A Year in Space

Astronaut Scott Kelly has accomplished a lot during his 51 years, much of it in non-normal environments. Nearly 2.5 years of Kelly’s life has been spent in extreme environments, either as a naval test pilot experiencing high-G’s in super-sonic military aircrafts or working on science experiments in the International Space Station (ISS)’s zero-G environment. As a NASA astronaut with long-duration experience on space shuttles and the ISS, Kelly volunteered and was selected by NASA, in November 2012, to be its member of a planned Year-in-Space mission. As its member of the planned two-person science-based mission, the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) selected veteran cosmonaut Mikhail Korniyenko. Kelly and Korniyenko were launched to the ISS on March 27, 2015, aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Both are scheduled to return to Kazakhstan in Spring 2016 (342 days).

Nanoquakes probe new 2-D material

In a step towards a post-graphene era of new materials for electronic applications, an international team of researchers, including scientists at the Univ. of California, Riverside, has found a new and exciting way to elucidate the properties of novel 2-D semiconductors. These materials have unique properties that promise better integration of optical communication with traditional silicon-based devices.

The researchers fabricated a single-atomic-layer-thin film of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) on a substrate of lithium niobate (LiNbO3). LiNbO3 is used in many electronic devices dealing with high-frequency signals such as cell phones or radar installations. Applying electrical pulses to LiNbO3, the researchers created very high frequency sound waves—“surface acoustic waves”—that run along the surface of LiNbO3, akin to earthquake tremors on land. Cell phones, for example, use resonances of these surface waves to filter electric signals in a manner similar to a wine glass resonating when a voice hits it at exactly the right pitch.

Simulating 3-D exotic clouds on an exoplanet

Scientists have catalogued nearly 2,000 exoplanets around stars near and far. While most of these are giant and inhospitable, improved techniques and spacecraft have uncovered increasingly smaller worlds. The day may soon come when astrophysicists announce our planet's twin around a distant star.

But size alone is insufficient to judge a globe. Though Earth and Venus are nearly identical in size, the latter's surface is hot enough to melt lead. Astronomers must gather information about an exoplanet's atmosphere, often through observing how the planet scatters or absorbs light from its parent star. But, that information is not always useful—as is the case with the exoplanet GJ1214b.

"When an exoplanet passes in front of its star, light can be absorbed at some wavelengths by molecules in the atmosphere, which we can analyze by looking at how light passes through the planet's atmosphere," said Benjamin Charnay, a postdoctoral researcher in the Univ. of Washington Dept. of Astronomy. "But for this planet, when researchers previously looked with the Hubble Space Telescope, they saw almost no variation with wavelength of light."

Chemical complexity promises improved structural alloys for nuclear energy

Designing alloys to withstand extreme environments is a fundamental challenge for materials scientists. Energy from radiation can create imperfections in alloys, so researchers in an Energy Frontier Research Center led by the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE)'s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are investigating ways to design structural materials that develop fewer, smaller flaws under irradiation. The key, they report in Nature Communications, is exploiting the complexity that is present when alloys are made with equal amounts of up to four different metallic elements.

Engineers design magnetic cell sensors

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers have designed magnetic protein nanoparticles that can be used to track cells or to monitor interactions within cells. The particles, described in Nature Communications, are an enhanced version of a naturally occurring, weakly magnetic protein called ferritin.

“Ferritin, which is as close as biology has given us to a naturally magnetic protein nanoparticle, is really not that magnetic. That’s what this paper is addressing,” says Alan Jasanoff, an MIT professor of biological engineering and the paper’s senior author. “We used the tools of protein engineering to try to boost the magnetic characteristics of this protein.”

Nanotech: The new alchemy

Alchemy left the mainstream centuries ago, but one of its core concepts, transmuting the elements, is experiencing a revival in nanotechnology.

Researchers at the Univ. of Michigan are charting a path toward materials with new properties by cleverly altering the nanoparticles used to build them.

"Today, scientists achieve something akin to alchemy when we change materials' building blocks by adding atoms or molecules to them, or even changing their shape. Such changes affect how the building blocks fit together, which in turn controls material's behavior and properties," said Sharon Glotzer, the John Werner Cahn Distinguished University Professor of Engineering and the Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering.

Researchers model birth of universe

Researchers are sifting through an avalanche of data produced by one of the largest cosmological simulations ever performed, led by scientists at the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE)’s Argonne National Laboratory.

The simulation, run on the Titan supercomputer at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, modeled the evolution of the universe from just 50 million years after the Big Bang to the present day—from its earliest infancy to its current adulthood. Over the course of 13.8 billion years, the matter in the universe clumped together to form galaxies, stars, and planets; but we’re not sure precisely how.

These kinds of simulations help scientists understand dark energy, a form of energy that affects the expansion rate of the universe, including the distribution of galaxies, composed of ordinary matter, as well as dark matter, a mysterious kind of matter that no instrument has directly measured so far.