer Van Allen belt, is scattering the electrons at the boundary with low frequency, electromagnetic waves that create a plasmapheric "hiss," said Baker. The hiss sounds like white noise when played over a speaker, he said.

Read more at Science Daily

DNA survives critical entry into Earth's atmosphere

The genetic material DNA can survive a flight through space and re-entry into Earth's atmosphere -- and still pass on genetic information. A team of scientists from UZH obtained these astonishing results during an experiment on the TEXUS-49 research rocket mission.

Applied to the outer shell of the payload section of a rocket using pipettes, small, double-stranded DNA molecules flew into space from Earth and back again. After the launch, space flight, re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and landing, the so-called plasmid DNA molecules were still found on all the application points on the rocket from the TEXUS-49 mission. And this was not the only surprise: For the most part, the DNA salvaged was even still able to transfer genetic information to bacterial and connective tissue cells. "This study provides experimental evidence that the DNA's genetic information is essentially capable of surviving the extreme conditions of space and the re-entry into Earth's dense atmosphere," says study head Professor Oliver Ullrich from the University of Zurich's Institute of Anatomy.

Spontaneous second mission

The experiment called DARE (DNA atmospheric re-entry experiment) resulted from a spontaneous idea: UZH scientists Dr. Cora Thiel and Professor Ullrich were conducting experiments on the TEXUS-49 mission to study the role of gravity in the regulation of gene expression in human cells using remote-controlled hardware inside the rocket's payload. During the mission preparations, they began to wonder whether the outer structure of the rocket might also be suitable for stability tests on so-called biosignatures. "Biosignatures are molecules that can prove the existence of past or present extraterrestrial life," explains Dr. Thiel. And so the two UZH researchers launched a small second mission at the European rocket station Esrange in Kiruna, north of the Arctic Circle.

DNA survives the most extreme conditions

The quickly conceived additional experiment was originally supposed to be a pretest to check the stability of biomarkers during spaceflight and re-entry into the atmosphere. Dr. Thiel did not expect the results it produced: "We were completely surprised to find so much intact and functionally active DNA." The study reveals that genetic information from the DNA can essentially withstand the most extreme conditions.

Various scientists believe that DNA could certainly reach us from outer space as Earth is not insulated: in extraterrestrial material made of dust and meteorites, for instance, around 100 tons of which hits our planet every day.

Read more at Science Daily

'Eye of Sauron' provides new way of measuring distances to galaxies

A team of scientists, led by Dr Sebastian Hoenig from the University of Southampton, have developed a new way of measuring precise distances to galaxies tens of millions of light years away, using the W. M. Keck Observatory near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

The method is similar to what land surveyors use on Earth, by measuring the physical and angular, or 'apparent', size of a standard ruler in the galaxy, to calibrate the distance from this information.

The research, which is published in the journal Nature, was used to identify the accurate distance of the nearby NGC4151 galaxy, which wasn't previously available. The galaxy NGC 4151, which is dubbed the 'Eye of Sauron' by astronomers for its similarity to the film depiction of the eye of the character in The Lord of the Rings, is important for accurately measuring black hole masses.

Recently reported distances range from 4 to 29 megaparsecs, but using this new method the researchers calculated the distance of 19 megaparsecs to the supermassive black hole.

Indeed, as in the famous saga, a ring plays a crucial role in this new measurement. All big galaxies in the universe host a supermassive black hole in their centre and in about a tenth of all galaxies, these supermassive black holes are growing by swallowing huge amounts of gas and dust from their surrounding environments. In this process, the material heats up and becomes very bright -- becoming the most energetic sources of emission in the universe known as active galactic nuclei (AGN).

The hot dust forms a ring around the supermassive black hole and emits infrared radiation, which the researchers used as the ruler. However, the apparent size of this ring is so small that the observations were carried out using infrared interferometry to combine W. M. Keck Observatory's twin 10-meter telescopes, to achieve the resolution power of an 85m telescope.

To measure the physical size of the dusty ring, the researchers measured the time delay between the emission of light from very close to the black hole and the infrared emission. This delay is the distance the light has to travel (at the speed-of-light) from close to the black hole out to the hot dust.

By combining this physical size of the dust ring with the apparent size measured with the data from the Keck interferometer, the researchers were able to determine a distance to the galaxy NGC 4151.

Dr Hoenig says: "One of the key findings is that the distance determined in this new fashion is quite precise -- with only about 10 per cent uncertainty. In fact, if the current result for NGC 4151 holds for other objects, it can potentially beat any other current methods to reach the same precision to determine distances for remote galaxies directly based on simple geometrical principles. Moreover, it can be readily used on many more sources than the current most precise method."

"Such distances are key in pinning down the cosmological parameters that characterise our universe or for accurately measuring black hole masses. Indeed, NGC 4151 is a crucial anchor to calibrate various techniques to estimate black hole masses. Our new distance implies that these masses may have been systematically underestimated by 40 per cent."

Read more at Science Daily

Buried Polish 'Vampires' Likely Had Cholera

“Vampires” buried in northwestern Poland with large stones wedged into their mouths or sickles over their necks were local people probably affected by cholera, says the first biogeochemical study of human skeletal remains from deviant burials.

The study investigated 285 human skeletons which were excavated between 2008-2012 from a post medieval cemetery in Drawsko, a rural settlement site in northwestern Poland. Dating to the 17th and 18th centuries, the remains represented individuals of all ages and both sexes.

Among the interments, six were identified as so-called vampire burials. They included an adult male, a late adolescent female, three adult females, and a younger person of unknown sex.

“Of these six individuals, five were interred with a sickle placed across the throat or abdomen, intended to remove the head or open the gut should they attempt to rise from the grave,” Lesley Gregoricka from University of South Alabama and colleagues, wrote in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

The remaining two people were found with large stones positioned beneath their chins -- evidence, the researchers say, that it was feared the individuals would rise from their graves to bite others.

Gregoricka and colleagues first hypothesized the people buried as vampires were targeted because of their outsider status as immigrants.

Indeed, abundant written evidence for the post-medieval period describes many waves of immigrants entering into Poland during that time.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers tested permanent molars from 60 individuals, including the six "vampires,” using radiogenic strontium isotope ratios from archaeological dental enamel. Local animals, including hare, mice and fox, were also sampled.

“While historic records describe the many potential reasons why some people were considered at increased risk of becoming a vampire, no previous study had attempted to examine the identity of these individuals using chemical analyses of the human skeleton,” Gregoricka told Discovery News.

Strontium isotopes incorporated into teeth during growth and development can tell about the place someone grew up, whether the individual moved later and whether the person was buried somewhere different from where they spent their childhood.

"Contrary to our hypothesis, we found that all of the vampires were local," Gregoricka said.

"We actually found others in the cemetery that were non-local to the region, but were not buried as vampires," she added.

According to the researchers, there should be another reason for the deviant burials, since the targeted individuals were not suspected of becoming vampires due to their identity as non-locals.

Gregoricka and colleagues propose cholera epidemics as an alternative explanation.

Multiple waves of cholera epidemics struck Europe during the post-medieval period, but people were unaware that cholera was a bacteria spread through contaminated drinking water.

“There was no scientific understanding of how infectious disease was spread. Instead, because they couldn’t explain it, they attributed cholera to the supernatural -- specifically, to vampires,” Gregoricka said.

In this view, the first person to die in an epidemic was thought to seek revenge on the living by returning from the grave to inflict the illness upon others, causing the disease to spread.

“As such, if these six individuals were the first to die in a series of cholera outbreaks that affected Drawsko during the post-medieval period, they may have been buried in this way as a means of preventing them from returning as vampires and attacking the living,” Gregoricka said.

Read more at Disocvery News

Early Shakespeare Works Found in French Library

A copy of William Shakespeare's First Folio, the first-ever compilation of the Bard's plays published in 1623, has been discovered in the library of a small town in northern France, a librarian said Tuesday.

One of the most valuable and coveted books in the world, the First Folio was uncovered when librarian Remy Cordonnier dusted off a book of Shakespeare's works dating to the 18th century for an exhibition on English literature in the town of Saint-Omer near Calais.

"It occurred to me that it could be an unidentified First Folio, with historic importance and great intellectual value," he told AFP.

The copy of the book, which was published seven years after Shakespeare's death, was authenticated on Saturday by First Folio expert Eric Rasmussen from the University of Nevada.

"It is the 231st copy found in the world and the second in France," said Cordonnier.

The book, a compilation of 36 of Shakespeare's plays, is in good condition but missing about 30 pages, including the title page, which could explain how it went unnoticed for centuries.

Rasmussen wrote a book on the First Folio called "The Shakespeare Thefts" detailing his thrilling global hunt for what remains of the initial 750 copies of the book, a favourite for thieves across the centuries.

He describes "run-ins with heavily tattooed criminal street gangs in Tokyo, bizarre visits with eccentric, reclusive billionaires, and intense battles of wills with secretive librarians," according to the publisher.

Rasmussen's book speaks of several First Folios which have had pages ripped out of them, and one with a bullet lodged in it.

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, which houses the largest collection of Shakespeare material, says on its website that the First Folio is the only source for 18 of Shakespeare's plays, including Macbeth, "which would otherwise be lost."

It is believed that the copy found in France was taken to Saint-Omer by English refugees from Anglican persecution, said Cordonnier.

Read more at Discovery News

First Ever 3-D Printed 'Tool' Fabricated in Space

Could this signal the start of a revolution in 3-D printed products and transform how we manufacture stuff in a microgravity environment? Possibly.

On Nov. 17, NASA astronaut and Expedition 42 Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore installed the first 3-D printer to be operated in space and conducted its first calibration test print. On Monday (Nov. 24), the printer produced its first component on the International Space Station (ISS) after commands were sent from ground control.

Delivered in September to the orbiting outpost by a SpaceX resupply mission, the Made In Space printer constructed a piece of hardware that acts as a functional part of the printer itself — a faceplate for the printer’s extruder printhead with the “Made In Space” and “NASA” logos embossed (pictured above).

The 3-D printer uses a process known as additive manufacturing “to heat a relatively low-temperature plastic filament and extrude it one layer at a time to build the part defined in the design file sent to the machine,” writes NASA.

This is a significant event as the faceplate is the first tool (or, at least, tool component) that has been manufactured, from scratch, off Earth.

“When the first human fashioned a tool from a rock, it couldn’t have been conceived that one day we’d be replicating the same fundamental idea in space,” said Aaron Kemmer, CEO of Made In Space, Inc., in a company press release. “We look at the operation of the 3-D printer as a transformative moment, not just for space development, but for the capability of our species to live away from Earth.”

The faceplate may be more of a symbolic first-run, but plans are afoot to use the printer to manufacture more components for use on board the space station, an asset that could prove to be extremely valuable for current and future spaceflight endeavors.

Until now, all tools and equipment for use aboard the ISS are manufactured on Earth. Often, this means costly and lengthy delays in getting the space station crew the tools they need. Using a 3-D printer, many of these components can be produced within hours of establishing a need for that tool.

Just imagine if the Apollo 13 crew had had access to a 3-D printer during their transit to the moon in 1970. After the oxygen tanks exploded, rendering the lunar landing an impossibility, issues with scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air inside the spacecraft were exacerbated by incompatible lunar module (LM) and command module (CM) filters. The stunning ingenuity of NASA engineers saved the day — they, basically, found a way to fit a square peg into a round hole. But a 3-D printer, if the technology had existed five decades ago, could have been used to quickly build an adapter.

Though this is a fanciful and purely hypothetical example, it shows that the rapid fabrication of products in space could be mission critical as not all events in space can be predicted months in advance on the ground. Designs are beamed up to the ISS and the printer gets to work. As 3-D printing technology evolves, more complex components will be possible within shorter and shorter time frames.

“This project demonstrates the basic fundamentals of useful manufacturing in space. The results of this experiment will serve as a stepping stone for significant future capabilities that will allow for the reduction of spare parts and mass on a spacecraft, which will change exploration mission architectures for the better,” said Mike Snyder, Director of R&D for Made In Space and Principal Investigator for this experiment. “Manufacturing components on demand will yield more efficient, more reliable, and less Earth dependent space programs in the near future.”

Now that the printer is up and running, test coupons and parts will be fabricated and returned to Earth so they can be validated and quality evaluated against similar products produced on the ground. Already, after this initial run, differences in 3-D printed microgravity products with their terrestrial counterparts are being noticed.

“This is the first time we’ve ever used a 3-D printer in space, and we are learning, even from these initial operations,” said Niki Werkheiser, project manager for the ISS 3-D Printer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. “As we print more parts we’ll be able to learn whether some of the effects we are seeing are caused by microgravity or just part of the normal fine-tuning process for printing. When we get the parts back on Earth, we’ll be able to do a more detailed analysis to find out how they compare to parts printed on Earth.”

Read more at Discovery News

LHC's 'Heart' Starts Pumping Protons Before Restart

While on its long road to restart, yet another milestone was reached at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over the weekend.

Protons were generated by the LHC’s source and blasted through a ‘daisy-chain’ of smaller accelerators before being intentionally smashed into a metaphorical brick wall. The particle beam didn’t reach the LHC’s famous 17 mile (27 kilometer) accelerator ring, they were stopped just short, but the event was used to begin calibration efforts of the massive experiment’s detectors before the whole system is powered back up again early next year.

The world’s most powerful particle collider, which is located at and managed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland, was powered down in February 2013 for repairs and upgrades. Now, with the improvements complete, CERN engineers are testing and calibrating each component of the complex system before experiments can restart in 2015.

“These initial tests are a milestone for the whole accelerator chain,” said the LHC’s chief engineer Reyes Alemany Fernandez. “Not only was this the first time the injection lines have seen beams in over a year, it was also our first opportunity to test the LHC’s operation system. We successfully commissioned the LHC’s injection and ejection magnets, all without beam in the machine itself.”

Before protons are ‘fed’ into the LHC’s main ring to be accelerated to relativistic speeds by the circuit of superconducting electromagnets, a series of smaller accelerators are used, each one ramping-up the particles’ energies before being passed to the next accelerator.

Starting at the source, which is responsible for creating a reservoir of protons (hydrogen atoms are stripped of their electrons, leaving the positively-charged protons behind), the protons are fed into the Linac2 accelerator — the first boost on the proton beam’s journey through the LHC. After Linac2, the particle beam is accelerated by the Proton Synchrotron Booster (a component that has seen some of the most radical upgrades since shutdown), then the Proton Synchrotron (PS) and then the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS).

But during this test, the high-speed protons were fed through the LHC injection lines, after being accelerated by the SPS, only to end their short journey smashing into 21.6 tons of graphite, aluminum and copper known as “beam dumps.” These dumps are used to absorb the energy of particle beams before they enter the LHC proper. This is useful during tests and can help prevent significant damage to the LHC’s electromagnets and sensitive detectors should there be a fault or “quench” event. The purpose of these dumps is to diffuse the particle beam, thereby scattering its energy, and then absorbing the rest.

Read more at Discovery News