Blog

A presentation by human factors/ergonomics researchers at the HFES 2015 International Annual Meeting in Los Angeles in October explained how a voter’s positive or negative experience with a particular voting system is influenced not only by perceptions of trust and aesthetics but also by the polling environment itself.

In fusion reactor designs, superconductors (which suffer no resistive power loss) are used to generate the magnetic fields that confine the 100 million degree C plasma. While increasing magnetic field strength offers potential ways to improve reactor performance, conventional low-temperature superconductors suffer dramatic drops in current carrying ability at high magnetic fields.

For more than 60 years, fusion scientists have tried to use “magnetic bottles” of various shapes and sizes to confine extremely hot plasmas, with the goal of producing practical fusion energy. But turbulence in the plasma has, so far, confounded researchers’ ability to efficiently contain the intense heat within the core of the fusion device, reducing performance

Magnetic reconnection, which occurs when magnetic lines of force break apart and reconnect with a violent burst of energy, gives rise to many beautiful and powerful phenomena in the natural world. These include solar flares, the Northern Lights, and geomagnetic storms that can disrupt cell-phone service or knock out power grids.

At a gala ceremony held in Silicon Valley on November 8, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), the Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND), and the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment (Daya Bay) were among five neutrino experiments awarded the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. All three were made possible by essential contributions from scientists and engineers at the U.S

An international collaboration of scientists led by Omar Yaghi, a renowned chemist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has developed a technique they dubbed “gas adsorption crystallography” that provides a new way to study the process by which metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) – 3D crystals with extraordinarily large internal surface areas – are able to store immense volumes of gases such a carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane. This new look at MOFs led to a discovery that holds promise for the improved design of MOFs tailored specifically for carbon capture, or for the use of hydrogen and natural gas (methane) fuels.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has successfully performed the last in a series of four targeting maneuvers that set it on course for a January 2019 encounter with 2014 MU69. This ancient body in the Kuiper Belt is more than a billion miles beyond Pluto; New Horizons will explore it if NASA approves an extended mission.

A new, low-cost experimental device for sea level measurement has been developed by JRC scientists. The first four devices have been installed in Spain and Portugal, in collaboration with the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection and the UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC).

The long history of severe droughts across Europe and the Mediterranean has largely been told through historical documents and ancient journals, each chronicling the impact in a geographically restricted area. Now, for the first time, an atlas based on scientific evidence provides the big picture, using tree rings to map the reach and severity of dry and wet periods across Europe, and parts of North Africa and the Middle East, year to year over the past 2,000 years.

A team of astronomers working at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA, TIFR), Pune have discovered, using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), an extremely rare galaxy of gigantic size. This galaxy—located about 9 billion light years away towards the constellation Cetus—emits powerful radio waves and has an end to end extent of a whopping 4 million light years! Such galaxies with extremely large ‘radio size’ are appropriately called giant radio galaxies.