Sunny side of life

Scientists at Towson University and the Johns Hopkins University are reporting a new way to peer through the event horizons around black holes and visualize what lies beneath. Their results could rewrite conventional ideas about the internal structure of spinning black holes. Current approaches use special coordinate systems in which this structure appears quite simple, but quantities that depend on an observer's choice of coordinates can give a distorted view of reality, as anyone knows who has compared the size of Greenland and the USA on a map. The new approach focuses exclusively on mathematical quantities known as invariants, which have the same value for any choice of coordinates. Expressed in terms of these quantities, black hole interiors reveal a much more intricate and complicated structure than usually thought, with wild variations in curvature from place to place. These new findings are timely for two reasons, according to Towson University's Kielan Wilcomb,...

In 1967 Colonel Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa; however, by the time he was assassinated, Gaddafi had turned Libya into Africa’s wealthiest nation. Libya had the highest GDP per capita and life expectancy on the continent. Less people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands. After NATO’s intervention in 2011, Libya is now a failed state and its economy is in shambles. As the government’s control slips through their fingers and into to the militia fighters’ hands, oil production has all but stopped. The militias variously local, tribal, regional, Islamist or criminal, that have plagued Libya since NATO’s intervention, have recently lined up into two warring factions. Libya now has two governments, both with their own Prime Minister, parliament and army. On one side, in the West of the country, Islamist-allied militias took over control of the capital Tripoli and other cities and set up their own government, chasing away a parliament that was...

A new type of solar-powered technology has the potential to play a big role in the fight against  climate change  if its inventors can take it from the laboratory to industrial-scale use. On Thursday, a team of scientists  announced in the journal  Science  that they have created a device that absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and uses sunlight to break it into a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen called synthesis gas or “syngas,” that can be used directly or turned into diesel or other liquid fuels, said Amin Salehi-Khojin, a mechanical engineer at the University of Illinois at Chicago who leads the lab that conducted the research. The team aims to produce fuel at about $2 a gallon, he said, a price that would be cost-competitive with gasoline and, in his opinion, make drilling for oil or gas obsolete. Although burning such a transportation fuel would release the carbon back into the atmosphere, it could be considered a  carbon-neutral...

Archaeologists in Saudi Arabia have announced the discovery of “the world’s oldest human bone” in a new excavation. The bone itself  is the middle section  of the middle finger of a human who they believe lived 90,000 years ago. If confirmed, it would make the bone the oldest trace of human life in the Arabian Peninsula, an official from the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage told  Al-Arabiya . Researchers from a joint Saudi-U.K. project, which  included the Saudi archaeologists  and University of Oxford experts, made the find at the Taas al-Ghadha site near to the northwestern Saudi city of Tayma. The project is an  extension of the Green Arabia  Project, which is studying sites near ancient lakes in the Nafud desert. Archaeologists began digging in the area in 2012. Its historic discovery  suggests that human life dated  back as far as 325,000 years, head of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Nationa...

Mr Manvelyan picture of the eye, let us have a look at something extraordinary. The picture of this HD quality reveals how the eye looks like something out of this world.  Millions of years of adaptation have led to our eyes becoming the complex structures that they are today, scientists believe.  The term Iris is derived from the name of the Greek goddess of the rainbow, due to the many colours they can have. In humans irises have been known to be green, blue, brown, and in rarer cases, hazel, grey, violet, or even pink.

University of California, Irvine researchers have invented nanowire-based battery material that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times, moving us closer to a battery that would never require replacement. The breakthrough work could lead to commercial batteries with greatly lengthened lifespans for computers, smartphones, appliances, cars and spacecraft. Scientists have long sought to use nanowires in batteries. Thousands of times thinner than a human hair, they’re highly conductive and feature a large surface area for the storage and transfer of electrons. However, these filaments are extremely fragile and don’t hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging, or cycling. In a typical lithium-ion battery, they expand and grow brittle, which leads to cracking. UCI researchers have solved this problem by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and encasing the assembly in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The combination is reliable and resistan...

Ocean currents can be generated by wind, density differences in water masses caused by temperature and salinity variations, gravity, and events such as earthquakes. Surface currents are generated largely by wind. Their patterns are determined by wind direction, Coriolis forces from the Earth’s rotation, and the position of landforms that interact with the currents.  Surface wind-driven currents generate upwelling currents in conjunction with landforms, creating deepwater currents. Currents may also be generated by density differences in water masses caused by temperature and salinity variations.  These currents move water masses through the deep ocean—taking nutrients, oxygen, and heat with them.  Occasional events also trigger serious currents. Huge storms move water masses. Underwater earthquakes may trigger devastating tsunamis. Both move masses of water inland when they reach shallow water and coastlines. Earthquakes may also trigger rapid downslope m...