Laboratory Equipment

Field Study Aims to Better Severe Weather Forecasting

Purdue Univ. professors and students will intercept storms as part of a major field project to improve predictions of severe weather and offer earlier warnings to those in its path.

Purdue professors of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences Jeff Trapp and Michael Baldwin, and graduate students Joe Woznicki and Logan Dawson are part of the National Science Foundation-funded Mesoscale Predictability Experiment, or MPEX. The project runs from May 15 to June 15 across the Great Plains.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/field-study-aims-better-severe-weather-forecasting

Physics Principles Can Be Observed in Bowls of Cereal

Andong He saw a phenomenon at work in his breakfast bowl that he couldn’t explain. It prompted this question: how does cereal shape influence the way cereals floating in the milk join? The Yale postdoctoral student offers an answer, along with collaborators Khoi Nguyen and Shreyas Mandre of Brown Univ., in a paper published in Europhysics Letters.

“Two floating objects, when they attract each other, will try to maximize the area of contact,” says He, of Yale’s Department of Geology & Geophysics. “Think about two ellipses — instead of tip to tip, they will try to align so that they are side to side.”

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/physics-principles-can-be-observed-bowls-cereal

Alaskan Volcano Continues to Erupt

A remote Alaska volcano continues to erupt, spewing lava and ash clouds.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory says a continuous cloud of ash, steam and gas from Pavlof Volcano has been seen 20,000 feet above sea level.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/alaskan-volcano-continues-erupt

Mars Rover Breaks 40-Year-Old Record

While Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt visited Earth’s moon for three days in December 1972, they drove their mission’s Lunar Roving Vehicle 19.3 nautical miles (22.210 statute miles or 35.744 kilometers). That was the farthest total distance for any NASA vehicle driving on a world other than Earth until yesterday.

The team operating NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity received confirmation in a transmission from Mars that the rover drove 263 feet (80 meters) on Thursday, bringing Opportunity’s total odometry since landing on Mars in January 2004 to 22.220 statute miles (35.760 kilometers).

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/mars-rover-breaks-40-year-old-record

Artificial Forest Splits Water

In the wake of the sobering news that atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, an important advance in the race to develop carbon-neutral renewable energy sources has been achieved. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have reported the first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis. While “artificial leaf” is the popular term for such a system, the key to this success was an “artificial forest.”

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/artificial-forest-splits-water

Volunteers Help Protect Native Trees

A major survey into the health of native trees in the Yorkshire and Humberside region has been launched this week at a York nature reserve.

Volunteers joined Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) community scientists at the St. Nicholas Fields Nature Reserve this week to learn how to monitor trees for pests and diseases. The regional launch event organized by OPAL scientists based in the Stockholm Environment Institute at the Univ. of York, is part of a national Tree Health Survey.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/volunteers-help-protect-native-trees

First Evidence for Extraterrestrial High-Energy Neutrinos

A massive telescope in the Antarctic ice has reported the detection of 28 extremely high-energy neutrinos that might have their origin in cosmic sources. Two of these reached energies greater than one petaelectronvolt (PeV), an energy level thousands of times higher than the highest energy neutrino yet produced in a manmade accelerator.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, run by an international collaboration and headquartered at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) at the Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison, identified the neutrinos, which were described in a talk at the IceCube Particle Astrophysics Symposium at UW–Madison.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/first-evidence-extraterrestrial-high-energy-neutrinos

Cotton is Eco-Friendly Way to Clean Up Oil Spills

With the Deepwater Horizon disaster emphasizing the need for better ways of cleaning up oil spills, scientists are reporting that unprocessed, raw cotton may be an ideal, ecologically friendly answer, with an amazing ability to sop up oil. Their report, which includes some of the first scientific data on unprocessed, raw cotton’s use in crude oil spills, appears in the ACS journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/cotton-eco-friendly-way-clean-oil-spills

Parasites ‘Talk’ to Each Other

Melbourne scientists have made the surprise discovery that malaria parasites can “talk” to each other – a social behavior to ensure the parasite’s survival and improve its chances of being transmitted to other humans.

The finding could provide a niche for developing anti-malarial drugs and vaccines that prevent or treat the disease by cutting these communication networks.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/videos/2013/05/parasites-%E2%80%98talk%E2%80%99-each-other

Nanoflowers Blossom from a Chemical Reaction

“Spring is like a perhaps hand,” wrote the poet E. E. Cummings: “carefully / moving a perhaps / fraction of flower here placing / an inch of air there… / without breaking anything.”

With the hand of nature trained on a beaker of chemical fluid, the most delicate flower structures have been formed in a Harvard laboratory — and not at the scale of inches, but microns. These minuscule sculptures, curved and delicate, don’t resemble the cubic or jagged forms normally associated with crystals, though that’s what they are. Rather, fields of carnations and marigolds seem to bloom from the surface of a submerged glass slide, assembling themselves a molecule at a time.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/nanoflowers-blossom-chemical-reaction

Injected Nanogel Can Help Fight Diabetes

Injectable nanoparticles developed at MIT may someday eliminate the need for patients with Type 1 diabetes to constantly monitor their blood-sugar levels and inject themselves with insulin.

The nanoparticles were designed to sense glucose levels in the body and respond by secreting the appropriate amount of insulin, thereby replacing the function of pancreatic islet cells, which are destroyed in patients with Type 1 diabetes. Ultimately, this type of system could ensure that blood-sugar levels remain balanced and improve patients’ quality of life, according to the researchers.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/injected-nanogel-can-help-fight-diabetes

Earth’s Iron Core is Shockingly Weak

The massive ball of iron sitting at the center of Earth is not quite as “rock-solid” as has been thought, say two Stanford mineral physicists. By conducting experiments that simulate the immense pressures deep in the planet’s interior, the researchers determined that iron in Earth’s inner core is only about 40 percent as strong as previous studies estimated.

This is the first time scientists have been able to experimentally measure the effect of such intense pressure – as high as 3 million times the pressure Earth’s atmosphere exerts at sea level – in a laboratory. A paper presenting the results of their study is available online in Nature Geoscience.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/earths-iron-core-shockingly-weak