Operations

Adding to chaos underground could help manage polluted water, according to CSIRO physicist Guy Metcalfe.

His team has been working on “chaotic advection”, which describes the motion of particles carried in a flow—from smoke drifting in the air, to the mixing of the milk into your morning coffee.

The same principle can be used to trap contaminated groundwater, and keep it continually rotating within a defined area, CSIRO researchers have calculated. Or it could be applied to encourage reactions between fluids and rocks that remove pollutants.

[Read more…] about From the chaos of stirring coffee to stirring rocks and cleaning up polluted ground water

UK researcher Anthony Brown reported on the IceCube neutrino telescope under construction at the South Pole.

The first stages are up and running, looking for high energy neutrinos from a variety of astrophysical sources, including dark matter.

[Read more…] about A cubic kilometre of South Pole ice looking for dark matter

David Karoly will rebut the common arguments and misinformation that question the role of human activity, particularly increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases, as the main cause of recently observed global warming.

He says, “Recent increases in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are due to human activity. The pattern and magnitude of observed global-scale temperature changes since the mid-20th century cannot be explained by natural climate variability. They are consistent with the response to increasing greenhouse gases and aerosols, and are not consistent with the responses to other factors. Hence, it is very likely that increasing greenhouse gases due to human activity are the main cause of the recent observed global-scale warming.” [Read more…] about Lies, damn lies and climate change sceptics: what has really caused recent global warming?

By Vivien Lee

Anyone can discover a neutron star in their own home, says the director of the Einstein@Home Project, Prof Bruce Allen. You don’t even have to be awake—your computer screensaver does it for you. In fact, it’s already been done.

In August, a couple in Iowa, USA and a man in Mainz, Germany made Einstein@Home’s first discovery, a speedy neutron star that spins 41 times a second compared with the typical once per second.

[Read more…] about Pursuing space research from the comfort of home

Melbourne physicists are trying to detect the undetectable – by searching for signs of its demise.

Nicole Bell and her colleagues at the University of Melbourne are analysing data on neutrinos, gamma and cosmic rays for evidence of the decay or annihilation of dark matter.

This mysterious material is suspected to exist because of the gravitational tug it exerts on the visible universe. But it has not, as yet, been found.

[Read more…] about Dark matter: detecting the invisible

By James Mitchell Crow

US researchers are beginning to understand how copper oxides can transmit electricity with no power loss at temperatures not far below -100˚C. Research which gives clues as to just how these superconductors work was presented at the Australian Institute of Physics Congress in Melbourne by Michael Norman from Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

Norman said his co-workers  had found pockets of electrons hidden within the superconducting materials. The discovery could help unravel the mechanism of operation of superconductors, he said, and point the way towards materials that superconduct at room temperature and above.

Norman is convinced such materials exist, it is just a question of finding them. “The record for high temperature superconductors has already increased by a factor of eight. To achieve room temperature superconductivity, we only need to improve by another factor of two.”

[Read more…] about Superconductors reveal their secrets

Discoveries in diagnosing diseases, finding new clues to detect climate change and the structural soundness of materials have all emerged from Australia’s nuclear research reactor.  Adi Paterson, the director of ANSTO (the body that manages the reactor) spoke about the role that nuclear science will play in Australia’s future.

[Read more…] about The future of nuclear science

Solar flares could have temporarily worsened the hole in the ozone layer, particularly in the southern hemisphere, says Marc Duldig of the Australian Antarctic Division.

Bursts of energetic particles erupting from the sun during some solar flares can boost levels of ozone-destroying chemicals in our atmosphere. Researchers from the Division are using ground-based sensors to detect the high energy solar particles.

[Read more…] about Are solar flares damaging our ozone layer?

In March 1989, six million people in the Canadian province of Quebec suffered a nine-hour blackout due to currents induced in their electricity grid by a geomagnetic storm. The currents themselves were caused by charged particles from a solar coronal mass ejection which struck Earth. There are reports of a storm 150 years ago with many times that power.

Today, such events would be even more disastrous, knocking out the electronic and communications systems upon which we all depend.

That’s why the US, Australia and many other developed nations are investing in understanding and modelling the Sun-Earth system to enable us to forecast space weather, according to Colorado researcher Tim Fuller Rowell.

[Read more…] about Could space storms blackout our homes and phones?