Return of the LHC – season 2 continues

CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research logo.

March 30, 2016

Image above: Applause in the LHC control room as the first particles began circulating in the LHC (image: Maximillien Brice/CERN).

On Friday, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) opened its doors to allow particles to travel around the ring for the first time since the year-end technical stop (YETS) began in December 2015. At 10.30 am, a first bunch was circulating and by midday the beam was circulating in both directions.

2015 saw the start of Run 2 for the LHC, the largest accelerator in the world where the LHC reached a proton-proton collision energy of 13 TeV -- the highest ever reached by a particle accelerator. Beam intensity also increased and, by the end of 2015, 2240 protons bunches per beam were being collided. This year, the aim is to increase the number of bunches even further to the target of 2748.

Beams are made of “trains” of proton bunches moving at almost the speed of light around the 27 kilometre ring of the LHC. By sending more bunches around the ring the LHC will be able to generate more collisions, meaning more physics data for the experiments.

Powering tests finished on 18 March 2016, and in the following week the LHC has been undergoing the final phase of preparation before beam. This phase is known as machine checkout, during which all the systems of the LHC, such as the magnetic circuits and collimators, are put through their paces without beam. This includes ramping all hardware up to their high-energy values and testing the “squeeze” process. By adjusting magnet strengths either side of a given experiment,  the squeeze reduces the beam size at the interaction point thereby increasing the collision rate.

The LHC restart in one minute

Video above: A time-lapse video of some of the important milestones preceding proton beam injection this year and the activities over the last few days in the CERN Control Centre (CCC), the place where the CERN accelerator chain is operated and controlled. (Video: CERN).

“Following the machine checkout, the LHC team works with low intensity beam for about 3 to 4 weeks to re-commission all systems and to check out all aspects of beam-based operation to make sure that the LHC is fully safe before stable beams is declared,” Mike Lamont of the Operations team explains. Stable beams are the signal that the experiments can start taking data.

In 2016 the LHC will continue to open the path for new discoveries by providing up to 1 billion collisions per second to its experiments as it continues Run 2. The goal this year is to reach an integrated luminosity of around 25 fb^-1, up from the 4 fb^-1 it reached by the end of last year. Luminosity is an essential indicator of the performance of an accelerator, measuring the potential number of collisions that can occur in a given amount of time. Integrated luminosity is the accumulated number of potential collisions. The inverse femtobarn (fb^-1) is the unit used by physicists to measure the integrated luminosity; 1 fb^-1 corresponds to around 80 million million collisions.

More information on the first beams seen by the ATLAS and CMS experiments available on their websites.

Note:

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.

Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 22 Member States.

Related article:

The LHC wakes up from its winter break:
http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2016/03/the-lhc-wakes-up-from-its-winter-break.html

Related links:

Large Hadron Collider (LHC): http://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider

ATLAS experiments: http://atlas.cern/updates/atlas-news/spring-awakening-atlas-experiment

CMS experiments: http://cms.web.cern.ch/news/lhc-back-online

For more information about the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), visit: http://home.web.cern.ch/

Images (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credits: CERN/Harriet Kim Jarlett.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Trigger for Milky Way’s Youngest Supernova Identified

NASA - Chandra X-ray Observatory patch.

March 30, 2016

Scientists have used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NSF’s Jansky Very Large Array to determine the likely trigger for the most recent supernova in the Milky Way. They applied a new technique that could have implications for understanding other Type Ia supernovas, a class of stellar explosions that scientists use to determine the expansion rate of the Universe.

Astronomers had previously identified G1.9+0.3 as the remnant of the most recent supernova in our Galaxy. It is estimated to have occurred about 110 years ago in a dusty region of the Galaxy that blocked visible light from reaching Earth.

G1.9+0.3 belongs to the Type Ia category, an important class of supernovas exhibiting reliable patterns in their brightness that make them valuable tools for measuring the rate at which the universe is expanding.

“Astronomers use Type Ia supernovas as distance markers across the Universe, which helped us discover that its expansion was accelerating,” said Sayan Chakraborti, who led the study at Harvard University. “If there are any differences in how these supernovas explode and the amount of light they produce, that could have an impact on our understanding of this expansion.”

Most scientists agree that Type Ia supernovas occur when white dwarfs, the dense remnants of Sun-like stars that have run out of fuel, explode. However, there has been a debate over what triggers these white dwarf explosions. Two primary ideas are the accumulation of material onto a white dwarf from a companion star or the violent merger of two white dwarfs.

Image above: Supernova G1.9+0.3. Image Credits: NASA/CXC/CfA/S. Chakraborti et al.

The new research with archival Chandra and VLA data examines how the expanding supernova remnant G1.0+0.3 interacts with the gas and dust surrounding the explosion. The resulting radio and X-ray emission provide clues as to the cause of the explosion. In particular, an increase in X-ray and radio brightness of the supernova remnant with time, according to theoretical work by Chakraborti’s team, is expected only if a white dwarf merger took place.

“We observed that the X-ray and radio brightness increased with time, so the data point strongly to a collision between two white dwarfs as being the trigger for the supernova explosion in G1.9+0.3,” said co-author Francesca Childs, also of Harvard.

The result implies that Type Ia supernovas are either all caused by white dwarf collisions, or are caused by a mixture of white dwarf collisions and the mechanism where the white dwarf pulls material from a companion star.

“It is important to identify the trigger mechanism for Type Ia supernovas because if there is more than one cause, then the contribution from each may change over time,” said Harvard’s Alicia Soderberg, another co-author on the study. This means astronomers might have to recalibrate some of the ways we use them as ‘standard candles’ in cosmology.”

The team also derived a new estimate for the age of the supernova remnant of about 110 years, younger than previous estimates of about 150 years.

Chandra X-ray Observatory. Image Credits: NASA/CXC

More progress on understanding the trigger mechanism should come from studying Type Ia supernovas in nearby galaxies, using the increased sensitivity provided by a recent upgrade to the VLA.

A paper describing these results appeared in the March 1st, 2016 issue of The Astrophysical Journal and is available online. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra's science and flight operations.

Read More from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2016/g19/

For more Chandra images, multimedia and related materials, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/chandra

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center/Molly Porter/Chandra X-ray Center/Megan Watzke.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

NASA’s Spitzer Maps Climate Patterns on a Super-Earth

NASA - Spitzer Space Telescope logo.

March 30, 2016

Observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have led to the first temperature map of a super-Earth planet -- a rocky planet nearly two times as big as ours. The map reveals extreme temperature swings from one side of the planet to the other, and hints that a possible reason for this is the presence of lava flows.

Image above: The varying brightness of an exoplanet called 55 Cancri e is shown in this plot of infrared data captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Cambridge.

"Our view of this planet keeps evolving," said Brice Olivier Demory of the University of Cambridge, England, lead author of a new report appearing in the March 30 issue of the journal Nature. "The latest findings tell us the planet has hot nights and significantly hotter days. This indicates the planet inefficiently transports heat around the planet. We propose this could be explained by an atmosphere that would exist only on the day side of the planet, or by lava flows at the planet surface."

The toasty super-Earth 55 Cancri e is relatively close to Earth at 40 light-years away. It orbits very close to its star, whipping around it every 18 hours. Because of the planet's proximity to the star, it is tidally locked by gravity just as our moon is to Earth. That means one side of 55 Cancri, referred to as the day side, is always cooking under the intense heat of its star, while the night side remains in the dark and is much cooler.

Animation above: This animated illustration shows one possible scenario for the rocky exoplanet 55 Cancri e, nearly two times the size of Earth. New Spitzer data show that one side of the planet is much hotter than the other – which could be explained by a possible presence of lava pools. Animation Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

"Spitzer observed the phases of 55 Cancri e, similar to the phases of the moon as seen from the Earth. We were able to observe the first, last quarters, new and full phases of this small exoplanet," said Demory. "In return, these observations helped us build a map of the planet. This map informs us which regions are hot on the planet."

Spitzer stared at the planet with its infrared vision for a total of 80 hours, watching it orbit all the way around its star multiple times. These data allowed scientists to map temperature changes across the entire planet. To their surprise, they found a dramatic temperature difference of 2,340 degrees Fahrenheit (1,300 Kelvin) from one side of the planet to the other. The hottest side is nearly 4,400 degrees Fahrenheit (2,700 Kelvin), and the coolest is 2,060 degrees Fahrenheit (1,400 Kelvin).

The fact Spitzer found the night side to be significantly colder than the day side means heat is not being distributed around the planet very well. The data argues against the notion that a thick atmosphere and winds are moving heat around the planet as previously thought. Instead, the findings suggest a planet devoid of a massive atmosphere, and possibly hint at a lava world where the lava would become hardened on the night side and unable to transport heat.

"The day side could possibly have rivers of lava and big pools of extremely hot magma, but we think the night side would have solidified lava flows like those found in Hawaii," said Michael Gillon, University of Liège, Belgium.

The Spitzer data also revealed the hottest spot on the planet has shifted over a bit from where it was expected to be: directly under the blazing star. This shift either indicates some degree of heat recirculation confined to the day side, or points to surface features with extremely high temperatures, such as lava flows.

Spitzer Space Telescope. Image Credit: NASA

Additional observations, including from NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, will help to confirm the true nature of 55 Cancri e.

The new Spitzer observations of 55 Cancri are more detailed thanks to the telescope’s increased sensitivity to exoplanets. Over the past several years, scientists and engineers have figured out new ways to enhance Spitzer’s ability to measure changes in the brightness of exoplanet systems. One method involves precisely characterizing Spitzer’s detectors, specifically measuring “the sweet spot” -- a single pixel on the detector -- which was determined to be optimal for exoplanet studies.

“By understanding the characteristics of the instrument -- and using novel calibration techniques of a small region of a single pixel -- we are attempting to eke out every bit of science possible from a detector that was not designed for this type of high-precision observation,” said Jessica Krick of NASA’s Spitzer Space Science Center, at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center. Spacecraft operations are based at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Related link:

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): http://www.nasa.gov/webb

For more information about Spitzer, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

Images (mentioned), Animation (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Felicia Chou/JPL/Whitney Clavin.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Integral sets limits on gamma rays from merging black holes

ESA - Integral Mission patch.

30 March 2016

Following the discovery of gravitational waves from the merging of two black holes, ESA’s Integral satellite has revealed no simultaneous gamma rays, just as models predict.

On 14 September, the terrestrial Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detected gravitational waves – fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime – produced by a pair of black holes as they spiralled towards each other before merging. The signal lasted less than half a second.

Merging black holes

The discovery was the first direct observation of gravitational waves, predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago.

Two days after the detection, the LIGO team alerted a number of ground- and space-based astronomical facilities to look for a possible counterpart to the source of gravitational waves. The nature of the source was unclear at the time, and it was hoped that follow-up observations across the electromagnetic spectrum might provide valuable information about the culprit.

Gravitational waves are released when massive bodies are accelerated, and strong emission should occur when dense stellar remnants such as neutron stars or black holes spiral towards each other before coalescing.

 Models predict that the merging of two stellar-mass black holes would not produce light at any wavelength, but if one or two neutron stars were involved in the process, then a characteristic signature should be observable across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Another possible source of gravitational waves would be an asymmetric supernova explosion, also known to emit light over a range of wavelengths.

Gravitational waves

It was not possible to pinpoint the LIGO source – its position could only be narrowed down to a very long strip across the sky.

Observatories searched their archives in case data had been serendipitously collected anywhere along this strip around the time of the gravitational wave detection. They were also asked to point their telescopes to the same region in search for any possible ‘afterglow’ emission.

Integral is sensitive to transient sources of high-energy emission over the whole sky, and thus a team of scientists searched through its data, seeking signs of a sudden burst of hard X-rays or gamma rays that might have been recorded at the same time as the gravitational waves were detected.

“We searched through all the available Integral data, but did not find any indication of high-energy emission associated with the LIGO detection,” says Volodymyr Savchenko of the François Arago Centre in Paris, France. Volodymyr is the lead author of a paper reporting the results, published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team analysed data from the Anti-Coincidence Shield on Integral’s SPI instrument. The shield helps to screen out radiation and particles coming from directions other than that where the instrument is pointing, as well as to detect transient high-energy sources across the whole sky.

The team also looked at data from Integral’s IBIS instrument, although at the time it was not pointing at the strip where the source of gravitational waves was thought to be located.

“The source detected by LIGO released a huge amount of energy in gravitational waves, and the limits set by the Integral data on a possible simultaneous emission of gamma rays are one million times lower than that,” says co-author Carlo Ferrigno from the Integral Science Data Centre at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Subsequent analysis of the LIGO data has shown that the gravitational waves were produced by a pair of coalescing black holes, each with a mass roughly 30 times that of our Sun, located about 1.3 billion light years away. Scientists do not expect to see any significant emission of light at any wavelength from such events, and thus Integral’s null detection is consistent with this scenario.

Similarly, nothing was seen by the great majority of the other astronomical facilities making observations from radio and infrared to optical and X-ray wavelengths.

Integral: gamma-ray observatory

The only exception was the Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, which observed what appears to be a sudden burst of gamma rays about 0.4 seconds after the gravitational waves were detected. The burst lasted about one second and came from a region of the sky that overlaps with the strip identified by LIGO.

This detection sparked a bounty of theoretical investigations, proposing possible scenarios in which two merging black holes of stellar mass could indeed have released gamma rays along with the gravitational waves.

However, if this gamma-ray flare had had a cosmic origin, either linked to the LIGO gravitational wave source or to any other astrophysical phenomenon in the Universe, it should have been detected by Integral as well. The absence of any such detection by both instruments on Integral suggests that the measurement from Fermi could be unrelated to the gravitational wave detection.

“This result highlights the importance of synergies between scientists and observing facilities worldwide in the quest for as many cosmic messengers as possible, from the recently-detected gravitational waves to particles and light across the spectrum,” says Erik Kuulkers, Integral project scientist at ESA.

This will become even more important when it becomes possible to observe gravitational waves from space. This has been identified as the goal for the L3 mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision programme, and the technology for building it is currently being tested in space by ESA’s LISA Pathfinder mission.

Such an observatory will be capable of detecting gravitational waves from the merging of supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies for months prior to the final coalescence, making it possible to locate the source much more accurately and thus provide astronomical observatories with a place and a time to look out for associated electromagnetic emission.

“We are looking forward to further collaborations and discoveries in the newly-inaugurated era of gravitational astronomy,” concludes Erik.

Notes for Editors:

“Integral Upper Limits On Gamma-Ray Emission Associated With The Gravitational Wave Event GW150914,” by V. Savchenko et al. is published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8205/820/2/L36

For more information about Integral mission, visit:  http://sci.esa.int/integral/

Images, Animation, Text, Credits: ESA/Markus Bauer/Erik Kuulkers/C.Carreau/François Arago Center APC - Astroparticule et Cosmologie Université Paris Diderot, CNRS/IN2P3, CEA/Irfu, Observatoire De Paris, Sorbonne Paris Cité Paris/Volodymyr Savchenko/Integral Science Data Centre, University of Geneva/Carlo Ferrigno/Medialab.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

The LHC wakes up from its winter break

CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research logo.

March 29, 2016

Image above: These are distribution feed boxes, which bring power to the magnets.There are 52 of them around the LHC, of 4 different sizes and characteristics. Big, copper cables transfer the current in tiny superconducting cables. (Image: Maximillien Brice/ CERN).

It’s March already, and time for the LHC to wake up from its short winter break.The LHC was the last machine to be handed back to operators after the completion of maintenance work carried out during the Year-End Technical Stop (YETS) that had started on 14 December, 2015.

During the past eleven weeks several maintenance activities took place in all the accelerators and beam lines. They included the replacement of the LHC beam absorbers for injection (TDIs) that are used to absorb the SPS beam if a problem occurs, providing vital protection for the LHC, maintenance at several points of the cryogenic system, the replacement of 18 magnets in the Super Proton Synchrotron and an extensive campaign to identify and remove thousands of obsolete cables.

The YETS also gave the experiments the opportunity to carry out repairs and maintenance work on their detectors. In particular, at CMS, the cold box, which had caused problems for the experiment’s magnet during 2015, was cleaned and a few water leaks on the site were fixed.

Powering tests began on 4 March and finished on 18 March 2016, marking the initial step to the first beams of the year. It was a tight schedule, with the tests scheduled for just 14 days before moving on to machine checkout and then commissioning with beam around Easter. During that time, over 8500 tests are being performed on the 1600 circuits. Even though the tests were executed automatically, the experts in charge of running and analysing them needed to pay careful attention to the thousands of multi-coloured signals on their screens.

Image above: LHC machine operators at work during powering tests of the LHC superconducting circuits. Powering is the first milestone in the LHC machine restart process. In this stage, the LHC operators perform tests with current of the superconducting circuits with the aim of checking the protection functionalities, the powering chain and the capability of the circuits to reach the values needed for operation. In total, more than 8500 test steps were performed on the 1600 circuits in less than 2 weeks. (Image: Maximillien Brice/CERN).

Last year marked a great start to Run 2. The objective was to establish proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV with 25 nanosecond bunch spacing.

2015 was a learning year for CERN, and by the time the machines were switched off for the end-of-year break a great deal was known about how to operate the LHC at the new higher energy, with shorter bunch spacing, allowing physicists to get many more bunches of particles into the beam and thereby deliver more data to the experiments.

“This was a great result but, to put it into context, the goal for the whole of Run 2 is to deliver 100 fb-1 by the end of 2018, so we still have a long way to go”, says Frédérick Bordry, Director for accelerators and technology.

“It would be easy to think that LHC running is becoming routine, and in many ways it is. Nevertheless, the year-end technical stop is a vital part of the running cycle and much has been accomplished over this short winter break,” he concludes.

Note:

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.

Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 22 Member States.

Related link:

Large Hadron Collider (LHC): http://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider

For more information about the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), visit: http://home.web.cern.ch/

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: CERN/Harriet Kim Jarlett.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

New DNA/RNA Tool to Diagnose, Treat Diseases

NASA patch.

March 29, 2016

Mars exploration. Image Credit: NASA

If NASA is going to send astronauts on years-long missions, the agency will need new and better tools to monitor whether the men and women are healthy along the way. One company has developed a tool that could make comprehensive diagnostics at long distances a reality for NASA — and it has big potential to advance medicine on Earth, too.

Currently, Earth-based researchers keep track of things like white blood cell counts and cholesterol and cortisol levels, dubbed “biomarkers,” with tests that use special proteins called antibodies. But the antibodies have a short, three- to six-month shelf life and can be ruined by the high levels of radiation in space, making them ill-suited for such missions.

Research from the 1990s suggested an alternative: single strands of RNA and DNA that can be folded into three-dimensional structures and, like antibodies, bind to specific molecules. These structures, called aptamers, can be stored at ambient temperatures without degrading and are impervious to radiation.

One Hundred Trillion Options

There are, however, drawbacks to using aptamers for diagnostics. For one, making them is a time-consuming, complicated process. Furthermore, until recently aptamers haven’t been as good as antibodies at sticking to target molecules.

Graphic above: Looking for a new way to monitor health markers like white blood cell count and cholesterol, researchers discovered that single strands of DNA and RNA could fold into three-dimensional structures called aptamers that bind to specific molecules, a process made faster and simpler with the AM Biotechnologies kit. Graphic Credits: National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

“They didn’t bind well enough — they weren’t specific enough for their targets,” explains Mark Shumbera, president of AM Biotechnologies LLC, based in Houston. “Certain chemical modifications needed to be added to their DNA to make them work better.”

A standard aptamer process starts by placing a target molecule into a solution holding one hundred trillion random RNA/DNA sequences. Some sequences will bond well with the target molecule, while others won’t — or will bond only weakly. The successful sequences are then separated and copied through a chain reaction to create another, more refined solution, in a process that is repeated up to 15 times.

This technique, called systemic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment, or SELEX, often requires many chemical modifications to best tailor aptamers to bind to target substances. However, scientists are limited in how many chemical modifications they can make, in part because the chain reaction “doesn’t work very efficiently like that,” says Shumbera. “So typically, people only use one, and maybe two modifications at a time.”

In part through NASA Small Business Innovation Research funding from Johnson Space Center, in 2007 AM Biotechnologies advanced a faster, simplified method for creating aptamers that bond strongly to their target molecule. The company calls these next-generation aptamers X-Aptamers.

The new, faster method uses a proprietary process to synthesize a library of 10 billion RNA/DNA sequences, including both natural and heavily modified sequences, onto microbeads, which are then used to develop aptamers with an affinity for particular molecules, such as the biomarkers NASA is interested in. The bead-based method removes the previous limitations on allowable chemical modifications and simplifies the manufacturing process.

“You can have 50 modifications in a sequence — there is virtually no limit,” Shumbera says. “This method allows for the DNA or RNA to be more chemically diverse, meaning there’s a better chance of creating a molecule with a particularly high affinity and specificity for the target.”

Building the Future of Medicine

The process is now in use by the company, which has also made it commercially available so anyone can make their own aptamers. The kit is so simple that anyone with basic biochemistry lab skills can use it easily, Shumbera says. “We have university customers, our prototype users, who have freshmen undergraduates select X-Aptamers using our kits. The bead-based process simplifies aptamer selection tremendously.”

In addition to helping diagnose diseases, X-Aptamers could also be used to carry and attach a chemotherapy drug to a tumor, sparing other parts of the body from receiving the treatment. “It could help usher in the next big revolution in terms of how we diagnose and treat patients,” Shumbera says.

Image above: The AM Biotechnologies’ X-Aptamer Selection kit is simple enough for freshman undergraduates to use and takes only a few days to achieve results. Image Credits: AM Biotechnologies LLC.

One aptamer drug, Pegaptanib, has already gotten FDA approval, and Shumbera believes diagnostic applications aren’t far behind. He sees a bright future for aptamers, especially for NASA uses. The agency is working with other companies to create a hardware platform that can perform analysis in space, helping to diagnose and possibly treat ailments while astronauts are thousands or millions of miles from Earth.

To learn more about this NASA spinoff, read the original article from Spinoff 2016.
For more information on how NASA is bringing its technology down to Earth, visit http://technology.nasa.gov.

Images (mentioned), Graphic (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/William Bryan.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

2016 Arctic Sea Ice Wintertime Extent Hits Another Record Low

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center logo.

 

March 29, 2016

 

Arctic sea ice appears to have reached a record low wintertime maximum extent for the second year in a row, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA.

Image above: Arctic sea ice was at a record low wintertime maximum extent for the second straight year. At 5.607 million square miles, it is the lowest maximum extent in the satellite record, and 431,000 square miles below the 1981 to 2010 average maximum extent.
Image Credits: NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio/C. Starr.

Every year, the cap of frozen seawater floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and its neighboring seas melts during the spring and summer and grows back in the fall and winter months, reaching its maximum yearly extent between February and April. On March 24, Arctic sea ice extent peaked at 5.607 million square miles (14.52 million square kilometers), a new record low winter maximum extent in the satellite record that started in 1979. It is slightly smaller than the previous record low maximum extent of 5.612 million square miles (14.54 million square kilometers) that occurred last year. The 13 smallest maximum extents on the satellite record have happened in the last 13 years.

Record Low Arctic Sea Ice Maximum - 2016

Video above: This short animation shows the Arctic sea ice freeze cycle from the last summertime minimum extent to March 24, when it reached its wintertime maximum extent.
Image Credits: NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio/C. Starr.

The new record low follows record high temperatures in December, January and February around the globe and in the Arctic. The atmospheric warmth probably contributed to this lowest maximum extent, with air temperatures up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit above average at the edges of the ice pack where sea ice is thin, said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The wind patterns in the Arctic during January and February were also unfavorable to ice growth because they brought warm air from the south and prevented expansion of the ice cover. But ultimately, what will likely play a bigger role in the future trend of Arctic maximum extents is warming ocean waters, Meier said.

“It is likely that we're going to keep seeing smaller wintertime maximums in the future because in addition to a warmer atmosphere, the ocean has also warmed up. That warmer ocean will not let the ice edge expand as far south as it used to,” Meier said. “Although the maximum reach of the sea ice can vary a lot each year depending on winter weather conditions, we’re seeing a significant downward trend, and that’s ultimately related to the warming atmosphere and oceans.” Since 1979, that trend has led to a loss of 620,000 square miles of winter sea ice cover, an area more than twice the size of Texas.

Arctic sea ice. Image Credit: NASA

This year’s record low sea ice maximum extent will not necessarily result in a subsequent record low summertime minimum extent, Meier said. Summer weather conditions have a larger impact than the extent of the winter maximum in the outcome of each year’s melt season; warm temperatures and summer storms make the ice melt fast, while if a summer is cool, the melt slows down.

Arctic sea ice plays an important role in maintaining Earth’s temperature—its bright white surface reflects solar energy that the ocean would otherwise absorb. But this effect is more relevant in the summer, when the sun is high in the sky in the Arctic, than in the winter, when the sun doesn’t rise for months within the Arctic Circle. In the winter, the impact of missing sea ice is mostly felt in the atmosphere, said Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

“In places where sea ice has been lost, those areas of open water will put more heat into the atmosphere because the air is much colder than unfrozen sea water,” Francis said. “As winter sea ice disappears, areas of unusually warm air temperatures in the Arctic will expand. These are also areas of increased evaporation, and the resulting water vapor will contribute to increased cloudiness, which in winter, further warms the surface.”

Related Link:

NSIDC's sea ice maximum announcement: https://nsidc.org/news/newsroom/arctic-sets-yet-another-record-low-maximum-extent

Image (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA's Earth Science News Team/Maria-Jose Viñas.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch