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Here is your customized Phys.org Newsletter for week 41:
A strange lonely planet found without a star
(Phys.org) �An international team of astronomers has discovered an exotic young planet that is not orbiting a star. This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago�a newborn in planet lifetimes.
Arizona solar plant achieves six hours after sun goes down
(Phys.org) �Abengoa's Solana plant in the desert near Gila Bend, Arizona, passed commercial testing this week The 280-megawatt Solana solar thermal power plant producing electricity without direct sunlight made the announcement on Wednesday. Abengoa said Wednesday that the facility, about 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, can store the sun's power for six hours via thermal energy. The three -square-mile facility near Gila Bend uses concentrated solar power (CSP) technology to collect the sun's heat. Thermal energy storage is Solana's distinctive feature. At 280 megawatts, Solana is one of the largest plants using parabolic mirrors. Its 2,700 parabolic trough mirrors follow the sun to focus heat on a pipe containing a heat transfer fluid, which is a synthetic oil. The heat transfer fluid flows to steam boilers, where it heats water to create steam. The steam drives 140-megawatt turbines to produce electricity.
Carbon's new champion: Theorists calculate atom-thick carbyne chains may be strongest material ever
(Phys.org) �Carbyne will be the strongest of a new class of microscopic materials if and when anyone can make it in bulk.
New finding shows climate change can happen in a geological instant
(Phys.org) �"Rapid" and "instantaneous" are words geologists don't use very often. But Rutgers geologists use these exact terms to describe a climate shift that occurred 55 million years ago.
Evidence for a new nuclear 'magic number'
Researchers have come one step closer to understanding unstable atomic nuclei. A team of researchers from RIKEN, the University of Tokyo and other institutions in Japan and Italy has provided evidence for a new nuclear magic number in the unstable, radioactive calcium isotope 54Ca. In a study published today in the journal Nature, they show that 54Ca is the first known nucleus with 34 neutrons (N) where N = 34 is a magic number.
First ever evidence of a comet striking Earth
The first ever evidence of a comet entering Earth's atmosphere and exploding, raining down a shock wave of fire which obliterated every life form in its path, has been discovered by a team of South African scientists and international collaborators.
Englert and Higgs win Nobel physics prize (Update 4)
Nearly 50 years after they came up with the theory, but little more than a year since the world's biggest atom smasher delivered the proof, Britain's Peter Higgs and Belgian colleague Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping to explain how matter formed after the Big Bang.
New material gives visible light an infinite wavelength
Researchers from the FOM Institute AMOLF and the University of Pennsylvania have fabricated a material which gives visible light a nearly infinite wavelength. The new metamaterial is made by stacking silver and silicon nitride nanolayers. It may find applications in novel optical components or circuits and the design of more efficient leds. The work will appear on October 13th in Nature Photonics.
Rosetta: 100 days to wake-up (w/ Video)
(Phys.org) �ESA's comet-chasing mission Rosetta will wake up in 100 days' time from deep-space hibernation to reach the destination it has been cruising towards for a decade.
Bending world's thinnest glass shows atoms' dance for first time (w/ Video)
(Phys.org) �Watch what happens when you bend and break the world's thinnest glass. This glass, discovered by Cornell University researchers and their international team of collaborators, was recently featured in the Guinness Book of World Records and is made of the same compounds as everyday windowpanes.
Scientists create first computer-designed superconductor
(Phys.org) �A Binghamton University scientist and his international colleagues report this week on the successful synthesis of the first superconductor designed entirely on the computer. Their findings were published in Physical Review Letters, the leading journal in the field.
Folding batteries increases their areal energy density by up to 14 times
(Phys.org) �By folding a paper-based Li-ion battery in a Miura-ori pattern (similar to how some maps are folded), scientists have shown that the battery exhibits a 14x increase in areal energy density and capacity due to its smaller footprint. Paper-based batteries are already attractive due to their low cost, roll-to-roll fabrication methods, and flexibility. The advantages of folding them into smaller sizes adds to these features and could lead to high-performance batteries for various applications.
Study reveals urgent new time frame for climate change
Ecological and societal disruptions by modern climate change are critically determined by the time frame over which climates shift. Camilo Mora and colleagues in the College of Social Sciences' Department of Geography at the University of Hawaii, Manoa have developed one such time frame. The study, entitled "The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability," will be published in the October 10 issue of Nature and provides an index of the year when the mean climate of any given location on Earth will shift continuously outside the most extreme records experienced in the past 150 years.
New device achieves self-biased solar hydrogen generation through microbial electrohydrogenesis at lab scale
A novel device that uses only sunlight and wastewater to produce hydrogen gas could provide a sustainable energy source while improving the efficiency of wastewater treatment.
Watery asteroid discovered in dying star points to habitable exoplanets
Astronomers have found the shattered remains of an asteroid that contained huge amounts of water orbiting an exhausted star, or white dwarf. This suggests that the star GD 61 and its planetary system � located about 150 light years away and at the end of its life � had the potential to contain Earth-like exoplanets, they say.
Charged particles can be accelerated using light, leading the way for more compact particle accelerators
Modern particle accelerators measure up to several kilometres in size and cost billions of euros. But thanks to a new method they could shrink to less than 10 metres and cost 10 times less in future. To this end, physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching accelerated electrons directly using a light wave. In the conventional procedure by contrast, particles are accelerated with microwaves. In their demonstration experiment, John Breuer and Peter Hommelhoff obtained an accelerating force that was equally as strong as the force achieved in current conventional particle accelerators. The unique feature of the Garching-based procedure is that it is modular and can be expanded into a multi-level system capable of accelerating charged particles � which could be protons or ions, as well as electrons � around 100 times faster than current systems, and therefore could be built to a much smaller scale. Developmental work is still necessary for this expansio! n, however.
'Stadium waves' could explain lull in global warming
One of the most controversial issues emerging from the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is the failure of global climate models to predict a hiatus in warming of global surface temperatures since 1998. Several ideas have been put forward to explain this hiatus, including what the IPCC refers to as 'unpredictable climate variability' that is associated with large-scale circulation regimes in the atmosphere and ocean. The most familiar of these regimes is El Ni�o/La Ni�a, which are parts of an oscillation in the ocean-atmosphere system. On longer multi-decadal time scales, there is a network of atmospheric and oceanic circulation regimes, including the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
'Unequivocal' evidence that global warming is man-made
(Phys.org) �A report from a panel of global scientists has offered the strongest evidence yet that climate change is a direct result of human behaviour.
US science is in peril, say Nobel Medicine Prize winners
Three American winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday said scientific progress in the United States is in peril due to unprecedented funding cuts and ideological challenges.
Several top websites use device fingerprinting to secretly track users
(Phys.org) �A new study by KU Leuven-iMinds researchers has uncovered that 145 of the Internet's 10,000 top websites track users without their knowledge or consent. The websites use hidden scripts to extract a device fingerprint from users' browsers. Device fingerprinting circumvents legal restrictions imposed on the use of cookies and ignores the Do Not Track HTTP header. The findings suggest that secret tracking is more widespread than previously thought.
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