Scientists Claim New State of Matter Created

Scientists claim to have created a form of aluminum that's nearly transparent to extreme ultraviolet radiation and which is a new state of matter.

It's an idea straight out of science fiction, featured in the movie "Star Trek IV."

The work is detailed in the journal Nature Physics.

The normal states of matter are solid, liquid and gas, and a fourth state, called plasma, is a superheated gas considered more exotic. Other experiments have created strange states of matter for brief periods. This one, too, existed only briefly.

"What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before," said professor Justin Wark of Oxford University's Department of Physics.

"Transparent aluminum is just the start," Wark said. "The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of 'miniature stars' created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth."


source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/scientistsclaimnewstateofmattercreated

In praise of astronomy

In praise of astronomy, the most revolutionary of sciences

On August 25th 1609 an Italian mathematician called Galileo
Galilei demonstrated his newly constructed telescope to the merchants
of Venice. Shortly afterwards he turned it on the skies. He saw
mountains casting shadows on the moon and realised this body was a
world, like the Earth, endowed with complicated terrain.

He saw the
moons of Jupiter--objects that circled another heavenly body in direct
disobedience of the church's teaching. He saw the moonlike phases of
Venus, indicating that this planet circled the sun, not the Earth, in
even greater disobedience of the priests. He saw sunspots,
demonstrating that the sun itself was not the perfect orb demanded by
the Greek cosmology that had been adopted by the church. But he also
saw something else, a thing that is often now forgotten. He saw that
the Milky Way, that cloudy streak across the sky, is made of stars.

That observation was the first hint that, not only is the Earth not the
centre of things, but those things are vastly, almost incomprehensibly,
bigger than people up until that date had dreamed.


source: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14213985