Science X Newsletter Week 28

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Here is your customized Phys.org Newsletter for week 28:

	New Image of Pluto: 'Houston, We Have Geology' It began as a point of light. Then, it evolved into a fuzzy orb. Now – in its latest portrait from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft – Pluto is being revealed as an intriguing new world with distinct surface features, including an immense dark band known as the "whale."
	Neutrons find 'missing' magnetism of plutonium Groundbreaking work at two Department of Energy national laboratories has confirmed plutonium's magnetism, which scientists have long theorized but have never been able to experimentally observe. The advances that enabled the discovery hold great promise for materials, energy and computing applications.
	Boeing patent puts focus on laser-powered propulsion system (Update) Boeing has patented a laser powered propulsion system for airplanes. A number of sites reported on the patent, with eye-rubbing headlines that told the story. The BusinessInsider headline read, "Boeing just patented a jet engine powered by lasers and nuclear explosions." Benjamin Zhang said the US Patent and Trademark Office approved Boeing's application for a laser and nuclear-driven airplane engine.
	Researchers build first working memcomputer prototype (Tech Xplore)—A combined team of researchers from the University of California and Politecnico di Torino in Italy has built, for the first time, a working memory-crunching computer (memcomputer) prototype. It is capable, the team reports in their paper published in the journal Science Advances, of solving the NP-complete version of the subset sum problem.
	Fermi sees record flare from a black hole in a distant galaxy Five billion years ago, a great disturbance rocked a region near the monster black hole at the center of galaxy 3C 279. On June 14, the pulse of high-energy light produced by this event finally arrived at Earth, setting off detectors aboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and other satellites. Astronomers around the world turned instruments toward the galaxy to observe this brief but record-setting flare in greater detail.
	Distant black hole wave twists like giant whip Fast-moving magnetic waves emanating from a distant supermassive black hole undulate like a whip whose handle is being shaken by a giant hand, according to a new study using data from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Long Baseline Array. Scientists used this instrument to explore the galaxy/black hole system known as BL Lacertae (BL Lac) in high resolution.
	NASA craft discovers heart shape on Pluto as flyby nears There's a near-perfect heart shape on Pluto's rusty red surface which scientists are seeing for the first time as a piano-sized NASA spacecraft, New Horizons, hurtles toward the distant body on its way toward a historic flyby on July 14.
	New study finds heat is being stored beneath the ocean surface For much of the past decade, a puzzle has been confounding the climate science community. Nearly all of the measurable indicators of global climate change—such as sea level, ice cover on land and sea, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations—show a world changing on short, medium, and long time scales. But for the better part of a decade, global surface temperatures appeared to level off. The overall, long-term trend was upward, but the climb was less steep from 2003–2012. Some scientists, the media, and climate contrarians began referring to it as "the hiatus."
	When will we know we have found extraterrestrial life? (Phys.org)—As we become more advanced in astronomy, continuously searching and finding lots of potentially habitable extrasolar planets that could harbor alien life, it seems that it's not a matter of if but when we will find extraterrestrial organisms. However, the real tough problem here is: How we could determine if the alien life has really been found? "The question is not so much 'when will we find extraterrestrial life?' But 'when will we know we have found extraterrestrial life?'" Terence Kee, the President of the Astrobiology Society of Britain told Phys.org. "My feeling is that we may indeed find signs of life in a few decades, but whether we will be unambiguously able to identify it as 'extraterrestrial life' - as opposed to terrestrial contamination or abiotic far-from-equilibrium processes - in such a short time-frame, I'm not so sure."
	'Straintronic spin neuron' may greatly improve neural computing (Phys.org)—Researchers have proposed a new type of artificial neuron called a "straintronic spin neuron" that could serve as the basic unit of artificial neural networks—systems modeled on human brains that have the ability to compute, learn, and adapt. Compared to previous designs, the new artificial neuron is potentially orders of magnitude more energy-efficient, more robust against thermal degradation, and fires at a faster rate.
	Training Schrodinger's cat: Controlling the quantum properties of light (Phys.org)—Constructing quantum computers and other quantum devices requires the ability to leverage quantum properties such as superposition and entanglement – but these effects are fragile and therefore hard to maintain. Recently, scientists at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris demonstrated a novel method for controlling the quantum properties of light by probing a superconducting circuit in a cavity with microwave photons to control the energy levels that photon quanta can occupy. Specifically, the scientists prevented access to a single energy level corresponding to a number of photons N, and thereby confined the dynamics of the field to levels 0 to N -1. In so doing, the intracavity field changed from a classical wave to a Schrödinger cat of light – a superposition between two waves of opposite phases instead of a single one. As a result, this new technique could apply to the development of quantum computers by protec! ting qubits from decoherence as well as enhancing quantum error correction and quantum systems measurement.
	Astronomers use cosmic gravity to create a 'black-hole-scope' The Integral, Fermi and Swift space observatories have used the magnifying power of a cosmic lens to explore the inner regions of a supermassive black hole.
	Students' 2098 mpg fuel-efficient car gets top score in mileage challenge SAE International, which is a global association of engineers and related experts in aerospace, automotive and commercial-vehicle industries, held its .36th SAE Supermileage competition in Michigan last month.
	Researchers produce industry's first 7nm node test chips An alliance led by IBM Research today announced that it has produced the semiconductor industry's first 7nm (nanometer) node test chips with functioning transistors. The breakthrough, accomplished in partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung at SUNY Polytechnic Institute's Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (SUNY Poly CNSE), could result in the ability to place more than 20 billion tiny switches—transistors—on the fingernail-sized chips that power everything from smartphones to spacecraft.
	Surfing a wake of light: Researchers observe and control light wakes for the first time When a duck paddles across a pond or a supersonic plane flies through the sky, it leaves a wake in its path. Wakes occur whenever something is traveling through a medium faster than the waves it creates—in the duck's case water waves, in the plane's case shock waves, otherwise known as sonic booms.
	Could black phosphorus be the next silicon? As scientists continue to hunt for a material that will make it possible to pack more transistors on a chip, new research from McGill University and Université de Montréal adds to evidence that black phosphorus could emerge as a strong candidate.
	NASA data shows surfer-shaped waves in near-Earth space The universe overflows with repeating patterns. From the smallest cells to the largest galaxies, scientists are often rewarded by observing similar patterns in vastly different places. One such pattern is the iconic surfer's waves seen on the ocean - a series of curled hills moving steadily in one direction. The shape has a simple cause. A fast fluid, say wind, moving past a slower one, say water, naturally creates this classic shape. Named Kelvin-Helmholtz waves in the late 1800s after their discoverers, these waves have since been discovered all over the universe: in clouds, in the atmospheres of other planets, and on the sun. Now two recently published papers highlight these shapely waves at the boundaries of near-Earth space.
	Biggest explosions in the universe powered by strongest magnets Observations from ESO's La Silla and Paranal Observatories in Chile have for the first time demonstrated a link between a very long-lasting burst of gamma rays and an unusually bright supernova explosion. The results show that the supernova was not driven by radioactive decay, as expected, but was instead powered by the decaying super-strong magnetic fields around an exotic object called a magnetar. The results will appear in the journal Nature on July 9, 2015.
	Engineers give invisibility cloaks a slimmer design Researchers have developed a new design for a cloaking device that overcomes some of the limitations of existing "invisibility cloaks." In a new study, electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego have designed a cloaking device that is both thin and does not alter the brightness of light around a hidden object. The technology behind this cloak will have more applications than invisibility, such as concentrating solar energy and increasing signal speed in optical communications.
	Study identifies new way to kill the malaria parasite Scientists have discovered new ways in which the malaria parasite survives in the blood stream of its victims, a discovery that could pave the way to new treatments for the disease.

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